wl-6791-The Politics of Dalit-Bahujan Cultural Appropriation

An impressive growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the North Indian states, suggests that significant groups within the Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi (DBA) are supporting the right-wing political ideals, deserting the politics of social justice. The right-wing achieved such dynamic inclusion of the marginalized social groups by addressing the intra-caste tensions, by innovating cultural strategies to develop a bond between Hindutva nationalism and the local caste histories and by organizing socio-political events that engage and revitalize the suppressed aspirations of the DBA groups. This paper argues that the BJP appropriated the available cultural resources, religious symbols and popular public idioms, curated and produced earlier by the Dalit-Bahujan ideologues and political movement. Especially during the realm of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, a popular genre of writing social history from a Dalit-Bahujan perspective erupted in the public, introducing several local heroes, deities, legends and historic events to establish their dignified presence in the past. The Left-Liberal political and intellectual class failed to appreciate the political significance of DBA’s cultural history and their quest to find a robust presence in the history. Instead, they relegated such objective as sectarian, petty bourgeois assertions, detrimental to the secular unity. In the current political discourse, the BJP has succeeded in appropriating the DBA’s history project, whereas the opposition lacks alternative vision and cultural strategies to challenge the Hindutva’s domination.