-Rajesh Tyagi/ 29 November 2008
The ascent to power of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, claiming itself a party of dalits and backwards, has once again brought the question of the legitimacy of the slogan of a ‘dalit party' to focus in the political discourse, having an added importance for Marxist parties. Here is a humble attempt to give an analysis of what this slogan means in essence.
Ambedkarism, to which all the so-called dalit parties of today owe their allegiance, emerged on the political scenario of India during the pre-independence period, as a native variety of bourgeois-liberalism, pampered and nurtured in the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Lincoln's and Gray's inns and sponsored under the aegis of world capitalism.
Around the end of the second decade of the last century when bourgeois liberalism was fast losing its vitality on a world scale in the face of the advance of revolutionary Marxism, the October proletarian revolution in Russia had already shaken world capitalism to its hilt.
The ascent to power of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, claiming itself a party of dalits and backwards, has once again brought the question of the legitimacy of the slogan of a ‘dalit party' to focus in the political discourse, having an added importance for Marxist parties. Here is a humble attempt to give an analysis of what this slogan means in essence.Ambedkarism, to which all the so-called dalit parties of today owe their allegiance, emerged on the political scenario of India during the pre-independence period, as a native variety of bourgeois-liberalism, pampered and nurtured in the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Lincoln's and Gray's inns and sponsored under the aegis of world capitalism.
Around the end of the second decade of the last century when bourgeois liberalism was fast losing its vitality on a world scale in the face of the advance of revolutionary Marxism, the October proletarian revolution in Russia had already shaken world capitalism to its hilt.
