The Left has stood with Dalits many times. It has found it much harder to let them stand on their own.
All India Students’ Association (AISA) National President Neha Bora addresses a press conference at the CPI(ML) Liberation Parliamentary Office | ANI Photo/Amit
Last month, AISA president Neha Bora was at the epicentre of the anti-SIR protests. Besides the dramatic moments at Jantar Mantar, Bora generated controversy when a clip from an interview went viral and touched a major nerve. In it, she questioned whether established anti-caste parties had actually helped marginalised communities.
The clash between her supporters and Dalit activists who called out her privileged consciousness highlights a long-standing question: who really gets to lead the fight for Dalit rights? It also points to a deeper question that has dogged the Left for nearly a hundred years: why does the Left, and its politics, find it so hard to accept Dalit political assertion on its own terms?
Ambedkar vs the communists
Ambedkar grasped something that much of the Indian Left was slow to accept — that caste was not merely another form of economic exploitation that would vanish once the economy changed. Caste and its machinations decided multiple things: dignity, who could touch whom, who could enter which institution, and who could hold and exercise power.
He learned his lessons via harsh political experiences in Bombay. During the great textile strike of 1928, Dalit workers were barred from the better-paid weaving section because they belonged to an untouchable caste. Ambedkar asked the communist-led Girni Kamgar Union to take up this issue. They blatantly refused and only relented after he threatened to keep Dalit workers out of the strike.
Ten years later, at a conference of Dalit railway workers in Manmad, Ambedkar put it plainly. He said that India’s workers had two enemies: Brahmanism and capitalism. You could not defeat one and ignore the other. His quarrel with the communists was not a side issue. It was about who would speak for the oppressed and on whose terms.
Hyphenated solidarity
This does not mean the two could never work together.
On 7 November 1938, Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party and the communists together led a one-day strike in Bombay against the Industrial Disputes Bill. Then, in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement of 1956 to 1960, his Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) joined communists and socialists on a common front. Lokshahir Annabhau Sathe, a Dalit writer and lifelong communist, gave the movement its songs and played an important role in it.
What needs to be understood is that these alliances worked because Dalit politics emerged in its own right, with its own party and its own leader. And once the goal was won, they broke. The chief reason was that the harder question of power sharing between them had never been settled.
That is why independent Dalit politics keeps being reborn, as is evident in post-independence India.
First came the Republican Party of India in 1957, originally conceptualised by Ambedkar, who did not live to see it established. The Dalit Panthers were formed in 1972, in response to disenchantment with post-independence mainstream politics and political processes. Later came Manywar Kanshi Ram’s BAMCEF, DS-4, and, in 1984, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
Each grew from the same lesson: emancipation could not depend on the goodwill or orthodox piety of other parties. In his mammoth text, The Chamcha Age, Kanshi Ram warned that parties prefer Dalit faces who owe their place to the party rather than to their people. These movements had their failures, but their insistence on representation changed Indian democracy.
Hard truths
Parts of the Left still have not made peace with this Dalit assertion and their quest for sovereign politics on their own terms. One example is the CPI(M), which was founded in 1964. The first Dalit member of its Politburo, the party’s highest body, was elected only in 2022.
The old reflex is most evident on educational campuses, where young people first learn what solidarity means. In 2014, Dalit, Adivasi, and backward-caste students at JNU, long a Left stronghold, formed the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA). They set out to break the “hegemony of both the Left and Right.” They wanted to set their own sovereign agenda rather than merely swell the crowds. The same blame-gaming and mud-slinging was seen then too. Sections of the student Left reacted to this sovereign Dalit assertion by accusing them of splitting the progressive vote and helping the Right. The same charge is heard on campus after campus whenever Ambedkarite students contest on their own.
This finger-pointing has ramifications for Indian politics at large. When Dalits ask for their own voices to be heard, they are accused of breaking unity. But unity that works only when Dalits stay in the second row is not unity. It is management. A student movement, or indeed a political movement, that cannot share leadership with Dalits at the age of twenty will struggle to share power with them at forty.
Today, the Opposition wants to stand together against a powerful ruling party. It speaks of social justice, holds up the Constitution at rallies, and puts Ambedkar’s photograph on its stage. Can it afford to overlook the political history of the very people in whose name it speaks? Dalit voters are sharp; they immediately notice who sits on the stage and who makes the decisions. Many have drifted away from parties that claimed to speak for them, some even to the BJP, which has been quicker to give Dalit leaders visible positions. Of course, critics rightly question how much real power those positions carry.
Meeting as equals
None of the above means that the Left has contributed nothing to the fight against caste. Its cadres have stood with landless labourers and faced jail and violence for it. Nor is Ambedkarite politics, or politics in the name of Ambedkar’s blood or lineage, beyond criticism. It has had its own splits, compromises, and catastrophic failures.
But the lesson from Bombay is that both the positive and the negative need to be learned. In fact, Ambedkar blamed his defeat in the 1952 Lok Sabha elections from the Bombay City North Constituency on the bitter opposition of CPI leader Shripad Amrut Dange, which split working-class votes.
The Left and Dalit politics were, and will be, strongest when they meet as equals. This was seen in the 1938 strike and the streets of 1956. Politics that demands unity and builds solidarity on equal, dignified terms, while respecting independent Dalit leadership, will build a lasting alliance. The Left does not need to lead Dalits. It needs to learn to walk beside them.
Nikhil Sanjay Rekha Adsule
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule is a lawyer, an alumnus of TISS, Creighton Peden Scholar, USA, and a Senior Scholar at IIT-Delhi. He tweets @Surajya_Raje_. Views are personal.
Courtesy : The Print
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