Aniket Gautam (AG): You have already written about the CJP/GenZ protests in detail in your article in The Wire. I, myself, was a part of the protest. I witnessed how Jai Bhim has become another slogan for the resistance and dissent. Especially for the GenZ, raising slogans of Ambedkar, which was very much dominant throughout the protest. What do you think is the reason for such sloganeering to be synonymous with resistance?
Anand Teltumbde (AT): It was not just one article. I wrote several – from its inception to the conclusion of its present phase – because I saw in it a flicker of hope amid the darkness surrounding us. In many ways, Gen Z, perhaps without fully realizing it, has demonstrated a model of struggle capable of confronting and ultimately taming the fascist autocracy that reigns over India today.
I am particularly heartened that the CJP protest transformed Jai Bhim from a slogan commonly associated with caste identity into a universal call for democratic change. This was only one among many remarkable features of the movement. Its transcendence of entrenched identities – caste, class, religion, and gender – has been historically unique. GenZ has vindicated my long-held hypotheses: however salient these identities may appear in ordinary times, and however much they are amplified by vested interests, they recede into the background when people unite in collective struggle. Equally remarkable was its absence of a dominant leader, its disregard for conventional norms of protest, and its unapologetic profanity. These unconventional features confounded the state’s expectations, blunted its usual strategies of control, and ultimately enabled the movement to prevail.
The movement also reclaimed Jai Bhim by foregrounding its association with Babasaheb Ambedkar – not as a symbol of a single community but as the embodiment of an India founded on liberty, equality, and fraternity. Initially, I worried that Ambedkar’s prominence might be used to persuade young people that this was merely a Dalit protest led by a Dalit – as Abhijit Dipke happened to be one – thereby limiting its broader appeal. I am delighted that GenZ proved me wrong. They seem remarkably free of the identity anxieties that burdened earlier generations and helped bring the country to its present impasse.
The movement’s spontaneity was its greatest strength. It swept aside conventional political categories and social divisions that have long kept people apart. By grounding its struggle in the constitutional morality associated with the demand for a minister’s resignation, so powerfully articulated by Ambedkar, it was only natural that he emerged as the movement’s defining moral and intellectual inspiration.
AG: Since the movement was largely concerned with the students and youth, why had there been almost no discussion/mention of Najeeb Ahmed or Rohith Vemula? How do you see that?
AT: First, I do not think there was any centralized policy governing slogans or posters. Different groups brought their own banners and slogans voluntarily. This spontaneity was one of the defining characteristics – and indeed one of the greatest strengths – of the protest.
It also explains why the movement did not foreground figures such as Rohith Vemula or Najeeb Ahmad. Rohith’s institutional death in 2016 and Najeeb’s disappearance the same year were widely understood as instances of caste, and, in Najeeb’s case, communally inflected institutional violence. The CJP movement, by contrast, was mobilized around a grievance that was, at least on its face, caste- and community-neutral: the collapse of integrity in the education system, symbolized by the examination scandal. Precisely because its immediate demand was universal rather than identity-specific, it was able to forge a remarkably broad coalition with extraordinary speed.
In retrospect, I believe this focus was a source of the movement’s strength rather than a limitation. By resisting the temptation to accumulate every legitimate grievance and instead concentrating on a single, broadly shared demand, the protesters preserved the unity and inclusiveness that gave the movement its distinctive power.
AG: What is the alternative of the present education system in your opinion? What can put an end to the commercialisation, communalisation, and privatisation of public education?
AT: There’s no single fix, because commercialisation, communalisation, and privatisation are three distinct mechanisms that happen to reinforce each other, and treating them as one problem tends to produce vague answers. On commercialisation: India’s public education spending has hovered little over half of the 6% of GDP the Kothari Commission recommended back in 1966, and every government since has restated that target without meeting it – so the coaching-centre-and-testing industrial complex that now effectively pre-selects who can even compete for a NEET or JEE seat exists precisely in the space public investment vacated. Closing that gap isn’t a slogan, it’s a budget line, and it would need to come with real curbs on how much of the ‘preparation economy’ is allowed to substitute for actual schooling. On privatisation: the Right to Education Act’s neighbourhood-school guarantee and no-detention provisions were genuine structural commitments that have been quietly weakened or abandoned in practice over the past decade, and enforcing what’s already on the statute books would do more than any new scheme.
On communalisation, the fix is narrower but more urgent: NCERT and state curriculum bodies need statutory insulation from direct executive control, so that textbook content is set by peer-reviewed academic process rather than by whichever ministry happens to hold office. The recent history of chapters being added, dropped, and rewritten by administrative fiat rather than scholarly consensus is exactly the failure mode that insulation is meant to prevent. None of this is exotic or utopian; it’s mostly a matter of funding what’s already promised and legally protecting what’s already been legislated, rather than inventing something new. The honest answer to “what’s the alternative” is less a different system than the current one actually built as designed, with the political interference and disinvestment that hollowed it out removed.
AG: Through your works on Ambedkar, you have already spoken and written against the iconisation of Ambedkar. Keeping that in mind, why there had been less discussion on the agrarian issues by the Dalit/bahujan forces despite the fact that landless agricultural workers are mostly exploited by the Brahmanical-patriarchal-capitalist relations.
AT: Iconisation and agrarian neglect are, in fact, two sides of the same phenomenon. It is far easier to garland a statue than to organise landless labourers against the intertwined nexus of caste and landlordism that demands sustained rural mobilisation.
The version of Ambedkar that has come to dominate public discourse has largely erased his engagement with the agrarian question. His advocacy of state ownership of agricultural land, collective farming, his early critique of the Mahar watan system, and his growing recognition in his later years that the struggle for land was indispensable to the emancipation of the overwhelming majority of rural Dalits – as distinct from the relatively small urban educated minority that benefited from policies such as reservations – stand completely ignored. Any attempt to recover this materialist dimension of his thought is moreover condemned as communist, and is systematically packaged as the enemy of Ambedkarites.
The consequence has been a Dalit-Bahujan politics that is increasingly urban, NGO-mediated, and centred on representation, while the majority of Dalits remain rural, landless, and largely voiceless. Recovering the agrarian Ambedkar is therefore not an exercise in historical retrieval or nostalgia. It is the difference between a politics of symbols and a politics of material transformation.
AG: How MNREGA’s killing by the hindutva-corporate state, is a serious attack on the life, liberty and dignity of the landless agricultural workers who are largely SCs and STs.
AT: This isn’t a hypothetical anymore – MNREGA has, in effect, already been dismantled. In late 2025/early 2026 the Union government repealed the Act and replaced it with the “Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin)” Bill, and reading past the rebrand tells you what actually happened. MNREGA was never just an employment scheme for landless SC/ST agricultural workers – it functioned as a structural counterweight to caste power in the village. SC/ST households drew MNREGA workdays above their population share in nearly every state studied, independent survey data found it cut poverty in Dalit households by close to 40% and Adivasi households by close to 30%, and it paid women the same wage as men in a context where almost nothing else does. Most importantly, it gave landless workers an exit option: guaranteed work elsewhere meant a worker could walk away from an exploitative, often caste-coded arrangement with a local landlord rather than accepting whatever wage and conditions were offered, because there was a legally fixed floor to fall back on. That exit option, not the wage alone, is what actually produced dignity in a village labour market.
The replacement bill claims to raise the guarantee from 100 to 125 days, but this is largely cosmetic, because it strips out the feature that made the original guarantee meaningful: MNREGA was a demand-driven legal entitlement, meaning the state was obligated to fund work whenever it was demanded. The new bill removes that obligation and allows the government to suspend the scheme for up to 60 days during peak agricultural season – precisely when landless workers depend on it most as leverage, and precisely when landlord demand for cheap, captive labour peaks. It also introduces job-card rationalisation that rights groups warn will exclude large numbers of genuinely eligible households, layered onto Aadhaar-linked payment failures that have already caused documented delays and exclusions disproportionately affecting SC/ST workers. Put together, this isn’t a welfare cut – it’s the removal of the one legally enforceable alternative landless SC/ST workers had to depend on dominant-caste landowners, which is a direct attack on liberty in the plainest sense: the capacity to refuse an exploitative arrangement without starving for it.
AG: In your prison memoir The Cell and the Soul, you mentioned the death of Bhola, an innocent undertrial prisoner. Can you please tell me more about such prison catastrophes?
AT: There were many suicides in the prison, although I did not know the background of every victim. I did, however, witness at close quarters the neglect of prisoners suffering from severe psychiatric disorders. One such prisoner was, in fact, the very first person I noticed on waking after my first night in jail. He had been tied to the prison bars and was being beaten by the guards. At the time, I did not know that he was mentally ill; I only knew that he had been shouting throughout the night. Later, he was shifted to the first floor, where I was lodged, and I watched his condition steadily deteriorate. The absence of proper psychiatric care was glaring. The prison had no resident psychiatrist and depended on the weekly visit of an outside specialist. Prisoners requiring sustained treatment should have been transferred to a proper mental hospital, but the jail administration was invariably reluctant to do so, perhaps because such transfers would expose the hollowness of its claims about being adequately equipped to care for inmates. Eventually, this prisoner too died in a pitiable condition.
Another case involved a hefty man who was brought to my floor and locked in a cell that was rarely, if ever, opened. He had neither bedding nor proper clothing. For more than a month, he was left without regular food and spent much of his time lying naked on the floor. Later, he was shifted to a cell near mine. He would scream obscenities, play with his urine and faeces, and masturbate openly – clear signs of profound mental illness. He remained in this condition for nearly three months. Only after my repeated appeals to the superintendent and the prison doctors was he finally transferred to a mental hospital. To our astonishment, he returned a few months later completely transformed. He had recovered so remarkably that many prisoners could scarcely recognise him. His recovery was a powerful reminder that what had appeared to be incurable madness was, in reality, a consequence of criminal neglect rather than an untreatable condition.
These were not isolated tragedies. Such catastrophic failures of care were a recurring feature of prison life, exposing a system that punished mental illness instead of treating it.
AG: I always found great interest in reading both Fanon and Ambedkar. Especially your article on decolonisation in the Wire. Can Fanon and Ambedkar be the guiding force against the fascism in the Indian context ?
AT: Fanon and Ambedkar arrive at the same problem from different directions, and reading them together is more useful than reading either alone. Fanon gives you the psychology and structure of colonial domination: how a subordinated population comes to inhabit the coloniser’s categories as if they were natural, and why formal independence – a flag, a parliament, a transfer of office – is not the same thing as decolonisation, which requires dismantling the internalised hierarchy itself, not just its administrative shell. Ambedkar gives you the specific architecture that domination runs through in the Indian case: caste as a self-reproducing social order, sanctioned by religious authority, that survives changes of regime because it was never primarily a political arrangement to begin with. Put together, they suggest a way of reading Hindutva that neither can supply alone – not as an aberration from Indian modernity, a temporary capture of an otherwise healthy democracy, but as an internal colonial project: Brahmanical hegemony achieving through cultural nationalism and state power what it no longer needs formal colonial administration, or even electoral dominance, to secure for it.
Where the combination gets genuinely productive – and where I think it has to stay honest rather than harmonised – is in the tension between them. Fanon’s account of decolonisation treats violence as structurally necessary to the process, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of it; Ambedkar, by contrast, built his entire strategy around constitutional method, statutory safeguards, and the abolition of caste through law, education, and organised political pressure rather than rupture. That’s not a contradiction to paper over. It’s a real disagreement about the method that anti-fascist politics in India has to actually work through rather than resolve by quietly picking the more comfortable half of each thinker. What both insist on, though, is the same warning against a shortcut: that you cannot fight fascism by winning elections or restoring institutions alone, if the underlying hierarchy – caste for Ambedkar, colonial psychology for Fanon – is left standing to simply find its next political vehicle. That, more than any specific tactic either proposes, is what makes them a guiding force together rather than two separate reading-list items.
AG: What books do you think are necessary for the students who are carrying the struggle against the saffronisation in the Indian universities?
AT: Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste first, always. Alongside it: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism for the structure of the fight; You may consider my own Anti-Imperialism and Annihilation of Caste and Republic of Caste. Golwalkar’s own We, or Our Nationhood Defined and Bunch of Thoughts – read your opponent’s foundational text, don’t just read about it; Christophe Jaffrelot’s The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India for the RSS’s actual organisational history; The Brotherhood in Saffron by Walter K. Anderson and Shridhar D. Damle (Provides an institutional history of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). Romila Thapar’s work for a counter to the saffronised historiography directly targeting NCERT; Gail Omvedt’s Buddhism in India and D.D. Kosambi for materialist readings of caste’s origins that Hindutva historiography can’t accommodate. Read the enemy’s texts as carefully as your own – that’s the discipline students skip most often.
AG: What are your views on imperialism, monopoly capitalism and class struggle in contemporary times?
AT: Contemporary imperialism doesn’t look like the direct territorial control of the classical colonial period – it operates through financialised global value chains that keep countries like India structurally subordinate while appearing formally sovereign. India supplies cheap labour, raw data, and an enormous consumer market, while the returns on capital, technology, and intellectual property continue to accumulate disproportionately in the metropolitan centres of global finance. This is Lenin’s basic insight about monopoly capitalism updated for a digital, deregulated era: a handful of transnational firms and financial institutions capture rents at scales that dwarf what productive labour anywhere actually earns, and states compete to offer themselves as the most extractable jurisdiction rather than building genuinely autonomous development paths. Domestically, this global pattern has a very specific local face: a corporate-Hindutva nexus in which a small number of conglomerates have captured infrastructure, media, telecoms, and increasingly agriculture and public-sector assets through privatisation, in exchange for which the state receives political and ideological cover – a mutually reinforcing arrangement rather than a coincidence of a business-friendly government.
Class struggle in this context hasn’t disappeared, but its classical form has changed shape in ways orthodox Marxism has been slow to register. Formal-sector employment keeps shrinking relative to the workforce even as GDP grows – India's ‘jobless growth’ pattern is now two decades old – which means the reserve army of labour Marx described is increasingly not an industrial proletariat waiting to be organised on the factory floor, but an informalised, gig-economy, seasonally migrant workforce with almost no legal protection at all. And in India specifically, that reserve army is disproportionately Dalit -Bahujan and Adivasi – which is exactly why a caste-blind class politics keeps failing here: it treats as a temporary or peripheral feature what is actually a structuring principle of who ends up in the most exploited, least protected layer of the workforce. A class politics adequate to the present moment has to be built explicitly at the intersection of monopoly capital’s global extraction, the corporate-Hindutva state’s domestic capture, and caste’s continuing role in sorting who bears the cost of both — not as three separate struggles, but as one.
AG: What is the antidote to caste violence? Walter Benjamin in his essay critique of violence writes about the Mythic violence and Divine violence. Do Indian working classes need this divine violence to pull the emergency break ?
AT: Fanon and Ambedkar address different dimensions of the same problem and, for that reason, can be read together rather than against each other. Fanon explains how oppressive social orders reproduce themselves through the psychology of fear and the expectation that violence against the oppressed will go unanswered. In the Indian context, where caste atrocities are often committed with an assumption of near-total impunity, this insight remains profoundly relevant. The issue is not to romanticise violence but to recognise the political significance of resistance that shatters this assumption. The credible capacity for collective self-defence or retaliation can create a cultural and psychological shock by demonstrating that caste violence is no longer cost-free. Unfortunately, India has not witnessed Dalit counter-violence comparable to Fanon’s Algerian context or even the armed self-defence movements seen among African Americans or the Black Panthers’ patrols and it is simply discarded as a non-alternative. Of course, it, in itself, is not an alternative to dismantle caste, but it can unsettle the confidence with which caste power has historically operated.
Psychological or cultural rupture as I have termed it in my writings is only the beginning. Caste survives not merely because of fear but because it is embedded in material relations of land, labour, education, credit, and political power. These structures can be transformed only through programmes that secure the economic and social autonomy of the oppressed—land reform, quality public education, livelihood security, and constitutional democracy. Ambedkar obviously proposed this but through constitutional methods. The relationship between Fanon and Ambedkar is therefore not one of choosing violence over constitutionalism or vice versa. Counter-resistance should not be discounted because it can alter the balance of power and generate pressure for structural reforms that entrenched interests would otherwise continue to block. Fanon illuminates the politics of rupture; Ambedkar provides the architecture of transformation. Against the contemporary authoritarianism of Hindutva, India needs both: the courage to end the culture of impunity and the vision to replace the structures that sustain it.
AG: Your views on the Marxism-Leninism; worker-peasant alliance.
AT: The worker-peasant alliance remains, I think, the correct strategic axis for a country like India, where agriculture and allied rural work still absorb a huge share of the workforce and where the classical industrial proletariat – concentrated, unionised, factory-based – has always been comparatively small and is shrinking further under informalisation. Lenin was right that a revolutionary movement confined to an urban working class in an overwhelmingly agrarian society is a movement talking to itself; the peasantry has to be a genuine partner in the alliance, not an auxiliary force mobilised and then set aside once power is won, which is roughly what happened in most twentieth-century applications of the model, including in India’s own communist movements at various points.
Where I part from orthodox Leninism is in what ‘worker-peasant alliance’ is usually taken to mean in practice: an alliance of two economically defined classes, with everything else – caste chief among them – treated as superstructure, a distraction from the ‘real’ material contradiction. In the Indian countryside that framing is simply false to the material relations involved. The very language of caste and class as parallel or intersecting categories is misleading. Landlessness, wage rates, access to credit, vulnerability to violence, and social exclusion are not separate economic and social realities but different expressions of the same structure of power. Rather than treating caste as an adjunct to class, I would redefine class itself to encompass the totality of social contradictions through which exploitation and domination are organised. Class struggle, correspondingly, must be understood as the struggle to overcome all these contradictions, not merely those conventionally labelled “economic.” Such a reconceptualisation radically reshapes the very idea of a worker-peasant alliance.
A worker-peasant alliance conceived in these terms cannot treat landless Dalit and Adivasi agricultural labourers as just another segment of an undifferentiated peasantry. Their specific experience of caste oppression, economic exploitation, and social exclusion must constitute the very centre of class politics, not an issue to be addressed alongside it. The organised Left's historical failure in rural India stemmed precisely from its inability to grasp this reality. While proclaiming class unity in theory, its practice often reproduced the caste hierarchies of the very villages it sought to transform. A genuinely emancipatory class politics must therefore begin by dismantling caste as an intrinsic dimension of class domination itself.
AG: Finally, my last question is about the debate on the Fascism and Neofascism. Which way do you understand the character of the Indian state today?
AT: The objection usually raised is that India cannot be called fascist because it has not formally dismantled the institutional architecture of democracy. Elections are still held, Parliament still exists, courts still function, opposition parties still govern some states, and therefore, it is argued, India fails to satisfy classical definitions of fascism, such as Dimitrov’s description of it as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of finance capital. I find this objection unpersuasive because it mistakes historical definitions for timeless templates. No social phenomenon reproduces itself as an exact replica of its earlier manifestations. Fascisms themselves differed significantly across countries and historical contexts. To insist that every future fascism must exhibit precisely the institutional features of interwar Italy or Germany is to reduce history to taxonomy and, in the process, risk overlooking new forms through which authoritarian rule evolves.
The more meaningful test is not whether every institutional marker of classical fascism has appeared, but how power is actually experienced by ordinary people. By that measure, India has unmistakably moved into fascist terrain. Democratic institutions increasingly function as instruments of authoritarian rule rather than checks upon it; state agencies are deployed selectively against political opponents, the media is overwhelmingly aligned with the ruling dispensation, dissent is criminalised, minorities are systematically demonised, and constitutional rights are rendered contingent upon political conformity. The continued existence of elections, Parliament, courts, and federal institutions does not negate this reality. On the contrary, it lends the regime a democratic façade that legitimises authoritarian rule at home and abroad while making it more difficult to recognise and resist. Fascism in twenty-first-century India has not arrived by abolishing democratic institutions but by subordinating them to an authoritarian project. The experience of the people, rather than fidelity to inherited definitions, is the decisive criterion, and by that criterion the contemporary Indian state is better understood as fascist than as any qualified form of democracy.