After the Common Man, the Convenient Bahujan: CJP Fails the Litmus Test of Representation

Yogendra Yadav’s account of the July 20 protest at Jantar Mantar is fine political writing. It encapsulates the core of a youth mobilisation that broke through governmental fear and media silence. Nevertheless, its most ambitious claim is that this movement – led by Dalit activist Abhijeet Dipke and inspired by Sonam Wangchuk – could inaugurate a new phase of social-justice politics. “Instead of demanding its share in the nation,” Yadav writes, “Bahujan politics can now define what the nation is.”

Can it, though? Or has the liberal intelligentsia simply found its next common man?

The first real litmus test of CJP’s potential was not Jantar Mantar, but during a moment that occurred almost two weeks after it declared its national leadership team. According to CJP, its National Working Committee “ratified” the list of eleven leaders.

It would appear from the publicly identifiable composition of CJP’s leadership that it is caste heterogeneous. However, it is disproportionately weighted towards upper-caste and regionally dominant caste groups, including Jats and Reddys. In any case, a caste mix is not automatically a Bahujan distribution of power. The relevant test is whether communities historically excluded from power exercise authority across the organisation.

Representation is not merely the identity visible at the apex; it is the distribution of power throughout the institution. In the same vein, protests can tell us who is angry, but it is organisations and their composition that tells us who will get to exercise power.

The CJP has yet to explain either the social rationale for this organisation or the process by which it was constituted. The importance of a Dalit convenor is undeniable, but that alone does not make it a Bahujan movement either. Representation does not lie in faces at the top; it lies in power structures below.

Further, if the CJP derives its politics from the constitution, social justice cannot wait for the moment when it takes up the question with the state. It must begin at home – with who leads and holds power and whose concerns form its agenda. An organisation that cannot practice social justice in the first institution it has created cannot credibly promise to deliver it elsewhere.

Yadav, especially, needs to understand this. He was part of the anti-corruption movement and was one of the founding members of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which promised to transcend ordinary politics through the idea of the common man, with a discourse about corruption, education and service delivery that quietly excluded caste, class and social relations from its agenda. The similarities go beyond political ideology: six out of twelve members of CJP’s core team belong to AAP’s political world, either because they worked with the party or publicly supported it.

The question that should have been asked of AAP then is the one that matters as CJP takes shape now: who, precisely, was the common man? The answer lies not in the social composition of AAP’s voters, but in the leadership it chose when it had real discretion – its national executive, Cabinet portfolios and Rajya Sabha nominations. The caste imbalance is visible without much excavation.

Even after winning Punjab, where Scheduled Castes constitute nearly a third of the population, AAP sent no Dalit to the Rajya Sabha. Its 2022 nominations favoured party insiders, professionals and business figures; no Dalit, Adivasi or OBC candidate made the list. The language of the common man was addressed to lower-caste and marginalised citizens, while institutional power remained concentrated among upper-caste and socially privileged groups.

Then there is Rajendra Pal Gautam, who held the position of Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment in AAP governments (2015-2022). He opposed the health department’s notification which excluded mohalla clinic contract workers from reservation policy in 2022. Months later, his presence at an event where Ambedkar’s twenty-two vows were recited was fabricated into a controversy. Being pressured by the BJP and due to the electoral sensitivity of AAP, he resigned.

In private, he was questioned for supporting reservation and publicly sacrificed for being an Ambedkarite. It shows the yawning gap between symbolic and substantive representation: a Dalit minister represents inclusiveness; an assertive Dalit minister becomes a liability.

The education model of AAP remains fascinating for the Indian liberal community – better classrooms, better exam results, all in the rhetoric of administrative efficiency rather than transformations of social relations. CJP seems to be joining the same league. Paper leaks and recruitment delays are real issues and readily become the agenda of “Indian youth”. Caste discrimination and the deaths of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students inside these institutions remain, as ever, a sectional footnote.

The Ministry of Education, say reports, recorded 122 student suicides in centrally-funded higher education institutions between 2014 and 2021, 24 of which were of Scheduled Caste scholars, three pf Scheduled Tribes and 41 from the Other Backwards Classes (OBC). Death is only the most brutal end of a longer exclusion. India still has no continuous, caste-wise registry tracking these deaths, dropouts and complaints – and that is not oversight but evasion of accountability.

Across 21 IIMs with 1,880 sanctioned faculty posts, government data count only 62 Scheduled Caste, 16 Scheduled Tribe and 109 OBC teachers. The bureaucratic verdict “not found suitable” has refused to die: a parliamentary committee condemned its continued use against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe academics as recently as in 2025.

An education movement that speaks only of paper leaks and examinations, silent on who teaches and who survives inside these institutions, is not confronting India’s educational crisis. It is choosing the part of the crisis liberal politics finds comfortable.

The demonstration of selectiveness can be better explained by the school kitchen. CJP has publicised broken toilets in government schools – a real problem, but one already addressed by a decade of campaigns and a Supreme Court directive. School reform must also ask what enters a child’s stomach. NFHS-5 found that 35.5% of India’s children under five were stunted, 19.3% were wasted and 32.1% were underweight⁠. Even so, eggs – a low-cost source of high-quality protein – remain absent from school meals in many states⁠, often in deference to “vegetarian sentiments”. This is caste-coded vegetarianism⁠, where the dietary morality of socially dominant groups is elevated to public policy for everyone.

The same hierarchy is in place when children boycott meals cooked by Dalit women – as some 40 upper-caste students did in Uttarakhand’s Champawat district and 147 students reportedly did in Gujarat’s Morbi. A politics of education that photographs a broken toilet but ignores what a child is permitted to eat, who is permitted to cook and whether caste follows that child into the lunch line is seeing infrastructure and calling it society.

This phenomenon might be called savarna-compatible universalism – a political strategy that delivers services to marginalised communities without changing the locus of control of the institutions providing those services. In the AAP model, the caste system becomes invisible in the fuzzy definition of the common man. The CJP model brings back caste as the dominant element in an unchanged power structure.

Premature applause is not harmless. Intellectuals do not merely observe new movements; they confer legitimacy on them. Declare one transformative before its institutions are examined, and the courage of Dalit, Adivasi and OBC youth becomes ready-made political capital for another elite formation – the same donation, collected twice.

July 20 may have broken the spell of fear among a section of the population. But CJP owes one answer before it earns the title Yadav wants to give it: will those who supplied its numbers and its courage also hold its power or only its stage? India has been here before.

Under Nehru, the postcolonial state tried to weaken caste by refusing to enumerate it. Caste vanished from the official census but never vacated power; the old hierarchy simply relearned to speak in the language of merit and neutrality. CJP must not repeat that mistake and call it progress. Until those counted in its crowds also count inside its structure, this is not Bahujan politics defining the nation. It is the old politics, wearing a more convenient face.

Pottepaka Sandeep Kumar is a PhD scholar in the Department of Political Science at Osmania University.

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