Organising grand events and celebrations in the month of April to commemorate Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary has become a national ritual now. These only showcase the presence of a vibrant and robust Dalit mass, engaged to democratise the mainstream public culture. However, such a display of national Dalit unity around B.R. Ambedkar’s iconography is unavailable in the political sphere. Instead, there is a growing splintering in Ambedkar’s political legacies today, making Dalit political parties a passive and relegated force.
Ambedkar envisaged a robust arrival of subaltern social groups, mainly the Dalit-Bahujan mass, as the prime claimant of state power and visualised that his political party, the Republican Party of India (RPI), would form a greater social alliance with the Adivasis, poor working classes and landless agrarian labourers and strengthen the movement against an exploitative feudal and Brahmanical order. In the post-Ambedkar period, the major task of Dalit politics has been to follow Ambedkar’s legacy and establish the Dalit-Bahujan as the key transformative force in democratic institutions. However, even a cursory examination of contemporary Ambedkarite Dalit politics would showcase that it has disintegrated into segments, and lacks a visionary leadership, strong social base and effective political strategies to re-emerge as a crucial player in democratic battles.
