Democracy is meaningful only if it allows fair and equal opportunities to its citizens, including substantive participation of the worst-off social groups in social and political affairs. However, nowhere does democracy function with such ethical riders. Instead, it is always the powerful and the rich minority that hegemonises public institutions and disallows ordinary people from having engaging and critical perspectives against the ruling elites.
In India, the ideological perspectives of the Dalit-Bahujan masses are often relegated as narrow, sectarian or particularistic, whereas ideas promoted by the social elites are marked as secular, nationalist and even universal. Dalit-Bahujan ideas are seen as detrimental to the Hindu civilisational heritage and antithetical to the nationalist Hindutva project.
In the current political context, though the right-wing proponents have projected the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as being inclusive of Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis, when it comes to…