More than a century after Phule sowed the seeds of Bahujan consciousness, and seven decades after Ambedkar handed a constitutional compass to the dispossessed, India’s majority-by-numbers remains a minority-in-power. The question is no longer whether division exists — it is why it persists, and whether it can be healed.
In the electoral arithmetic of modern India, the Bahujan — a Sanskrit compound meaning literally “the many people,” encompassing Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and religious minorities — constitute somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of the country’s population. And yet, this vast numerical majority exercises political influence that is, by most institutional measures, nowhere near commensurate with its size. The paradox is not new. It has been observed, lamented, and theorised for well over a century. What is new is the urgency.
The question “Why is the Bahujan not united?” is not a provocation — it is a diagnostic. It deserves the same rigorous, unsentimental examination that a physician would apply to a chronic ailment: locating the causes without assigning moral blame to the patient, identifying the treatment without dismissing the history of the wound.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
“Men are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.”
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
“There is no god. There is no god. There is no god at all. He who invented god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel.”
Jyotiba Rao Phule
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change your power structure.”
A Majority Divided by Design
The fragmentation of the Bahujan is not accidental. Caste the primary fault line was never simply a social hierarchy; it was, as Ambedkar documented with clinical precision in Annihilation of Caste (1936), a system of “graded inequality,” in which each sub-group was incentivised to look upward with aspiration and downward with contempt. This graduation is the architecture of division: it prevents horizontal solidarity by rewarding vertical compliance.Phule had understood this nearly half a century earlier. Writing in Gulamgiri (1873), he described the caste order as a structure that kept the Shudra and Ati-Shudra not merely subordinate, but separated from each other turned not against the system but against their neighbours. The genius of the structure, if one may use that word without admiration, was its self-perpetuation. One need not maintain it actively once the lower orders are arranged to maintain it for you.
“Caste is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers — a hierarchy in which the divisions are graded and, therefore, anti-democratic.”— B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 1936.
The numerical data, where available, reinforces this structural reading. The SC/ST population combined constitutes roughly 25–26 percent of India’s population per the 2011 Census, and OBC communities — whose enumeration remains contested — are commonly estimated at 40–52 percent. The religious minorities add another 14–20 percent. Yet this demographic bloc has never coalesced into a stable electoral or institutional force, except in isolated regional pockets and in specific historical moments — most notably in the UP elections of 1993, when the BSP and SP coalition briefly reordered the state’s political landscape.
Fragmented Parties, Fragmented Futures
Post-independence Indian democracy democratised the franchise but did not democratise representation proportionately. Political parties ostensibly representing Dalit or OBC communities have proliferated — BSP, RJD, SP, VCK, AIMIM, and dozens of smaller formations — but proliferation has not produced consolidation. Instead, it has produced competition: for caste votes, for symbolic leadership, for the limited spoils of coalition arithmetic. The result is a landscape in which Bahujan parties frequently divide each other’s vote banks rather than uniting against common structural adversaries.Periyar, whose Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu provided perhaps the most sustained model of anti-Brahminical mobilisation in Indian history, was characteristically blunt about political co-option: “Do not trust those who ask for your votes in the name of your caste, while keeping the caste system intact.” The warning has proven prescient. Several parties that emerged from Bahujan movements have, over time, accommodated the very hierarchies they were founded to challenge — in alliance strategy, in candidate selection, and in the symbolic language of governance.
Historical NoteThe Kanshi Ram model of BAMCEF and DS4, which preceded the BSP, was explicitly designed as a cadre-based movement before a party — a sequencing that Kanshi Ram believed was necessary to prevent premature electoral compromise. The erosion of that cadre culture after his illness and the BSP’s shift toward Brahmin vote consolidation in the mid-2000s is studied by political scientists as a textbook case of Bahujan political capture and redirection.
Identity Without Ideology
Perhaps the deepest fracture within the Bahujan project is philosophical. Ambedkar’s vision was ultimately universalist his conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was not merely a personal spiritual act, but a public rejection of a religion he found structurally incompatible with human dignity, and an embrace of a tradition he believed could provide Dalits with a liberatory, non-hierarchical metaphysics. Phule’s vision was similarly rooted in a critique of Brahminism as ideology, not merely as caste group. Periyar went furthest demanding a rational, atheist, post-caste selfhood as the precondition of emancipation.Contemporary Bahujan politics, however, has often moved in the opposite direction: toward a celebration of caste identity rather than its transcendence, toward the symbolic statues, reservation demands, caste pride rather than the structural land reform, educational access, institutional representation. Identity affirmation is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A politics that ends at pride and does not proceed to power is, as Ambedkar might have said, a politics that admires the chain while remaining in it.
“Political power is the master key. With this master key, we can open all doors. Without it, all other efforts will fail.” Kanshi Ram, often attributed, c. 1985
The absence of a shared ideological framework — one that all Bahujan communities can inhabit without subordinating their particular identities — is perhaps the central intellectual challenge. The Ambedkarite tradition offers the most articulated candidate for such a framework, but it remains in genuine tension with the religious worldviews of large sections of Muslim, OBC-Hindu, and Adivasi communities who are otherwise natural Bahujan allies. Building ideological cohesion across this diversity is not impossible — but it requires intellectual labour that political expediency routinely defers.
What Can Actually Be Done (Conclusion)
Diagnosis without prescription is a luxury the Bahujan cannot afford. The following are not utopian proposals — they are actions that have precedent, logic, and urgency behind them.
- Coalition architecture over merger politics.The 1993 UP experiment showed that SC and OBC communities need not merge into one party to act as a political unit. A pre-electoral coalition framework — with seat-sharing, a shared minimum programme on reservation, land rights, and institutional access — is achievable without demanding ideological homogeneity. The model has worked in Tamil Nadu (DMK-led alliances), in Maharashtra (Maha Vikas Aghadi), and episodically in Bihar. It requires sustained negotiation, not charismatic shortcuts.
- Investment in cadre, not just candidates.Kanshi Ram’s original insight — that sustainable political power requires a trained, ideologically grounded movement base before electoral contestation — has been vindicated by the decline of every Bahujan party that abandoned cadre-building for vote-bank management. Investing in Bahujan civil society, in reading circles, in Phule-Ambedkar study groups, in journalism and documentary production, is not soft politics — it is infrastructure.
- A shared economic agenda.Caste hierarchy and class hierarchy in India are deeply entangled but not identical. A Bahujan economic programme — centred on land redistribution, enforcement of minimum wages in agriculture and construction, access to formal credit, and robust implementation of existing reservation policies in education and employment — can bridge communities that disagree on religion and culture. Economic solidarity is historically the most durable foundation for political coalitions.
- Ambedkar’s constitutional legacy as common ground.The Constitution of India, which Ambedkar chaired the drafting committee of, contains more Bahujan-compatible provisions than most Bahujan parties have consistently demanded the implementation of — Articles 17, 46, 330, 332, and the Directive Principles on social and economic rights. Using the Constitution as a movement document — citing it, litigating under it, organising around it — provides a legitimate, legally enforceable, and symbolically powerful common language.
- Inter-sub-caste dialogue.The 3,000+ sub-castes within the OBC category alone represent a web of sometimes competing, sometimes collaborative histories. Facilitated dialogue — not homogenisation — between these communities at the district and block level, focused on shared grievances rather than shared origins, is the slow, patient work that precedes political unity. Phule began it in Maharashtra in the nineteenth century. It must be continued in every state
“I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”— B.R. Ambedkar — a reminder that Bahujan unity must also be gender-inclusive, not only caste-inclusive
Unity among the Bahujan is not a sentimental aspiration — it is a political necessity in a democracy where, if numbers were ever to vote as a block, the outcome would be transformative. The fact that this has not happened is not evidence of impossibility; it is evidence of the enduring effectiveness of the structures Phule and Ambedkar spent their lives naming and opposing.There is a Pali phrase that Ambedkar returned to repeatedly in his later years: Atta dipa — be your own lamp. He meant it as encouragement to individual self-reliance in the face of social dependency. But it also carries a collective meaning: a movement that waits for a messiah to illuminate it will remain in the dark. The Bahujan question is not “who will unite us?” It is “how do we build the conditions — intellectual, organisational, economic, political — in which unity becomes rational, durable, and ours?”That is the question this generation inherits. And unlike Ambedkar’s generation, it inherits both a Constitution that guarantees the tools and a democracy that, however imperfectly, still requires the vote. The lamp is already there. The question is whether enough hands will hold it.
