— ✍️ Swagata Chatterjee

The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal cannot be understood merely as an electoral event. It is not only the result of Hindutva propaganda, organisational expansion, anti-incumbency, or communal polarisation. These factors matter, but they remain insufficient. The BJP’s consolidation in Bengal must also be read as a consequence of a deeper historical failure: the failure of Bengal’s dominant progressive politics to build an anti-caste, anti-Brahminical and Ambedkarite democratic imagination.

For decades, Bengal has imagined itself as an exception within India. It has celebrated its reformist history, literary modernity, secular culture, Left politics and intellectual sophistication. The popular self-image of Bengal has been that of a society shaped more by class than caste, more by reason than ritual, more by culture than communalism. But this self-image has always required a silence: the silence around caste.

Caste did not disappear in Bengal. It was made invisible.

This invisibility was not accidental. It was produced through the political and cultural dominance of the 'bhadralok' : the educated, respectable, largely upper-caste Bengali Hindu middle class that shaped Bengal’s public sphere, universities, newspapers, parties, literary institutions and cultural memory. The bhadralok spoke in the language of modernity, secularism and progress, but its modernity rarely required the annihilation of caste. Its secularism rarely became anti-Brahminical. Its progressivism often coexisted with upper-caste control over knowledge, leadership and respectability.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Bengal’s political history. The state produced powerful traditions of peasant struggle, labour mobilisation and Left politics, yet it did not produce an equally powerful mainstream Ambedkarite politics. The Left spoke of workers and peasants, landlords and capitalists, imperialism and communalism. But Dalits, Namasudras, Matuas, Adivasis, OBCs and other Bahujan communities were often absorbed into broader class categories rather than recognised as independent political subjects with their own histories of humiliation, assertion and thought.

The BJP’s rise in Bengal must be located in this vacuum.

Hindutva did not enter a caste-free Bengal. It entered a Bengal where caste had been denied public language. Here Dalit-Bahujan assertion had often been dismissed as “identity politics”, while upper-caste domination was treated as culture, merit or ideology. It entered a Bengal where Dr. Ambedkar had not been placed at the centre of democratic education, where Mahatma Phule, Savitribai, Iyothee Thass, Jogendranath Mandal and Harichand-Guruchand Thakur were not made foundational to progressive political consciousness.

This is why the BJP’s expansion cannot be explained only as a communal success. It is also the failure of a secularism that refused to confront caste.

Dr B.R. Ambedkar understood caste not as a secondary social evil but as the central structure of Indian society. In *Annihilation of Caste*, he argued that caste is not merely a division of labour; it is a division of labourers. It is a system that organises human beings into graded inequality. This concept of graded inequality is crucial for understanding Hindutva. Hindutva does not need to abolish caste in order to build Hindu unity. It can preserve caste while offering a larger Hindu identity. It can absorb caste grievances into majoritarian politics without dismantling Brahminical power.

This is precisely why anti-Hindutva politics that does not become anti-caste remains incomplete. A politics that opposes the BJP electorally but does not confront Brahminism socially cannot defeat the deeper ideological structure that sustains Hindutva.

The Bengal Left’s historical weakness lies here. It often treated caste as a derivative of class, assuming that economic transformation would eventually dissolve caste hierarchy. But caste is not merely an economic relation. It is also a system of social status, religious sanction, cultural memory, sexual regulation, political representation and knowledge production. Caste decides not only who owns land or labour, but who is considered respectable, who speaks theory, who becomes a leader, whose history is remembered and whose pain is dismissed.

Gail Omvedt’s work is essential for understanding this point. Omvedt repeatedly argued that anti-caste movements are not narrow identity movements but radical democratic struggles against Brahminism and social hierarchy. She showed Dalit-Bahujan movements produced an alternative imagination of India: one based not on Hindu unity or upper-caste nationalism, but on equality, dignity and the destruction of caste. Omvedt’s scholarship also challenged class-reductionist approaches that viewed caste as a secondary contradiction. For her, the anti-caste tradition was not an appendix to radical politics; it was one of its central foundations.

If Bengal’s progressive forces had taken Omvedt seriously, they would have understood that class politics in India cannot be emancipatory unless it is also anti-caste. The landless labourer, the refugee, the peasant, the informal worker and the migrant are not abstract economic figures. They are located in caste histories. Their exploitation is mediated by humiliation, exclusion, stigma and inherited social power. To speak of class without caste in India is to speak with one eye closed.

Gopal Guru helps us understand another dimension of this failure: the politics of knowledge. Guru famously argued that Indian social sciences often divide intellectual labour in a deeply unequal way: Dalits are expected to provide “experience”, while upper-caste scholars retain the authority to produce “theory”. This insight is crucial for Bengal. Dalit-Bahujan communities in Bengal could be represented as peasants, refugees, workers, victims or voters. But they were rarely accepted as theorists of Bengal’s society. Their suffering could be documented; their thought was not canonised.

This is the intellectual core of bhadralok dominance. Marx, Lenin and Mao were treated as universal thinkers. Dr. Ambedkar was often treated as a sectional Dalit leader. Class was theory; caste was identity. Upper-caste intellectuals could speak for the universal; Dalit-Bahujan thinkers were confined to the particular. This hierarchy of knowledge is itself a form of caste power.

The marginalisation of Dr. Ambedkar in Bengal was therefore not just an omission. It was a political act. To place Dr. Ambedkar at the centre would have required Bengal’s Left and liberal public sphere to interrogate their own caste composition. Who led the parties? Who controlled the newspapers? Who dominated universities? Who wrote histories? Who defined secularism? Who decided what counted as progressive politics? Dr. Ambedkar’s presence would have disturbed the comfort of bhadralok self-congratulation.

This discomfort also explains the historical neglect of Bengal’s own anti-caste traditions. Namasudra assertion, Matua spirituality and the politics of Jogendranath Mandal are not marginal episodes; they are central to any serious history of Bengal. Harichand and Guruchand Thakur created a powerful moral and social critique of caste society. The Matua movement carried within it a history of dignity, community formation and resistance to Brahminical exclusion. Jogendranath Mandal’s political life exposed the fragility of caste Hindu nationalism and the difficulty of Dalit assertion in a political field dominated by upper-caste interests.

Yet mainstream Bengal often remembered itself through the bhadralok archive: reformers, poets, nationalists, communists, intellectuals. Dalit-Bahujan histories were pushed to the edges. The result was not castelessness, but caste invisibility.

The BJP recognised the political possibilities created by this invisibility. Its outreach to Matua and Namasudra communities, its use of citizenship politics, its symbolic recognition of neglected icons, and its attempt to fold caste communities into a wider Hindu identity must be understood in this context. The BJP did not create the alienation of Dalit-Bahujan communities in Bengal; it exploited an alienation produced by decades of neglect.

This does not mean the BJP represents Dalit-Bahujan emancipation. On the contrary, Hindutva’s project is fundamentally opposed to Dr. Ambedkar’s vision of social democracy. It seeks unity without equality, representation without annihilation of caste, symbolism without structural transformation. It can celebrate Dalit icons while weakening the radical content of their thought. It can invoke community pride while keeping intact the Brahminical foundations of Hindu society.

But precisely because Hindutva is capable of appropriating anti-caste symbols, anti-BJP politics must be more than secular rhetoric. It must become Ambedkarite in substance.

The old language of Bengali secularism is no longer enough. It often speaks of communal harmony but avoids caste hierarchy. It condemns religious majoritarianism but hesitates to name Brahminism. It defends constitutional democracy but does not always embrace Dr. Ambedkar’s social democracy. This gap is dangerous because Hindutva thrives wherever caste is silenced.

Bengal’s political crisis is therefore also an intellectual crisis. A society that refuses to name caste cannot understand the BJP’s rise. A Left that refuses Dr. Ambedkar cannot rebuild democratic politics. A secularism that refuses anti-Brahminism cannot confront Hindutva at its roots.

What is needed is not a nostalgic return to old bhadralok Leftism. Bengal does not need another politics where upper-caste intellectuals speak in the name of the oppressed while Dalit-Bahujan communities remain objects of mobilisation. It needs a new democratic imagination rooted in Ambedkarism and the lived struggles of Dalit-Bahujan communities.

Such a politics must begin by rejecting the myth that caste is insignificant in Bengal. It must recognise that caste operates not only through violence and untouchability, but also through silence, respectability, cultural authority, marriage, education, land, party structures and intellectual legitimacy. It must treat Dalit-Bahujan communities not merely as electoral blocs, but as producers of theory, history and leadership.

The BJP’s rise in Bengal is a warning. It tells us that when caste is denied, Hindutva finds an opening. When Dr. Ambedkar is reduced to a symbol rather than engaged as a theorist, Brahminism survives under progressive language. When Dalit-Bahujan histories are excluded from the mainstream, majoritarian forces appropriate their anger.

An Ambedkarite response to the BJP in Bengal must therefore be both electoral and epistemic. It must fight the BJP at the ballot box, but also fight the caste structure of Bengal’s public sphere. It must challenge Hindutva, but also challenge the bhadralok arrogance that made Hindutva’s rise possible. It must defend the Constitution, but also insist on Dr. Ambedkar’s unfinished project: liberty, equality and fraternity as social realities, not merely legal promises.

The central lesson is clear: Hindutva cannot be defeated by caste-blind secularism. It can only be defeated by a politics that annihilates caste.

Until Bengal confronts its bhadralok common sense, its exclusion of Ambedkarite thought, and its erasure of Dalit-Bahujan histories, the BJP will continue to find political space. The future of democracy in Bengal depends not on reviving the old progressive self-image, but on building a new anti-caste, anti-Brahminical and Dalit-Bahujan democratic politics from the ground.

- The author is an Ambedkarite, and her research is grounded in Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s critical analysis of caste as a structural system of power and exclusion. Building on his work, she extends this framework to examine how caste operates within culture, media, and digital spaces —shaping representation, knowledge production, and access in contemporary society.