Over the last few years, the relationship between Dalit and Muslim identities has opened in ways that are both politically urgent and intellectually generative. Debates have multiplied: from the constitutional demand to extend Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians—beginning with Ghazi Saaduddin v State of Maharashtra—to concerns over a National Population Register being introduced through the Census, even as the long delayed caste census has finally become feasible. From the disquiet around Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls to the earlier specter of the National Register of Citizens, and from the renewed articulation of the Pasmanda Muslim movement to emerging solidarities across universities, each of these moments underscores how social justice politics in India must evolve to survive and flourish.
Across public universities, student alliances between Ambedkarite and Muslim organizations are emerging as fragile but significant experiments in political imagination. The 2019 Maharashtra Lok Sabha elections, where the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen briefly converged, were another testing ground for this idea of solidarity, even as the electoral results revealed both arithmetic limits and organizational shortcomings. Many dismissed these experiments as naive or opportunistic, while others argued that any genuine alliance could only emerge between Dalits and Pasmandas, not Dalits and Muslims as a whole. Yet such thinking misreads both the enemy and the terrain.
By narrowing the horizon of unity to internal gradations of caste within Muslim communities, it sidesteps the central problem of our time: Hindutva. Caste is treated as the only enduring structure of power, while the violent consolidation of Hindu nationalism, which weaponizes both religion and caste, is ignored. Yes, caste operates among Muslims, as it does among every community shaped by the subcontinent’s history. Yet for Hindutva, the Muslim remains the primary target, with Christians not far behind. Anti Muslim hatred is the binding glue of Hindu nationalism, while caste hierarchy is the adhesive that keeps its social base intact. The two reinforce each other.
The post-Mandal moment unsettled the upper-caste hegemony of Hindutva, both as response and effect. Its cadres are drawn from various castes and regions, yet their ideological unity depends on the fiction of a singular Hindu identity. That fiction is sustained by coercing lower-caste Hindus into complicity against Muslims and Christians. It is caste consolidation that forms the sustainability of ethno-religious nationalism, turning the oppressed into foot soldiers of their own subordination.
The everyday experience of violence, surveillance, and humiliation provides a point of convergence between Dalit and Muslim lives. Police encounters, custodial deaths, demolition drives, and denial of housing follow similar social logics. These are not random or isolated acts but techniques of governance designed to mark certain populations as permanently suspect. The language may differ—“illegal encroacher,” “anti-national,” “criminal tribe,”, “anti-Hindu”—but the state’s gaze is the same. Recognizing this continuity is not about comparing suffering but about mapping power and understanding how it operates across identity lines.
There is also a long history of deliberate attempts to divide these solidarities. Colonial administrators categorized and ranked communities, while postcolonial elites preserved graded inequality. Every ruling order has depended on preventing horizontal alliances among the oppressed. Today, the right continues this strategy, using identity politics as a tool of social management. The challenge for social justice politics is to reclaim identity as a site of collective resistance rather than as a source of division, and to do so in ways that link Dalits and Muslims without flattening the distinctiveness of their experiences.
The fractures and mistrust between Dalit and Muslim communities have long been produced by the same structures that govern them. Electoral arithmetic, local competition for scarce resources, and social stigma have been used to keep these groups apart. Yet beneath these divisions lies a shared memory of exclusion and resistance that predates the current moment. Recognizing the legacy of figures like Savitri and Fatima, we must see Dalits and Muslims as fellow targets of the same social order. To rebuild this recognition today means confronting not only oppressive power but also the prejudices left behind in our own communities.
In recent years, cultural expressions have begun to reimagine this shared condition. Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, based on Basharat Peer’s “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway” for The New York Times, offers a striking instance. Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown and the migrant crisis, the film traces a friendship between a Dalit man and a Muslim man navigating abandonment and precarity together. Their bond gestures toward a broader political question: what does it mean to build friendship as solidarity in a world determined to divide? To read their companionship politically is to see the possibility of a new ethics of alliance, one that emerges not from ideology alone but from shared vulnerability and mutual care, suggesting how friendship itself can become a form of resistance.
But Dalit–Muslim solidarity cannot remain an occasional alliance or rhetorical gesture. It must become a political project rooted in a shared understanding of power. The question before us is not whether caste exists among Muslims—it does—but whether we can build a politics that breaks both caste and communal domination. That is the only ground on which equality can stand.
V.T. Rajshekhar understood this long before it became a common slogan. Dalit Voice was not only a magazine but a platform insisting on Dalit–Muslim unity as the foundation of any real challenge to Brahminical and Hindu majoritarian power. He refused to treat these communities as separate constituencies; he saw them as parts of a single historical struggle against graded inequality and unfreedom. Reviving his project today means returning to that clarity of purpose, not by repeating his words but by extending his political vision into the realities of our time—where digital surveillance, economic exclusion, and organized hate have replaced older instruments of control. To build on his legacy is to keep the idea of Dalit–Muslim solidarity alive as both strategy and ethics, a politics that seeks not coexistence but collective liberation.
Writing this for the revival of Dalit Voice matters because V.T. Rajshekhar’s work spoke directly to this entanglement, and I— like many others—am a product of this political vision. His idea of “persecuted nationalities” named not only the victims of the Brahminical Hindu order but all those who can challenge it: Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, Christians, women, the working poor. That vision remains unfinished. Its strength lies in seeing persecution not as fragmented suffering but as a shared political condition. To build from that recognition is to move from sympathy to solidarity, from outrage to organization.
Mohammad Aamir Khan is a student of history and anthropology.
