How Abhijeet Dipke created a broad-based idea of politics that put the BJP on the backfoot
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In The Flaming Feet and Other Essays, the late cultural critic DR Nagaraj puts forth a broad overview of Dalit movements in India. He identifies two kinds of contemporary Dalit activists: one who seeks to create a better society by repressing caste domination with Dalit assertion, and the other expects the transformation of the caste-Hindu heart for a better society.
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During one of my coursework discussions, my professor referred to Nagaraj as a “kind intellectual” and that word stayed with me. Nagaraj was capacious enough to understand how either of the two paths was partially successful and had limitations. He treated them with extreme sensitivity and a desire to intimately understand why people act the way they do, and he made space for both.
Abhijeet Dipke, who led the satirical Cockroach Janata Party through the recent protests, is a telling example of this capaciousness: he held space for multiplicity and contradictions and was eventually able to put the Bharatiya Janata Party on the back foot.
Unlike the Left activist circles in urban spaces that struggle to form meaningful connections with ordinary people due to their abstruse language and lack of organisational outreach, Dipke spoke in a language everyone understood. He also went against commonsensical, mainstream Ambedkarite politics by...