What good is an emancipatory philosophy that remains confined to the already converted?
In Bhilgaon, a suburb of Nagpur, preparations were underway for a Buddha Vihar event. The organizers wanted it to be a gathering that celebrated the Dhamma, its teachings, and its anti-caste message. Committee members were asked to invite others from the community. When names were suggested, one name came up: Borkar Tai. She has been attending these events for years, listening to these discourses, participating in the chants, absorbing the teachings over and over. Borkar Tai, by all accounts, is dedicated and sincere. Her attendance is never in question. Yet, something striking became apparent: the invitation list remained largely unchanged. The same familiar faces would attend, the same community circle would fill the benches, and yet, no one thought to reach out beyond the fold to neighboring families, young people from other castes, those who had never experienced the Dhamma firsthand. The teachings, radical in essence, were circulating only among the already converted.
This was not an isolated incident. Similar patterns emerged in multiple Buddha Vihars, where even the bhikkhus and organizers unintentionally reinforced an internal loop: inviting the same devotees, holding the same discourses, rehearsing the same chants, without considering the broader social outreach.The story of Borkar Tai is not a critique of her dedication or of the Buddha Vihars themselves. It is, instead, a reflection of a structural problem—of circulation that is internal, self-reinforcing, and limited.
Buddhism in India was reborn not as devotion, but as defiance. When Babasaheb Ambedkar stood before half a million followers in Nagpur in 1956, he did not merely offer a new faith—he offered a collective escape from centuries of humiliation. The Dhamma became the language of dignity, a moral and social rupture from a Hindu order that had long denied the oppressed their humanity.
Yet, decades later, the emancipatory fire Babasaheb ignited flickers in isolation. The Dhamma, conceived as a weapon against caste itself, risks being contained within the very boundaries it sought to dissolve.
What good is a philosophy of liberation that remains confined to the already converted?
And if the promise of the Dhamma is to reach all, why have we left Kanshi Ram’s lessons in silence?
A Movement Stalled
Buddha Vihars were envisioned as crucibles of social awakening—spaces where the oppressed could come together to learn, reflect, and act against the structures of caste. But over time, many of these spaces have turned inward. The discourse that once unsettled the Hindu social order now too often repeats itself within closed circles.
The issue is not devotion, it is containment. The same devotees attend the same sermons, delivered by the same bhikkhus, to the same audience. The language of liberation, instead of radiating outward, keeps echoing within the same walls. This internal repetition may appear as continuity, but in truth it marks stagnation. A movement cannot grow if its pedagogy never leaves the comfort of the familiar.
This inwardness reflects a deeper structural problem. The social imagination of Ambedkarite Buddhism remains tied, almost exclusively, to the Mahar experience of oppression and resistance. While this history is foundational and must never be diminished, it has inadvertently produced a form of cultural insularity- where the Dhamma is seen less as a universal ethic and more as a community identity. When the revolutionary is reduced to the representational, the project of liberation loses its horizon.
Such internal circulation breeds intellectual fatigue. In the absence of new interlocutors, new communities, new debates, new contradictions, even the most radical ideas risk becoming domesticated. The Dhamma, which was meant to unsettle moral complacency, begins to mirror it. Ritual replaces rupture; repetition replaces reflection.
Babasaheb did not create a philosophy to comfort the oppressed within their own boundaries. He created it to collapse those boundaries entirely. The true measure of the Ambedkarite movement’s vitality lies not in how many gather inside a Vihar, but in how far its message travels outside it.
Comparative Cultural Mobilisation: Kanwar Yatra vs. Buddhism
Every year, the call echoes across villages and towns: “Chalo re Kanwariya, Shiv ke dhaam!” The chant is simple, rhythmic, and powerful. And it works. Regardless of caste, economic status, or region, Hindus who identify with Shiva respond—some pick up the kanwar, others join in the procession, and still others return the chant, sending it onward. The magic of the Yatra lies not in coercion or formal authority, it lies in the shared ritual and embodied call to participation. Within this one call, centuries of social stratification dissolve momentarily: the chant binds the many, creating a network of collective action and visibility.
By contrast, Ambedkarite Buddhism, anti-caste at its core, has struggled to translate its emancipatory philosophy into a comparable cultural force. Rituals, festivals, and gatherings within the Buddha Vihars are often rich with ethical and historical significance, but they remain largely contained within the Mahar community. Unlike the Kanwar Yatra, which brings together the many in a shared symbolic and bodily practice, Buddhism has yet to create spaces that catalyze cross-community participation and visibility. This contrast is not a failure of devotion, sincerity, or scholarship. It is a failure of mobilization strategy. Where Hindutva rituals thrive by creating shared experiences across communities, Ambedkarite Buddhism has often focused on internal consolidation: commemorating Ambedkar, celebrating conversion anniversaries, and reiterating canonical teachings to a dedicated, familiar audience. While this is vital for historical memory, it leaves the Dhamma bound by its own base, unable to challenge caste structures outside its immediate fold.
The intellectual lesson is stark: a social movement requires not only ideas but also mechanisms for circulation, visibility, and engagement. Rituals and mass gatherings are not mere spectacle—they are sites where ideas are embodied, consent is shaped, and social hierarchies can be contested or reinforced. The Kanwar Yatra demonstrates that a networked, performative, and cross-community approach can achieve mass participation without dissolving core beliefs. Buddhism, in contrast, risks being perceived as sectarian, a spiritual enclave rather than a catalyst for social transformation.
If the Dhamma is to fulfill its promise of universal liberation, it must learn not only from its own ethical and philosophical depth but also from the pragmatics of cultural mobilisation. The challenge is not merely intellectual; it is social, spatial, and performative.
What good is a philosophy of liberation that remains confined to the already converted?
The Role of the Intellectual Class: Babasaheb’s Warning
If emancipation is to move beyond ritual and remembrance, it requires more than educated devotees. It requires an intellectual class capable of leading moral imagination into social transformation.
Babasaheb Ambedkar was clear: “In every country, the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class that can foresee, advises, and leads. In no country does the mass of the people live life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class.” (BAWS, Vol. 1, p. 86)
In Ambedkarite Buddhism, we have the educated: bhikkhus, teachers, scholars, government employees, activists, and community leaders. They attend conferences, organize events, and preserve historical memory. Yet education alone does not constitute the intellectual class in Babasaheb’s sense.
The Buddha himself understood this distinction. He built an intellectual order, not merely a religious one. The Bhikkhu Sangha was structured as a moral-intellectual vanguard—individuals trained to think, debate, and lead society through reason and compassion. The rules of the Sangha were severe, especially the one prohibiting Bhikkus from owning private property.
As Babasaheb noted: “Buddha realized that for a person to give a true lead to society and be its trustworthy guide he must be intellectually free and further, which is more important, to be intellectually free he must not have private property. In the Vedic order of Brahmins there was no such prohibition. A Brahmin was free to hold property. The Bhikkhus formed an intellectual class. The Brahmins formed on the other hand merely an educated class. There is a great difference between an intellectual class and an educated class.”(BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 322)
This difference remains decisive. The Brahminical order, once intellectually stagnant, has evolved under new institutional forms—especially the RSS—producing not just education, but ideology. Meanwhile, converted Buddhists, despite producing thousands of educated individuals, have yet to nurture an intellectual class that can challenge the dominant moral order or shape new social consciousness.
Without a genuine intellectual class, Ambedkarite Buddhism may retain moral authority without exercising societal power, becoming a repository of ethical memory rather than a living, expansive force for emancipation. The question, then, is whether the Mahar community will nurture thinkers capable not just of teaching the Dhamma, but of leading its dissemination across caste lines, translating radical philosophy into actionable social strategy.
Hinduism as the “Easier” Religion? A Gramscian Possibility
Why have so many oppressed castes remained within Hinduism, despite its entrenched hierarchies and moral violence? Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “hegemony” offers a compelling lens: power is rarely maintained through coercion alone; it endures through consent, the subtle shaping of common sense, of what society collectively perceives as “natural” or inevitable. Hinduism, in its polytheistic and ritualistically flexible form, achieves precisely this. Its capacity to absorb local gods, sects, and practices grants communities a sense of autonomy—an illusion of freedom—while the underlying Brahmanical order remains intact.
Consider the historical and ritual strategies of various OBC groups. The Yadavas, for instance, have long venerated Krishna; other communities have rallied around Shiva-based sects. These religious formations appear independent, even empowering, yet they are strategically nested within the caste hierarchy, offering spiritual legitimacy without challenging social domination. In this way, Hinduism provides a religious and cultural comfort zone: oppressed castes can participate, assert local identity, and cultivate ritual authority, all while remaining tethered to a system that preserves Brahmanical supremacy.
Ambedkarite Buddhism, by contrast, was conceived as a radical counter-hegemony. Its ethical and philosophical architecture explicitly rejects caste hierarchy, offering not accommodation but rupture.
If Hinduism’s flexibility makes it easier for oppressed castes to remain within its fold, how can Ambedkarite Buddhists strategically translate ethical radicalism into social expansion? How can the Dhamma move from the boundaries of one community to become a shared moral and political force capable of unsettling the entrenched structures of caste hegemony?
Coalition Politics and Kanshi Ram: Lessons in Emancipatory Expansion
Kanshi Ram understood a fundamental truth of social change: liberation confined to a single community risks permanent marginalization. The Bahujan Samaj Party, in its inception and rise, was not a Dalit-exclusive project; it was a coalitional experiment, a deliberate strategy to build counter-hegemony across caste lines, a movement for the Bahujan- the majority oppressed, encompassing Dalits, OBCs, Muslims, and even the sympathetic savarnas. By extending representation beyond Dalits, Kanshiram created a shared arena of leadership and participation, signaling that the struggle against caste and inequality could not be confined to a single community if it were to attain moral and social traction.
Kanshi Ram’s genius was to recognize that coalitional politics could also achieve religious and cultural reverberations. The iconic slogan of the 1990s, “Mile Mulayam-KanshiRam, hawa mein udd gaye Jai Shri Ram”, captured this disruption. His strategy achieved a dual effect. Politically, it challenged the dominance of upper-caste formations and fragmented entrenched power networks. Symbolically, it created a coalition that undermined the ritualized authority of Hindutva and upper-caste hegemony.
The power of this political and social vision is punctuated not only by courage and conviction but by deliberate attempts at its containment.
Punjabrao Deshmukh, a leading OBC voice, was strategically co-opted by Nehru into the Congress and appointed Agriculture Minister. Ambedkar lamented, “Politics is a game for you, but Politics is a mission for me.” The effect was clear: potential alliances between Dalits and OBCs—alliances that could have significantly amplified the emancipatory potential of both Ambedkarite politics and Buddhism—were politically neutralized before they could take root.
Another moment of suppression exemplifies this pattern. Ambedkar’s attempts to forge an alliance with the OBC leadership in Uttar Pradesh—an alliance capable of unsettling upper-caste dominance—were systematically undermined by Govind Ballabh Pant, then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and a prominent Congress figure. Pant worked actively to sabotage this emerging front, reflecting the deep anxiety within the savarna establishment: a cross-caste, anti-caste coalition was a threat too potent to be allowed. At the Lucknow Conference, Babasaheb declared unflinchingly that if the Scheduled Castes and the OBCs were to unite, even a Savarna like Pant would be compelled to bow before them. Decades later, the truth of Babasaheb’s warning was borne out when Kanshi Ram’s coalition politics, culminating in Mayawati’s rise, made even the mightiest bow before the Bahujan will.
This history is not merely anecdotal; it illustrates a structural dynamic that continues to resonate. The fear of a unified anti-caste front constrained Ambedkar’s vision at its inception, limiting the translation of his ethical revolution into a broader sociopolitical force. Buddhism, conceived as a moral and political weapon against caste, was from the start throttled by the anxieties of entrenched power, leaving the emancipatory promise largely confined to a single community.
The lesson is stark: the political and ethical potential of Ambedkarite Buddhism was never fully realized because its capacity to form alliances across caste lines was deliberately stifled. Recognizing this historical throttling is crucial, not as a lament, but as a call to revive the coalitionist spirit that Kanshi Ram later demonstrated, ensuring that the Dhamma’s promise does not remain circumscribed by historical limitations.
Beyond Religion
Babasaheb Ambedkar did not turn to Buddhism to replace one god with another. His conversion was not an act of spiritual substitution, but of social negation, a decisive rejection of Brahmanism’s moral order. When he said, “I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu”, he was not abandoning faith, but rejecting hierarchy. Yet, in the decades since, Ambedkarite Buddhism has often been read narrowly as a religious identity rather than as a civilisational counter-narrative to caste itself.
To see Buddhism only as an alternative religion is to diminish its radical purpose. The Dhamma, as Ambedkar reinterpreted it, was a grammar of equality—a moral framework for reconstructing society. Its gods were not divine, but ethical: compassion, justice, fraternity. But in public life today, that language of ethics risks being drowned out by the louder, more performative religiosity of the Hindu Right.
The challenge, then, is not to make Buddhism “more religious,” but to reclaim its social and political essence. This means inviting those still waiting at the gates of equality not to a new religion, but to a shared struggle, a collective moral rebellion against the logic of caste. The Dhamma’s universality lies not in conversion, but in conscience.
To expand the Dhamma, we must speak its ethical truths in the languages of people’s everyday struggles—of land, labour, education, and dignity. Babasaheb’s Buddhism is not about worship; it is about transformation. Its temples are schools, its rituals are acts of equality, its salvation is social justice.
If the fight against caste remains limited to commemorations and anniversaries, it becomes memory without motion. But when the Dhamma returns to the street, the village, the picket line, when it begins once again to speak to the worker, the farmer, the student, it reclaims its true form: not just a religion of renunciation, but a revolution of reconstruction.
The Unfinished Task
The revolution Ambedkar began was never meant to end with conversion. Conversion was only the beginning, the declaration of a moral rebellion, the foundation for a new social order grounded in equality. But a revolution confined to its initiates is a revolution unfinished. The burden of Ambedkarite Buddhists today is not merely to preserve memory, but to extend meaning—to take the Dhamma beyond the boundaries of the Mahar community and offer it as a grammar of liberation for all who live under caste. The Dhamma cannot remain a private inheritance; it must become a public conscience. If Ambedkar built the moral architecture of freedom, Kanshi Ram showed the scaffolding needed to make it stand. One without the other leaves the project incomplete. To fulfil the promise of the Dhamma, Ambedkarite Buddhists must once again step beyond the comfort of sameness- to teach, to invite, to organize, to unsettle.
The task is unfinished until the Dhamma speaks not only to the converted, but to the country itself- until the chant that once rose in Nagpur echoes across castes, regions, and generations.