If the prerequisite of the imagination of a decent society is the logic of democracy, then the logic of caste absolutely militates against it. Democracy broadly presupposes equal moral worth of all human beings and can be conceptualised as a dynamic process where unfreedoms and inequalities are constantly being contested and contracted in all domains of social life. Caste, on the other hand, presupposes birth-based gradations of value that curbs self-realisation and human flourishing, among other factors, primarily through the regulation of choice in work (occupational specialisation) and intimacy (endogamy or marriage within caste). The caste principle broadly enables oligarchic power through elite monopolies and networks of knowledge, wealth, and force. 

Ambedkar articulated democracy not merely as a “form of government” but as “primarily a mode of associated living,” with caste as a counter force that made a common public purpose and bonds of social sympathy impossible through self-enclosed caste enclaves of mutual envy and parochial loyalties.

In his considered view, formal or political democracy was not sustainable without social and economic democracy, and he envisioned the annihilation of caste as central to any meaningful democratic revolution. After the rupture in the hegemony of the Nehruvian socialist consensus in the crucible of the 1990s – characterised by Yogendra Yadav as the 3Ms: Mandir, Mandal, and Markets – it seemed that Bahujan (anti-caste) nationalism might offer itself as a viable alternative to Hindutva (majoritarian) nationalism.

However, at this point, democracy appears to be backsliding, and anti-caste politics seems to have reached a plateau. To reinvigorate anti-caste (and broadly progressive) politics in desired directions, one urgently requires an open conversation on its longstanding conceptual and political closures – what I will characterise as the 4 Ds, namely decolonisation, diversification, democratisation, and development. 

Decolonisation

Scholars like Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer have conceptualised “the postcolonial predicament” as a condition in which, while one is free from foreign rule, the ideas of essence and difference articulated by the colonial knowledge-administrative regime continue to inform the postcolonial state, intelligentsia, and public life vigorously.

Any attempt at serious decolonisation, therefore, necessitates engagement with the four key orientalist-colonial moves that still influence our public discussions. First, the framing of religion as an essentialist and overarching primary identity.

Second, the motivated and selective history writing through the lens of Hindu-Muslim antagonism.

Amalendu Misra in Identity & Religion: Foundations of Anti-Islamism in India (2004) traces how British historiography influenced the early nationalist thinkers like Vivekananda, Gandhi, Nehru, and Savarkar to arrive at “a consensus”, or rather a blindspot, on two core questions: a) the nature of Muslim rule in India and b) Islam as a faith tradition per se. Misra suggests that most of these early thinkers held that “Muslim rule was bad and Islam incompatible with the majority religion and way of life.” Obviously, in the dominant British narrative, the so-called “Muslim” rule was seldom complicated by ethnicity (Turk, Afghan, Arab, Persian, Abyssinian, etc.), and the complexity of cross-religion and ethnic alliances and conflicts was discounted to produce the overarching and sanitized narrative of the Hindu-Muslim conflict.

Ironically, the Muslim thinkers, mostly belonging to the privileged caste Ashraf sections, also did not challenge this masculinist and selective view, as they were either themselves somewhat complicit as native interlocutors in the British historiographical project or, in any case, had internalised it.

Third, the essentialist conceptualisation of Hinduism as tolerant but inegalitarian and Islam as fanatic but egalitarian. Caste, which was broadly a secular mode of social stratification and ordered political economy in South Asia, was religionised and turned into an internal moment of Hinduism. Consequently, despite the play of caste across religions, it was rendered illegitimate and residual when addressing stratification in non-Hindu, particularly Muslim and Christian, communities. 

Also read: An Anthology of Anti-Caste Essays and the Question of Who Gets to Kill Whom

Fourth, the persistent influence of the geographical origins of faiths in their positioning in the imagination of the nation. Thus, despite the much longer presence of Islam and Christianity in India, they are still understood within a framework of “foreignness” because of their West Asian origins when compared to, say, a more recent faith like Sikhism with putative Indic origins. Thus, Savarkar’s twin conditions of being a Hindu, the sharing of pitrabhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land), and the imagination of India-Hinduism in civilisational terms effectively render the Muslims and Christians as cultural aliens. This logic is somewhat inscribed in Article 25(b) of the Constitution and the Hindu Code Bill, where Hinduism is defined in distinction to faiths with an external geo-genesis like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, thereby infecting Indic faiths with a conceptual schizophrenia: religiously Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and so on, but legally Hindu.

Intriguingly, one of the reasons cited by Ambedkar against the conversion of Dalits to Islam or Christianity is that it will “denationalise the Depressed Classes.” Indeed, most elite Muslims and Christians themselves took pride in the foreign pedigree of their social stock or faiths. These orientalist-colonial moves continue to provide the conceptual horizon to frame public discussions, polarise communities on religious lines, and work against a counterhegemonic pan-religion solidarity of oppressed communities, as evidenced, for instance, in the animated discussions around the demand for inclusion of Muslims and Christians of Dalit origins in the Scheduled Caste category. 

Diversification and Democratisation

While all Bahujan communities undergo the experience of caste humiliation, they do it differentially and in an interlocking and simultaneous relationship with other axes of oppression, namely gender, religion, language, class, sexual orientation, and so on. The sheer heterogeneity of the Bahujan – Dalit, Backward, and Adivasi – lifeworld necessitates radical diversification in terms of interpretive frameworks and narratives.

For instance, there have been multiple Bahujan strategies to address the entanglement of faith and caste:

a) exit and conversion (Ambedkar),

b) radical atheism (Periyar),

c) internal reform/liberation theology (Narayana Guru, Abdul Qaiyum Ansari, Arvind P. Nirmal),

d) new faiths (Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, Ramswaroop Verma’s Arjak Sangh).

Can or should the Bahujan settle on any one overarching strategy in this respect? 

Hinduism, like all faith traditions, is a complex and multifaceted collection of disparate and often conflicting interpretative communities that evolve within the dialectic of interpenetrating texts and contexts. The frequently overly negative and literalist evaluations of Hinduism in the orthodox anti-caste thought, though eminently understandable, must also contend with the question of why conversions of the disenfranchised castes to faiths outside Hinduism have been an episodic rarity in recent history. Why have most Dalit-Bahujans chosen to stay back in the “Hindu” flock?

The intuitive answers, like the grip of Brahmanical-induced false consciousness or state governmentality, probably take the agency of the Dalit-Bahujans for granted. One must investigate the process of Dalit-Bahujan meaning-making and Hindu hermeneutics more closely to arrive at more persuasive answers. Apart from the classic reconfigurations of Hinduism by Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, or Tagore, the much more recent articulations—the American scholar Anantanand Rambachan’s “Hinduism as liberation theology”, Swami Agnivesh’s “Vedic Socialism”, the Christian liberation theologian Sebastian Kappen’s “Vedic Ecosophy”—are interesting interpretations that one must engage with. So far, the Bahujan narratives have been dominated by the lived experience and cognitive frameworks of the few vanguard (or leading) castes. There is a greater need to accommodate peripheral narratives of Bahujan women, working classes, LGBTQI , minor religious and linguistic groups, Pasmanda Muslims, Adivasis/NTs/DNTs, and those from remote regions within the broad anti-caste discourse. 

The discussion on democratisation necessitates foregrounding the questions of internal justice, power differentials, and voice within the Bahujan community itself. Quite akin to the historical mobilisations of vanguard Bahujan castes that sought and won safeguards and representation rights from the privileged castes, the castes that have been left behind are mobilising by formulating new identities, such as the Mahadalit, Atipichda, Pasmanda, and others. They have demanded categorical revisions in the form of sub-quotas or subclassifications across the extant quota categories: SC, ST, and OBC.

However, any judicious categorical revision must be based on proper caste-based census data. Moreover, the first-past-the-post electoral system is highly insensitive to the needs of numerically small communities, and a serious debate on a proportional electoral system is warranted eventually. The much broader concern in this regard is the vulgar delinking of the logic of representation with any transformative agenda itself. The founding anti-caste icons imagined representation as a means to achieve the ends of social justice and meaningful democracy. The often reductionist battles between various Bahujan communities over representation, without any reference to the ideological propriety of the vision or spaces themselves, are striking, to say the least. 

Development

Ambedkar had identified Brahmanism and Capitalism as the two enemies of the working classes. While “graded inequality” is a key aspect of Brahmanism, the appropriation of “surplus value” (the difference between the value created by the laborer and the wage) by the capitalist class is a key feature of capitalism. The dominance of the mechanical “base (economic)/superstructure (culture)” model of Indian Marxist orthodoxy led, according to Gail Omvedt, to a “dual systems theory” where Brahmanism and Capitalism were seen as separate forms of exploitation that necessitated separate struggles: the former a politico-cultural battle, the latter a material struggle. Consequently, according to Anand Teltumbde, “…economic considerations were sidelined by the dalit movement in favor of social, political, and religious concerns.” Another explanation could be what the Afro-American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” that is, the hijacking of anti-caste movements by the aspirational middle classes, who were content with narrow achievements by performing identitarian politics within the attention economy rather than addressing the exclusion of the broader Bahujan community within the material economy. 

One must bring capitalism back strongly on the anti-caste agenda. The play of capital is deeply embedded in the modernist-Enlightenment imaginary, which privileges instrumentalist rationality in human relations and the relation between humanity and nature.

Also read: Why Does Narendra Modi Suddenly Want a Caste Census?

A few glaring manifestations are: one, the damages to psychic life and acute alienation due to the increasing standardisation, rationalisation, quantification and consumerism; two, almost irreversible damage to ecology and the climate crisis because of the objectification of nature and the sovereignty of the profit principle; three, periodic financial downturns and recessions leading to severe social costs and instability in the form of unemployment, mental health issues, broken families and so on; four, the probable catastrophic impact of automation, qualitative leaps in AI and robotics within the capitalist framework; the emerging hegemony of the military-techno complex resulting in the war economy, surveillance and mediatisation of life and so on.

Historically, neither private capitalism (in its Keynesian-welfarist or neoliberal variants) nor state capitalism (as exemplified by the socialist models of the former Soviet Union or China) has seriously embraced workplace democracy. In the former, a board of directors elected by shareholders holds all power; in the latter, party-appointed bureaucrat-managers control key decisions about production and the allocation of surplus.

Taking the cue from Ambedkar, the Bahujans, comprising the artisans, farmers, and the working classes in India, must envision a political democracy alongside economic democracy. In other words, they must work towards a post-capitalist future. In articulating this vision, they can learn from Adivasi cosmologies, as well as transitional campaigns such as Universal Basic Income, discussed by scholars like Guy Standing and Rutger Bregman. Additionally, they can draw inspiration from a "trickle-up" economic model centred on Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs), as suggested by the economist Richard Wolff and others. As the worst victims of the neoliberal model, the Bahujans must think of alternative sustainable models of development rather than being content with a competitive struggle for economic rights within the framework of exploitation. Anti-caste politics must be relaunched as a world-making project, and a renewed conversation on the 4Ds – decolonisation, diversification, democratisation, and development – may catalyse that process.

Khalid Anis Ansari is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Views are personal.

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