Caste, Race & the Left in Post-War Britain
An interview with a Dalit leader of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) on casteism and racism in post-war Britain, Black-Dalit solidarity, and reconciling Ambedkar and Marx via Mao.
Indian Workers Association (IWA) leading a protest against the 1971 Immigration Act in London. Image: BBC
Recently, Jamhoor editors Divyani Motla, Arsalan Samdani and Shozab Raza spoke with Dalit Shukra, a former Dalit leader of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA). Tracing its origins to 1930s Britain, and to revolutionary figures like Udham Singh, the IWA would go on to lead the confrontation against racial capitalism during the post-war period.
In this interview, we discuss the IWA’s battles with racism and casteism during the 60s and 70s, their relationship to US Black Power movements, contemporary efforts at Black-Dalit solidarity, the tension-ridden relationship between Ambedkar and Marx, and finally how Mao might assist in their reconciliation.
Divyani Motla (DM): Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself, and specifically why you adopted the nom de guerre of Dalit Shukra?
Dalit Shukra (DS): As you know, “Dalit” is a Sanskrit word for oppressed. The name challenges Brahmanical Hinduism. Shukracharya is a well-known guru who is the teacher of demons in Lokayata or Charvaka philosophy in Hinduism. Shukra and these demons were proponents of materialism, and opposed to idealism. I use Shukra in my surname to capture my commitment to materialist philosophies.
I don’t tend to use my personal name, because I don't think the individual person is very important. The collective is important.
DM: That’s very interesting. Could you talk about the formative experiences that led you to adopt this nom de guerre?
DS: This name conveys my commitment to both Ambedkarism and Marxism. I was first exposed to Ambedkarism as a child growing up in India. At 14, I moved to England. When I started working in the foundries and factories of the West Midlands, I began to see casteism here in England. Although I wasn't a factory worker - I was a technical apprentice – I saw how casteism was so deeply embedded amongst the Indian employees. It was even present in the progressive Indian organizations at the time. The Indian Workers Association (IWA), for instance, was very active in the factories where I did my training. But I was initially turned off from them because I didn’t see any Dalits in their midst.
1965: A demonstration against the colour-bar outside The Dartmouth Arms, a London pub that refused to serve people of colour. Image: Transpontine
Still, these were very progressive Indian groups – trade unionists and so forth – who were fighting racism on a day-to-day basis. They were inviting people like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael to visit the UK to share their experiences of racism. I remember Jagmohan Joshi, the General Secretary of IWA, was once being interviewed by a white American reporter about racism in the UK. The reporter half-jokingly said “well surely it’s not as bad as the US”. Joshi then asked the reporter to go out drinking with him that night, to see for himself what racism looked like. At the end of their pub crawl, the reporter was totally drunk. Joshi, on the other hand could not even get a single drink through the evening at any of the pubs. That's how deep racism was.
I got closer to the IWA when I went to university in Birmingham. I lived close to the progressive bookshop that Joshi ran. I used to pop in now and again, and eventually struck up a friendship with him. We would talk about all kinds of things, especially Left politics. That's when I got interested in Marxism, Maoism and China.
My Chinese (not from Mainland China) friends also encouraged me to study Chinese cultures and history, especially 20th century history. I think this combination of Joshi and my Chinese friends influenced me to join the IWA, which was of course very influenced by Maoism. Then I left Birmingham to get a job in Luton, where there was no IWA branch. So I joined the branch in the nearby city of Bedford.
The Bedford IWA branch was very active fighting racism locally. One of the fights I recall clearly was the pub issue. There were pubs in Bedford that refused to serve non-whites. At first, we argued with the bar-men and owners. I remember once they called the police on us. Six police cars, a big police van and about half a dozen dogs and their handlers turned up. We didn’t get arrested and we held our ground. But it taught us that something needed to be done. We needed to organize.
So we printed leaflets in Gurumukhi (Punjabi), Urdu, Bengali and English and we distributed them around the community. We invited people to boycott racist pubs. Because of the boycott, the brewery licensing companies caved in after six months. They changed their landlords and said that there won't be any more discrimination at the pubs.
At the time, Bedford was a kind of centre for IWA’s anti-racist activity. Part of the reason was that IWA members in that branch were young. Members in other branches – in the West Midlands, say – were from older generations. They had experienced the struggle in India and brought that experience to the UK. But people in Bedfordshire were very young, they had grown up in the UK and had very different ideas about organizing.
It was from this younger generation that the IWA’s Dalit members came from. One of those was Balbir Dutt. He eventually became the assistant general secretary for the national IWA, and was a very popular man in the community. When he died, his funeral could not be held in his own community’s (the Dalit sub-caste, Valmiki) temple because it was too small. Because his funeral was expected to draw a lot of people, it had to be held in the Sikh Gurdwara, which was a much larger space. The funeral was so big that the police had to divert the traffic from outside of Bedford. That's how well he was known. Yet, he’s mostly been forgotten from the official story of the IWA.
DM: Obviously, the politics of the IWA was complicated. Its members were united against racism, but as you say, there was caste discrimination, both within the organization and in the UK at large. Could you elaborate on what this discrimination looked like?
DS: Now, Dalits coming to the UK would be poorer, so they would have to take up loans to emigrate, whereas people from upper-caste Jat backgrounds, for instance, would mortgage their land to come here. So upper-castes always had a head start over the lower castes. But when Indians, from whatever caste, first came to the UK, they had to break some caste boundaries out of necessity. They had to cooperate with each other to find decent housing, to share accommodation, and to find jobs, which were scarce. There was also inter-faith collaboration. When money was needed for the Gurdwara, Jat Sikhs would go to Ravidasis and Valmikis (Dalit sub-caste), who would then contribute.
However, after women arrived from India and marriages took place between India and here, then the caste system began rearing its head in a stronger way. The Dalits were then edged out of the Gurdwaras, so they started to have their own organizations.
The IWA, to an extent, replicated these dynamics. But I don't want to say that everybody was like that. The Bedford branch was somewhat of an exception to the general trend because it had so many young people. IWA leaders like Joshi and Gautam Appa from the London School of Economics also had a very open attitude toward all these things. But the majority of the membership, who came from India’s countryside, ended up reinstalling caste divisions in the IWA itself.
In addition to caste, gender was another issue. Very few women participated in the IWA. You could count them on one hand. That's not justifiable, though understandable. The main reason for this was that IWA members and leaders did not try hard enough to bring women into the organization. In a way, they reproduced some of the gender relationships from the Punjabi countryside in the UK. Just like the Black power movement in 1960s US can be criticized for reproducing the patriarchy of wider society, we were no exception.
Arsalan Samdani (AS): What was your specific role in the Indian Workers Association?
DS: I was the General Secretary of the London branch for a few years in the 1980s. Before that, in the 1970s, I was very active in the Bedford branch, where Balbir Dutt, the prominent Dalit leader in the IWA I mentioned before, worked. I was active in the advice centre we ran on the weekends. Dutt and I worked as a team: he had a full-time job and family responsibilities, while I was single with a decently paid job so could put in more time. In my lunch-break, I would draft a leaflet, read it out to him on the phone and in the evening, I would travel to Bedford for an IWA members’ meeting.
AS: You mentioned Balbir Dutt. As you suggested earlier, the IWA, like other Left-leaning Indian groups, generally dismissed caste. Exceptions like Jagmohan Joshi, Balbir Dutt proved the rule. Was this general dismissal due to the fact that the IWA was led by upper-castes?
DS: To some extent, yes. Jat Sikhs, who made up much of the leadership, did not take up the Dalit question seriously, even though in the 70s the Dalit Panthers were active in India. There was an implicit, if not explicit, assumption in the IWA that everybody could be united as workers and that, come the revolution, the caste question would take care of itself.
“Against the mechanical materialism, what we needed at the time – and still need – was a dialectical materialist approach to caste. ”
In short, many within the Indian Left – the IWA, among them – held onto mechanical materialism. Some militant people were even in the habit of waving the communist manifesto whenever you brought up the Dalit question: they would say “show me where it is written”.
In any case, I don’t think you can fully understand caste from books. You have to actually fight it in order to understand it. Practice is necessary, not just for combatting casteism but understanding its operation. Against the mechanical materialism, what we needed at the time – and still need – was a dialectical materialist approach to caste.
A meeting of the Dalit Panthers Movement (DPM), Dharavi Branch. Inspired by the US Black Panther Party, DPM actively combatted caste discrimination in India during the 1970s. Image: BlackPast
AS: Could you shed some more light on what kind of debates were happening between Joshi, Balbir Dutt and you within the IWA. What sort of interventions on the Dalit question did you or others make at the time?
Sant Ram Udasi (C) posing for a picture with IWA activists Dev Raj Kler (L) and Balbir Dutt (R) at the burial site of Karl Marx. Image: The Poet Udasi
DS: We would ask questions like: where does caste fit into all this? Why don't we have more Dalit members? Why are most of our members from the Jat Sikh community?
The stock answer from IWA folks was that Dalit members should put in the work to bring in more members from their community. Essentially, these folks didn’t want to make the Dalit question an IWA issue. Of course, this never really satisfied Dalits like us.
Eventually, Joshi stepped in and we started to do more work on caste. In the 1970s, we held a conference in Birmingham on the origins of the caste system. Coincidentally, Sant Ram Udasi, the progressive Dalit poet and Punjabi Naxalite, happened to be visiting England at the time and attended the conference. After meeting him, I realized that the Dalit question was also being forcefully raised in India.
Unfortunately, even Udasi faced some discrimination while he was here – and by our own members. One evening, we sat down with Udasi and all the comrades. Udasi was not just an excellent poet: he was also interested in the natural sciences. Knowing that some of us had a science background, he began asking us questions about atomic structures and quantum physics.
Some of the Jat comrades, however, gave him some really silly answers – to tease him. I didn’t like this – he was our guest after all, and he wanted serious answers – so I stepped in to answer his questions. He appreciated that. Udasi reprimanded the Jat comrades for their casteist behaviour.
Sant Ram Udasi (center) at a meeting with Indian activists and poets at The Queen pub in Bedford. Image: The Poet Udasi
AS: So it wasn't just that the IWA overlooked caste in its political line; its members, at least the Jat Sikh ones, also had a dismissive attitude towards Dalits.
DS: Yes, this was prevalent amongst the membership and some leaders as well. Sometimes the senior leadership didn't show it overtly but you could see that they didn't want to tackle the question.
To be fair, even now, many on the Indian Left can’t tackle the Dalit question. The Indian Left is still trying to grapple with Ambedkarism and Marxism, and of how to practically and theoretically reconcile the two.
AS: Could you tell us more about Dalit leader Balbir Dutt? How was he able to become an IWA leader in this casteist context?
A photograph of Balbir Dutt. Image: South Asian Writers
DS: Balbir, though he had Indian roots, actually came from Malaysia. He had a very inquiring mind, intuitively understood many things and was a good organizer. I remember once an upper-caste shopkeeper was interviewed by a journalist from the local press about why untouchables were not allowed into the Hindu temples. The shopkeeper said it was because they are dirty. This statement ended up in print and of course, hell broke loose. Balbir and other IWA members – especially Dalit members – organized a boycott of that shop, and the shopkeeper was forced to close it down and leave town.
There were also certain factors in Bedford that facilitated a Dalit like Balbir becoming a leader. There were many young people in that IWA branch, many of whom were also Dalits. There were also younger generation of Jat Sikhs, who had either come to England when they were very young, or were born here. They had a different mindset and were more progressive on the caste question. In any other town, a Dalit IWA leader would not have been acceptable but in Bedford, Balbir was.
Shozab Raza (SR): I wanted to ask about IWA’s relation to blackness. Right now, there's a lot of people talking Dalit and Black solidarity. This call to bridge these two communities and their struggles is, in part, precipitated by their shared experience under authoritarian regimes – Modi in India, Trump in the US.
In some ways, the experience of the IWA offers a different lens to the question of Dalit and Black solidarity because of the particular racialized class politics in the UK at the time. Then, IWA members understood themselves to be Black. They had a concept of political blackness, one that enabled them to connect with figures like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael on a basis that went beyond solidarity in some sense. The IWA saw themselves as part of the Black power movement, and not simply in solidarity with it. Therefore, the kind of distinction between Black and Dalit upon which contemporary calls for Black-Dalit solidarity rests did not necessarily hold back then. Could you comment on how the IWA, and especially its Dalit members, conceived of their relation to blackness?
DS: Yes, it's a very interesting question.
It was certainly a good thing that there was this cross Atlantic unity between the two groups. Members of the IWA (including the Dalits) saw themselves akin to Blacks in America and the UK, but there were contradictions. On the one hand, the IWA identified themselves as politically black, but at the same time, they denied the distinctive oppression and exploitation of Dalits – their distinctive blackness if you will – within the overall category of the politically black Indian.
“Both caste and race are social constructs created due to colonialism – one external, the other internal. ”
Ambedkar was more attuned to this, to how Dalits and Blacks, more so than politically black Indians and Blacks, shared similar experiences. He was in touch with the civil rights movement when he was in America. He understood the black question in America to be very similar to the question of the Dalits in India.
People often ask how the black question is similar to and different from the Dalit question in India. To me, one similarity – and a basis of solidarity – is colonialism. In the US, anti-black racism came about because of colonialism and slavery. That's very clear. Now the caste question or the caste discrimination question came from India’s internal colonization of the Adivasis, who were then incorporated into the caste hierarchy as untouchables and other low caste Sudras. Both caste and race are social constructs created due to colonialism – one external, the other internal. Both are also products of class struggle, which is itself part and parcel of colonialism.
More recently, movements are raising this question about the connection between race and caste on an international level. Of course, these movements have their opponents. When the issue of caste discrimination as a form of racism was taken to the United Nations in the late 1990s, the Indian government argued that caste is not the same as race. A lot of the anthropologists from India also argued that caste could not be treated in the same way as race. But we argued that, while caste isn't the same as race, racism is very similar to caste discrimination, and both have similar histories in colonialism and class struggle.
SR: This brings me to my second question. How do contemporary calls for Dalit-Black solidarity, in particular, compare to the efforts in the 70s of the Dalit Panthers, who modelled themselves after the Black Panther Party? To me, it seems that those earlier efforts were much more militant: they connected caste to the question of class and communism/socialism. The Dalit Panthers thought of the Dalit identity as one that could overturn not simply casteism but also capitalism, and the Black Panther Party made similar arguments with respect to the Black identity. Nowadays, it seems like that connection between Dalit politics and anti-capitalism – or black politics and anti-capitalism – has been untethered. In a recent interview, for instance, Suraj Yengde, a young Dalit scholar, argued that Dalit is a category that enables negotiation and dialogue with the oppressor, a positioning of the identity that is radically different from the militant meanings given to it by the Dalit Panthers. Could you comment on this?
DS: Yes, we – and other Dalits activists – were certainly more militant in the 70s and 80s.
The Dalit movement was more militant because they based themselves on the Black Panthers in USA, as you said, but also because the Republican Party in India was disintegrating at the time, after Ambedkar passed away in 1956. That disintegration provoked Dalits to ask: what are we going to do now? Some turned to a reformist politics, while others, in reaction to that, turned to more militant forms. That’s when we see the birth of the Dalit Panther movement. Now, of course, it eventually splintered, going three or four different ways. One of the leaders is now even a member of the BJP and a minister in the central government.
But don't forget that most Dalits in India didn’t even identify themselves as Dalit back then: only activists and intellectuals used that word. But today, the Dalit identity has become more widely used. That’s a legacy of the Dalit panthers, to be sure, but also due to the important political work of a recent generation of Dalit activists.
Scene from a protest in India against the murder and rape of a Dalit girl. Image: The Stand
DM: It's quite interesting that the IWA mostly rejected caste, but then at the same time, they identified with black politics. To me, that's a clear contradiction within the organization. The IWA’s solidarity with blackness was, in this sense, quite different from the solidarity forged today between Dalits and blacks. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.
DS: Yes, it is very complex question. In order to understand your complex question, you have to look at history, and you have to consider the fact that contradiction is everywhere.
“They (Black Panthers) were studying colonialism and imperialism and its link to racism, and the best model they could think of was the Maoists. ”
Now, in the 70s, the Black Panthers took the Chinese as their model. They were influenced by Maoism and the red book. They were studying colonialism and imperialism and its link to racism, and the best model they could think of was the Maoists. In their effort to theorize their own oppression, they found that the Maoist model at least explained part of it – the other part of it could be explained through black rebellions in places like Haiti. And of course the Dalit Panthers were also influenced by China and Mao – not directly, but through their engagement with the Naxalite movement in India.
Coming to the UK, the IWA leadership was in touch with the black power movement in USA and UK, yet they had the same contradiction – the caste question – within their own community, which they did not face up. That's why I say contradictions are everywhere. Part of the reason why the IWA, which was one of major progressive organizations in UK in the 60s and 70s, lost its lead was because it ignored these contradictions within its own organization. Part of the reason for its decline was that the group lost its trade union base as factories and foundries collapsed in 70s. But I think the major reason for the IWA’s collapse is that they didn’t attend to these internal contradictions over caste, but also over gender.
SR: This is a good segue into another set of questions we want to ask: specifically, about the tension-ridden relationship between Ambedkar and Marx. That tension was notoriously inflected in the debate between Ambedkar and S.A. Dange, the founder of the Communist Party, when he was organizing the Bombay textile Workers Union. Ambedkar wanted Dange to raise the issue of caste amongst the workers, but Dange refused, arguing that caste-talk was going to divide the workers. And Ambedkar’s famous response was that workers were already divided by caste. Since then, there's been a lot of efforts to either reconcile Ambedkar and Marx in one way or another or, alternatively, to argue that they cannot be reconciled.
Your position, which you elaborate on, using Mao, is that there is certainly a contradiction, but that this is a non-antagonistic one. Could you elaborate on this theoretical reconciliation? And further, what does such a theoretical exercise mean for political practice?
DS: Let's start with Dange and Ambedkar. At the time, Ambedkar was trying to join forces with the Left because he identified two things which were the enemies of the Dalit people: Brahmanism and capitalism. If you look at it from the perspective of classical Marxist theory, Brahmanism is the superstructure and capitalism is the base, so he was correct in trying to join with the communists. But the problem is that the Left leadership had caste contradictions in their ranks. The leadership was Brahmin-dominated.
Dange certainly opposed Ambedkar, but if you look at some at the theoretical contributions that Dange made during his time, it is absolutely revolting. For example, he wrote an introduction to his son-in-law's book, The Universe of Vedanta, a book which aimed to reconcile Vedanta (i.e. Brahmanical) philosophy with Marxism. His own party opposed him on this. He also wrote a book called India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery, and the famous historian D.D. Kosambi tore him to shreds in a book review. Then Dange’s friend EMS Namboodripad also made some theoretical contributions in which he said that Brahmanism was a positive trend in Indian history. Like all great lies, there is some truth in this. When Brahmanism went into Adivasi societies, they brought in a more forward mode of production; they brought in the power of modern agriculture rather than hunter-gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture. So historically, it was progressive, but it only benefited the upper castes. The real purpose of EMS was to oppose Ambedkar at a theoretical level.
Shripad Amrit Dange (right), a founding member of the Communist Party of India. Image:artsandculture.google.com
The opposition between Ambedkar and Dange wasn't just on the question of the mill workers strike and that dialogue, it was lot deeper than that. I think Ambedkar was quite well read on the topic of Marxism. In fact, I would go so far as to say he (Ambedkar) was a Marxist in many aspects of his thinking (e.g. caste, gender, ethnicity and religious/communal questions), but in an idealist sense and without the formal label. If you read him properly, for instance, his book Buddha or Karl Marx, he is very clear. He argues that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a good idea for India.
He also takes on the question of violence. Though he disliked violence as a Buddhist, he did have a nuanced position on it. He makes a distinction between people who have justice on their side and those who don’t. He says non-violence is not a rule, but a principle. You either break the rule or the rule breaks you. What he means is that, if you stick to the rule too rigidly, it’s going to break you but if you have justice on your side and the violence is a defensive violence, then you can use it.
To me, Ambedkar’s engagement with Marx shows there is a non-antagonistic contradiction between Dalits and the Left in India. An antagonistic contradiction is the type where one side or the other will eventually triumph: you cannot have both sides of the contradiction permanently co-existing, although they can co-exist temporarily. Dalits and the Left in India, together, are in an antagonistic contradiction with the upper classes and upper castes. Because they have a common purpose – to triumph over the upper classes/castes - the contradiction between Dalits and the Left is a non-antagonistic one in that it can be resolved without one side triumphing over the other.
B.R. Ambedkar delivering his speech on “Buddha or Karl Marx” at Kathmandu on 20 November 1956. Image: Wikimedia Commons)
The RSS’s majoritarian Hindutva project puts it in antagonistic contradiction with the Adivasis, the Dalits, the Muslims, the Christians and with the other backward castes. Essentially, the RSS has an antagonistic contradiction with the overwhelming majority of the Indian people, one that cannot be resolved through peaceful negotiation. Either the RSS will win or the majority will win. One or the another will be annihilated, politically speaking. If there is a stalemate, it will carry on until the stalemate breaks – something we are now seeing with farmers’ protests and mass arrests of critical intellectuals and activists.
A non-antagonistic contradiction, on the other hand, exists between Dalits and, for instance, the Muslims. They have conflicts with each other, but these can be resolved through dialogue, especially since they share a larger enemy: the RSS and the BJP. Now in the past, RSS cadres would go and recruit Dalits, occasionally putting them at the forefront of the fight against Muslims. In other words, the RSS tried to turn the non-antagonistic contradiction between Dalits and Muslims into an antagonistic one.
What this implies is that the Brahmanical ideology understands the law of contradictions very well – Hindutva understand Mao Tse Tung very well and they are good at applying it. For the last 20-30 years, the BJP-RSS have been living amongst the people, and have educated them into their ideology. They slowly turned what were non-antagonistic contradictions into antagonistic ones, and in last 10 years or so, they have reaped the benefit of all this.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) camp. Image: Amit Mehra via Indian Express
Fortunately, their hegemony is cracking. Dalits are increasingly realizing that it was a mistake to ally with the RSS. We are also seeing, for example, other religious groups protect Muslims. For instance, when RSS tried to antagonize the Muslims in certain parts of Punjab like Phagwara, they were beaten back by the Sikhs because the Sikhs themselves realized that the RSS and BJP are picking people off one at a time. They felt it was their duty to protect the Muslims, and now the Muslims are cooking for the farmers in Punjab. People are now understanding the Hindutva ploy to convert what are basically non-antagonistic religious differences into antagonistic ones
Here, we can extend Mao a little bit further by drawing on Antonio Gramsci, especially his notion of corporate interests. What does he mean by this? He means that, if you want to liberate yourself, you have to help differently-positioned others. So, if you’re a man, you must also fight for women's right because only then would you yourself find true liberation. Or, if you’re from the other backward castes, your liberation is bound up with the Dalits. Likewise, if you’re a Dalit, your liberation is also tied to the liberation of others.
For instance, the leader of the Dalit Bhim army, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, went to support the farmers demands precisely on these grounds. He said we're supporting farmers because, if this legislation is implemented, it would mean multinational agribusinesses would come, the average farmer will be pauperized and will be working as a farmhand, food prices will rise folds and his people would suffer. Ravan recognized that, although there is no short-term advantage for Dalit people to support the farmers demand, they have everything to gain – and lose – in the medium to long term.
Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, co-founder and national president of the Bhim Army. Image: The News Minute
SR: So you’re saying that landless Dalits in Punjab are also in non-antagonist contradiction with the small Jat Sikh farmers?
DS: Certainly. It used to be an antagonistic one, but then we had internal migration of Dalits from Bihar and other places to Punjab. Punjab Jat farmers have experienced a modicum of upward mobility, and some of that prosperity has been redistributed downwards: Dalits in Punjab are now probably the most prosperous Dalits. The kind of anti-Dalit atrocities that we used to see in Punjab in the past have disappeared, and the Jat Sikh farmers are now with the farmers movement realizing they need Dalits support politically.
So contradictions change all the time, and it's important to understand when a contradiction will change. You need understand that the contradictions do not remain the same: these are processes, not static entities.
DM: You mentioned the current farmers movement, and how the contradiction between Dalits and Jat farmers in Punjab has changed. But I’m not sure it’s changed that much. Dalits are 35% of the population in Punjab, but only 3.5% of them have access to arable land. The farm bills would affect Dalits the most, as they would almost certainly lose whatever meager landholdings they have. The contradiction between Dalits and Jat Sikhs – even if it’s non-antagonistic one -- still persists, and is a real one. On top of that, we have the current idea of India, which is so intertwined with Brahmanical nationalism, which is only adding to the difficulty of forging inter-religious and inter-caste unities. The Left is certainly crucial in getting these different groups and interests together, but to some extent, they have failed. Could you comment?
DS: I think the non-antagonistic contradiction between the Dalits and Jat Sikhs in Punjab has now been overtaken by the antagonistic contradiction between them, as a group, and imperialistic and indigenous capital. That is now the “primary contradiction” at the moment, to use that Maoist term. Whereas before, that may have been a secondary contradiction, now, because of the farmers movement, it has become primary one. And so, if it’s primary, then the contradictions between Jat-Sikhs and Dalits are now secondary. The primary contradiction has to be tackled now because it is an antagonistic one: if the bills pass and the farmers go out of business, how are the Dalits going to afford food and keep their families alive? Dalits uniting with Jat Sikhs is now a matter of survival.
“the non-antagonistic contradiction between the Dalits and Jat Sikhs in Punjab has now been overtaken by the antagonistic contradiction between them, as a group, and imperialistic and indigenous capital.”
This is not to say the contradictions between Jat Sikhs and Dalits shouldn’t be addressed. They should be, but within an overall framework of upholding unity and solidarity. We should criticize each other and unite at the same time, and criticize again and unite – in a dialectical process. If we criticize each other and amplify those criticisms to the point that we fragment, then all we’re doing is cementing Hindutva hegemony.
The Left can play an important role in this. Right now, however, there are many left-wing groups who are hell bent on criticizing all of Ambedkar's weaknesses, not that he didn't have any. But it serves no purpose to do that, just as it serves to no purpose for Dalits to blanketly criticize the Left. Rather, you have to articulate your critiques from an understanding of contradiction: which ones are antagonistic, and thereby merit vigorous critique, and which ones are non-antagonistic, and thereby merit comradely critique aimed at forging solidarities.
Ultimately, by putting Marxism and Ambedkarism together, the conclusion you reach is that the fight has to take place at many different levels – at both the base and the superstructure, if you want to call it that. You can’t say: well we’ll wait for the revolution and then we'll think about the caste system, which was the old line. You have to think which contradiction is the fundamental one and out of those, which is the one that is preventing people from uniting. If there is a disunity of people because of the caste system – as I believe there is – then you have to confront the caste system if you have any chance of defeating capitalism. That’s your justification – from the point of view of theory of contradiction – for attacking the caste system now and not waiting for it to happen in the future. And that, of course is, what Ambedkar himself believed, and he in fact raised that question in 1936 roughly around the same time Mao was heading towards his theory of contradictions.
Dalit Shukra is a former Dalit leader of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA).