Tag Archives: Ambedkar

Since February, a group of mostly lifelong BJP voters from the Brahmin community has been meeting in Lucknow to plan the party’s defeat in Uttar Pradesh. They have formed the Rashtriya Adhikar Morcha (RAM), led by former judicial officer Alankar Agnihotri, who resigned in February over the University Grants Commission’s proposed equity rules. Agnihotri has announced that RAM will contest 150 seats in the 2027 Assembly elections and possibly extend unconditional support to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the remaining 253. The offer puts the BSP in an awkward position: a party established to challenge upper-caste dominance is being proposed as a vehicle for Brahmins disaffected with the BJP, and the proposal cuts against Mayawati’s stated preference for contesting elections independently.

In his speech “Two Serious Mistakes That Killed the Dalit Movement,” delivered at the BAMCEF Karnataka State Convention in Gulbarga on 22 November 2009, V. T. Rajshekar criticised the Dalit movement’s excessive concentration on electoral politics. The BSP, now courted by the community it was founded to oppose, shows where that concentration can lead.

On 29 January, the Supreme Court stayed the University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, directing that the 2012 regulations remain in force while the legal challenge proceeds. The new rules followed a legal campaign initiated in 2019 for stronger protections against caste discrimination in higher education. Mayawati welcomed the stay, arguing that the UGC should have consulted all stakeholders and ensured adequate representation for upper-caste members on inquiry committees. Her position on the rules is close to Agnihotri’s own objection to them, which gives RAM one reason to look to the BSP.

Mayawati has spoken forcefully against caste discrimination when responding to particular incidents. On 14 August, she condemned the purification of a stage in Haldwani after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a rally there, demanding action against those responsible. She also criticised RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s suggestion that beneficiaries who no longer need reservations should give them up. These interventions show that the BSP continues to invoke its anti-caste politics but has been notably absent from social movements that have defined the times.

Mayawati’s electoral strategy has increasingly centred on recovering upper-caste support. On her 70th birthday on 15 January, she said the BSP would contest elections independently, leaving open the possibility of future alliances if partners could transfer their votes to the party. She subsequently renewed her outreach to Brahmins, drawing on the BSP’s 2007 Uttar Pradesh victory, when it won 206 Assembly seats with 30.43 per cent of the vote. That coalition brought Brahmin voters into an electoral arrangement with Dalits under the slogan of Sarvajan politics. The strategy now faces a different political landscape. On 5 August, SP president Akhilesh Yadav said that the “P” in his PDA formula, originally standing for Pichhde, Dalit, Alpsankhyak (backward classes, Dalits and minorities), would also include Pandits. At the local level, however, Brahmin discontent with the BJP does not necessarily translate into support for the BSP. Brahmin voters distinguish their dissatisfaction with Narendra Modi from their views of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. OBC and Scheduled Caste villagers described local Brahmin political dominance as a source of pressure on land and labour, including allegations that influential figures enabled below-minimum-wage payments and land seizures. The interests of Brahmin voters whom the BSP hopes to attract may therefore conflict with the demands of Dalit and OBC communities whose support the party also needs.

The BSP’s electoral decline has made the coalition issue more urgent. After the death of its lone Uttar Pradesh MLA, Uma Shankar Singh, on 5 August, the party was left without a representative in the state Assembly. It had already lost all its Lok Sabha seats in the 2024 general election, when its Uttar Pradesh vote share fell to 9.39 per cent, against the SP’s 33.59 per cent. Its organisational decisions have also exposed the concentration of authority around Mayawati. In September, she removed her nephew Akash Anand from his national convenor position and expelled him from the party, before appointing his younger brother Ishan to the post. After Akash apologised publicly on 2 October, Mayawati reinstated him and restored his position on 5 October. The repeated reversals have left senior party responsibilities dependent on Mayawati’s personal decisions. The BSP also failed to win a seat in the May 2026 Assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu or Kerala, polling less than one per cent in each state. In Bihar’s 2025 Assembly election, it won one seat. Its response to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Uttar Pradesh followed the same pattern of distance from other Opposition parties. The final roll, published on 10 April, contained 13.39 crore electors, down from 15.44 crore before the exercise; more than 2.04 crore names had been removed, while approximately 84 lakh were added during the claims-and-objections period. Mayawati called for more time to protect poor people and migrants from exclusion, but the BSP did not join the wider Opposition campaign against the revision. These developments point to a party whose electoral reach and organisational depth have contracted while its leadership remains committed to controlling its political direction independently. Rajshekar described this vulnerability in a movement that puts office ahead of institutions of its own.

Chandrashekhar Azad’s Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) has pursued a different route, combining street mobilisation with electoral expansion. Azad first gained prominence through the Bhim Army, founded in 2015 to organise Dalit communities against caste discrimination and violence. His participation in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, the 2020 Hathras case and other caste atrocities established him as a Dalit activist before he entered Parliament by winning the Nagina Lok Sabha seat in 2024 with 5.12 lakh votes. In July 2026, he announced plans for a political front outside both the BJP-led NDA and the INDIA bloc. His party subsequently named 45 constituency in-charges for the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections: 18 from Scheduled Castes, 16 from OBCs, 10 Muslims and one Sikh. The composition signals an effort to build a wider Bahujan constituency. Mayawati has accused Chandrashekhar Azad of undermining the BSP and Bahujan unity, portraying him and other rival leaders as opportunists seeking political mileage from Dalit issues, while Azad has continued to raise issues concerning caste violence and the exclusion of marginalised voters. His trajectory shows how mobilisation outside electoral institutions can create a route into Parliament. Aazad Samaj Party must now turn Chandrashekhar Azad’s individual electoral presence into an enduring political organisation rooted in Dalit movements and capable of building a broader political base.

In Tamil Nadu, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), led by Thol Thirumavalavan, won two Assembly seats in the 2026 election as part of the DMK-led alliance. After Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged as the single-largest party with 108 seats but fell short of a majority, reports citing VCK sources said the party had discussed seeking the deputy chief minister’s post for Thirumavalavan and cabinet positions for its legislators if it joined a TVK government. Thirumavalavan subsequently announced unconditional outside support for TVK, saying the aim was to prevent President’s Rule, while maintaining that VCK would remain in the DMK-led alliance and would not join the government. The shift from reported discussions over a share in power to support without government participation leaves VCK with a problem: how a Dalit party can translate its electoral presence into executive influence while preserving its independent political position.

In Maharashtra, Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) has sought to rebuild its electoral position through alliances and legal challenges concerning voting rights. After winning no seats in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election or the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it allied with Congress for the January 2026 municipal elections but failed to win a seat in Mumbai’s Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation or Nanded-Waghala; it won four seats in Latur. The party has also challenged Maharashtra’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. In October, the Bombay High Court deferred its hearing on a petition filed by two Mumbai residents, including VBA youth president Sagar Ramesh Gawai, after being told that related questions were before the Supreme Court. The petition sought safeguards against voter exclusion and an interim direction preventing deletions from the state’s rolls. Prakash Ambedkar has also urged Rahul Gandhi to bring opposition parties and organisations together to challenge the Election Commission’s process. Yet during the November 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election, he declared that the VBA would support whichever party or alliance could form the government, adding, “We will choose power!” This emphasis on access to power sits uneasily with his appeal for opposition unity around the electoral-roll issue. Rajshekar’s criticism of a movement that concentrates on office applies to this emphasis. If the VBA seeks to build an independent political force, its alliance strategy has to reconcile electoral bargaining with the causes it claims to represent.

Within the BJP-led NDA, Chirag Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi have clashed over how Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe reservations should be distributed. On 29 August 2026, Paswan, the chief of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), demanded that Manjhi and his son, Bihar minister Santosh Kumar Suman, resign over their support for sub-classification and the creamy-layer principle. Manjhi, founder of the Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) and a member of the Musahar community, has argued that communities such as Musahars, Bhuiyas, Nats and Doms remain underrepresented and need a greater share of existing quotas. Paswan rejected sub-quotas, arguing that they would divide Dalits and weaken their collective position. In its August 2024 judgment in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, the Supreme Court permitted states to sub-classify SC and ST reservations on the basis of evidence of unequal representation.

Ramdas Athawale’s Republican Party of India (Athawale), another NDA ally, has called for any decision on sub-classification of Scheduled Caste reservations to follow the publication of caste census data. Athawale has argued that the population of individual SC communities should guide the distribution of Maharashtra’s 13 per cent quota, raising particular concerns about the Matang community. His position differs from Paswan’s opposition to sub-quotas. Athawale has also faced repeated disputes over the RPI(A)’s share of electoral opportunities within the BJP-led alliance. The BJP and Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena excluded the party from their seat-sharing agreement for the January 2026 Mumbai civic elections, prompting Athawale to accuse them of betraying the alliance; the RPI(A) subsequently fielded candidates independently in Mumbai. Ahead of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Athawale has demanded 25 seats for his party and said it would contest independently if an agreement with the BJP failed. His continued presence in the Union government has not secured his party a dependable share of electoral space, leaving it to negotiate its position with a much larger ally.

The fortunes of these parties unfold alongside a much wider field of Ambedkarite and anti-caste organising. At the University of Hyderabad, the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA) launched an indefinite relay hunger strike in May after the administration imposed a ₹5,000 fine on a student accused of assaulting and subjecting Dalit student Anuj Kumar to casteist abuse. ASA demanded the release of a fact-finding committee report and stronger disciplinary action, arguing that the punishment failed to address the seriousness of the allegations. Outside electoral politics, Dalit and Bahujan mobilisation has continued around the distribution of reservations, caste discrimination within institutions and access to land. In Maharashtra, Ambedkarite organisations representing 59 Scheduled Caste communities mobilised against the proposed sub-categorisation of SC reservations, demanding withdrawal of the Badar Committee report. In Bihar, the Aarakshan Badhao, Samvidhan Bachao Sangharsh Samiti marched in Patna to demand restoration of the 65% reservation quota struck down by the Patna High Court, alongside reservation in private-sector employment and government contracts. The All India Independent Scheduled Castes Association (AIISCA), led by Rahul Sonpimple, has taken the demand for private-sector reservation beyond individual states, announcing a nationwide campaign for reservation in private employment and private educational institutions. The issue of institutional accountability has also driven sustained mobilisation in Mumbai after IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode’s death. AIISCA, Aamchi Padhai Aamchi Ladhai, the Progressive Students Union and the Samyak Vidyarthi Andolan have joined protests demanding an independent inquiry into his family’s allegations of caste discrimination and harassment. Activists formed a Justice for Sahil Joint Action Committee at Azad Maidan, taking the demand beyond the campus. Elsewhere, the Kula Vivaksha Vyatireka Porata Sangham and Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch in Andhra Pradesh have mobilised over land rights and living conditions in Dalit settlements. Dalit Christians have organised around caste-based exclusion from state protections: on 10 August, organisations marked Black Day with protests demanding Scheduled Caste status. The Telangana Christian Joint Action Committee demonstrated at Jantar Mantar, while the Vellore Catholic Diocese SC/ST Committee, the CSI Church’s Vellore Diocese and the All Minorities Federation organised a protest involving more than 400 people in Vellore. These campaigns differ in their immediate demands, yet each has involved organised pressure on institutions and governments over decisions affecting Dalit and marginalised communities. Rajshekar asked for institutions of the community’s own; these campaigns mostly press existing ones.

The BSP’s decline and the relative irrelevance of Dalit parties more broadly sit alongside the continuing activity of anti-caste organisations, and the parties that have gained ground are those doing movement-style work. Together these point to a distinction between electoral strength and the capacity to organise politically. Electoral results show whether a party can win seats and exercise power, but they do not capture the ability of a movement to mobilise communities or force institutions to answer for caste discrimination. The BSP’s rise rested on an organisation that mobilised Dalit voters and brought other Bahujan communities into a wider political coalition. Its decline shows what happens when electoral strategy outlasts the organisational base that once sustained it. Azad, Thirumavalavan, Prakash Ambedkar and Athawale have pursued different routes to representation, from independent mobilisation to alliances with larger parties. Their trajectories however show the fragile possibilities of converting electoral presence into independent political power.

V. T. Rajshekar argued that electoral victories could not sustain a Bahujan movement without independent institutions and political education rooted in the community. The campaigns around reservations and caste discrimination suggest that social movements may offer greater scope for political change than electoral parties currently do. Dalit and anti-caste communities continue today to organise collectively and challenge the institutions that sustain caste, even as the future relationship between these movements and electoral politics remains unresolved.

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 24, Issue No. 5, 1 March 2005), this essay by Rajendra of Ambedkar Pratishthana defends Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy against attempts to portray him as anti-Dalit. The essay recalls Periyar’s role in the anti-caste struggle, his break with the Congress and his relationship with Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. It asks the present generation to remember Periyar alongside Phule, Ambedkar and Shyam Sunder as part of the history of the anti-caste struggle.

The essay places particular emphasis on Periyar’s relationship with Ambedkar. It recalls Periyar’s efforts to bring Ambedkar into the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal conference and the mutual respect between the two leaders. For Rajendra, Periyar’s importance lies in a politics of self-respect that directly challenged Brahminical social authority. He also presents Periyar within a wider Bahujan politics, arguing that Dalits and Backward Castes have a shared stake in fighting Brahminism. This makes the essay an important record of a political tradition that saw Ambedkar and Periyar as connected figures in the anti-caste movement rather than as representatives of opposing camps.

Published in September, the month of Periyar’s birth anniversary, the essay speaks to a contemporary tendency to divide anti-caste politics between Ambedkarite and Periyarist traditions, particularly in Tamil Nadu. That division can obscure the historical connections between the two movements and the different ways in which they confronted caste. Periyar’s emphasis on self-respect remains important because it locates caste oppression in the social relations and cultural authority that make hierarchy appear natural. His work also shows why anti-caste politics must challenge the ideas and institutions through which caste reproduces itself, alongside the struggle for political and legal rights. Revisiting Periyar through this history helps recover a broader anti-caste tradition in which his contribution and Ambedkar’s can be understood together without treating them as interchangeable.

Periyar E.V.R. As Champion Of Dalits

Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy is a leader of international repute and is hailed as a great thinker, reformer, revolutionary and humanist. The United Nations itself recognised this during his lifetime.

So any discussion on his sterling qualities and services to the oppressed people, victims of Brahminism, is ridiculous. Some Dalits under Brahminical influence have lately started branding Periyar as anti-Dalit. They should not be ungrateful to the extent of falsifying history itself. Dr. Ambedkar wanted his children to be sincere and truthful.

The present generation should know the history of their progress and the services and sacrifices of elders like Phule, Periyar, Babasaheb and Shyam Sunder.

Vaikom struggle: Periyar’s self-respect movement began in an aggressive way at Vaikom, in the present Kerala. It was on behalf of the Untouchable castes who were not allowed even to walk on a street right before a temple. Periyar rushed there and fought on their behalf.

This historic agitation led by Periyar attracted Muslim leader E.V.K. Abdulla and Christian leader Gorge Joseph. Gandhi, as a true Hindu, criticized Periyar for supporting the Untouchables. Sikhs came from Punjab and ran the free kitchen (langar). This will establish the truth of Periyar’s universal leadership.

Periyar was then arrested by the Trivancore state police and kept in prison for this agitation. Yet the agitation continued. Finally, the Untouchables won the right to walk on the road. This may not be a material gain, but a self-respect achievement for Untouchables. The agitation became famous as “Vaikom struggle”. Dr. Ambedkar wrote an Editorial about this historic achievement in his journal, Mooka Nayak.

Declaration to destroy Congress: The Congress, the original Brahmin party of India, passed a resolution in 1917 showing its concern for the welfare of Untouchables. M.K. Gandhi, the dictator of the Congress, claimed credit for this action of the Brahmin party. But the truth is Gandhi came to know about the British giving recognition to Untouchables and providing political rights based on the census of 1911, for which Prince Agha Khan was responsible.

From that day onwards, Congress started discussing social reforms in its sessions. But even such discussions were stopped when the Brahmins set fire to the Congress session pandal in Maharashtra. At the Madras session of the Congress, Periyar Ramaswamy, who was then an active worker of the Congress, forced a discussion on social problems, mainly Untouchability.

Rowdies engaged by Brahmins then dragged Periyar out of the pandal and thrashed him. Periyar declared on the spot that he would destroy the Congress in Tamil Nadu and he did it. The Congress is wiped out in Tamil Nadu.

Dr. Ambedkar respected Periyar: Dr. Ambedkar had great respect for Periyar and Periyar had respect for Dr. Ambedkar. It was Periyar who advised the organizers of Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore, when they invited him to the conference, to invite Dr. Ambedkar, being a better person, well read, better informed and able to speak English.

Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal approached Dr. Ambedkar, who agreed and prepared a speech for the conference. But Gandhi planned his usual trick, which resulted in Dr. Ambedkar cancelling his engagement.

Later, Dr. Ambedkar got his speech published as a book, titled Annihilation of Caste.

Three greatest personalities: Some Dalit leaders are critical of Periyar just because he belonged to a Backward Caste. They also quote and misquote Dr. Ambedkar on the subject. They know only the title of this book. But they do not know the history behind this book.

Dr. Ambedkar always made it a point to meet Periyar when he visited Madras. One such visit was when Jinnah attended the Muslim League meeting at Madras. On this occasion, all the three greatest personalities of the day, Dr. Ambedkar, Jinnah and Periyar, met and discussed the Indian caste problem. A photo with these three taken during that meeting of the great statesmen is in my possession. Another important photo with me is of Periyar with the great Bheem Sena leader Shyam Sunder.

Birthday celebration in UP: Kanshi Ram is another great revolutionary of India. He organised the Bahujan Samaj Party which came to power in UP and celebrated Periyar’s birth anniversary.

Kanshi Ram knows who is who among the Bahujans. If Periyar had been anti-Dalit, as made out by some Dalits in Tamil Nadu, would India’s topmost Dalit leader praise Periyar? Similarly, our Editor has assigned the No.2 place to Periyar among the three greatest revolutionaries of “independent” India.

With all these facts, why do some Dalits call Periyar anti-Dalit? The mistake is not of Dalits but of the Backward Castes. It is easy to call it Brahminism.

The pity is the Backward Castes are the agents and foot-soldiers of Brahmins.

They ill-treated Dalits all over India, including Tamil Nadu, pushing Dalits to Islam at Meenakshi Puram 25 years ago. The BCs must mend their attitude towards Dalits, Muslims and Christians.

Dalits are duty bound to lead the entire Bahujan Samaj. That can be fulfilled only when BCs, at least the Most Backward Castes (MBC) like the barber, dhobi, potter, blacksmith etc., understand the importance of building Bahujan Samaj. Muslims and Christians also are distancing themselves from BCs. As an Ambedkarite, I call upon the BCs to join Dalits to fight Brahminism.

Periyar spent his whole life in this work for over half a century.

“The purpose of a system is what it does,” Stafford Beer once said: not what its charter claims, not what its founders intended, not what its defenders insist it’s secretly working toward once the numbers look bad. The line comes from Beer’s work in cybernetics and systems theory, but it travels well, because it was really a warning against taking any institution’s word for itself. Apply it to the state and the sentence stops being quippy and starts being uncomfortable. A state does not do what its Constitution’s preamble promises. It does not do what its bare acts say it must. It does what its politicians ignore until an election forces a promise out of them. It does what a police force using violence on citizens with impunity does. It does the slow torture bureaucrats in government offices administer by attrition. It does the routine ignoring of injustice courts specialise in. Everything else is marketing.

A state’s default setting isn’t a neutral one, but it isn’t a fixed conspiracy either: it simply doesn’t move unless it’s made to. Every gain anyone has pulled out of a state came after someone made not conceding more expensive than conceding.

Reservation itself carries the memory of that fact in its own founding story. Ambedkar’s original demand, at the Round Table Conferences, was a separate electorate for the Depressed Classes: our own constituencies, our own voters, our own representatives answerable to no one else’s veto, a political existence independent of Hindu society rather than embedded inside it. The Communal Award of August 1932 granted exactly that. Gandhi, in prison, announced a fast unto death to force its withdrawal, blackmailing the Depressed Classes and its leaders as well as the British rulers, on the ground that a separate electorate would permanently divide Hindu society. Ambedkar held out against a starving man for days before the political pressure, not the argument, became unbearable on practical grounds, and what emerged from the negotiation at Poona was not the separate electorate but reserved seats inside a joint electorate: more seats than the Award had granted, 148 in the provincial legislatures instead of the original allotment, but folded back into the same political body Ambedkar had tried to exit. Reservation was not the original ask. It is what remained after the original mandate was made impossible by someone else’s leverage and the Hindu moral bankruptcy behind it. The instrument defended for ninety years since it has itself been a settlement, arriving at under duress, from a wider claim.

Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All India Independent Scheduled Castes Association (AIISCA), made a version of this point at a press meeting on private sector reservation in Delhi on 27th September, framing reservation as something closer to a treaty than an entitlement: a thin, fragile thread and the only one tying Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs to the Indian state, functioning not as generosity but as a negotiated peace. It buys the state and the dominant castes who still hold most of the country’s assets a measure of calm from a majority whose rightful share has otherwise been denied, while giving the numerically dominant Bahujan population some working proxy for the democratic weight their numbers should carry. A contract, not a gift. Except a contract is only as good as what a party can be made to perform under it, and a state that already treats its own preamble as marketing will treat a contract no differently.

A contract implies parties, and a state, unlike a private employer, actually has one with its citizens. It demands loyalty, taxation, submission to its law, alongside the monopoly to dictate the political fates of those within its territory, in exchange for a set of standing obligations back. A private firm asks for labour under a contract either side can in principle at least walk from, and owes nothing back to someone who was never bound to it in any comparable way. That asymmetry is a large part of why a claim on the state’s own hiring is different in kind from a claim on a firm’s, not because the state behaves more responsibly in practice, as we are all well-aware, but because it owes something on the terms of the relationship itself. Although an obligation the state owes but doesn’t perform is worth exactly as much as a preamble it doesn’t act on.

A private firm is not identical to the state, and the case for reaching it anyway doesn’t depend on pretending otherwise. It rests on two separate facts. The economy itself has changed since the framers drew the line at public employment, and a social justice framework confined to the public sector now leaves most of economic life untouched, because most of it no longer sits inside the public sector at all, a gap widened further by the same state’s ongoing privatisation of what public capacity remains, shrinking the one terrain where proportional representation currently carries legal force. But the second fact runs deeper and doesn’t depend on how recent liberalisation is: a private sector built on land, credit, licenses and infrastructure the state provides, privatising its profits while routinely and unsparingly socialising its costs through subsidy, tax concession and public investment, has never sat outside the state’s reach in the first place, this was true of Indian capital before 1991 as much as after it. A firm that depends on the state which itself takes from the public commons for that much can never be allowed to answer to nothing beyond its own balance sheet.

Even so, there’s a real limit to what representation alone produces. Elevated individuals from a movement or caste often become instruments of the institution’s own legitimation rather than being accountable to the base that elevated them, and when they try to push further beyond the constraints and the logics of those systems, they get cut down by the sheer weight of social forces unwilling to tolerate the progress already made. Despite that, political reservation has still converted into something more durable than individual token presence, an independent structure of Bahujan power that didn’t exist before it, even as oppressor-caste violence against that rise has grown alongside it. What government service has that the private sector doesn’t is exactly this: decades of organised structure built up around the reserved seat, structure that keeps contesting the ceiling even where it doesn’t break through it. The private sector has never had an equivalent foothold, and no amount of employer voluntarism has ever built one. That’s the case for statutory reservation even in its thinnest form: not that a quota alone delivers equality, especially substantively, but that it’s the minimum legal anchor around which durable, organisable power can be built at all.

Against that backdrop, private sector reservation is not a new demand groping for its first hearing. It has been formally raised for close to two decades. The All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations was pressing the case as early as 2012, organising a march on Delhi backed by three dozen SC/ST organisations, arguing plainly that no nation stays strong while its economic and social levels remain this split. But even before that, in 2003, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed a meeting of SC and ST MPs and said that the private sector cannot exist in isolation and has to be responsive to the needs of the society, making it essential to have reservation in the private sector. This was followed by a broad consensus among electoral parties across the ideological spectrum on the matter, even though it has not yet been translated into political will or substantive action. One concrete effort came in 2006, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when he appealed directly to Indian industries to become the government’s partner on the question. However, rather than legislate a mandate, the government let industry regulate itself: CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM each adopted a Voluntary Code of Conduct built around four pillars, Employability, Education, Entrepreneurship Development and Employment. That October, the PMO had already constituted a Coordination Committee on Affirmative Action in the Private Sector, chaired by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, drawing on the Department of Personnel and Training, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and serviced by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. The Committee has met nine times since. By 2010, the government’s own review found adoption of the voluntary codes was slow; by 2013, it was still describing the same dialogue as ongoing; by 2015, industry associations were reporting hundreds of member companies signed on. Twenty years of this arrangement has produced a voluntary code without enforceable duties, and industry associations professing over a lakh of beneficiaries with no verifiable representation data to back the figure. Now we cannot sit once again with a renewed appeal for goodwill. What is needed is to go beyond an empty promise and fight for a statutory guarantee: a binding quota, backed by rule of law, not another code any signatory can stop honouring when they feel like it.

On 26 July 2024, that demand reached Parliament directly. Chandrashekhar Azad, MP for Nagina, introduced a private member’s bill titled the Reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in Private Sector Act, 2024, one of three private member’s bills he introduced in the Lok Sabha that day. It covers private firms, educational institutions and other establishments employing at least twenty people with no government financial stake. Even this bill stops short of a binding hiring quota: its mechanism is incentive-based, requiring the central government to induce private firms toward reservation through special concessions and lower-interest loans via nationalised banks, with an annual implementation report tabled in both Houses. Structurally, a private member’s bill has almost no chance of becoming law: enactment is the exception, not the rule, and has been for decades. That a bill this cautious, relying on incentives rather than quotas, remains a private member’s bill and is still pending says something about how far Parliament remains from treating this as settled business.

But the case for the demand itself rests on documented discrimination. Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell’s 2007 correspondence study sent matched applications under upper-caste Hindu, Dalit and Muslim names to private-sector job advertisements in the English dailies and found discrimination operating at the very first screening stage, before any interview, before any assessment of merit beyond a name on a page. Zahra Siddique’s 2011 work went further, quantifying the size of the gap and who was driving it: low-caste applicants had to send 20% more resumes than high-caste applicants to get the same callback rate, with the disparity sharpest when the recruiter was male or Hindu, and more pronounced at smaller firms than larger ones. Axmann, Swanson and Cuspinera Contreras, using Indian Human Development Survey data in 2016, found significant wage discrimination against Dalits and Adivasis specifically inside the private sector. Madheswaran and Singhari, drawing on National Sample Survey employment data the same year, found SC workers earning less than equally qualified forward-caste workers in urban labour markets, with the gap wider in private employment than public, and unequal access to occupations itself doing much of the work in producing the disparity. Pattayat’s 2024 study of rural non-farm workers, using NSSO and PLFS data spanning 2004-05 to 2019-20, found the earnings gap persisting across that entire period and examined how much of it discrimination itself accounted for.

Article 15(5) already gives the state constitutional room to act on half of this. Inserted by the 93rd Amendment in 2005 and in force since January 2006, it permits special provision by law for socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in admission to educational institutions, explicitly including private institutions, aided or unaided, with the sole carve-out for Article 30(1) minority institutions. Because education sits on the Concurrent List, both Parliament and state legislatures can act under it, and several states have already legislated on private educational admissions. Tamil Nadu enacted a 2006 law providing 69% reservation for Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in private educational institutions. Andhra Pradesh had already applied SC, ST and Backward Class reservations to admissions in private professional institutions through its admission rules. Karnataka’s 2006 Professional Educational Institutions Act provides for 50% reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs in unaided non-minority professional institutions. Maharashtra enacted a 2006 law providing reservation for SCs, STs, Denotified Tribes, Nomadic Tribes and OBCs in private professional educational institutions, while Haryana’s 2016 Backward Classes Act provides reservation for Backward Classes in admissions to educational institutions, including private institutions.

What that record shows is that Article 15(5) has been given statutory effect at the state level, but unevenly and without a nationwide framework. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report presented to the Rajya Sabha in August 2025 said that private educational institutions are currently under no national legal obligation to implement reservation because there is no central statute mandating it. It recommended that Parliament legislate 27%, 15% and 7.5% reservation for OBCs, SCs and STs respectively in private higher educational institutions, with government reimbursement of the associated costs on the model of the Right to Education Act. Although a sincere Caste Census may tell us that the necessary numbers should be much higher, the constitutional ceiling on reservation itself also needs to be revisited.

What Article 15(5) doesn’t reach at all is employment, and that gap isn’t small: education and employment were never separable; a degree that doesn’t convert into a job is a credential, not a livelihood. One state that tried a binding private-sector quota by its own legislation ran straight into that trap. Haryana’s 2020 State Employment of Local Candidates Act mandated 75% reservation for domiciled candidates in private jobs under a salary threshold, with a 10% district sub-cap built in, not a caste quota, a domicile one. The Punjab and Haryana High Court struck it down in 2023 as unconstitutional and violative of Part III of the Constitution; the challenge to that judgment remains pending before the Supreme Court. The deeper problem predates the ruling: the 93rd Amendment gave the state constitutional room to reach private education specifically and never extended that room to private employment. Domicile was the classification that failed here, not caste, but replacing domicile with caste would not by itself resolve the Article 19(1)(g) problem, because no amendment has yet done for employment what the 93rd did for education. That is what this demand still needs and hasn’t gotten: not just a statute, but a constitutional amendment opening the same room for private employment that the 93rd opened for private education, without which any statute meets the wall Haryana did.

Winning that room would still only secure a narrower claim than the one Ambedkar himself eventually made. Private sector reservation, at its most comprehensive, means reservation in private employment, reservation in private educational institutions, and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act as organizations like AIISCA and others have been demanding: legislation with a working complaint mechanism, an investigation process, ongoing monitoring, and real accountability, reaching recruitment, wages, promotion, workplace treatment, termination, occupational allocation, contract employment and professional advancement, not just the moment of hire. That last piece is the one twenty years of voluntary codes never touched, because a Voluntary Code of Conduct had no enforceable complaint mechanism and no statutory consequence for ignoring it. A statute would. But even this full slate, a foothold at every stage of the employment relationship, asks only for fair terms of entry into an economy whose ownership stays exactly where it already is. It is a claim to be treated fairly inside the room. It has never been a claim on who owns the room.

Ambedkar’s own economic writing sits alongside all of this as one part of a longer record, that expands the horizon of economic fight itself. In States and Minorities, the memorandum he prepared for the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Scheduled Caste Federation, he proposed a state control over economy in which key industries would be owned and run directly by the state and basic industries owned by the state and run through its own corporations, with land held under state ownership and cultivated through cooperative farming, aimed at dismantling landlordism and the agrarian exploitation caste had built itself around. That program was never incorporated into the Constitution in the form Ambedkar proposed. Although a version of that was found in the Nehruvian socialist project, which was itself eventually given up in the face of global neoliberal onslaught. What it shows, regardless of anyone’s own view of state ownership as a remedy, is how early and how directly Ambedkar located the actual target in who owns the economy, not merely who holds a fair position inside it.

Ambedkar’s economic target, and the demand for reservation in the private sector, concern forms of structural injustice that are harder to see than the moments when that injustice erupts into visible violence. That shapes not only who gets to have this conversation and on what terms, but who is willing to listen to it. Oppressor-caste liberals attend to Dalit-Bahujan life most readily through the news cycle of atrocity, because atrocity is visceral and immediately legible, while the guilt of a grieving conscience often springs into action only when Dalit-Bahujan rage forces that attention. A Dalit-Bahujan body demands attention in a way a hiring statistic does not. A wage-discrimination dataset spanning fifteen years, a Coordination Committee that has gone nowhere, a bill pending in Parliament since 2024, none of these produces the same urgency because none offers an easy villain, a headline image or a clean moment of collective horror to perform. Grieving a corpse asks nothing ongoing of anyone. But there is a real villain here, even if it is harder to identify in any single moment: the state, which owes more than what it does and routinely shows where its priorities lie, alongside the structural violence produced through years of oppressor-caste apathy at best and antipathy at worst.

The historical record here is a caution, not a reason to wait. What survived Poona wasn’t Ambedkar’s original demand: it was a narrower settlement that still had to be fought for afterward, seat by seat, for decades, before it was more than ink. The same will be true of a private-sector statute and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act alongside it. Winning them will not finish anything on its own; a seat is captured as often as it’s built on. Beer’s sentence applies once more, now to the law: a statute’s purpose isn’t what its statement of objects and reasons says either. It’s what the Act does. Whether the complaint mechanism gets used, whether a violation carries any real cost, whether the oversight committee holds its next meeting or goes missing in action the way it already has. None of that follows from any bill becoming an act. It follows only if the pressure that forces the act into existence keeps being applied after it exists. Because a state, as established, only holds what it’s made to hold.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

Dr. Milind Kamble of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in an interview, “Capital can break caste system… Market and money will defeat anti-capital Marx and Manu.”

His argument might seem attractive, but I disagree. Capital cannot break the caste system because the market is not casteless. It carries caste into every transaction that takes place before the consumer reaches the shop. Certainly, accumulation of capital can improve economic standing, especially among marginalised sections, but it absolutely will not defeat Manu or the caste system. Dr. Kamble is confusing individual economic mobility with the abolition of caste as a social and economic structure. His entrepreneurial agenda does not resolve the concerns that structure and constrain many lives. Who owns land? Who has collateral? Who can access networks? Who can survive a period without income? Who can get a loan without family wealth behind them? Who has the social connections to find suppliers, customers and contracts? And who is trusted when they walk into a bank, a business association or a potential partnership?

Although India, under the leadership of Dr. Manmohan Singh, entered a phase of economic reforms in 1991, opening its economy to liberalised and globalised economic spaces, the trajectory changed significantly since 2014. The post-2014 phase represents a particularly aggressive intensification of neoliberal policies combined with right-wing populist politics. This has manifested through the divestment of profitable stakes in publicly owned companies and their outright sale to private ownership. In post-2014 India, Dalits are being told, again and again, to become entrepreneurs. They are even invited into the market as borrowers, as start-up founders, as “self-made” men and women who can pull themselves up through grit and a bank loan. DICCI has given it a name, “Dalit Capitalism,” asserting that “caste and capital can never co-exist.” However, to assume that capital accumulation can dismantle caste is to ignore how contemporary markets articulate and weaponise pre-existing social hierarchies to maintain structural stratification.It produces hierarchical adverse inclusion, in which Dalits are brought into the market, yet the structures that keep them subordinate remain untouched. This inclusion works through a predatory sorting mechanism where the market invites Dalit actors as economic agents while it simultaneously locks them into asymmetric low-tier commercial arrangements. Such low margin supply roles cannot challenge the pre-existing monopoly of dominant caste. As a result, entrepreneurship functions less as a pathway to mobility and more as a mechanism that reproduces existing hierarchies. Only a small minority are able to move upward through episodic access to capital and networks.

The mix of neoliberal economic policy and right-wing Hindutva politics has reshaped Dalit entrepreneurial inclusion in three connected ways. First, it encourages Dalits to see themselves as entrepreneurial subjects without redistributing land, capital, or other assets. Second, it expands formal credit on paper while leaving caste-structured barriers like collateral, networks, documentation, and bias firmly in place. Third, it depoliticises caste inequality by wrapping it in the language of opportunity, merit and self-help. In this setting, credit and entrepreneurship schemes work less as tools of emancipation and more as mechanisms of managed inclusion within an order that remains deeply unequal.

There is a mutual relationship between right-wing politics and neoliberalism that produces a strong ideological hegemony. On one side, neoliberalism generates social and economic crises that produce grievances, job scarcity, and financial uncertainty, which right-wing populism mobilises politically. Populist politics reinforces neoliberalism by creating doubt and controversy around the causes of economic insecurity, while directing public attention towards cultural and political conflicts rather than the material failures of capitalism. Through this, it delegitimises progressive economic alternatives, framing structural challenges to the free market as corrupt, globalist, or anti-national threats. Pühringer and Ötsch (2018) conceptualised this as a loop that constructs a binary worldview, effectively reorganising societal conflicts by splitting them into two polarised groups. In India, those two groups are the Hindu majoritarian masses versus the progressive dissidents and minority outsiders. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing Hindutva government that fiercely encourages privatisation and entrepreneurship, it is crucial to understand exactly where Dalits stand in the political economic landscape of India. Because the state is pushing for Dalit entrepreneurship by reframing credit and start-ups as the ultimate pathways to empowerment, the populist discourse successfully depoliticises caste inequality, shifting the burden of survival from the state onto the isolated individual.

A central feature of India’s material economy is the unequal distribution of assets. Around 58.4% of rural Dalit households reportedly do not own agricultural land, while at the individual level, around 71% of Dalits work as landless agricultural labourers, cultivating land owned by the dominant caste. The concentration of landlessness is particularly severe in states such as Punjab, Bihar and Haryana, where more than 85% of Dalit households reportedly own no land. At the same time, under the neoliberal policy reforms by the BJP government, the public sector enterprises that historically provided secure jobs with SC/ST-focused affirmative action are being aggressively privatised, and Dalits are being shifted to informal employment. Dalits and Adivasis account for over 40% of seasonal migrants, despite making up just 25% of the total population. In India, short-term labour migration is seven times more common than permanent relocation, and this gap widens to 16 times for these specific communities. Furthermore, these workers are frequently forced into the most dangerous, physically demanding, and toxic jobs in the country.

Over the years, the government has launched multiple schemes to provide credit through loans to SC/ST persons, focusing on entrepreneurial activities. For example, through Stand-Up India (2016), it aimed to provide loans of up to ₹ 1 crore to SC/ST and women entrepreneurs. National SC/ST Hubs were formed to give them market access, help with procurement, and training. A special credit-linked capital subsidy is also in place. However, official data presented by the Ministry of Finance compiled by SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India) shows a contrasting view. While Stand-Up India has sanctioned over ₹ 62,000 crore in loans to around 2.75 lakh beneficiaries since 2016, only about 1/5th of these loans has reached SC/ST entrepreneurs with the majority going to general category women.

Table 1: Stand-Up India disbursements by social category, based on Department of Financial Services data.

From 2016 to 2025, around 22.49% of all money disbursed under the Stand-Up India scheme went to SC and ST entrepreneurs together. There are also high documentation requirements and margin requirements of up to 25%. This clearly indicates that even when formal credit is available, structural barriers like collateral, networks, and bureaucratic delays filter most vulnerable Dalit applicants out. Because of the lack of traditional collateral, 82% of Dalit borrowers rely on informal lenders and high-interest borrowing parties.

Furthermore, MUDRA Bank (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank), formally established in 2015, is a prominent credit scheme of the incumbent government, but the data exposes the structural limitations of the institution’s reality that the government does not want to focus on. Around 51% of MUDRA accounts belong to SC/ST/OBC categories. However, the way these accounts are divided is staggering. Over 70% to 80% of all MUDRA loans fall under the “Shishu” category (under ₹50,000). A loan of ₹30,000 or ₹40,000 cannot build a competitive, wealth-generating start-up. It can only buy a fruit cart, a sewing machine, or open a tiny roadside tea stall. Effectively, such amounts are more suited to small-scale livelihood activities than to building a competitive, wealth-generating enterprise. The state celebrating “start-up culture” is actually promoting necessity entrepreneurship, a term for entrepreneurship born out of an absolute absence of alternative employment options. A study by Jarwal and Kahal (2022) similarly finds that the growth of Dalit entrepreneurship as an impact of liberalisation policy can be positive; however, this has resulted in a proliferation of very small business units, which are mainly engaged in survival activities. The study further states that most Dalit-owned enterprises were established out of the necessity to survive. This is because their owners did not get employment opportunities, and had they received employment opportunities, they would have been earning more than what they are currently earning through necessity entrepreneurship. This necessity entrepreneurship keeps people alive at a subsistence level, but it does not generate institutional capital or challenge upper-caste corporate monopolies. According to official Economic Census Data analysed by the Economic and Political Weekly (2025), 89% of rural and 72% of urban Dalit-owned enterprises are OAEs (Own Account Enterprises). Most do not grow into larger firms; they function primarily as a substitute for daily wage employment and household income to keep the family fed. For many Dalit entrepreneurs, entry into the entrepreneurial market is shaped less by the pursuit of a profitable market opportunity than by the limited availability of secure employment. Entrepreneurship therefore becomes a strategy for economic survival rather than a straightforward pathway to wealth creation. Thus, as scholars have already shown, market inclusion alone is not an explanation of Dalit economic empowerment.

Such divergent scenarios between governmental schemes and Dalit economic conditions make the market an unequal playing field. Along with the unequal access to financial capital, there is also a profound social imbalance: private capital in India does not operate through a socially neutral field, as a mathematical principle unaffected by social forces. Its allocation is shaped by historically embedded caste structures and institutions, concentrated among predominantly Baniya and other mercantile castes. Avichal Dhiwar, founder of 20th March Venture Pvt Ltd, said in an interview, “Despite having complete paperwork, we faced a lot of problems getting loans from banks. They made it so tough for us that we eventually realised that they had no intention of extending us any loan.” This clearly shows the need for a mandatory public credit system to prevent systemic market exclusion of marginalised entrepreneurs. However, even necessary government loans and other forms of financial assistance reach only 10% of Scheduled Caste (SC) units, clearly indicating credit starvation. Furthermore, traditional business chambers, such as FICCI and CII, and trade networks have historically been dominated by these mercantile castes, who hold a monopoly over market trust and proudly flaunt it. When massive corporate monopolies run into billions of rupees in bad loans (Non-Performing Assets), the state steps in to bail them out, absorbing the damage; here, corporate risk is socialised. However, when a marginalised Dalit entrepreneur seeks a micro-loan, the state forces them to take on immense personal credit risk in a volatile market without any state security. Rather than providing security against the risks generated by market participation, right-wing neoliberal policy increasingly encourages historically excluded groups to become market participants and assume responsibility for navigating those risks themselves. For marginalised communities such a market means “competition among wolves and lambs“, as mentioned by Dr. Ambedkar in States and Minorities (1947). As Fischer (2020) argues, social policy under neoliberal restructuring does not necessarily remove structural inequality; instead, policies designed to promote inclusion can produce what he describes as hierarchical or adverse forms of inclusion, in which marginalised populations are incorporated into markets while remaining disadvantaged within them.

For Ambedkar, this distinction was fundamental. Economic reform could not be separated from social reform. Opening the market does not create equality when the social relations governing access to that market remain unequal. Credit can provide an opportunity to enter the market, but it also creates an obligation to repay within an environment where access to assets, networks and stable markets remains highly unequal. Without control over credit, markets will become a field of monopoly and exploitation. An increase in privatisation also results in the government abdicating its responsibility to safeguard its citizens.

In Annihilation of Caste (1936), Dr. Ambedkar said,“The problem of the Untouchables is a unique problem… You cannot have economic reform unless you pursue social reform. … The division of labour under the caste system is not a mere division of labour. It is a division of labourers.” In the private informal sector, Dalits often work as low-tier subcontractors for larger firms, which is not empowerment in any politically, socially, or economically meaningful sense. Here, inclusion into the market happens without dismantling the structural barriers, such as caste networks, which keep Dalit businesses at the periphery. Therefore, targeted entrepreneurial policies under the right-wing government does not dismantle caste-based economic exclusion, but primarily facilitates Dalit participation within markets whose underlying structures remain unequal. The right-wing government is therefore simultaneously promoting Dalit entrepreneurship while leaving many of the structural conditions that constrain Dalit entrepreneurship intact.

What can be done?

Rejecting market participation because caste structures already shape the market and the inability of the government to safeguard rights is not a feasible solution. While under neoliberalism, individual entrepreneurship can function as a form of economic mobility; enterprise can be re-signified as a potent tool for collective social emancipation. Crucially, this social emancipation is not achieved through isolated individuals taking on personal liabilities in a structurally unequal market. Rather, it becomes possible only when market participation is backed by stronger public regulation of credit markets and corporate concentration, along with the development of independent, community-owned institutional capacities.

The government is meant to play a crucial role in enforcing existing policies requiring corporations, such as the policy requiring public sector undertakings (PSUs) to procure 4% of their supplies from SC/ST-owned micro and small enterprises, and entrepreneurs. They are also expected to provide concessional loans through the Venture Capital Fund for Scheduled Castes, etc. However, trusting the right-wing neoliberal regime to implement these policies sincerely or effectively is not realistic. Doing so would directly contradict its ideological alliance with corporate capital. Therefore, there is a need for counter-hegemonic power, where Dalit communities stop acting merely as scattered voters or isolated market actors and instead use their collective leverage to disrupt the system. This can be done by moving from individual credit risk to structural social democracy and by aggregating thousands of small Dalit producers into a large cooperative, so they gain bargaining power to compete against corporate monopolies. Sustained institutional action and litigation can also be used to document state non-compliance with procurement obligations and seek appropriate judicial remedies, including through PILs, while RTIs can be used to obtain the relevant records.

Finally, the Dalit community must construct its own autonomous institutional capacity to provide Dalit entrepreneurs with finance, information, mentorship and bargaining power. It will be a community-led ecosystem that integrates community-owned credit cooperatives, independent capital funds and digital business directories that pool resources to guarantee internal markets. These institutions would be unlike DICCI, which operates primarily as a networking hub within the existing structures of caste capitalism.

Building autonomous Dalit institutions does not absolve the state of its responsibility to safeguard rights and provide social security. Micro-loans alone cannot produce emancipation if they merely manage poverty without changing the conditions under which Dalits participate in the market.

Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte is a development economics researcher, anti-caste writer and public speaker working on inequality, Dalit and Buddhist economics.

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 1, Issue No. 17, 16 June 1982), this essay asks why India has failed to produce intellectuals who can challenge the ruling order rather than serve it. Rajshekar treats intellectual life as a political question, arguing that knowledge has little value when those who possess it refuse to confront power.

The essay places this argument alongside Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of the Brahminical character of India’s intellectual class. Rajshekar argues that when the intellectual class is tied to caste interests, it becomes an obstacle to the destruction of caste. He also attacks the pressures that push intellectuals towards careers, awards, money and proximity to power, while dissenters are branded as dangerous or “controversial”.

The essay then asks why India did not produce another Ambedkar after independence. Rajshekar connects this to the loss of the limited space he believed Ambedkar had found under British rule, arguing that Dalits and other oppressed communities were left without protection from the ruling order after independence. The essay’s central question is therefore about the political purpose of intellectual life: what happens to a society when those capable of challenging its dominant ideas choose accommodation instead?

The Role of Intellectuals in Society

Every society, every country in the world is shaped and led mainly by its intellectuals. All those who are remembered by history are mostly intellectuals. An intellectual may not get instant recognition by society when alive, but in course of time the person’s greatness will be recognised and recorded on the pages of history. Because an intellectual and intellectual alone can help bring about socio-economic changes.

The Buddha, Plato, Marx, Rousseau, Lenin, Abraham Lincoln, Maxim Gorky, Bernard Shaw, Mao, Thiruvallavar, Mahatma Phule were all great intellectuals. It is intellectuals who not only think but make others think.

After Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, M. N. Roy, Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy and Ram Manohar Lohia, we have hardly produced any intellectual giants in India. India’s Ruling Class has been systematically corrupting any up-and-coming intellectual, and if anyone dares to defy, he is mercilessly crushed. That is why rarely one wants to show originality, innovation. So much so, India has gone into total intellectual bankruptcy.

The very fact that India has not received a single Nobel Prize after it became independent proves that we are a country of mediocre dwarfs. But we are never tired of boasting that we have the second largest scientific manpower in the whole world. If so, what are they doing? Why not a single one has made an international mark?

The one agricultural scientist who received the Magsaysay Award was later found to have got it after making a false claim. But even this man has now taken up a cushy job outside India. This is the disease with our intellectuals. One social scientist, considered very distinguished, is seldom in India and even when at home never rubs the ruling class lest it may upset his lucrative income. Scientists like Khurana have settled down in the USA.

All this is because our society and our value system do not believe in encouraging and promoting intellectuals. India’s Ruling Class wants to make its people surrender their judgement to it. Every intellectual is a suspect. It looks upon him as a source of trouble.

Some of the finest budding, blooming flowers of our society were shot dead, dubbing them as Naxalites. Any person who does not fall in line and conform to the established thinking is considered a threat to society. Dissent is disliked, nay, dangerous. Truth should not be spoken. And those who speak the truth will be branded as “controversial” persons.

Any number of organisations, both govt. and non-govt., are set up to watch and weed out such “dangerous” persons. Innumerable State and private awards are instituted to win over any brilliant writer, scholar, to pocket if not corrupt him.

Courage is an essential prerequisite to become an intellectual. He has to suffer and sacrifice, pay for his commitment. That is why intellectuals and intellectuals alone can lead a society or a movement. An intellectual can lead as well as mislead. But in India, very often our intellectuals have been only misleading the society.

Nobody has painted such an Indian situation better than Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, and things have hardly changed since he wrote it:

“Whether you accept the theory of the great man as the maker of history or whether you do not, this much you will have to concede that in every country the intellectual class is the most influential class, if not the governing class. The intellectual class is the class which can foresee, it is the class which can advise and give lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life of intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class.

There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destiny of a country depends upon its Intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest, independent and disinterested, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises.

It is true that intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means, and the use of means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he can easily be a rogue. Similarly, an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity, or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of a narrow clique from which it draws its support.

You may think it a pity that the intellectual class in India is simply another name for the Brahmin caste. You may regret that the two are one, that the existence of the intellectual class should be bound with one single caste, that this intellectual class should share the interest & the aspirations of that Brahmin caste, which has regarded itself the custodian of interest of that caste, rather than of the interests of the country.

All this may be very regrettable. But the fact remains that the Brahmins form the intellectual class of the Hindus. It is not only an intellectual class but it is a class which is held in great reverence by the rest of the Hindus. The Hindus are taught that the Brahmins are Bhudevas (gods on earth). The Hindus are taught that Brahmins alone can be their teacher. Varnaram Brahmano Guru. Manu says, “If it be asked how it should be with respect to points of the Dharma which have not been specially mentioned, the answer is that which Brahmins who are Shishthas propound shall doubtless have legal force.”

When such an intellectual class, which holds the rest of the community in its grip, is opposed to the reform of Caste, the chances of success in a movement for break-up of the Caste System appear to me very, very remote.”

A film actor like Amitabh Bachchan or actress like Hema Malini may have millions of fans, but the glamour is temporary. The moment the youth fades, the star sinks. A cricketer or sportsman is adored till his capacity lasts. A wrestler, boxer or a King Kong will be feared until his body strength stays.

A politician like Indira Gandhi or Reagan is adored until the person is in power. Remember, people used to avoid Indira Gandhi like plague when she was defeated by the Janata. Those with money come and go. No Tata or Birla is remembered by history. A beauty queen is glorified till her skin fades.

There is nothing permanent with stars, sportsmen, body-builders, political personalities or wealthy tycoons. But that is not the case with an intellectual. He is respected not only in his lifetime but even after that.

Kalidasa was simply a poet under King Vikramaditya, but the king’s name has faded, but not that of Kalidasa, India’s greatest Sanskrit writer. Sometimes an intellectual is respected and recognised more after his death. Karl Marx’s name will be there as long as history is there. So too Plato, Jesus Christ, Mohamed Paigambar, Lenin, Mao, Martin Luther King.

Progress of any country depends only on its intellectuals. They alone can lead, but in India, alas, our intellectuals have been only misleading the society because they have been impotent and corrupt. That is why they compromise.

Look at the courage of J. B. S. Haldane. He subjected himself to great physical pain by himself becoming a guinea pig of his experiments. Have we produced a scientist of his calibre?

Our scientists are spending their time not in laboratories but in air-conditioned offices, busy pushing files. Intellectuals of India have not given evidence of their courage, their independence of thought and conviction, which are the indices to judge an intellectual.

They are not courageous, because they are so preoccupied with selfish interests. That is why they migrate to foreign countries in search of cushy jobs. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 3 is reported to have expressed concern over “brain drain of scientific talent.” But this is not the first time she and other top leaders are expressing such a concern.

What is the use of a brain that allows itself to be drained? Better not have such brains. What we want is brains with hearts, and such brains will rarely allow itself to be drained. Heartless brains are more dangerous than brainless hearts. Therefore, let the heartless brains go. India will in no way become poorer.

A true intellectual will not sell himself. He can never be bought. He can never seek power and ambition. He will speak the truth, come what may, even at the cost of his life.

The evil has triumphed in India and the country is drifting because our intellectuals do not speak up. So much so, the country has grown sick and its sickness is affecting the outside world as well. But our intellectuals are unperturbed. To them, their caste and cash is more important than the eternal pursuit of truth.

What is the use of learning and knowledge when it does not bring cash or power? Popularity does not depend upon one’s ability but other factors. “Success in life” depends not on learning but on bank balance. In such a society, what use is learning or intellectual pursuits?

Intellectuals are laughed at, despised. Why should we strain the brain when money can be made without it? This is India today.

If our intellectuals are corrupt and spineless, the masses are dumb, deaf and blind because of poverty and illiteracy. The latter are illiterate because they are poor. When they are preoccupied all the time in an endless battle of the belly, where is the time for them to think, even if thinking is possible?

If this is the position of the poorest, what about the educated, employed people who come from this very same revolutionary section, Dalits and other persecuted minorities? The tragedy with this section is they have become easy-going, pleasure-seeking. Not only that. A considerable number of them, particularly the educated Untouchables, hide their identity and turn into bumlickers.

Yes, there are a tiny section of conscientious people among them who are angry. Who wants to rebel?

“The world owes much to rebels who would dare to argue in the face of the pontiff and insist that he is not infallible. I don’t care for the credit which every progressive society must give to its rebels.” (Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, preface to second edition of Annihilation of Caste.)

Ambedkar, however, lived up to the definition of a rebel, an intellectual giant. But such of the rebels are spotted out and finished at the very initial stage. Those who have managed to escape and build up their leadership are recruited by the ever-watchful political parties.

So there is an all-round famine. No ruling class will produce a revolutionary. On the other hand, the revolutionary section is starved to submission by the ruling class.

This answers the oft-repeated question: “Why India has not produced a second Ambedkar?”

Babasaheb lived a major part of his life when India was under the British, who were benevolent rulers. Not only they gave us education, denied to us by Brahmins, but even gave us modern, Western knowledge.

Not only that. If there was any “freedom struggle” and some leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were able to fight the British, it was because of the knowledge they gained from the very British education and the encouragement they gave to fight for liberty and fraternity.

But for the British rule, which in fact meant a Christian rule, India would not have been what it is today. So Ambedkar, despite his open criticism of the British Government, got all the encouragement from the British.

Nobody criticised the British right on their face as Ambedkar did. They gave him all the facilities and also protected him against his enemies. They gave all-out encouragement and built up his leadership.

Once the British were out, Dalits & the persecuted minorities of India had none to protect them. They were virtually thrown to wolves. The independence that India got on Aug. 15, 1947 was the independence given to the high castes to exploit, which they could not do earlier so freely.

The lambs are bound and bundled and handed to wolves on a silver platter. That is the reason why after independence India did not get a second Ambedkar.

No honest, dedicated leadership is tolerated by these ever-watchful headhunters. This is the heinous role played by India’s intellectual class.

India has expanded education as a formal right while simultaneously allowing the conditions under which that right is exercised to become increasingly differentiated by market capacity. Because market capacity is structured by caste and class, the marketisation of education can undermine the equalising function that constitutional education rights were intended to serve.

Article 21A, inserted through the Constitution (Eighty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, establishes free and compulsory education as a fundamental right for all children between six and fourteen years of age. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, provides the statutory framework for implementing this constitutional guarantee. This places an obligation on the government to ensure that free and compulsory education reaches children across the most disadvantaged sections of society.

However, there is an evident gap between what the Constitution proclaims education must be, namely, not a private commodity, and what is happening under a neoliberal economic structure. While the right to education is formally universal, as it should be, the quality and conditions under which that right is delivered remain deeply unequal, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable sections of society, particularly students from SC/ST communities.

In India, there are broadly two types of institutional spaces that provide education and shape the kind of education, exposure, infrastructure, and social networks available to a child: private schools and public schools. Private schools operate through fees and market demand, with annual fees ranging from thousands to several lakhs of rupees, and reaching as high as ₹28–30 lakh in some elite schools. Their appeal is often associated not only with classroom teaching but also with advanced infrastructure, English-language education, extracurricular opportunities, technology, and claims of global exposure. Government schools, by contrast, depend substantially on public expenditure and government provision. A 2025 national survey indicates that average annual household expenditure per child in non-government schools was ₹25,002, compared with ₹2,863 in government schools, making household expenditure on non-government schooling nearly nine times higher.

The government budget for School Education and Literacy, as per the latest available Union Budget 2026–27, is ₹83,562 crore, of which around 70–80% goes towards salaries and administrative costs, leaving substantially less budget for infrastructure, school advancements, and labs. This substantially impacts the passing rate of students and the quality of education they receive.

When a private-educated student and a public-educated student enter a university, the field becomes unequal and highly disadvantageous for public-school students. It is within this unequal field that the neoliberal commodification of education becomes particularly important, as access to better educational opportunities increasingly depends on one’s ability to pay.

Neoliberalism places considerable emphasis on markets, competition, individual choice, and the withdrawal or restructuring of direct state provision. When applied to education, these principles can transform education from a predominantly public responsibility into a service increasingly mediated by market mechanisms. It drives the privatisation of government schools, turning education into a marketable commodity driven by competition, choice, and profit. This is what can be seen in the Indian education system.

Rather than increasing funding and upgrading public schools, the right-wing government has used policies to systematically transfer school ownership, management, or funding to private entities. This has resulted in the closure or merger of 94,000 government schools since 2014, as per a NITI Aayog report. That is 25 public schools per day. On the other hand, private unaided schools grew from 2.88 lakh to roughly 3.39 lakh.

This systematic institutional mobility of schools has resulted in two major shifts. First, the migration of public-school students towards private schools, numbering around 86 lakh. Second, those unable to transfer to or pay for private schools were denied their fundamental right to education.

Such consequences of this marketisation cannot be separated from India’s existing social structure. The ability to choose between schools is itself socially differentiated in India, as income, wealth, social capital, geography, and caste are already unequally distributed.

According to the UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education) school database system, around 68.7% of ST students and 62.4% of SC students rely on government schools. For them, public schools continue to function as a major educational lifeline.

A wealthy household facing declining public provision can respond by purchasing private education. A poor household may not have that option. The same policy therefore produces different consequences for different social groups. And therefore, when public education is weakened and monetised, the consequences are not distributed evenly across society, with SC and ST communities bearing a disproportionate share of the impediment.

Furthermore, the incumbent government has allocated just 4% of its GDP to education instead of the 6% recommended by NEP 2020. This gap in allocation, combined with the residual income gap among people, inadequate facilities, and caste domination in government schooling, provides a stark contrast between the constitutional right to formal educational inclusion and substantive equality in education.

In this class and caste divide, SC and ST students are among the most vulnerable. The inequality that begins with access to education continues into the opportunities available to students, eventually contributing to economic inequality. This creates a vicious circular system of unequal education.

unequal schooling → unequal educational attainment → unequal skills and credentials → unequal employment opportunities → reproduction of economic inequality.

Public schooling in India is not simply about education; it is also a political question. In India, neoliberal governance and right-wing politics are lovers, bound together in the making and remaking of the state’s approach to public education. Here, neoliberal restructuring can generate social and economic crises that produce grievances and uncertainty, which right-wing populism can then mobilise politically. In turn, right-wing populism can reinforce the same neoliberal restructuring by redirecting these grievances, generating doubt and distrust towards alternative political and economic narratives, and weakening challenges to the prevailing order.

The recent “School Thik Karo” movement by CJP provides a contemporary illustration of such a love story. The campaign involved visits to government schools, interaction with students, and demands for improvements in educational infrastructure and facilities. What government should fear a demand for better schools? However, rather than being understood simply as a demand for better schools, the campaign encountered political resistance, including restrictions on access to schools in Rajasthan and an FIR in Maharashtra.

This points to a broader tension: government schools are public institutions intended to deliver a constitutional right, yet demands for better infrastructure and greater accountability can become politically contentious. And once again, the consequences fall most heavily on those who have the fewest alternatives: SC and ST students.

Their inability to purchase education, or their household’s lack of the resources necessary to exercise that choice, is a systemic failure of neoliberalism. As neoliberal marketisation increasingly determines who can access quality education, the danger is that education itself, which is intended to enable social mobility, may instead reproduce the inequalities it was expected to overcome.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar said, “Education is the milk of a tigress, and he who drinks it will not fail to roar.”

But what happens when that milk is filtered by income, caste, and market access? The milk is no longer the same for everyone. Some receive it diluted and adulterated, while others receive what allows them to roar. Who gets which kind of milk, and who decides?

Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte is a development economics researcher, anti-caste writer and public speaker working on inequality, Dalit and Buddhist economics.

Say what you will about the CJP protests against the NEET paper leak, everyone has already said that the immediate demands are not enough to change the education system. Education scholars are more likely to tell you about the 5-point charter submitted by the CJP to the Government of India. But one class of discourse generators is rattled by the protests themselves, or has been looking for an opportunity to vent its pre-existing frustrations or biases and has now found the perfect one . This is the oppressed castes’ general status and their tiresome, repeated, annoying rant against reservation.

This includes someone fabricating a fake post by actor Vijay Varma about his one non-reserved category friend suffering in some educational institution, which the pro-protest actor quickly said he had never posted. His acting in the anti-Mandal movement film Hurdang alongside Sunny Kaushal, however, may not have made his supposed stance difficult to believe had the post been genuine. Whether he posted it or not, and whether he believes the logic underneath that post, are different questions.

Mrunal Thakur, another actor, apparently posted a story on her Instagram account suggesting that the key moment that changed the game for everyone during these protests was NEET aspirant Harsh Dubey questioning the dominant narrative around the protests, arguing that the focus on the paper leak has overshadowed other longstanding issues in medical admissions. This was apparently a clip from a conversation with NDTV’s Shiv Aroor, where Dubey said questions around reservation policy and the difficulties faced by general category students also deserve public attention. Whether Mrunal Thakur will also come out and deny posting this is a matter of no one’s concern. Bollywood celebrities have shown their political illiteracy and general inhumanity more than once.

But this idea that neither the BJP nor the CJP wants to touch reservation, and that this is what led to the compromise, is one of those Savarna delusions burdened with so many argumentative flaws that a sane mind can hardly engage with it. To begin with, despite its classist and meritocratic articulation of the protests, the CJP does not appear to be opposed to reservation, partly reflected in its use of Ambedkarite symbolism, whether sincere or strategic. One also forgets that the BJP is a heterogeneous party with multiple caste groups and not simply Brahmins and other general category persons. There is no consensus on this question even within the Hindutva fold, something evident from the raita vs. trad debates that have long existed within their own ideological circles. To treat a single interview, one that merely regurgitates the most banal opinion circulating on the Savarna reactionary internet, as having played any pivotal role in shaping the protests is fantasy writing in its purest form.

But what is up with the casteist Savarnas? In a protest that brought together people from the non-protesting middle classes and celebrities, wherein status and privilege are also disproportionately held by oppressor castes, what has made the casteist Savarnas launch into their regular rant with great vigour? Are Savarnas simply waiting for any needle to move so they can carry their anti-reservation agenda? Are they simply incapable of shutting up for once?

Why, then, does every major public mobilisation touching education or even employment seem to invite an anti-reservation chorus from casteist Savarnas? The answer is not that reservation is secretly the central issue every time, like the Dubeys make it out to be. It is that reservation has become the preferred language through which sections of the Savarna public interpret almost every institutional crisis. Whenever a crisis emerges in education or public recruitment, reservation is summoned as the familiar explanation, even when it has little to do with the event itself. It is less a response to the facts before them than a political reflex.

This reflex performs an ideological function. It redirects public anger away from institutions and towards beneficiaries of affirmative action. A paper leak points towards failures of governance, regulation, corruption, examination agencies, and political accountability. None of these explanations preserve the moral authority of the existing Brahminical social order. Reservation, on the other hand, offers an already available narrative; and if Savarna public discourse has shown anything, it is that they love readily available labour, intellectual and otherwise. The next generation of casteists also lack imagination and will rely on the intellectual dis-labour of their Savarna forefathers.

These complaints are very vapid. They transform a structural failure into a grievance against redistributive and representational justice. Instead of asking why an examination system repeatedly fails millions of students, they ask who supposedly enjoys unfair advantages, even though the empirical facts reveal it is they who do. The institution escapes scrutiny because caste once again becomes framed as the problem only when it attempts to correct itself.

There is another reason why these moments are politically useful. Large protests produce so much uncertainty. They reopen public debate and create the possibility that questions long considered settled may be discussed again, especially now that social media has permitted everyone to have an opinion, for good and bad alike. For anti-reservation voices, this is an opportunity to attach their long-standing campaign to a movement that was never organised around their demands. They seek legitimacy through proximity of discourse. If enough people begin associating educational injustice with reservation rather than with state failure, the moment gets a new meaning.

This explains why Harsh Dubey’s interview came to acquire symbolic importance far beyond its actual place in the protests. It offered something many casteist Savarnas had been waiting for: an apparently articulate voice on national television through which they could restate arguments that have circulated for decades. Reservation disrupts the comforting belief that educational success reflects individual merit alone. Every conversation about admissions threatens to reopen the history of caste privilege that made merit appear natural in the first place. It is therefore unsurprising that even a movement against examination malpractice becomes, for some, another occasion to defend inherited advantages while presenting themselves as victims of an unjust system. The anti-reservation discourse surrounding the NEET protests tells us less about the movement than about the persistence of Savarna political common sense.

DalitThinkerToday is a Chartered Accountant by profession from Sangli, Maharashtra, who occasionally dabbles in thinking about politics when people in her oppressor-caste-majority office frustrate her. This is her pseudonym.

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 17, Issue No. 11, 16 April 1998), this essay enters debates over whether oppressed communities should relinquish their jati identities as part of the struggle against caste. Rajshekar argues that such demands misunderstand the relationship between caste hierarchy and the identities of historically oppressed communities, and questions whether calls for caste abolition are being applied equally across society.

Building his argument through a close reading of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s discussion of subcastes in Annihilation of Caste, Rajshekar contends that abolishing subcastes without dismantling the caste order would strengthen existing hierarchies. He therefore defends jati identity as a political question rather than treating it as an obstacle to emancipation.

The latter part of the essay draws on examples from Kerala to argue for separate representation within the Scheduled Castes and questions the classification of some communities under the reservation system. These assertions reflect Rajshekar’s interpretation and should not be read as established historical or legal fact.

Debate On “Jati” Identity

Subcaste abolition will strengthen Hindus & their caste system: Dr. Ambedkar

Our fake democrats, socialists, and other savarna outfits say: “Don’t ask about caste, don’t think about caste, and don’t talk about caste.” They repeat this mantra through their media, so much so that our innocent Dalits and BCs, who are the original victims of the caste system, have also started repeating this very same mantra. As they are the original victims of the caste system, they want to annihilate this devilish system. That is why, when the savarnas just whisper about destroying caste, the Dalits and BCs shout and scream. But why are the savarnas (Hindus), who are the beneficiaries of the caste system, advising only Dalits not to ask about caste, not to think about caste, and not to talk about caste? Are the Hindus willing to surrender the benefits of their caste system? Will they lead a movement, the ultimate result of which will destroy the power and prestige of the savarnas? This is a serious question that we Dalits and BCs have to answer.

CALL TO ELAVAS

No Pope can be a revolutionary. Similarly, no upper-caste man can be a revolutionary. The source of his income, power, prestige, and property is his caste system. So, can he think sincerely of destroying caste? Still, he talks about destroying caste. Why? This is where we become suspicious of his motive. While they call upon us to destroy our caste, what they actually mean is to destroy our ethnic identities, but not their caste system. When they say yes, they actually mean no, and vice versa.

Sree Narayana Guru, the liberator of the Elavas of Kerala, once said:

“Don’t ask about caste, don’t think about caste, and don’t talk about caste,” but his disciple, Sahodharan Ayyappan, the most revolutionary among the disciples of Sree Narayana Guru, reversed the statement and said: “We must always ask, think, and talk about caste.”

USE THORN TO REMOVE THORN

Caste is a thorn in the body of our society. So, we have to use another thorn to remove this thorn. After its removal, we will discard both the thorns. We have lost all human rights due to the caste system. So, we must use the very caste to regain our human rights. Only after we regain all human rights can we think of the removal of caste.

The fact is, we (SC/ST/BCs) have no caste because we are not Hindus. As the original inhabitants of India, what we have are our ethnic identities, which are not caste. Our Editor is right. We are not Hindus. So, destroying caste is not our duty. It is the duty of Hindus.

While they go on strengthening their own evil caste, why are they interested in destroying our ethnic identities like the Pulaya (Pariah), Elava, etc.? This is the puzzle. The fear of the upper castes is that our caste consciousness may help us regain our lost human rights. That is why they advise us to destroy our caste (ethnic identities). For this, they want to destroy our “subcastes” first, which are our ethnic identities. When they use the word “subcaste,” they make us think that we are a part of the Hindu caste system. They know that when we destroy our “subcaste,” we will lose our identity, join the Hindu caste system, and become their most obedient slaves.

INNOCENT DALITS MISLED

Some innocent Dalits also join this Hindu anti-caste campaign. For this, they want us to give up our “sub-caste” first and unite all subcastes in the name of “Dalit.” But can they destroy our identity? Never. Is it a true solution to get our human rights? No. Babasaheb says:

“But assuming that the fusion of subcastes is possible, what guarantee is there that the abolition of subcastes will necessarily lead to the abolition of castes? On the contrary, it may happen that process may stop with the abolition of subcastes. In that case, the abolition of subcastes will only help to strengthen the castes and make them more powerful and therefore far more mischievous. This remedy is, therefore, neither practicable nor effective and may easily prove to be a wrong remedy.” (W&S Vol. 1, p. 67).

Here Babasaheb says that if we abolish the subcastes, it will only help to strengthen the caste system and make the Hindus more powerful.

That means, when we strengthen the subcastes, the Hindu caste system will be destroyed and Hinduism itself will be abolished. That is why the savarnas call upon us to destroy our caste, meaning our ethnic identity, so that enslaving the entire indigenous Dalits and BCs becomes easy.

Some Dalits may have a genuine doubt that when we strengthen our subcaste identity, our people may get divided and fight, which in turn may destroy the very “Dalit concept” and “Dalit unity.” If our people are fighting each other even now on the basis of subcastes, it is not because of these subcastes but because they are Hinduised. They also think that they are Hindus. That is why each subcaste thinks that it is “superior” to other subcastes.

The fighting is not because of our subcastes but because of this wrong notion of superiority or inferiority that they copied from Hindus.

When we educate our people on Ambedkarism and Buddhism, remove the “Hindu mind” from their brains, they will know that we are all different but equal. Each community should recognise the human rights of other communities.

Strengthening the “caste identity,” without proper education, will be a dangerous thing for the Dalits and BCs.

KERALA SCENE

How do we ensure the human rights of each and every subcaste? The good old democratic principle is by giving adequate representation to every subcaste in every field. Otherwise, only the powerful subcaste will gain everything at the cost of other weaker subcastes.

In Kerala, the Pulaya subcaste is the biggest of all other Dalit subcastes. The word “Pulayan” means the owner of the land, peasant, intellectual, etc. Now, as they have lost all their lands, the meaning of the word Pulaya is landless people. They have become the most depressed class in Kerala. The Paraya (Pariah) subcaste is also depressed and landless. They were scavengers in Kerala. Pulaya, Paraya, Valluva, Nayadi, and Chakliyas are the most depressed classes in Kerala. All these subcastes have no adequate representation in the governance of the state.

In Kerala, there are 68 subcastes in the list of Scheduled Castes.

In this list, there are so many subcastes that should actually have been included in the BC list because they are socially and economically forward.

K.R. NARAYANAN IS FORWARD

Recently, I examined the reservation list of some educational institutions, especially in MBBS and Engineering. I could find hardly two or three SC candidates who actually hail from the most downtrodden people of Kerala, i.e., Pulaya, Paraya, Chakliya, etc. Even the MLAs and MPs from reserved constituencies are actually from the forward communities but included in the SC list. This is a serious injustice to the SCs.

President K.R. Narayanan belongs to the Parava community (not Pariah). This community should have been included in the BC list. The Paravas were not unseeables but only Untouchables like the Elavas of Kerala. The hereditary occupation of the Parava women was washing, and hence they were not Untouchables.

In my area, the Paravas behave like the savarnas and discriminate against the Pulayas, Parayas (Pariah), and other Untouchables. They will not even invite these communities to their marriages. There are so many communities in the SC list who behave like the savarnas. They treat the SC people with contempt. In a fight between an SC and a savarna, they side with the savarnas. And yet, they are having all facilities, including reservations, in the name of SC. But at the same time, they will not join us in our struggle for our human rights. The original SC people are fighting and fighting without gaining anything. The benefit goes to other people who oppose and insult them in society. I have no doubt that if the original SC people understand these facts, they will demand adequate representation for each subcaste.

I can tell you that among those who are in the forefront of the “caste annihilation campaign,” we can find many such touchable SC castes. Hindus use these touchable SC subcastes to criticise our Editor’s “caste identity” thesis.

So, to end these problems, each and every subcaste must get proportional representation in every field according to its population in the governance of the country.

On May 31, 1936, Babasaheb organised a Mahar conference in Bombay. Does it mean that he hated other subcastes? What we should build between different subcastes is fraternity (brotherhood). When we fight for our human rights, we cannot oppose the human rights of other communities. This is what our Editor means when he advocates “caste identity.”

All over the world, we can see thousands of ethnic identities. None is interested in destroying its identity. Then, why should we alone destroy our identity?

However, our ethnic identities are not jati or caste. Our people are imitating the Hindus, thinking that they are Hindus. That is why some innocent, unthinking Dalits demand the destruction of our caste.

CASTE SYMBOLISES IDENTITY

What we want to destroy is the casteism of Aryans and also non-Aryans. Destroying our identity means destroying our soul. So, we must think and talk about caste, whether it is Aryan or non-Aryan.

If the upper-caste people do not use their caste identity, how can we identify them, whether it is a cobra or a rat snake? Without identifying our Enemy first, we cannot fight the Enemy.

So, ask, think, and talk about caste for liberation. Remember, as we strengthen our identity, we should also enlighten our people on Ambedkarism and Buddhism.

Our upper-caste rulers acquired everything by their communal thinking. We also can have everything in the same way. So, we too must be communalists.

That means we must love our people.

The savarnas advise us to love the enemy. We must know the trap behind this advice. They know very well that we consider them our Enemy. That is why they ask us to love the enemy. How can we fight our enemy when we don’t hate this Enemy? If we don’t hate the Enemy, we cannot fight and secure our liberation. So, we must hate our Enemy. It is our right to hate and fight our enemy to win our liberation.

What the enemy hates, we must love, and what the enemy loves, we must hate.

Then only will we get a clear picture of the Enemy’s mind. That is why, when they ask us to destroy our caste, we say no. That is why, when they ask us to love our enemy, we oppose it.

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 22, Issue No. 20, 16 October 2003), this essay by V. T. Rajshekar intervenes in debates over the social and political composition of the anti-caste movement at a time when questions of Bahujan unity and electoral realignments were reshaping Indian politics.

Rajshekar argues that the Brahminical Social Order, rather than the Backward Classes (BCs), is the principal adversary of Dalits. He contends that excluding BCs from the Ambedkarite movement weakens the struggle against Brahminism and calls for a renewed Bahujan alliance grounded in the shared emancipatory vision of Phule, Shahu, Periyar, and Ambedkar.

More than two decades later, the essay remains relevant as anti-caste politics continues to grapple with questions of coalition-building, social solidarity, and the relationship between caste oppression and political strategy.

Dalit movement will suffer if BCs are excluded

The one-line answer to the question, “Who is the enemy of Dalits?” is the Brahmins, not BCs, who are the natural allies of Dalits.

Both the Dalits and BCs are the victims of the Brahminical Social Order. The historical truth also must be considered that the BCs and Dalits are from the same stock. Of course, we cannot ignore the involvement of forward BCs in the atrocities against Dalits. Persons enacting the rule seem to be cruel because they are in direct touch, but the actual cruelty lies in the rule and the frames of the rule. The same thing is with BCs and the BSO.

So, I suggest establishing a positive relationship between Dalits and BCs because the root cause of the problem is not the BCs but the Brahminical system.

Dalits alone can save BCs: We have to remove the false Kshatriyatva from the minds of BCs. Of course, Dalits cannot say that it is not their duty. It is their duty because they are the pillars of the Ambedkarite movement. The Dalits, as leaders of the Indian revolution, must lead the BCs also.

Our duty is to generate attachment of BCs with the ideology of Phule-Shahu-Ambedkar. The first step for this is the detachment of BCs from the Brahminical fold. Of course, BCs cannot detach themselves. It is the Dalits who have to do this job.

Restricting the movement to Dalits will not only not help our movement, but it will take the movement backward. On the contrary, we will help the BSO only. Our movement is to abolish the BSO. One of the purposes of our struggle is this. Our target should not be any individual but the culture which creates individuals like Mulayam, Kalyan, Katiyar, and even Paswan. If you want to abolish the BSO, a major part of this system should get out from the BSO, and that major part is the BCs. By avoiding the relationship between Dalits and BCs, we cannot run the Ambedkarite movement. On the contrary, we put a question mark on Phule-Shahu-Periyar-Ambedkar’s mission.

Mulayam is a Hindu: It is a misconception that BCs cannot accept Dalit leadership. Jagjivan Ram did not accept the leadership of Dr. Ambedkar. That does not mean that Dalits did not accept the leadership of Babasaheb. Today, the movement is identified with the name of Babasaheb, not Babuji. So, you cannot generalize the relationship between Dalits and BCs by citing the example of Mulayam and Kalyan (both BCs), but we must understand that they are not accepted by all the BCs. Mulayam, Kalyan, and Paswan are driven by the Brahminical force. Mulayam and Kalyan do not accept the leadership of Kanshi Ram not because of their BC origin but because of their “Hindu mentality.”

Thakur-Brahmin alliance: A leader having the Indian Constitution in one hand and the Manusmruti in another must not be tolerated, even if he is a Dalit.

When Thakurs and Brahmins can join hands to save their BSO, why not Dalits join with BCs? Look how BC MLAs in the BSP have shown their loyalty to the BSP. None of the BC MLAs other than 3 Yadavs left the party (still there are 2 Yadav MLAs with the BSP). While 1 Nishad (ST) and 1 Khatik (SC) have left the BSP, BC MLAs like Rajbhar and Maurya are still with the BSP. Who says that BCs cannot accept Dalit leadership? In UP, Swamiprasad Maurya, BSP legislature party leader, and Sukhdev Rajbhar (chief whip of the BSP) are BCs. In UP, 90% of the Rajbhars vote for the BSP. Similarly, the Maurya and Nonia (BC) castes also cast over 70% of their votes for the BSP.

We cannot put a line between Dalits and BCs because such a division will be a division of ourselves only. Koli is a caste whose subcastes are in different categories: SC, ST, BC, and outside these categories, i.e., general. Where will such castes stand? A caste like Bhar is BC in UP, SC in MP, and ST in Maharashtra.

Psychological violence: We must understand the fact that the BCs are not oppressors. Rather, they are an instrument in the hands of the oppressive forces, the BSO. We must understand that psychological violence is more injurious than physical violence. We should learn something from dogs. If somebody throws a stone at a dog, it does not run after the stone but after the hand that throws the stone. BCs are like stones that are being thrown by the BSO mind. If we do not make them (BCs) part of our struggle, they will go more and more into the BSO camp. We must develop the culture of Bahujan Samaj instead of Dalit Samaj. We should learn a lesson from the collapse of the RPI. Without the BCs, Dalits cannot capture power in the true sense. The true sense means to capture power, retain it, and use it to preserve and propagate the ideology set by our forefathers.

The protests against the irregularities and paper leak in the NEET examination brought thousands of students, parents and supporters onto the streets. The scale of participation, including the visible presence of sections of the middle classes, public figures and artists, reflected a growing willingness to challenge institutions that many increasingly perceive as opaque and unaccountable. That widening participation deserves recognition. It signals that concerns over public education are no longer confined to those who have historically borne the burden of institutional failures.

Yet the state’s response once again demonstrated a familiar pattern. Lathi charges, water cannons, tear gas, detentions, surveillance and criminal cases against protesters indicate that even peaceful demonstrations continue to be treated through the language of policing rather than democratic engagement, no matter how much the protesters try to facilitate dialogue. The violence of the state is not merely reactive to dissent; it is constitutive of its authority and often pre-emptive in its operation. By acting before grievances can acquire wider political legitimacy, it seeks to cast suspicion upon and diminish the credibility of citizens’ claims. Such responses are not isolated excesses but part of a broader tendency in which coercive measures take precedence over any meaningful assessment of public grievances. This pattern is all too familiar for the Muslims, Dalits, workers, and other oppressed communities in the country now. It is no wonder that many of them continue to remain skeptical of this movement even as they lend their solidarity.

The protests have also unfolded within a now routinised political script. Peaceful public mobilisation quickly became an opportunity for the mainstream Godi media to manufacture misinformation, while the state treated the moment as another justification for expanded policing. The original concerns were steadily displaced in newsrooms by manufactured debates over alleged anti-nationalism and public disorder, even as protesters have taken to social media to repeatedly redirect attention to the issues that first brought them to the streets.

Recognising this reality, however, also requires asking difficult questions of protest movements themselves. Large numbers are not only a measure of organisational success; they are also a political responsibility. Every mass mobilisation creates a temporary public capable of imagining new forms of solidarity and new political possibilities. Leadership therefore involves more than maintaining order or ensuring that a demonstration appears respectable. It also involves shaping how participants understand the broader structures within which their immediate grievance exists. But the organisers from CJP have recently shown a remarkable abdication of this responsibility, even as they may be doing so with sincere efforts to protect the movement.

Over the last decade, many protests have come to treat the expression of dissent as an end in itself. In a political climate where public assembly is increasingly surveilled and criminalised, simply occupying the streets and making disagreement visible has acquired democratic significance. That impulse should not be dismissed. But if protests are to aspire to more than bearing witness, they must also confront the difficult question of what political consequences their strategies are intended to produce. The NEET protests, however, did not appear content with symbolic dissent alone. The CJP seems to have approached the movement through a strategic lens, making choices that they believed would improve its chances of achieving concrete outcomes. That is a welcome departure.

The question is whether that strategic calculation expands or contracts the political horizon of the movement. The current strategy of CJP and other organisers does not merely reduce immediate risk; it also diminishes what that movement is capable of becoming. The logic of this strategy leads us towards an ever-receding political horizon, where each concession made in the name of prudence leaves less space for political imagination than the one before. This is where the limitations of a politics centred primarily on respectability become apparent. In the effort to appear reasonable, the strategic moderation may ultimately concede more ground than it preserves. The state does not necessarily refrain from coercion because a movement carefully disciplines itself. Recent history offers little evidence for such confidence.

Many of the choices made reflect a strategic calculation about what constituted acceptable dissent. Expressions of solidarity with incarcerated activists such as Umar Khalid and other Muslims facing prolonged imprisonment were rejected. Attempts to build common cause with other democratic movements such as farmers coming to Delhi on 22 July were resisted, with suggestions that different protests remain physically and politically separate. Participants were instructed on which slogans were permissible, even as some of the approved slogans drew upon nationalist idioms that have, over the last decade, become closely associated with Hindutva politics. The movement also declined to articulate a broader political critique of fascism and majoritarianism or the present government’s treatment of democratic dissent. This was not simply an omission of rhetoric; it marked a refusal to locate the immediate crisis within the wider political conditions that shape how public institutions function and how protests against them are received. Its demands also remained underdeveloped at the structural level. The crisis invited a broader interrogation of the National Testing Agency as an institution and of the direction of educational reforms under the National Education Policy by this government. Instead, the movement largely remained confined to the immediate failures surrounding the paper leak. Many of these suggestions have been made by leftist members of the movement who have been foregrounding these demands for years.

The movement’s current demands combine institutional accountability and immediate relief. They have called for the resignation or dismissal of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the immediate release of Sonam Wangchuk without restrictions on his movement, compensation of ₹1 crore for the families of NEET aspirants who died by suicide following the paper leak, and the withdrawal of all FIRs and legal action against those who participated in the July 20 protest. These are necessary demands, and each deserves to be pursued. But they cannot be mistaken for a sufficient response to the structural crisis of India’s education system. If these demands are achieved without an equally substantive agenda for what follows, the political leverage created by the protests risks dissipating before it can be translated into structural reform.

Equally troubling dynamics from the protest also must be interrogated. The willingness to hand over protesters deemed disruptive or excessively angry to the police without publicly articulating clear criteria for doing so is a decision that demands careful scrutiny. Any movement must protect participants from harassment and deliberate sabotage. But when those distinctions remain opaque, the police are effectively invited to regulate the boundaries of acceptable dissent within the protest itself. Expanding police discretion over who belongs and who does not, in a context of police violence, carries significant political consequences.

Similarly, symbolic gestures such as serving refreshments or showing kindness towards police personnel may reflect genuine human concern, and recognising the difficult conditions under which many lower-ranking officers work is neither unreasonable nor incompatible with criticism. Yet these gestures cannot obscure the structural reality that the police operate as instruments of state power and are institutionally equipped with resources and authority unavailable to ordinary citizens. Empathy for individual officers should not come at the cost of depoliticising the institution they serve.

None of this diminishes the importance of the NEET protests or the courage of those who participated in them, including the organisers, who transformed what began as a meme page into one of the country’s most significant student mobilisations in the recent past. On the contrary, their significance lies precisely in the possibility they opened. The question is whether that possibility ends with registering public anger or extends towards building broader democratic solidarities capable of confronting the structures that repeatedly produce such crises. Every protest is liable to become an opportunity for the police to exercise violence, for Godi media to manufacture misinformation, and for the government to expand its coercive powers. These are calculations movements cannot control. What they can control is whether their own strategies continually retreat before them, or instead expand the political imagination of those who have come together in hope.

By the time Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule announced that the government was withdrawing the draft Maharashtra Devasthan Inam Abolition Act, 2026, the proposed legislation had spent barely a month in the public domain. Published on May 6 for comments and objections, it was presented as an attempt to address one of the state’s longest-running land disputes: nearly 5.5 lakh hectares of Devasthan Inam land, much of it under encroachment or contested occupation, and temple trusts that had struggled to recover property endowed over centuries. Within weeks, however, the government abandoned the draft and promised to begin again.

The reversal followed sustained opposition from temple trusts and organisations including the Maharashtra Mandir Mahasangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti. More than a thousand trustees reportedly joined the campaign, hundreds of representations were submitted to ministers and district officials, and delegations met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and other senior members of the government.

When the withdrawal was announced, temple organisations described it as the outcome of a collective struggle. The government, for its part, insisted that it was merely responding to concerns raised during the consultation process and that a fresh draft would be prepared after wider discussions.

According to the Revenue Department, the proposed law sought to create a statutory mechanism for recovering temple lands from illegal encroachments while protecting the rights of lawful occupants. Officials argued that temple trusts often lacked the administrative and legal capacity to reclaim endowed properties and that the state could provide a more effective framework. Bawankule repeatedly said that the proposal had been conceived on lines comparable to the legal framework governing Waqf properties, allowing the government to assist in protecting religious endowments rather than leaving trusts to pursue long and expensive litigation on their own.

Temple organisations read the draft very differently. The Maharashtra Mandir Mahasangh argued that provisions of the Bill would effectively abolish historical Devasthan Inam grants made by earlier rulers and weaken rather than strengthen temple ownership. It objected to clauses that it said recognised ownership claims of some long-term occupants, questioned restrictions on approaching civil courts, and criticised what it described as differential treatment between temple lands and Waqf properties.

Whether those objections reflected the actual legal consequences of the draft or apprehensions about how the law might eventually operate is a wholly different matter. The Hindu fold today perceives itself to be victimised in public discourse despite having been in power at the Centre for the last twelve years and mobilises moralised protest tactics that are often rooted in narratives of self-victimisation. Whatever the merits of those objections, they were enough to stop the Bill before it reached the Assembly.

The government never argued that temple lands should change hands. On the contrary, ministers repeatedly said the purpose of the Bill was to help temple trusts recover lands that had slipped into encroachment and to give those properties stronger legal protection. The resistance came from temple organisations that feared the proposed law would give the state greater control over how disputes were settled and how rights over Devasthan land would eventually be determined. Their objections were directed less at the objective than at the mechanism through which the government proposed to achieve it.

For all the talk of ideological unity, governing and movement politics do not always pull in the same direction. The Devasthan Bill became one of those moments when the seams briefly showed. Electoral alliances often make those differences easy to miss. Yet land has always been a source of authority as much as a form of property. Questions of who records land and who settles disputes have a way of exposing those tensions.

The BJP has spent much of the past decade presenting itself as the party of a strong, interventionist state. Governing through legislation inevitably extends the state’s reach into institutions that have long operated through inherited arrangements and local authority. Temple trusts may welcome stronger protection for their lands, but greater state involvement also means surrendering some control over how disputes are settled and property is administered. That is where governments and religious institutions can begin pulling in different directions. The fault lines are not entirely new. They surfaced publicly during the online battles between the so-called “raitas” and “trads” during the Bulli Bai app case, and the Devasthan Bill suggests that those disagreements extend well beyond social media into much wider political constituencies.

It is striking that the government defended the draft by invoking the legal framework surrounding Waqf properties. The comparison was meant to reassure temple trusts that similar protections could be extended to temple lands. Yet the politics around Waqf have unfolded very differently in recent years. Legislative changes affecting Muslim institutions have largely proceeded despite sustained objections from Muslim organisations. In Maharashtra, by contrast, the government withdrew its own proposal before it reached the legislature, reopened consultations and gave temple representatives a central role in rewriting the Bill.

Temple organisations opposed the draft before it entered the legislature, secured meetings with senior ministers, compelled the government to withdraw its own proposal and now have formal representation on the committee tasked with preparing a revised Bill. The committee, headed by Additional Chief Secretary Vikas Kharge, includes fifteen representatives from temple trusts alongside senior officials from the Revenue Department.

Governments routinely ask farmers’ organisations, workers’ unions, unemployed youth and communities affected by displacement to wait for departmental reviews or expert committees. Families pursuing justice after caste-based violence often confront years of administrative delay and prolonged litigation before receiving meaningful responses. Many Muslim organisations have found themselves responding to legislative changes only after they have already been enacted and have then faced criminalisation for protesting. Temple organisations, by contrast, intervened while the law was still being drafted and altered its course before it reached the legislature.

The debate has also left largely unexplored the people living on Devasthan Inam land. Public discussion has centred on temples, trusts and encroachments, while remarkably little attention has been paid to the social composition of those occupying or cultivating these lands. The category of “encroacher” can include very different histories: long-term agricultural tenancy, informal occupation, disputed ownership, commercial acquisition and settlement by landless households over several generations.

The Devasthan Bill was withdrawn after organisations within the broader Hindutva fold challenged a government that is often assumed to speak for them. The next draft of the Bill will answer some legal questions. It may also answer a political one: how much room the state still has to regulate institutions that are among its closest ideological allies.

DalitThinkerToday is an Chartered Accountant by profession from Sangli, Maharashtra who occasionally dabbles in thinking about politics when people in her oppressor caste majority office frustrate her. This is her pseudonym.

Holi arrives each year with fire and colour. On the eve of the festival, bonfires commemorate the burning of Holika; the next day, colours create community, at least symbolically. Yet for many of us Dalit-Bahujan thinkers and activists, Holi is not merely a spring festival. It is also a reminder that myth is never innocent. Who is cast as demonic? Who is sanctified? And who gets to decide? Where do the borders of this community that are based on violence and trauma begin and end?

Religious and mythological reinterpretation has been a recurring strategy in anti-caste thought. Rather than cede the terrain of epics and Puranas to Brahminical authority, generations of thinkers have re-read these stories against the grain, recovering suppressed figures, unsettling canonical heroes, and exposing the moral grammar of caste society. These interventions are not uniform; they differ in clarity, force, and political consequence. But taken together, they reveal a long-standing struggle over cultural meaning.

A major intervention was articulated by Jyotirao Phule in Gulamgiri. Phule reinterpreted the story of King Bali and Vamana, the dwarf incarnation of Vishnu. In the orthodox account, Vamana subdues Bali and consigns him to the netherworld. Phule inverted the moral hierarchy: Bali became the just ruler of the Bahujans, while Vamana symbolised Aryan-Brahmin cunning and conquest. The myth was reframed as political allegory, an account of indigenous dispossession. Invocations of “Bali Raja” as a symbol of egalitarian rule continue to animate Bahujan imagination in parts of India.

Then we return to Holi. The dominant narrative commemorates the burning of Holika, who attempts to immolate the devout Prahlad and is herself consumed by fire. In several Dalit-Bahujan reinterpretations, Holika and other Asura figures are read not simply as embodiments of evil but as representatives of demonised lineages, figures whose defeat encodes the triumph of one social order over another. The bonfire, then, is not only purification; it is conquest ritualised. To question what is being burned, and why, is to interrupt the moral ease of celebration.

One of the most enduring examples centres on Shambuka in the Ramayana. In the orthodox narrative, Rama executes Shambuka, a Shudra ascetic, for performing penance deemed inappropriate to his varna. Anti-caste thinkers have repeatedly foregrounded this episode as an explicit theological defence of hierarchy. The killing is not incidental; it is justified as necessary to restore cosmic order. By elevating Shambuka as a symbol of aspiration punished by caste, Dalit-Bahujan readings transform the moral centre of the story. Dussehra, for some, becomes a day not of triumph but of mourning. This is reinterpretation with sharp political edges: it confronts scripture at the precise point where it sanctions graded inequality.

A fourth powerful example is the story of Ekalavya from the Mahabharata. Denied instruction by Dronacharya because of his birth, Ekalavya trains himself in archery before a clay image of the guru. When his talent threatens the Kshatriya monopoly, he is compelled to sever his thumb as guru dakshina. In Dalit-Bahujan discourse, Ekalavya has become a paradigmatic figure of merit thwarted by caste privilege. His mutilation is read as an allegory of exclusion from knowledge systems, an allegory that resonates in contemporary debates on education, institutional gatekeeping, and social mobility. The story’s clarity makes it difficult to dismiss: it names the wound and locates responsibility.

Fifth, the most systematic critique of scriptural authority in modern India came from B. R. Ambedkar. In Riddles in Hinduism, Ambedkar subjected revered deities and narratives to rational and ethical scrutiny, exposing contradictions and moral failures in the epics and Puranas. His interrogation of religious figures was not an exercise in inversion but in demolition; he refused the presumption that tradition is beyond question. Crucially, Ambedkar did not stop at reinterpretation. His turn to Navayana Buddhism in 1956 marked a decisive break, an effort to build new ethical and institutional foundations rather than endlessly contest old ones.

Taken together, these examples illustrate a spectrum of cultural politics. Some reinterpretations, like those of Shambuka and Ekalavya, and Ambedkar’s broader critique and deconstruction of religious texts, directly confront narratives that naturalise caste hierarchy. They target explicit moments where scripture disciplines the lower orders. In these cases, counter-reading is not decorative; it exposes the theological underpinnings of social exclusion.

Others, however, raise more complicated strategic questions.

The reimagining of Bali as a subaltern sovereign and the reframing of Holika Dahan as ritualised conquest are imaginative and often emotionally compelling. They assert dignity and refuse demonisation. Yet their political effects are less determinate. Both operate within the symbolic universe of the Puranas; both depend on reversing moral valence rather than escaping the frame.

In the case of Holi especially, there is an additional difficulty. The festival today is an expansive cultural production, embedded in neighbourhood ritual, cinema, advertising, and state spectacle. A radical reinterpretation of Holika may carry intellectual force, but it can easily be absorbed as background noise amid colour and commerce. Unlike the Shambuka episode, which directly encodes punishment for caste transgression, or the Ekalavya episode, which lays bare the calculated demand that the caste-oppressed mutilate their own talent to preserve upper-caste monopoly, the Holika narrative does not transparently legislate varna order. The critique risks appearing as hostility to festivity rather than confrontation with power.

This does not mean such reinterpretations are futile. Cultural humiliation leaves deep scars, and symbolic reclamation can be a form of healing. But strategy matters. If the goal is to dismantle caste hierarchy, one must ask where myth is doing active political work and where it functions more as inherited folklore.

There is also a broader transformation to consider. While many ritual and religious practices historically emerged within caste society, contemporary caste power often operates through bureaucratic, economic, and institutional channels: land relations, educational access, employment networks, labour dynamics, and matrimonial markets. Myth may provide background justification, but its influence can be epiphenomenal in daily governance. To focus on narrative inversion risks neglecting the material sites of domination within these festivities themselves.

The contrast with projects that build alternative institutions is instructive. Ambedkar’s embrace of Navayana Buddhism was not merely theological; it created new commemorations and community infrastructures. Similarly, congregational traditions around figures such as Guru Ravidas and Kabir have sustained distinct devotional and organisational forms that dilute Brahminical mediation. These moves shift the terrain from reinterpretation to reconstruction.

What, then, might be a way forward?

Perhaps the task is not to abandon mythological critique but to discriminate among its targets. Where stories explicitly justify hierarchy, as in Shambuka’s execution or Ekalavya’s mutilation, they warrant sustained confrontation. Where reinterpretation risks dissolving into aesthetic dissent, intellectual energy might be better directed elsewhere. At the same time, there may be ways to sharpen even the more tentative critiques. Rather than attacking Holi as a whole, one might ask how contemporary celebrations reproduce social exclusion: who organises, who participates safely, and whose labour sustains the spectacle. The argument would then hit more obvious instances of power, connecting cultural practice to present structures rather than ancient allegory.

Holi will continue to blaze and bloom each year. The question is not whether to celebrate or abstain, which caste Hindus will continue to do, but how to think and intervene. If anti-caste politics is to colour the future differently, it must decide when to contest the inherited story, when to build new ones, and when to move beyond the story altogether.

Divya Jadhav is a student of literature and politics.

On 26 January 2026, the Indian republic marks its seventy-seventh year. The arithmetic is neat; the history is not. For Dalit-Bahujans, and all those made disposable by caste, faith, gender, sexuality, and labor, Republic Day has long arrived with a knot in the stomach. It asks us to celebrate a promise that has been delivered unevenly, deferred habitually, and in moments like the present, openly betrayed.

The constitutional protections that exist did not arrive as gifts. They were carved out against a deeply hostile social order. Babasaheb Ambedkar understood this with singular clarity. He knew that a constitution could not annihilate caste, but he insisted that institutional safeguards were necessary to slow its violence, to widen the space for political contestation, and to make survival possible. The decades of Dalit-Bahujan political, cultural, and intellectual assertion that followed have done more to democratize this country than any ceremonial invocation of liberal democratic virtues. If the republic has endured for those it otherwise sought to exclude, it is because of this pressure from below. Not because the state became ethical overnight, but because it was compelled to respond.

To celebrate Republic Day uncritically at this juncture, amid the consolidation of ultranationalism, deepening hierarchies across axes of oppression, and a narrowing tolerance for dissent, would therefore be a profound irony. The language of constitutionalism circulates widely, but increasingly as performance. “Constitutional morality” is invoked with reverence, even as the social conditions that give substance to its values are steadily eroded.

The postcolonial Indian state has perfected a very particular politics of recognition. Unlike many liberal democracies, it has acknowledged historic injustice in ways that have been formally democratizing. Yet this recognition has always been carefully managed, its scope narrowly policed, its consequences contained. When those most affected demand more, land, safety, representation, or even the right to speak, they are reminded to be patient, procedural, and grateful.

This tension is not accidental. Constitutionalism in India has never operated evenly across the terrain it claims. In parts of the country governed through emergency, militarization, and administrative exception, it has often functioned as a mediator rather than a constraint on state violence. Rights there are experienced as permissions rather than guarantees. Legality bends easily to necessity. What is tested in these regions rarely remains contained. For those already positioned at the bottom of social hierarchies, this produces a familiar condition. We are all too familiar with the oppression of those in power. The present moment has only sharpened these long-standing contradictions.

None of this diminishes Babasaheb’s legacy. It demands renewed fidelity to it. Ambedkar warned that political democracy without social democracy would remain fragile and hollow. He insisted that liberty, equality, and fraternity were not ornamental ideals but material conditions that had to be continuously produced through struggle. To invoke his name on the occasion of Republic Day while draining those principles of substance is to hollow out the tradition itself.

The horizon that continues to animate Dalit-Bahujan political imagination lies elsewhere. It lies in the promise of Begumpura, a society without fear, without hierarchy, without the everyday violence of graded worth. Begumpura is not a distant utopia. It is a measure against which the present is judged and found wanting. It refuses the narrowness of a politics that asks the oppressed to accept managed inequality and symbolic inclusion. It insists that freedom cannot be segmented, rationed, or indefinitely deferred.

On this Republic Day, the task before us is not celebration but reckoning. Seventy-seven years after its founding, the question is not whether Dalit-Bahujans belong to the republic. We have built it, sustained it, and borne its costs. The question is whether the republic is willing to be transformed, structurally, materially, ethically, into something worthy of that labor.

The editorial ‘Anti-Brahminism as an Ideology’ from the original Dalit Voice run’s Vol. 2, Issue No. 10 (01/03/1983) critically explores anti-Brahminism as a powerful indigenous philosophy and social movement that has profoundly shaped Indian history, society, and politics by opposing the entrenched caste hierarchy symbolized by Brahmin dominance. While acknowledging that anti-Brahminism does not constitute a systematic ideology in the classical sense, the piece argues that it functions as a necessary and enduring counterpoint to Brahminism’s religiously sanctioned exploitation, embedded in a caste system that subjugates millions, including women and even Brahmins themselves. Tracing the genealogy of this resistance through seminal figures—from Buddha and Phule to Ambedkar, Periyar, and Lohia—the essay positions anti-Brahminism as a secular, revolutionary force committed to the destruction of caste’s core institutions: sacred scriptures, priesthood, and caste itself.

At the same time, V. T. Rajshekar’s framing of caste as a specifically Indian and Brahminical phenomenon invites critical unsettling. Treating caste as an exclusively Hindu aberration risks obscuring the broader social logic through which descent-based and occupation-linked hierarchies reproduce themselves globally. Comparable regimes of inherited exclusion—such as those experienced by Haratine and Osu communities in parts of Africa, the Burakumin in Japan, and Quilombola and Palenque communities in Latin America—demonstrate that caste-like structures are not civilizational anomalies but recurring social forms produced at the intersection of labour, purity, and power. Contemporary Dalit movements have increasingly foregrounded these parallels, forging transnational solidarities that situate anti-caste struggle within a wider global politics against racialization, coerced labour, and inherited inequality.

The essay also situates anti-Brahminism at the centre of a broad spectrum of social movements, including Dravidian identity politics and Dalit emancipation, which mobilize histories and cultures of India’s “original inhabitants” to counter Aryan and Brahminical narratives. While such claims of indigeneity are politically potent and historically intelligible within anti-caste struggles, they must be read as strategic polemics rather than settled historical truths. Across genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and critical historiography, the evidence points to long population continuity and repeated admixture in South Asia, with categories such as Shudra, “untouchable,” and tribe emerging much later as historically contingent social hierarchies rather than as markers of a singular, primordial indigenous people. Recognizing this does not diminish anti-Brahminism’s political force; rather, it sharpens its critique by anchoring caste firmly in relations of domination and social reproduction rather than in competing origin myths.

Yet, engaging this legacy from the vantage point of the twenty-first century—long after Rajshekar’s original intervention—also demands a critical reckoning with the limits of anti-Brahminism as a purely negative philosophy. Contemporary anti-caste politics is increasingly fragmented, particularly in the electoral sphere, where alliances and compromises risk diluting its radical horizon, a trajectory that would have deeply troubled Ambedkar. The present conjuncture calls for renewed efforts to articulate a positive and shared minimum programme of anti-Brahminism or anti-caste politics—one that foregrounds liberty, equality, and dignity, and translates these principles into concrete social-justice demands, as many anti-caste thinkers and practitioners are already attempting to do. Importantly, while the essay does not necessarily state this explicitly, it underscores the dual role of anti-Brahminism in fostering self-respect and political consciousness among marginalized communities,  In presenting anti-Brahminism not merely as opposition but as a constructive and historic force for justice, the essay challenges readers at this summit to engage deeply with the legacies of caste resistance and the ongoing struggle for equality, dignity, and democracy in India.

The essay is a key text from the archives of Dalit Voice for exposing the tensions within broader national and leftist movements. For contemporary NGOs, academics, activists, and journalists, this piece serves as a vital reminder that caste oppression remains foundational to India’s social inequalities and that any emancipatory work must confront this reality head-on. It also raises critical questions about the complexities of identity politics, the role of religion and tradition in oppression, and the necessity of inclusive yet uncompromising strategies for social transformation.

V. T. Rajshekar

“Anti-Brahminism” may not be a perfect, systematic ideology, but it undoubtedly is a powerful philosophy which once moved, and still moves, millions of people—not only among Hindus in India, but others as well. Since some urban-bred people cannot so much appreciate the importance and significance of this most powerful indigenous ideology, an effort is being made here to go into its different aspects.”

How can anti-Brahminism, a negative concept, be an ideology or a philosophy? It is being described so for want of any other appropriate name. When Brahminism can be a philosophy, why not anti-Brahminism? Suffice it to say that the revolt against the domination of Brahmins and even those non-Brahmins immediately below them in the Hindu caste hierarchy by those who have suffered at the hands of Brahminism has played and continues to play a great role in shaping Indian society and politics. Anti-Brahminism has, therefore, been the central theme of all protest movements in India for centuries—from the days the Aryans invaded India.

However, anti-Brahminism cannot be confined merely to a revolt against the Brahmins alone but includes all those non-Brahmins who subscribe to their value system. Brahminism is, therefore, more dangerous than Brahmins, because the Brahmins themselves have been victims of Brahminism. From the Buddha, the greatest enemy of Brahminism, Basaveshwara, Guru Nanak, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, to Mahatma Phule, Narayana Guru, Ambedkar, Lohia, and Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy—all of them rank among India’s most virulent crusaders against Brahminism. Therefore, anti-Brahminism can be considered the most indigenous among the different secular ideologies of India. Social or political leaders can ignore this ideology only at their peril.

What gives teeth to anti-Brahminism is the caste system, which is a specific Indian phenomenon. Caste is the curse of Hinduism, with its ascending scale of reverence and descending degree of contempt. Anti-Brahminism believes that the caste structure, with the Brahmin standing at the apex of this deathless pyramid, is the root cause of exploitation, inhumanity, and slavery in India. The Brahmin domination has religious sanction, and the Brahmin hereditary priesthood plays a central role in perpetuating Brahminism. Therefore, anti-Brahminism calls for the destruction of its three major institutions—the “Sacred Scriptures,” the caste system, and priestcraft. This is the quintessence of its philosophy.

Including the Brahmin, every Hindu has been a victim of Brahminism, particularly the Untouchables, many of whom have sought refuge in other religions to escape its tyranny. Women, including women among Brahmins, have suffered silently from the barbarity of Brahminism. Even Vivekananda and Gandhi, two of its greatest pillars, were forced to speak out against the havoc caused by Brahminism. M. N. Roy and Nehru—both Brahmins—had also lent powerful support to anti-Brahminism. “Democracy and caste cannot coexist,” they said. Anti-Brahminism has thus become the most powerful ideology that has moved every social, cultural, literary, and political movement in India since the days of Jainism, over 2,500 years ago. Every political party was rocked by it. Even the Communist parties were not spared, and many splits took place because Indian Marxists refused to heed the pulls of this ideology.

Mahatma Phule of Maharashtra is considered the father of this anti-Brahminism in recent times. Author of several books on this philosophy and founder of the powerful Satya Shodak Movement, he described the Manusmriti as an unholy book. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, an “Untouchable”, was mainly inspired by Phule, who belonged to a backward (gardener) caste. Anti-Brahminism also became the ideology of a powerful social, cultural, and political movement for realising the Dravidian identity of Tamils. Founded in 1944 by Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy, the DMK of Annadurai came as an offshoot of DK in 1949. EVR improved upon this philosophy and ridiculed the Hindu gods and the Hindu religion itself. Hinduism (its correct name is Brahminism), he said, was founded by Brahmins to exploit the poor, illiterate, and ignorant masses. The abolition of Brahmin priestly services was his basic programme.

Ambedkar followed a similar line of thinking. He said caste deadens, paralyses, and cripples the people. It has ruined the Hindus and has destroyed, demoralised, and devitalised Hindu society. Ranked among the greatest thinkers and philosophers of modern India, Ambedkar, in his innumerable books, has given a call to free every woman and man from the thralldom of “sacred scriptures.” He also considered the priest as the real villain of Brahminism. Both Ambedkar and EVR dubbed Brahminism as a reactionary philosophy.

What did anti-Brahminism achieve? By reviving the glorious cultural and social traditions of the original inhabitants of India before the Aryan invasion, it helped them to find their roots, gain self-identity, and recover self-respect. Phule, Ambedkar, and EVR said shudras and atishudras (Untouchables), along with tribals, were the original inhabitants of India before the Aryan invasion, and they had enough historical evidence. To condemn the Brahmin as a stranger in Tamil Nadu has become a handy weapon of the non-Brahmin to beat the Brahmin with, but popularising the myth of their Dravidian origin also gave Tamil non-Brahmin Hindus both an identity and a self-confidence, says E. F. Irschick.

Evidence has also been found to prove that Tamil society was free from idol worship and the caste system before Brahminism invaded. The Indus Valley Civilization has conclusively proved that the Aryans were not the first or the most important creators of Indian culture. Father Heras said that Tamils were the purest cultural descendants of the Indus Valley.

Brahminism, being a proselytising religion, savagely persecuted Jains and Buddhists and reconverted them to Hinduism—a new name given to Brahminism after the death of the Buddha. Murder and torture of Buddhists and Jains are cited by many historians. Behind the DK-DMK slogan of “Tamil for Tamilians” lies the conviction that Aryans are the aliens and non-Brahmins are the Dravidians. Anti-Brahminism has thus brought a new awakening, a new pride among the non-Brahmins, and convinced them that their poverty and suffering were due to Brahminism.

The emphasis given to social revolution has made them conscious of their exploitation at the hands of Brahmins. So much so that many non-Brahmins preferred British rule to Brahmin rule. Both Ambedkar and Periyar EVR boldly said so. It is this anti-Brahminism that drove EVR out of the Congress and made him found the Self-Respect Movement. Later, he launched an agitation for a separate Dravidastan. EVR also said that the so-called nationalism is nothing but Brahminism in another form. The growth of RSS and Jan Sangh (now BJP) has confirmed their fear.

Lohia contributed a great deal to the promotion of anti-Brahminism in the Hindi heartland. Lohiaites all over India are today in the vanguard of anti-Brahminism. It is to be noted that all the leaders of anti-Brahminism came into conflict with the Indian Left movement for ignoring the basic principles of its philosophy. All of them warned that Marxism, an alien philosophy, cannot take root in India as long as it fails to attack Brahminism and its three pillars. Ambedkar said Brahminism and capitalism are the twin enemies of the working class and that both must be attacked simultaneously. He criticised Dange, the lone Lenin Order winner in India, and others controlling the Communist parties as a “bunch of Brahmin boys.” EVR was also critical of the Brahmin domination of the Communist parties—so too was Lohia. Caste being the principal contradiction in India, its elimination should be our prime effort.

One of the greatest impacts of anti-Brahminism was on education. Phule and Ambedkar launched an education drive among the low castes, laying stress on anti-Brahminism in their books. Ambedkar set up a chain of educational institutions. Both Phule and Periyar introduced anti-Brahmin interpretations of the Puranas. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, the epics, are interpreted as a fight between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. Bonfires of the Gita and Manusmriti, which spread the poison of Brahminism, became popular. Ambedkar himself publicly burnt the Manusmriti in 1927. Periyar entered temples and broke idols, burnt scriptures, tarred hotel name boards bearing Brahmin names, and cut Brahmin tufts. His most popular programme, which turned out to be a mass movement, was “self-respect.”

(Letter to Editor)

Durai Anbalagan, Dalit Panthers President, Dharavi unit, Bombay:

We came to know during our tour of Tamil Nadu that more than 10,000 people in the State are planning to embrace Islam to get equal status.

We admit that conversion to Islam will bring status. But at the same time, Muslims are less in number. By joining Islam our strength will go down. Therefore I suggest the Dalits to get converted to Buddhism. Ambedkar had shown us the path.

The truth is that Dalits need no ‘religious conversion’ but ‘spiritual conversion’.

Dalits should think over this. By going over to Islam they will never solve their problem. On the other hand, Dalits will lose their strength in population.

Is there any guarantee that in future our converted Dalits will not be called “Harijan-Muslims and they continue to be untouchables like “Harijan-Christians”?