What is identity politics? Discuss the main trends in Dalit movements in India. (2021, 20 Marks)
Identity politics is mobilisation around a shared ascriptive or experiential identity — caste, race, gender, religion — in which the demand is not only a larger share of resources but public acknowledgement of the group’s worth. Charles Taylor (“The Politics of Recognition”, 1992) argued that misrecognition is itself oppression, since identity is dialogically formed and a demeaning image inflicts real harm. Nancy Fraser (“From Redistribution to Recognition?”, 1995) contrasted it with class politics: redistribution seeks to abolish a group’s distinctiveness, recognition to affirm it. Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci place such movements in post-industrial society, where struggle shifts from control of production to control of self-definition.
Identity politics in the Indian setting
Caste was never pre-political. Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) showed that democratic competition politicised caste while caste democratised politics. Colonial enumeration made caste countable and claimable; reservation made it legally consequential. Because caste is simultaneously a status order and an economic order, Dalit identity politics is also redistributive politics conducted in the only vocabulary the state recognises.
Main trends in Dalit movements
1. From emulation to repudiation. Early mobility followed what M. N. Srinivas called Sanskritisation — positional change leaving the hierarchy intact. B. R. Ambedkar rejected it in Annihilation of Caste (1936): caste is graded inequality sanctioned by shastra, so imitation concedes the premise.
2. Exit through conversion. The Nagpur conversion to Buddhism (1956) made religious exit a collective strategy with its own cosmology and history.
3. Cultural and literary assertion. The Dalit Panthers (Bombay, 1972; Namdeo Dhasal, J. V. Pawar, Raja Dhale), modelled on the Black Panthers, defined “Dalit” to include all the oppressed and made Dalit literature and autobiography its weapon, asserting the authority of lived experience.
4. The electoral-party turn. Kanshi Ram’s BAMCEF (1971) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (1984) culminated in the BSP’s 2007 Uttar Pradesh victory (206 of 403 seats, 30.43 per cent), part of what Christophe Jaffrelot calls the silent revolution. Sudha Pai (Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution, 2002) records both the dignity it conferred and the land it failed to deliver.
5. The legal-rights turn. The SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 made atrocity a distinct offence; its dilution in Subhash Kashinath Mahajan (2018) and restoration by the 2018 amendment after a nationwide bandh show law itself becoming the arena of movement.
6. Campus, digital and new-generation assertion. Mobilisation after Rohith Vemula’s death (2016), the Una flogging (2016) and Bhima Koregaon (2018) was student-led and social-media-borne; the Bhim Army’s Chandrashekhar Azad won Nagina in 2024.
7. Internal differentiation. Gopal Guru (“Dalit Women Talk Differently”, 1995) and Sharmila Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint (1998) dissolved the assumption of a homogeneous Dalit subject; State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) recognised sub-caste inequality by permitting sub-classification of Scheduled Castes.
Evaluation
Gail Omvedt (Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, 1994) read Dalit assertion as a democratic revolution in its own right, not a deviation from class politics. Anand Teltumbde counters that identity has been bought at the cost of structural change, yielding a Dalit middle class while land and private capital stay closed — the NCRB’s 57,789 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes in 2023 measure the distance remaining.
Conclusion
Identity politics gave Dalits what class politics could not: a self-chosen name, a canon and a public presence. Its limit is Fraser’s dilemma — recognition secured, redistribution deferred. A mature Dalit politics must hold both, which is exactly what the sub-classification and caste-enumeration debates now demand.