What good is an emancipatory philosophy that remains confined to the already converted?
In a suburb of Nagpur, preparations were underway for a Buddha Vihar event. Committee members were asked to invite others from the community. When names were suggested, familiar names came up. They have been attending these events for years, listening to these discourses, participating in the chants, absorbing the teachings over and over.
By all accounts, their dedication is sincere and their attendance is never in question. Yet, something striking becomes apparent: the invitation list remains largely unchanged. These same familiar faces return each time, the same community circle fills the benches, and still, little thought is given to reaching beyond the fold—to neighbouring families, to young people from other castes, to those who have never encountered the Dhamma firsthand.
This is not an isolated incident. In multiple Buddha Vihars, even the bhikkhus and organizers unintentionally reinforce an internal loop: inviting the same devotees, holding the same discourses, rehearsing the same chants. This story is not a critique of their dedication, it is, instead, a reflection of a structural problem—of circulation that is internal, self-reinforcing, and limited.
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. 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?
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, that once unsettled the Hindu social order, have turned inward. The issue is not devotion, it is containment. 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.
In the absence of new interlocutors, new communities, new debates, new contradictions, even the most radical ideas risk becoming domesticated. 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
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 embodied call to participation. Within this one call, centuries of social stratification dissolve momentarily.
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. What the Kanwar Yatra demonstrates is not a model to copy, but our failure of mobilization strategy – that 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.
Buddhism 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.
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, Gramsci argued, is sustained not merely through coercion, but through consent – through the slow shaping of common sense, of what appears to society as natural, inevitable, even desirable.
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.
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 – granting dignity, mythic ancestry, and spiritual legitimacy, yet they are strategically nested within the caste hierarchy, offering spiritual legitimacy without challenging social domination.
Ambedkarite Buddhism, by contrast, offers not accommodation but rupture.
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.
In Ambedkarite Buddhism, we have the educated: bhikkhus, teachers, scholars, government employees, activists. 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.
“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.”
— BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 322
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.
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.
Coalition Politics and Kanshi Ram: Lessons in Emancipatory Expansion
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. Pant worked actively to sabotage this emerging front, reflecting the deep anxiety within the savarna establishment. At a 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.
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. 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.
The iconic slogan of the 1990s, “Mile Mulayam-KanshiRam, hawa mein udd gaye Jai Shri Ram”, captured this disruption and 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.
If Ambedkar built the moral architecture of freedom, Kanshi Ram showed the scaffolding needed to make it stand. The history is not merely anecdotal. Recognizing this historical throttling is crucial, not as a lament, but as a call to revive the coalitionist spirit.
Beyond Religion
Babasaheb Ambedkar did not turn to Buddhism to replace one god with another. 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. To expand the Dhamma, we must speak its ethical truths in the languages of people’s everyday struggles – of land, labour, education, and dignity.
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. 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.
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.