Beyond Binary: Bahujan Has Its Own Ideological Enchantment

Ajay Gudavarthy’s formulation of “Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan", in his recent article published in Outlook, is so provocative. It is partially useful in exposing the social elitism that has historically structured much of institutional Left politics in India. However, the framework risks reproducing a new binary that flattens the agency of Bahujans. It misunderstands recent mass movements, such as the farmers’ protest, and underestimates the autonomous ideological traditions of Bahujan politics. Such a framing ultimately re-centres savarna epistemologies even while claiming to critique them.

The reading of the farmers’ movement is emblematic of this limitation. Gudavarthy’s discussion subtly implies that the inability of the movement to electorally dislodge the BJP signals ideological incoherence. This inference reproduces an elite Left moralism that equates political efficacy exclusively with regime change.

The farmers’ agitation, however, constituted one of the most sustained and effective mass resistances to corporate-driven neoliberal restructuring in recent Indian history. Its success lay not in electoral realignment but in forcing the repeal of farm laws that sought to dismantle minimum support prices, accelerate corporate control over agriculture, and transform peasants into precarious contract labourers. To read this struggle as politically insufficient because it did not translate into immediate electoral outcomes is to impose a narrow, institutional conception of politics that has historically failed to recognise subaltern modes of resistance.

More significantly, the expectation that marginalised groups must shoulder the burden of overthrowing an entire political system reproduces the very hierarchies the Left claims to oppose. The farmers’ movement demonstrated that class struggle can and does occur outside electoral logics, and that mass resistance need not conform to elite theoretical expectations in order to be politically meaningful. What is often interpreted as fragmentation or inconsistency is, in fact, the product of structural coercion and constrained choice, rather than ideological confusion.

The “Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan” binary further risks collapsing the Bahujan assertion into a cultural idiom easily appropriable by the Right. This move is analytically untenable. Bahujan politics has never been reducible to either Left or Right formations; nor has it merely “shifted” camps in response to cultural appeal. It emerges from an autonomous ideological tradition shaped by anti-caste struggle, lived experience of humiliation and exclusion, and the production of alternative moral and political universes.

The rise of Ambedkarite movements, from the Dalit Panthers to contemporary formations such as the Bhim Army, demonstrates that Bahujan politics is neither a residue of Left failure nor the raw material of Hindutva mobilisation, but a distinct and ongoing political project. This autonomy becomes clearer when one recognises that Ambedkarite politics does not treat caste as a secondary contradiction to be resolved after class struggle. Instead, it begins from the annihilation of caste as the precondition for democracy, equality, and fraternity.

This difference is not merely strategic but epistemic. Whereas much of the parliamentary Left has universalised class by abstracting from caste, Ambedkarite thought insists that class itself is constituted through caste hierarchies. Any political project that ignores this insight reproduces Brahmanical universalism under the guise of secular radicalism. Even the understanding of politics within the electoral form is limited, as caste is a political one embedded within the social structure based on power relations.

Gudavarthy’s emphasis on culture as a domain the Left must learn to deploy also remains limited insofar as it treats culture instrumentally. For Bahujans, culture has never solely been an add-on or a communicative tool adopted to mobilise masses.

Culture for the Bahujan has been the primary site of ideological struggle that produces the materiality of living a dignified life. Sharmila Rege’s interrogation of the so-called “irrational deification” of Ambedkar is instructive here. Rege demonstrates that Ambedkarite commemorative practices—far from being instances of blind hero worship—constitute a Dalit counter-public organised through critical memory, collective pedagogy, and affective labour.

Annual gatherings at sites such as Chaityabhoomi, Dikshabhoomi, and Bhima Koregaon serve as spaces where Dalit history is remembered, reinterpreted, and circulated outside the dominant public sphere. Rege’s analysis shows that Ambedkarite calendars, songs, pamphlets, and performances are not symbolic excesses but modes of knowledge production from below. Through music, oral histories, and popular literature, Dalit publics contest dominant narratives of nationalism, democracy. Thus, Dalit counter-public reform articulates alternative visions grounded in equality and dignity. These practices generate what Rege calls “ dalit heterotopias”—real, inhabitable spaces that mediate between utopian aspirations and lived social realities. Such cultural production is simultaneously rational, reflexive, and political, challenging the savarna tendency to dismiss subaltern affect as irrational or excessive.

Seen through this lens, the Bahujan turn away from Brahmanical mythology cannot be read as cultural retreat or susceptibility to right-wing symbolism. It was an act of epistemic resistance. Figures such as Ravidas and Ambedkar are not merely cultural icons but architects of counter-hegemonic philosophies. Ravidas’s vision of Begumpura articulated a radical egalitarianism long before modern socialism, while Ambedkar’s reconstruction of Buddhism constituted a material intervention into social ethics, subjectivity, and collective life. These traditions do not supplement Left ideology; they challenge its foundational assumptions.

What Gudavarthy identifies as political fragmentation is better understood as the consequence of Brahmanical universalism’s refusal to recognise difference as constitutive rather than divisive. For oppressed communities, plural and sometimes contradictory political strategies are not symptoms of neoliberal individualisation but conditions of survival in a caste-stratified society. Demanding ideological coherence from Bahujans while ignoring the structural violence that shapes their choices reproduces privilege in the language of theory.

The crisis of the Left, therefore, cannot be resolved through rebranding, affective politics, or selective appropriation of subaltern culture. It requires a more fundamental epistemic shift: an acknowledgement of Ambedkarite politics as an equal intellectual tradition; an understanding of caste as constitutive of class relations; and a willingness to learn from, rather than pedagogically address, Bahujan movements. Solidarity cannot be built by absorbing Bahujans into pre-existing Left frameworks. It can only emerge through the transformation of those frameworks themselves. Nonetheless, in recent times, the existence of left-wing politics on campus among students has become subtly aware of this, and they have applied it, chanting slogans like ‘Birsa Phule Ambedkar’ instead of ‘Lenin Marx Bhagat Singh’.

Recognising Bahujan politics as an autonomous ideological force—historically grounded, culturally productive, and theoretically generative—disrupts the binary of “Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan” and opens the possibility of a genuinely emancipatory politics. Such a politics begins not with instruction but with listening, not with universal abstraction but with situated knowledge, and not with moral judgement but with historical responsibility and acknowledgement.

This is a response piece to an article “Left Brahmins, Right Bahujan and Caste of Ideologies” by Ajay Gudavarthy, recently published in Outlook.