Dalit Politics in India

Dalit politics is the longest-running attempt in modern India to convert a stigmatised social identity into political power. It began as a nineteenth-century challenge to ritual hierarchy, became under Ambedkar a constitutional and electoral project, and has since fragmented into competing strategies that disagree less about the goal than about the route. The question it keeps returning to is the one Ambedkar posed in 1949 — whether political equality can survive alongside social and economic inequality.

The Name and What It Carries

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• “Dalit” is a chosen name, not an administrative one — and the choice is itself the argument. The word derives from the Marathi and Sanskrit dalita, meaning broken, ground down, crushed, and it names an experience of being acted upon rather than a place in a ritual order.
  • Jyotirao Phule used it in the nineteenth century for those outside the varna order; the Dalit Panthers turned it into a mass political vocabulary from 1972 onward.
  • Its force is that it describes oppression rather than pollution. Where “untouchable” locates the person in a hierarchy of purity, “Dalit” locates a perpetrator.

• Ambedkar rejected “Harijan”, and the rejection was substantive rather than semantic.
  • It made untouchables the beneficiaries of upper-caste generosity rather than the holders of rights, which is precisely the relationship he spent his career trying to dissolve.
  • He preferred “Bahishkrit” (excluded) and later the statutory “Scheduled Castes”, on the reasoning that a legal category can be litigated while a devotional one cannot.
  • Parliament formally dropped “Harijan” from official use in 1982, and the term is now largely absent from public language outside quotation.
• The state has repeatedly tried to police the word “Dalit”. In June 2018 the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court directed the Union government to consider asking the media to avoid it, and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory in September 2018 telling broadcasters to prefer “Scheduled Caste”.
  • Dalit organisations read this as an attempt to retire the political name — an argument about who gets to name a community.

Article 341 and the Making of a Legal Category

• Article 341 empowers the President, after consulting the Governor, to specify by public notification the castes, races or tribes deemed Scheduled Castes in relation to a particular State or Union Territory.
  • The list is therefore state-specific: a jati scheduled in one state may not be scheduled across a border, which produces recurring migration and domicile disputes.
  • Clause (2) reserves to Parliament alone the power to include or exclude a community by law; no notification can subsequently vary the list. This is the constitutional lock on the category.
• The Presidential Order of 1950 created the first list, and its paragraph 3 confined SC status to persons professing Hinduism — extended to Sikhs in 1956 and to Buddhists in 1990, but never to Christians or Muslims. That exclusion drives one of the sharpest live controversies in Dalit politics.
• Article 366(24) defines Scheduled Castes purely by reference to Article 341, so the definition is circular by design — the category is whatever the President and Parliament say it is.

Scale and Internal Stratification

• Census 2011 counted 201.4 million Scheduled Castes — 16.6% of the population, a group larger than every country in the world except China, India, the United States and Indonesia.
  • Uttar Pradesh has the largest absolute SC population at over 41 million; Punjab has the highest share of any state, at roughly a third. SC literacy in 2011 stood at 66% against a national 73%.
• The category contains well over a thousand distinct jatis, and they do not share an outcome. This is the single most important fact for understanding twenty-first-century Dalit politics.
  • Maharashtra: Mahars (Ambedkar’s own jati, and the base of the Buddhist conversion) against Mangs/Matangs and Charmakars.
  • Uttar Pradesh: Jatavs/Chamars, roughly half the state’s SC population and the BSP’s core, against Pasis, Koris, Valmikis and Musahars.
  • Andhra Pradesh and Telangana: Malas against Madigas — the rivalry that generated the whole sub-classification litigation.
  • Tamil Nadu: Paraiyars and Pallars against Arunthathiyars, who are the poorest and least represented.
  • Punjab: Ravidasias/Ad-Dharmis against Mazhabi Sikhs and Valmikis.
• Untouchability is practised within the category. Better-placed SC jatis maintain distance from those associated with scavenging and leatherwork, which is why the phrase “Dalits among Dalits” has entered political usage and why sub-classification became unavoidable.

A category that contains a thousand jatis was always going to fracture once its benefits became worth fighting over.

Anti-Caste Currents Before Ambedkar

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced anti-caste movements that were not yet electoral but were already political. They differed on whether the route out of subordination lay through reforming Hinduism, leaving it, or claiming a prior identity that predated it — a disagreement that Dalit politics has never fully resolved.

• Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 in Pune, the first organised assault on Brahminical authority mounted from below rather than from within reform Hinduism.
  • His Gulamgiri read caste as conquest: Aryan invaders subjugating an indigenous population, with the varna order as the ideology of that conquest.
  • He grouped shudras and atishudras together as a single exploited mass — the direct ancestor of Kanshi Ram’s bahujan.
  • He and Savitribai Phule opened schools for girls and untouchable children, treating education as the primary political instrument, a conviction Ambedkar inherited.
• Narayana Guru in Kerala worked through the SNDP Yogam (1903) among the Ezhavas, consecrating temples for those barred from existing ones and turning ritual exclusion into an organisational base.
  • His dictum condensed a whole programme into six words, and it was addressed to Hindus rather than against them.
  • The Vaikom Satyagraha (1924-25) over road access around a temple, and the Temple Entry Proclamation in Travancore in 1936, were the concrete outcomes of this strand.

“One caste, one religion, one God for man.”

• E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) broke with the Congress in 1925 over its refusal to guarantee communal representation and founded the Self-Respect Movement, the most radical rejection of Hinduism produced by the anti-caste tradition.
  • He treated Hinduism as the instrument of Brahminical domination rather than as a faith incidentally captured by Brahmins, and read the Ramayana as a record of Aryan conquest of the Dravidian south.
  • Self-respect marriages dispensed with priests and mantras, and his campaigns against idols and against Hindi fused anti-caste with anti-north politics.
  • He became president of the Justice Party in 1938 and converted it into the Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944, the organisational stock of Tamil Nadu’s later party system.
• The “Adi” movements of the 1920s made the boldest claim of all: that untouchables were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent, dispossessed by Aryan arrivals, and therefore not low-caste Hindus at all but a separate people.
  • Swami Achhutanand built the Adi-Hindu movement in the United Provinces, arguing that untouchables were the autochthonous Nagas or Dasas.
  • Parallel formations appeared as Adi-Dravida in Madras, Adi-Andhra under Bhagya Reddy Varma, and Adi-Karnataka; at the 1931 census nearly a third of the Malas and Madigas of Madras Presidency registered as Adi-Andhra.
  • Mangoo Ram Mugowalia, a returned Ghadar revolutionary, founded the Ad-Dharm movement in Punjab in 1926, demanding recognition as a separate religion; roughly half a million Punjabi Dalits registered as Ad-Dharmis in the 1931 census.
  • The strategy was census politics — using the colonial enumeration itself to claim a distinct identity, a tactic being revived today.
• The Mahar movement in Maharashtra supplied Ambedkar’s own base, and it had a pre-history he built on.
  • Gopal Baba Walangkar and Shivram Janba Kamble had already petitioned for Mahar recruitment into the army and against ritual degradation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  • The Mahars’ traditional village service obligations gave them literacy, mobility and a grievance that was administrative as well as ritual — an unusually combustible combination.

Ambedkar as Organiser and Strategist

Ambedkar‘s contribution to Dalit politics was not primarily doctrinal. It was the construction, over three decades, of an independent political apparatus — newspapers, conferences, satyagrahas, parties and finally a constitutional text — that allowed untouchables to negotiate as a bloc rather than petition as supplicants. Everything Dalit politics has done since is a variation on tools he built.

Building a Public

• Newspapers came before parties. Mooknayak (1920, “leader of the voiceless”) and Bahishkrit Bharat (1927) created a Marathi-reading Dalit public before any electoral vehicle existed.
• The Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924) took the motto “Educate, Agitate, Organise” and combined hostels, libraries and schools with agitation — the same fusion of service and confrontation that the Bhim Army would rediscover ninety years later.
• Ambedkar’s evidence to the Southborough Committee (1919) and the Simon Commission (1928) established him as the recognised spokesman of the Depressed Classes, which is what earned him a seat at the Round Table Conferences.

The Satyagrahas

• Mahad, 20 March 1927 — Ambedkar led thousands to drink from the Chavdar tank, a public water body legally open to all and practically closed to untouchables.
  • The point was civic, not religious: a right already conferred by law was being tested against social power, and the resulting violence proved that legal rights without enforcement are declarations.
  • At the December 1927 session, the Manusmriti was publicly burnt — a deliberate act of symbolic destruction aimed at the textual authority of caste rather than at any individual.
• Kalaram Temple, Nashik, 2 March 1930 — a year-long campaign for entry that ended without entry.
  • Its failure was instructive rather than merely disappointing: it convinced Ambedkar that the struggle for admission into Hindu sacred space was a poor investment of Dalit political energy, and turned him toward political rights and, eventually, exit.

Round Table Conferences, the Communal Award and the Poona Pact

• Ambedkar attended all three Round Table Conferences (1930-32) as the representative of the Depressed Classes, arguing that untouchables were a distinct element of the national population entitled to their own political representation.
• The Communal Award of 16 August 1932 granted the Depressed Classes separate electorates with a double vote — they would elect their own representatives from reserved seats and vote in general constituencies. It allotted them 71 seats.
• Gandhi began a fast unto death at Yerwada jail on 20 September 1932, holding that separate electorates would sever untouchables from Hindu society permanently and vivisect Hinduism.
• The Poona Pact was signed on 24 September 1932. Ambedkar traded the principle for the numbers.
  • Separate electorates were surrendered; in exchange, reserved seats in the provincial legislatures rose from 71 to 148, with 18% of British India’s general seats in the central legislature reserved.
  • A primary-election or panel system was agreed, under which Depressed Class voters would shortlist four candidates for each reserved seat, to be voted on by the general electorate — a partial substitute for the double vote, scheduled to lapse after ten years and never seriously operated.
• What Ambedkar gave up was the electoral independence of the Dalit representative. A candidate on a reserved seat has to be acceptable to a non-Dalit majority, which selects for accommodation rather than assertion.

The Poona Pact gave Dalits more seats and less power; every argument about reserved constituencies since has been an argument about that trade.

Parties: Labour, Federation, Republic

• The Independent Labour Party (1936) was Ambedkar’s first electoral vehicle, and revealingly it was framed around class rather than caste.
  • It fought on tenancy, agrarian debt and industrial labour, seeking an alliance of Dalits with poor non-Dalit workers and peasants.
  • In the 1937 Bombay provincial elections it won 14 of the 17 seats it contested — the strongest electoral performance any explicitly Ambedkarite formation achieved before 1993.
  • Its limitation was structural: a regional party in a single presidency could not negotiate at the all-India level with the Congress and the League.
• The Scheduled Castes Federation (1942) abandoned the class frame for an explicitly caste-based all-India party.
  • It performed poorly in the 1946 elections, largely because reserved seats under the Poona Pact system were decided by general electorates that preferred Congress-aligned Dalit candidates. The Pact’s logic worked exactly as Ambedkar had feared.
  • Ambedkar himself was defeated in Bombay and entered the Constituent Assembly from Bengal with Muslim League support, then re-entered from Bombay after Partition.
• Ambedkar was himself defeated in 1952 and again in a 1954 by-election, after resigning as Law Minister over the stalling of the Hindu Code Bill — a record showing how weak the Ambedkarite vote was as an electoral force in his own lifetime.
• The Republican Party of India was Ambedkar’s design for a broad-based party open to all the oppressed, announced shortly before his death and founded in 1957.
  • It won seats in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh in the 1960s and led the 1964-65 land satyagraha, but splintered repeatedly into personality-based factions.
  • Its fragments were progressively absorbed into larger parties — the trajectory of Ramdas Athawale’s RPI(A), now an NDA constituent, is the clearest illustration.
• The conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, with roughly half a million followers and twenty-two vows explicitly repudiating Hindu deities and Brahminical authority, was the political culmination of the Kalaram lesson.
  • It created a Buddhist Dalit constituency, concentrated among Mahars, with its own festivals, calendar and symbolic geography — the cultural infrastructure on which later assertion movements drew.
  • Buddhists were excluded from SC status until 1990, a penalty that shaped the pace of conversion for three decades.

Ambedkar Against Gandhi

The disagreement between the two men is regularly softened into a matter of temperament. It was not. They disagreed about whether caste could be reformed from within Hinduism, about whether untouchables were a distinct political community, and about who was entitled to speak for them — and every subsequent strategic choice in Dalit politics descends from one side or the other of that dispute.

• Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) was written as an address to a reform organisation that then cancelled the event, and it makes the argument the political disagreement rests on: caste is sustained by scriptural sanction, so reform requires destroying the authority of the shastras, not appealing to conscience.

Three Strategic Choices

Since independence, Dalit political energy has flowed down three channels. Each accepts that untouchability must end and disagrees about what power is for and how it is obtained. They are not sequential phases — all three are active simultaneously, they compete for the same voters, and each has periods of ascendancy.

Co-option: Working the Mainstream

• Jagjivan Ram is the model. From the All India Depressed Classes League (1935) he chose the Congress rather than Ambedkar’s Federation, and converted that choice into the longest ministerial career in Indian history.
  • He was in the Union cabinet almost continuously from 1946 to 1979, held Labour, Agriculture, Railways and Defence, and was Deputy Prime Minister in the Janata government (1977-79).
  • He left the Congress in 1977 to found the Congress for Democracy, contributing materially to its defeat — proof that co-option can generate real bargaining power.
  • He was nonetheless never made Prime Minister despite being the senior claimant in 1979, and the ceiling on the co-opted Dalit leader is the point his career actually establishes.
• The rightward shift is the strand’s contemporary form, and it is a genuine ideological position rather than mere opportunism.
  • Ram Vilas Paswan built the Lok Janshakti Party and served in cabinets under the United Front, the NDA and the UPA alike, on the reasoning that a small Dalit party maximises returns by being indispensable to whoever governs.
  • Udit Raj moved from the Indian Justice Party to the BJP and later to the Congress, arguing that the annihilation of caste is a utopia and that Dalits should extract concrete gains — jobs, contracts, protection — from whichever formation holds office.
  • Ramdas Athawale‘s RPI(A) has been an NDA ally since 2011, taking the last coherent fragment of Ambedkar’s own party into the ruling coalition.
• The BJP’s absorption of Dalit votes since 2014 is the largest single fact in contemporary Dalit electoral politics.
  • It worked chiefly on non-dominant SC jatis — Pasis, Koris, Valmikis in UP; Musahars in Bihar — who had gained least from a BSP dominated by Jatavs, combining welfare delivery with symbolic recognition.
  • Ram Nath Kovind’s election as President in 2017 was its most visible symbolic act, and exactly the kind of appointment Pratap Bhanu Mehta would classify as managerial.
• Bihar 2025 shows the strand is not spent. Chirag Paswan’s LJP (Ram Vilas) contested 29 seats as an NDA constituent and won roughly two-thirds of them, one of the best strike rates of any party in an election the NDA swept with over 200 of 243 seats.
  • The lesson a co-optionist draws is that a disciplined small Dalit party inside a winning coalition delivers more offices and more patronage than an autonomous party outside it.

Autonomy: The Ambedkarite Party Project

• Autonomy was Ambedkar’s own preference — the constitutional method pursued from an independent political base, so that Dalit votes could not be taken for granted by a party that did not need to concede anything for them.
• Kanshi Ram revived that project from an unlikely starting point. A Ramdasia Sikh from Ropar working at a defence laboratory in Pune, he was radicalised by a colleague’s struggle to have Ambedkar Jayanti recognised as a holiday, and by reading Annihilation of Caste.
  • His diagnosis was that Dalit political failure was caused by dependence on hostile-party patronage, and that the cure was an autonomous cadre with its own money.
  • BAMCEF — the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation — grew out of organising work begun in the early 1970s and was formally launched in 1978. It taxed the salaries of reserved-category government employees to fund the movement, on the principle “pay back to society”.
  • DS-4 (Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, 1981) added agitation to the employee network, and the Bahujan Samaj Party was founded on 14 April 1984, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary.
• His writing was a strategic document, not a memoir. The Chamcha Age (1982), published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Poona Pact, argued that reserved constituencies had manufactured a class of chamchas — stooges dependent on non-Dalit parties — and that the task was to replace them with genuine representatives.
  • This is the clearest theoretical link between the 1932 compromise and the 1984 party.
• The bahujan formulation widened the base from SCs to SCs, STs, OBCs and religious minorities, claimed as roughly 85% of the population against a 15% manuvadi elite.
  • The symbols carried the arithmetic: the blue flag for the sky, the elephant for numerical strength, and slogans built on succession — “Baba tera kaam adhura, Kanshi Ram karega pura.”
  • His electoral doctrine was patient: a new party loses its first election, is noticed in the second, and wins the third.
• Mayawati’s four terms as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh — 1995, 1997, 2002-03 and 2007-12 — made her the first Dalit woman to head an Indian state and the strand’s proof of concept.
  • The first three were short, coalition-dependent and dominated by symbolic assertion: statues, memorials and district renamings that inscribed Dalit icons onto the public landscape of the state.
• The 2007 social engineering was the strategic peak. The BSP won 206 of 403 assembly seats with a clear majority, the first single-party majority in UP in fourteen years.
  • Brahmin bhaichara committees were organised under Satish Chandra Mishra, and Brahmin, Thakur and Muslim candidates were fielded on general seats where the Dalit base supplied the decisive bloc.
  • Bahujan became sarvajan — “all people” — which converted a party of the oppressed majority into a coalition-manager. That widened the vote and hollowed out the ideological core.
• The decline after 2012 has been continuous and is now structural: 80 seats in 2012, 19 in 2017, and a single assembly seat with 12.9% of the vote in 2022, the party’s worst showing since 1989.
  • In the 2024 Lok Sabha election the BSP won no seats anywhere and fell to around 9% in Uttar Pradesh, failing to carry even one of the state’s 17 SC-reserved constituencies.
  • Ajoy Bose‘s Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati reads the trajectory as a leader who mastered the mechanics of caste arithmetic and then allowed a personality cult and a closed inner circle to substitute for organisation.
  • The uncertainty over Akash Anand‘s designation and repeated de-designation as successor has become the visible symptom of a party with no second rank.
• The honest assessment is that the autonomous strand has contracted to a Jatav base. It retains a loyal core that no other party can fully absorb, and it has lost the capacity to convert that core into seats.
  • Sudha Pai argues that the sarvajan turn cost the BSP its non-Jatav Dalit support without permanently gaining upper-caste support, and that the vacuum was filled by the BJP under conditions of right-wing hegemony.
  • The strand survives outside UP in Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi in Maharashtra and Thol. Thirumavalavan’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi in Tamil Nadu, both of which win seats only in alliance.

Autonomy built a party, co-option built careers, and radicalism built a language. None of the three has yet built social equality.

Radicalism: Panthers, Poetry and the Street

• The Dalit Panthers were founded in Bombay in 1972 by the poets and writers Namdeo Dhasal, J.V. Pawar and Raja Dhale, taking their name and their posture directly from the Black Panther Party in the United States.
  • The provocation was Raja Dhale‘s essay in Sadhana contrasting the fine imposed for insulting the national flag with the impunity surrounding the public stripping of a Dalit woman in a Maharashtra village — a comparison between symbolic and actual sovereignty.
  • They were formed in frustration with the Republican Party’s absorption into Congress and to counter the Shiv Sena’s hold on Bombay’s streets.
• The 1973 manifesto defined “Dalit” far more broadly than the Scheduled Caste list: members of SCs and STs, neo-Buddhists, landless and poor peasants, women, and all those exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion.
  • It fitted the Ambedkarite inheritance into a Marxist frame, naming landlordism, capitalism and imperialism alongside Brahminism.

“We want the rule of the whole land. We are not looking at persons but at systems and change of heart… the giant mass will rise like a tidal wave of revolution.”

• The organisation split within two years, and the fault line was ideological before it was personal.
  • Dhale held that the movement’s foundations were Ambedkar and Buddhism; Dhasal insisted on a Marxist class analysis, and his support for Indira Gandhi during the Emergency made the breach final.
  • Dhasal later moved toward the Congress and, at the end of his life, toward the Shiv Sena — a trajectory that co-optionists cite as evidence that radicalism cannot sustain itself.
  • The organisation split in the mid-1970s and fragmented thereafter, successor formations under Arun Kamble and Ramdas Athawale carrying the name into the 1980s.
• Dalit literature was the movement’s most durable achievement. The Panthers were a literary formation that became a political one, and the writing outlasted the organisation.
  • Namdeo Dhasal‘s Golpitha brought the language of Bombay’s red-light district into Marathi poetry; Daya Pawar‘s Baluta and Sharankumar Limbale‘s Akkarmashi established the Dalit autobiography as a political form.
  • Limbale‘s Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature argues that Dalit writing requires its own criteria of value, not assimilation into existing literary standards.
  • Om Prakash Valmiki‘s Joothan in Hindi and Bama‘s Karukku in Tamil carried the form beyond Marathi.
• The Namantar Andolan — the sixteen-year campaign from 1978 to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar, finally conceded in 1994 — showed both the mobilising power of symbolic demands and the violent backlash they provoke in rural Maharashtra.

The Revival: Bhim Army, Bhima Koregaon and the Campus

• The Bhim Army, founded in western Uttar Pradesh around 2014-15 by Chandrashekhar Azad, revived the Panther model of combining service with confrontation.
  • It runs hundreds of free schools for Dalit children alongside street-level intervention against atrocities — the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha’s formula in a new register.
  • The Saharanpur clashes of May 2017 made Azad a national figure; he was detained under the National Security Act and released in 2018.
  • The Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), founded in March 2020, gave it an electoral vehicle, and Azad won the Nagina Lok Sabha seat in 2024 with over half the vote against both the BSP and the major alliances.
• Bhima Koregaon, 1 January 2018, is the episode that crystallised the new radicalism and the state’s response to it.
  • The annual commemoration marks an 1818 battle in which a Company force with a substantial Mahar contingent defeated the Peshwa’s army — read in Dalit memory as Dalits defeating Brahminical rule, not as a colonial victory.
  • The bicentenary drew enormous crowds; violence on the day left one dead and many injured, and the Elgar Parishad held at Shaniwar Wada on 31 December 2017, convened by retired judges, was later identified by the police as its cause.
  • Two FIRs were registered. The one naming Hindutva figures produced no prosecution of consequence; the other became a UAPA conspiracy case against sixteen writers, lawyers, academics and activists, several of whom had not attended the event.
  • Father Stan Swamy died in custody in July 2021, aged 84, after three years of refused bail; forensic analysis by an independent firm found that incriminating files had been planted on a defendant’s computer.
  • Bail has come slowly — Sudha Bharadwaj in 2021, Anand Teltumbde in 2022, Gautam Navlakha in 2024, and Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawale in January 2025 after six and a half years in jail.
  • Charges have still not been framed more than eight years after the arrests, which makes the process itself the punishment and the case a standing grievance in Dalit politics.
• Rohith Vemula’s suicide at the University of Hyderabad on 17 January 2016 made caste in higher education a national issue.
  • His suspension followed a complaint from an ABVP office-bearer; his final letter — “My birth is my fatal accident” — became the text of a national campaign.
  • The Telangana police closure report of March 2024 concluded he was not a Scheduled Caste, an assertion that inflamed the case rather than closing it; the state ordered further investigation within hours.
  • The demand for a “Rohith Vemula Act” against institutional caste discrimination has since produced a Karnataka bill carrying imprisonment and fines for discrimination in higher education, announced for implementation in the state’s 2026-27 budget.
• The Una flogging of 11 July 2016 — four Dalit men publicly beaten in Gujarat by cow vigilantes for skinning a dead cow — triggered the sharpest rural mobilisation in years.
  • Jignesh Mevani‘s Una Dalit Atyachar Ladat Samiti turned it into a land demand rather than a dignity demand, with the slogan that caste Hindus should keep the cow’s tail and give Dalits their land, and the Azadi Kooch march to Una.
  • The refusal to dispose of carcasses was a withdrawal of ritually degrading labour — an economic weapon rather than a petition.
• The protests of 2 April 2018 against the dilution of the Atrocities Act were the largest Dalit mobilisation in decades, leaving at least a dozen deaths across several states. They forced a legislative reversal within five months.
• The university and the timeline are now the movement’s two main sites. Ambedkar Students’ Associations, campus reading circles and Dalit-run digital platforms have built a publishing and argument space that needs no upper-caste gatekeeper.
  • It bypasses the institutions of certification — universities, publishing houses, newsrooms — that Gopal Guru identified as closed to Dalit theory-making.
  • It also produces a politics that is leaderless at the point of mobilisation, which is why an atrocity now generates a national campaign within hours, and why the state finds it harder to negotiate with.

The New Dalit Challenge

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, writing in the aftermath of Bhima Koregaon, argued that this generation of Dalit politics differs in kind from what preceded it, and that the difference explains the intensity of the reaction to it.

• Constitutional recognition is no longer sufficient. Dalits secured formal equality, reservation and representation, and the new politics treats these as a floor that has been reached rather than a settlement to be defended.
• The “managerial approach” is being rejected. Mehta’s term names an upper-caste strategy of symbolic co-option — absorbing Dalits into the symbolic order without any real shift of power.
  • Its mechanism is to manufacture a class of beneficiaries whose elevation is offered as proof that the system works, thereby exhausting the question of social justice and diffusing conflict.
  • A Dalit Speaker or President is the paradigm case: visibility standing in for power.
• Dalits are building counter-hegemony rather than practising a politics of survival. The claim is Gramscian in structure — the contest is over which account of the past is authoritative.
  • History is being rewritten rather than merely supplemented: Bhima Koregaon as Dalit victory, the Peshwai as the thing defeated.
  • The posture is antagonistic rather than celebratory. Mehta’s example is precise — the commemoration says “you are defeated”, not “we won”, which addresses an opponent rather than an audience.
  • The pressure of this new Dalit imagination, on his reading, is colliding with the upper-caste strategy of containment, and the collision is what produces both the assertion and the prosecutions.
• C.P. Bhambri enters a caution. Rising Dalit consciousness is a gain, but a consciousness that does not ally with progressive forces will limit the scope of its own struggle.
  • The reasoning is that caste-exclusive mobilisation caps itself at the group’s numerical share, and that structural change requires coalitions on questions — land, wages, education — where Dalit interests overlap with others’.

Constitutional recognition was Ambedkar’s floor. Three generations later it is being treated as a ceiling worth breaking.

The Scholarly Field

• Gopal Guru theorises the Dalit public sphere — the parallel world of conferences, little magazines, jayantis and reading circles through which Dalits produced political knowledge outside institutions that excluded them.
  • His essay on the “theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras” of Indian social science argues that Dalits are admitted as sources of data but excluded from theory-making, which reproduces caste inside the academy.
• Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, in Why I Am Not a Hindu, argues that Dalitbahujan life-worlds — productive labour, non-vegetarian food, goddess worship, collective decision-making — constitute a distinct civilisation rather than a debased version of Hinduism.
  • His counter-proposal, “Dalitisation”, inverts Sanskritisation: society should adopt Dalitbahujan values rather than the reverse, and what he calls spiritual democracy should replace priestly monopoly.
• Gail Omvedt placed the anti-caste movements at the centre of Indian modernity rather than at its margins, reading Phule, Ambedkar and the non-Brahmin movements as an alternative democratic revolution that the nationalist narrative has written out.
• Anand Teltumbde insists on the caste-class fusion. His study of Khairlanji treats the massacre as a product of rural political economy rather than of ritual prejudice alone, and Republic of Caste argues that identity politics has delivered symbols while material conditions worsened.
• Sudha Pai‘s work on Uttar Pradesh charts the “new Dalit politics” of assertion from the 1990s and its subsequent unravelling, treating the BSP’s rise and decline as one arc rather than two stories.
• Christophe Jaffrelot‘s “silent revolution” thesis describes the transfer of power from upper castes to lower castes through the ballot — and is explicit about its limits.
  • The revolution has been far more OBC than Dalit: Dalits remain heavily dependent on reserved seats, thinly present in state cabinets outside UP, and largely absent from the higher judiciary, the media and corporate leadership.
  • Political representation has advanced fastest where economic transformation has advanced least, which is the puzzle the whole literature circles.

Dalit Capitalism and Its Critics

• Chandra Bhan Prasad argues that the market is a solvent of caste in a way that the state is not: a buyer does not ask the caste of a supplier, and capital accumulation creates a form of power that ritual status cannot cancel.
  • The Bhopal Declaration of January 2002, adopted by a conference of Dalit and Adivasi intellectuals, set out a twenty-one point agenda: democratise capital, redistribute land, and require supplier and dealership diversity in procurement.
  • The Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, founded by Milind Kamble in 2005, institutionalised this — turning Dalits from job seekers into job givers, and lobbying successfully for reserved shares in government and PSU procurement from SC/ST enterprises.
• The critique is that this mistakes individual escape for collective emancipation.
  • Teltumbde points out that a few thousand Dalit entrepreneurs among more than two hundred million people is statistically trivial, and that presenting them as the measure of progress is a distraction from landlessness and casual wage dependence.
  • He also contests the appropriation of Ambedkar, who named Brahminism and capitalism as the twin enemies of the labouring classes and whose economic programme was closer to state socialism than to markets.
  • The intermediate position, held by much of the field, is that Dalit enterprise widens the escape routes without touching the structure that makes escape necessary.

Dalit Feminism

Dalit feminism took shape as a double critique: of a women’s movement that spoke of Indian women as though caste were incidental, and of a Dalit politics that spoke of the community as though its leadership were naturally male. Its claim is that the Dalit woman’s position is not the sum of two disadvantages but a distinct location that generates its own knowledge.

• Gopal Guru‘s essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently” made the founding argument: Dalit women’s assertion of difference is not divisive but necessary, because both the feminist and the Dalit movements had misrepresented them.
  • The external factor is the caste blindness of mainstream feminism; the internal factor is patriarchy within Dalit organisations, where women mobilise and men lead.
• Sharmila Rege developed this into a “Dalit feminist standpoint” — a position rather than an identity, available to anyone who adopts it, and epistemically privileged because those at the intersection of caste, class and gender can see the structure that those above it cannot.
  • She historicised the marginal place given to Dalit women in Maharashtra’s social movements, and warned that a politics of pure difference risks becoming testimony collected by others rather than theory produced by the women themselves.
  • Chhaya Datar contested whether any standpoint can be declared superior and liberatory, and Rege replied by defending standpoint theory as a method of accountable knowledge — one of the few genuine theoretical debates the Indian feminist field has sustained.
• Uma Chakravarti‘s concept of brahmanical patriarchy supplies the structural account: caste purity is transmitted through women, so endogamy and the control of female sexuality are not side-effects of the caste order but its reproductive machinery.
  • This explains why inter-caste marriage attracts the most extreme violence, and why sexual violence against Dalit women functions as collective punishment of a community rather than as individual crime.
• The National Federation of Dalit Women (1995), founded by Ruth Manorama, gave the critique an organisation.
  • It took the argument international at the World Conference Against Racism at Durban in 2001, pressing for caste to be recognised as descent-based discrimination within the racism framework — a claim the Indian government resisted on the ground that caste is an internal matter.
  • The All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch and the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights carried the work into documentation of atrocities against Dalit women.
• Khairlanji, 29 September 2006, is the case the movement returns to. Surekha Bhotmange and her daughter Priyanka were paraded naked and killed along with two sons in a Maharashtra village, in a dispute over land and a road.
  • The trial court convicted for murder, but the atrocity charge under the SC/ST Act was not sustained and rape charges were not pressed, on the reasoning that the motive was revenge rather than caste.
    • Dalit lawyers treat this as the textbook failure to see caste when it is in front of the court.
  • Hathras in September 2020, where a young Dalit woman died after a gang rape and the district administration cremated her body at night without her family’s consent, reproduced the pattern with the addition of an active cover-up.
• Dalit women’s writing is the field’s other archive — Baby Kamble‘s The Prisons We Broke, Urmila Pawar‘s The Weave of My Life, and Bama’s Sangati, which describe caste and patriarchy as a single continuous experience rather than two subjects.

The State’s Instruments and Their Record

• The National Commission for Scheduled Castes is treated at length in its own place; what matters here is that it is a constitutional watchdog with recommendatory power, and that its findings bind nobody.
• The Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955 — enacted as the Untouchability (Offences) Act and renamed in 1976 — criminalised the enforcement of disability arising out of untouchability.
  • It has been largely inert for decades, because it requires proof that the act was done on the ground of untouchability — nearly impossible to establish.
• The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 was passed precisely because the 1955 Act had failed.
  • It creates a schedule of specific offences committed by non-SC/ST persons against SC/ST persons, Special Courts, enhanced punishments, and a bar on anticipatory bail under Section 18.
  • The 2015 amendment added offences reflecting how atrocity actually operates — tonsuring, garlanding with footwear, forcible manual scavenging, dedication as a devadasi, obstruction of access to public spaces.
  • It also created Exclusive Special Courts with a sixty-day trial target, a chapter of victim and witness rights, and a presumption of knowledge of caste where the accused was acquainted with the victim.
• Subhash Kashinath Mahajan (20 March 2018) effectively suspended the Act’s central deterrent.
  • Citing misuse, the Court directed a preliminary inquiry before an FIR, written approval before arrest, and permitted anticipatory bail where the complaint was prima facie mala fide.
  • The protests of 2 April 2018 followed, and Parliament passed the 2018 amendment inserting Section 18A: no preliminary inquiry, no approval requirement, and Section 18’s anticipatory-bail bar restored notwithstanding any court order.
  • Prathvi Raj Chauhan v. Union of India (10 February 2020) upheld the amendment, while clarifying that anticipatory bail remains available in the rare case where the complaint discloses no offence at all on its face.
• The Manual Scavengers Act 2013 replaced the 1993 law, banning both manual scavenging and hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks, and mandating survey, identification and rehabilitation.
  • The NAMASTE scheme (2023) replaced the earlier self-employment scheme, funding protective equipment, mechanised sanitation units and capital subsidies for sanitation worker enterprises.
  • In Dr Balram Singh (2023) the Court directed the eradication of manual scavenging and raised compensation for a sewer death to ₹30 lakh; in January 2025 it ordered a halt to manual sewer cleaning in six metropolitan cities, and has since issued contempt notices to states over continuing deaths.
  • It persists because the work is subcontracted and the workforce drawn almost entirely from a handful of SC jatis — the clearest surviving case of caste-assigned occupation.
• Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India (3 October 2024) struck down caste-based provisions in the prison manuals of ten states, holding that the assignment of menial and sanitation work by caste and the segregation of barracks violated Articles 14, 15, 17, 21 and 23.
  • It ordered the deletion of the caste column from prisoner registers, revision of the Model Prison Manual, and an end to the treatment of denotified tribes as “habitual offenders” — and registered a suo motu case to monitor compliance.
• The atrocity data points in one direction. Crime records show cases registered against Scheduled Castes running at roughly fifty thousand a year.
  • Convictions have risen too, but pendency has risen faster than disposal, so the deterrent effect of a law with a sixty-day trial target is largely notional.
  • Registration measures reporting as much as incidence, so a rise can signal better access to the police as easily as worse violence. What is unambiguous is the gap between cases filed and cases concluded.

Reserved Constituencies and the Representation Question

• Eighty-four Lok Sabha seats and around 600 assembly seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes under Articles 330 and 332, allocated in proportion to population.
• Scheduled Castes are a minority of the electorate in every one of them. Unlike Scheduled Tribes, SCs are dispersed rather than territorially concentrated, so no constituency can be drawn in which they dominate.
  • The reserved seat therefore restricts who may stand without altering who decides — the structural consequence of the Poona Pact.
  • Francesca Jensenius‘s work finds that reserved-seat legislators behave as representatives of their party and their whole constituency rather than of their caste group, and that NOTA and abstention run measurably higher in reserved seats.
• Kanshi Ram’s chamcha argument is the political form of the same point, and the BSP’s strategy was built as an answer to it.
  • The party’s method was to accumulate a Dalit vote that could be transferred to non-Dalit candidates on general seats, making Dalit voters the kingmakers rather than the wards of a reserved constituency.
  • In 2007 this produced Brahmin and Muslim MLAs elected on Dalit votes — a genuine reversal of the reserved-seat relationship, and the reason the BSP’s decline is a loss for the representation question and not only for one party.
• Reserved seats are also captured internally. In UP the seats go overwhelmingly to Jatavs and Pasis; in Tamil Nadu to Paraiyars rather than Arunthathiyars; in the Telugu states to Malas rather than Madigas.
  • Parties pick from the best-organised SC jati in a constituency, reproducing the internal hierarchy inside the institution designed to correct it — the strongest argument for sub-classification.
• Delimitation after the coming census will redraw both the total and the distribution of reserved seats, and is already a live political question.

Contemporary Fault Lines

Sub-Classification and the Politics It Released

• State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) held 6:1 that States may sub-classify within the Scheduled Castes, overruling E.V. Chinnaiah(2004), on empirical evidence of inadequate representation and without excluding any caste from the general SC pool.
  • The politics split along the internal fault line the judgment identified. The most marginalised jatis — Madigas, Valmikis, Mazhabi Sikhs, Arunthathiyars, Musahars — welcomed it; the better-placed — Malas, Jatavs, Paraiyars, Mahars — opposed it as a device to divide the category and dilute its collective bargaining power.
  • NACDAOR called a Bharat Bandh on 21 August 2024, backed by the BSP and the Samajwadi Party.
    • Its demands were that the Centre reject the judgment, legislate afresh and place the law in the Ninth Schedule, release caste-wise employment data, fill backlog vacancies, and secure 50% representation of marginalised groups in the higher judiciary.
  • The creamy-layer observations by four judges caused far greater alarm than the holding, because Dalit organisations read the extension of an OBC device to SCs as an attack on the premise that untouchability attaches regardless of income. The doctrine belongs to the reservation debate; the politics belongs here.
  • The Union Cabinet resolved, on 9 August 2024, that there would be no creamy layer for SCs and STs, framing the decision as fidelity to Ambedkar’s Constitution — a rare instance of a governing coalition moving within days under pressure from its own Dalit MPs.
• States moved quickly, and the formulas differ enough to show that sub-classification is a political negotiation dressed as an empirical exercise.

• Nomadic and “touchable” SC groups in Karnataka continued to agitate after the order, which is the pattern to expect: sub-classification converts one dispute into several.

The Religion Question and the Census

• Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims remain outside the SC list because paragraph 3 of the 1950 Presidential Order confines it to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
  • The Ranganath Misra Commission (2007) recommended de-linking SC status from religion; the Sachar Committee documented the persistence of caste practice among Indian Muslims and Christians.
  • The Justice K.G. Balakrishnan Commission, constituted on 6 October 2022 under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, was asked to examine the claim; its tenure was extended repeatedly through 2024, 2025 and into 2026.
    • Its report was described as ready for submission in mid-2026, but the contents are not in the public domain, and the Supreme Court has held its own proceedings pending it.
  • The politics is three-cornered: converts want inclusion, existing SC groups fear dilution of a fixed quota, and recognising caste after conversion concedes that conversion does not end it.
• The caste enumeration in the 2027 census matters to Dalit politics differently than to OBC politics. SCs have always been counted; what will now be counted is jati within the category, which supplies exactly the empirical basis Davinder Singh requires for sub-classification.
  • Census politics has revived the oldest tactic in the repertoire. In July 2026 thousands gathered at Phagwara in Punjab demanding a separate Ravidassia column in the 2027 census — a direct descendant of Mangoo Ram’s Ad-Dharm registration drive a century earlier.

Where the Vote Went

• The 2024 Lok Sabha election saw the NDA lose roughly five percentage points of the Dalit vote, leaving the INDIA alliance close to parity among SC voters nationally after a decade of BJP advantage.
  • The “Constitution in danger” campaign was the mechanism — the claim that a large majority would be used to alter reservation proved unusually potent among Dalit voters.
  • The shift was uneven: non-Jatav SCs in UP and Paswans in Bihar moved to the opposition, while the BJP held its Dalit vote in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat and gained among Madigas in Telangana.
  • The BSP’s collapse to zero seats and Chandrashekhar Azad’s win at Nagina occurred in the same election, in the same state — the clearest available snapshot of one strand replacing another.
• Bihar 2025 ran the other way. The NDA’s landslide included a strong performance by Chirag Paswan’s LJP (Ram Vilas), confirming that the co-option strand delivers where it is embedded in a winning coalition.
• Across both elections the Dalit vote is now competitive and internally divided by jati — no longer a bloc any single party, Ambedkarite or otherwise, can assume.

Ambedkar’s Three Warnings, Tested

In his closing speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, Ambedkar set out three dangers to the republic. Read as a scorecard on Dalit politics itself, they have held up uncomfortably well.

• The contradiction of political equality with social and economic inequality.

“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.”

• The political half has been delivered — reserved seats filled, a Dalit twice in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Dalit voters twice in a decade shifting a national result.
• The social and economic half has not. Landlessness, wage dependence, occupational segregation in sanitation and an atrocity docket near fifty thousand cases a year describe a stratification the vote has not dislodged.
• He warned that those denied equality would blow up the structure of political democracy. What has happened is subtler — a politics that keeps the structure and treats it as insufficient.
• The grammar of anarchy. Ambedkar urged abandoning the methods of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha once constitutional means were available, calling them nothing but the grammar of anarchy.
  • The record is genuinely ambiguous. Constitutional method delivered the Atrocities Act and Sukanya Shantha; street mobilisation delivered the 2018 restoration of that Act after a court had gutted it.
  • The state’s answer to Bhima Koregaon — an eight-year prosecution without framed charges — shows what happens when assertion is classified as anarchy rather than as politics.
• Bhakti and hero-worship.

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

• Every strand has violated this: Ambedkar is venerated more than read, the BSP’s decline is inseparable from a personality-centred structure with no second rank, and the newer formations are built around single leaders.
• The counter-case is that in a community denied public honour, statues and jayantis are claims on public space rather than sentimentality — precisely the argument between Mehta’s counter-hegemony and Ambedkar’s warning.

Conclusion

Dalit politics has done what Ambedkar built it to do and stalled where he predicted it would. It converted a stigmatised identity into a recognised political interest, produced a party that governed India’s largest state four times, and forced Parliament to reverse the Supreme Court within five months.

• What it has not done is convert political weight into social equality, and the three strategies remain unreconciled — co-option delivers offices without leverage, autonomy has contracted to a single jati, and radicalism generates a language and a prosecution in roughly equal measure.
• The new frontier is internal. Sub-classification, the religion question and the coming enumeration will all be settled by arguments among Dalits about who counts as most disadvantaged — the mark of a movement that has won recognition and now has to decide what to do with it.