“A Dalit still remains a Dalit”: a study of the communist movement and the caste question, 1926–2016

India’s communist parties have long been accused by Dalit thinkers of ignoring caste, or of treating it as something that would vanish once class struggle won. In this chapter Debayudh Chatterjee asks how the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the largest of them, actually dealt with caste over ninety years, “with special reference to its erstwhile bastion, West Bengal” (p. 55).

His answer cuts both ways. He pushes back on the claim that the communists did nothing against caste. But he argues that each time the party took up caste, it “succeeded, if problematically, in co-opting the caste question within its well-known stance on class struggle” (p. 55).

What the study argued

A theory that expected caste to fade. Chatterjee starts with Marx, who wrote in 1853 that railways and modern industry would “dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes” (p. 54). Indian communists took from this the view that economic exploitation was the base of the problem and caste a matter of ideology built on top of it. So the party worked against caste through class struggle, “hoping that its success would automatically dissolve caste relations” (p. 55).

Ambedkar and the communists. Drawing on Anand Teltumbde, Chatterjee notes that Ambedkar kept an interest in Marxism all his life. In 1940 his Independent Labour Party took a red flag with eleven stars, and in November 1938 he shared a platform with the communist leader S.A. Dange during a Bombay strike, “for the first and the last time” (pp. 55–56). They fell out, in a phrase he quotes from Debjani Ganguly, because the communists would not act against caste prejudice among workers “for the fear of displeasing caste Hindu workers” (p. 56). Ambedkar later said the party was “originally in the hands of some Brahmin boys” (p. 56). Teltumbde calls the split between class and caste “fundamentally a blunder” (p. 56).

A divided Dalit movement. After Ambedkar’s death, Chatterjee writes, Dalit writers split. Some, such as Baburao Bagul, Namdeo Dhasal and Daya Pawar, wanted to join Marxist and Ambedkarite thought; others, such as Raja Dhale, rejected a Marxism they saw as “based only on economic disparity” (p. 57). Gail Omvedt observes that several leading first-generation Dalit activists, including Anna Bhau Sathe, came from communist backgrounds (p. 57).

The early years in Bengal. The party’s first manifesto, drafted by M.N. Roy in Moscow, did not see that caste divided the workers themselves (p. 58). In 1928 Muzaffar Ahmad led a strike of Calcutta’s manual scavengers and sanitation workers. Chatterjee reads Ahmad’s memoir of it closely: it never mentions caste, and the strike’s leaders were Savarna (upper caste), not drawn from the workers themselves. Even so, he writes, the strike brought “many untouchables under the fold of the communist party” (p. 59).

From “mundane” to central. In 1932 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, later chief minister of Kerala, called the fight over separate electorates a diversion to “the mundane cause of the upliftment of the Harijans” (p. 59). After the rise of identity politics in the 1980s and of parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, the CPI(M) had to rethink. By 1979 Namboodiripad wrote that the struggle for democracy and socialism “could not be separated from the struggle against caste society” (p. 61). B.T. Ranadive’s Class, Caste, and Property Relations (1979) still urged Dalits to give up “fighting caste battles in isolation from other toilers” (p. 61).

Where the party went wrong. This is the core of Chatterjee’s own critique. The party went on treating Dalits as a section of the lower class, a view that “did not take into account that caste humiliation could be inflicted irrespective of class” (p. 62). If caste came from relations of production, he argues, the merchant castes who held capital would be at the top of the ladder, not the Brahmins. And class can change while caste does not: “A Dalit still remains a Dalit and faces social prejudice even if they are able to climb up the class ladder” (p. 62).

Rethinking under pressure. As the Hindu right grew, the party moved again. In 2002 an article in its journal Marxist by Jayantanuj Bandyopadhyaya argued that caste should be dealt with separately from class struggle, though not against it, and called for a “cultural revolution” (p. 63). In 2006 the party adopted a resolution on the problems of Dalits; its general secretary, Prakash Karat, called the fight against caste “intrinsic to the fight for a basic social transformation” (p. 64). In West Bengal, meanwhile, Dalit politics was reviving, with the Matua Mahasangha as one sign (p. 64). The Left lost ground in the 2009 Lok Sabha election and lost power in the state in 2011 (p. 64).

Caste talk as vote-saving. Chatterjee reads the timing of the party’s writing on caste as tied to its losses. Shyamal Chakraborty, a CPI(M) Central Committee member and general secretary of the trade union CITU, published a book on fundamentalism, terrorism and casteism in 2003, with later editions in 2004, 2009 and 2014. Chatterjee links these dates to Mayawati’s support for the BJP-led government in 2003, the run-up to the 2009 election, and the eve of the 2014 election (p. 65). The book praises Tagore and Vivekananda and names Ambedkar only near its end. Chatterjee calls this a co-option of Ambedkar “without serious involvement with his thoughts and pedagogy”, and “symptomatic of the desperation on the part of the communists to regain their waning political support” (p. 66).

After 2014. With the BJP in power and the suicide of the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, the Left “could not afford to turn its back” on caste (pp. 66–67). In 2016 Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) politburo urged joint action between Dalit groups and left mass organisations, criticised Ambedkarites who see the Left as “the main target”, and also admitted that her party had to “confront any casteist feelings and approaches” within its own mass organisations (p. 67).

Why it matters

The quarrel between Ambedkarites and Marxists is one of the oldest in Dalit politics, and it is still argued in parties, unions and campuses. This chapter is useful because it follows one party’s own words over ninety years, from a 1932 dismissal of Dalit claims as “mundane” to a 2016 admission that casteism lives inside its own organisations. It shows that the party’s position did change, and asks why it changed when it did.

Its central point, that caste humiliation does not depend on class and does not end when a Dalit’s income rises, echoes Ambedkar’s description of caste as a division of labourers, not of labour, which Chatterjee cites (p. 58). Here it is turned on the party that led West Bengal’s government from 1977 to 2011 (p. 69, note 17).

What the study does not show

• Votes and members. There are no election figures or counts of Dalits among the party’s members and leaders, so the claim that the Left kept and then lost Dalit support is not measured.
• Motive. The link between a book’s editions and the party’s electoral fears is the author’s inference from dates.
• Other states. West Bengal is the focus. Kerala and Tripura, where the CPI(M) also governed, are not studied.
• Dalit voices inside the party. The chapter quotes party leaders and outside scholars, but not Dalit members or voters of the Left.

Talking points

• Chatterjee argues that “A Dalit still remains a Dalit” whatever their class. Does the CPI(M)‘s 2006 language of caste as “intrinsic” to social change answer that, or repeat the old view in new words?
• He reads the party’s writing on caste as a response to lost votes. Does it matter why a party turns to caste, if it does turn?
• The chapter ends by asking Dalit and Left forces to set aside “us versus them” differences against the Hindu right. A question to weigh against the study: does unity on those terms ask Dalit claims to wait again?

The work

Debayudh Chatterjee, “Class versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016)”, in Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle, ed. Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Amanda F. Grzyb (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 54–71. ISBN 978-0-2280-1196-5 (paperback), 978-0-2280-1195-8 (cloth).