Unity between the Left and the Dalit-Bahujans

Even as the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims emerged as a contentious issue under the current regime, the long-standing issue that kept surfacing on the sidelines of the political drama over the last many years is that of the unity between the Left and the Dalit politics. There have been long-standing differences in viewpoints between both the political forces. While the Dalit-Bahujans find the Left essentially caste-Hindu in terms of who dominates and who they represent and find Dalits missing from leadership positions, the Left remained critical of the identitarian politics of the Dalits that have pushed for cultural valorization at the peril of neglecting redistributive issues. The future of Right-wing populism in particular and future of Indian democracy and the way they will play out in some measure depend on whether or not these two political forces come together, if not to merge but to engage in a more productive dialogue. Among others, one site where this tension is playing out in a full measure is the student politics in JNU. We have already discussed how JNU had come under attack under the current regime; however, on the sidelines of that conflict was the issue of Bahujan politics versus the Left.

For the Left-democratic forces, the results of the JNU student elections in 2017 came as a relief with the Left unity winning all the posts to the central panel.²⁰ However, the emerging story is more complex than a simple-minded celebration. The worrying part of the story is that while Left unity helped win all the four posts in the central panel, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) still managed to come second on all the posts.

Even more worrying is the growing rift between the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities and the Left student organizations. Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) fared reasonably well and seems to have managed to poll most of the Dalit and OBC votes.

Anti-Intellectualism

There was a range of sociological factors that stand common between the discourse of BAPSA and that of the ABVP. Both are steadfastly suspicious of the available institutional spaces. While the ABVP is critical of the open, socially transformative nature of institutions such as the JNU, the students of BAPSA are equally suspicious of the casteist nature of the institutional arrangements. The demand to reduce the viva voce marks to 15%, since the Dalit-Bahujan students believed that in many cases, there was a glaring gap between the marks they procured in the written as against the marks they got in viva, is a case in point.²¹ It is a different matter that the Left groups on campus have also fully supported the demand, a fact that BAPSA continues to ignore. Similarly, there is a streak of anti-intellectualism in both the ABVP and the BAPSA. Both are critical of the role faculty members play in the name of being progressive. While the ABVP feels that the Left-leaning faculty is ‘anti-national’, including being supportive of radical-Left politics, and are pro-Muslim and sexual minorities, support freedom for girl students, etc., the BAPSA feels faculty intellectualizes issues, ignoring the urgency of the need to provide wider representation to the students from the Dalit-Bahujan communities. For instance, anti-intellectualism takes the shape of undue emphasis on English, and the importance given to maintaining quality and merit. Both suffer from the common feeling of being short-changed by the English-speaking secular-progressive intelligentsia.

Left and Leadership

Left student groups, on the other hand, have equally failed to be sensitive to the changing political discourse and the pressing need for representation being demanded by the Dalit-Bahujan students. Left politics on campus has steadily become election-centric over the years, and yielding any space to groups that do not speak the language they do is seen more as losing space than a political experiment worth carrying out. Fears of the Dalit-Bahujan communities that Left parties use them as cadre but do not allow them to assume leadership positions remain unaddressed.

Meanwhile, it is intriguing to watch that those Dalit students that do get to leadership positions in the Left groups are perceived as being not ‘Dalit enough’ since they do not talk the identitarian language that groups such as the BAPSA are more oriented towards. The general complaint on the campus against the Left unions, not just of the BAPSA, is that they work at a distance, and most of the planning and strategization happens behind the scenes, without taking students into confidence. To Dalit-Bahujan students, this element of strategization comes across as brahminical manipulation. The split in the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) was due to such machinations.²² Left student leaders are often perceived as being less than transparent, less emotional and real, and hiding behind a cosmetic and sanitized Left-Radical discourse that fails to come across as organic.

While the Left groups successfully transform very many students from privileged backgrounds to become more sympathetic to the cause of those coming from lesser backgrounds, including garnering support for reservations, they continue to fail to provide a sense of belonging to the Dalit-Bahujan communities. What should have been an open-ended political experiment is reduced to a debate on the size, support, and presence of student groups as a precondition to forge alliances. This calculative, pragmatic and instrumental way of negotiating historical anxieties has distanced and is gradually weakening the appeal of the Left student bodies on campus. There is an urgent need for the Left and Dalit-Bahujan groups to strike a dialogue outside electoral calculations. In this, it is incumbent on the Left groups to take the first step, including listening to the alternative social logic of the Dalit-Bahujan groups.

The Dalit-Bahujan groups must realize that the identity of being a Dalit at the end of the day is an imposed identity and part of the Brahminical system they are struggling against. The more they reduce the Left students and faculty to their castes, the more they get reduced to being ‘only’ Dalits. To overcome this, Dalit-Bahujan groups must begin by recognizing the immense contribution that Left politics has made to provide them an enabling atmosphere on campus to gain self-confidence and to articulate an alternative discourse.²³ Acknowledgment and celebration of these enabling spaces only broadens and does not weaken the Dalit-Bahujan discourse. Missing this historic opportunity will cost all those wishing to be part of the transformative process of restoring dignity to a majority of social groups.

And this continues to be the essential difference with the Right-wing student body, the ABVP, which has been active in earlier instances in abusing Dalit faculty, vandalizing Ambedkar’s pictures, and also in physical violence.²⁴ This common condition will not automatically lead to a unity between the Left and other political forces but it should also not lead to a competitive bargaining in making advances and forging alliances with the Right. Under the current regime, intriguingly, we have witnessed both the play out of social prejudices against the Dalits but also the moves of Dalits towards the Right. It only highlights the layered complexity in Indian politics that refuses to get straightjacketed, and this layered reality is a vibrant source on which Right-wing populism has worked itself.