Bengal Elections 2026: Why Political Parties are Averse to the Dalit Question

 

Bengal Elections 2026: Why Political Parties are Averse to the Dalit Question

Subhajit Naskar

Such a narrative is rooted in denial of social recognition of Tapashilis, who are categorised as Scheduled Caste (SC) and their historically transformative anti-caste politics in undivided Bengal.

Even the social justice icon Dr B R Ambedkar is not celebrated in the state beyond the few assertive independent Dalit groups while he is duly acknowledged with remarkable state honours in rest of the country. If selective amnesia had not engulfed the Bengali upper caste “bhadraloks” at large, it wouldn't be tough to remember Ambedkar's long association with Bengal. It was his All India Scheduled Castes Federation (AISCF), whose Bengal branch was headed by Jogendranath Mandal, a prominent leader from SC community in 20th century Bengal.

The association of Mandal with Ambedkar grew so unwaveringly loyal that, in 1946, Ambedkar turned to Bengal to be elected to the Constituent Assembly of India. Mandal and six other Dalit MLAs of the Bengal legislative assembly secured the seat for him. Ambedkar later went on to be the chairman of Constitution Drafting Committee. The glorious role of Bengal and its autonomous Dalit leadership in sending the main architect of Indian Constitution to the Constituent Assembly is today grossly erased institutionally. The caste question and Ambedkarite politics too, despite its powerful legacy in Bengal, is relegated to the background through coercion and social misrecognition.

Bengal has sixty constitutionally recognised scheduled caste communities, which is 23.51% of state’s total population according to the 2011 Census. Bengal comes second after Punjab among Indian States in size of Dalit population. And yet, the question of Dalit political aspirations and substantive caste representation doesn't find any resonance in the Bengal assembly elections. At the same time, the Dalit factor is one of the driving factors in every Punjab assembly election.

Interestingly, 19th and early 20th century's popular historiography of Bengal was largely shaped by majoritarian Hindu upper caste supremacism camouflaged as nationalist movement and deeply influenced by ''practicing Hindu rituals and glorification of Hindu kings''. Sumanta Banerjee in his book 'Unravelling the Bengali Identity' writes, how the Bengali upper caste hindu intellectuals of the 19th century tended to put emphasis on the Brahminical, Sanskrit oriented elements in that culture, while the same century had contemporaneously witnessed Dalits’ progressive assertions against upper caste Bengali bhadraloks’ caste supremacism.

Dalit assertions in Bengal

From early 19th century onwards, a host of Dalit social reformers started challenging the blatant casteism of Brahminical Bengali bhadraloks. In fact, the absence of Dalit sensibilities in Bengali nationalists' anti colonial struggle had been looked at with suspicion by Dalit political leadership. Harichand Thakur (1812-1878), Benimadhab Halder (1858-1923), Panchanan Barma (1866-1935), Raicharan Sardar (1876-1942), Mahendranath Karan (1886-1928), Guruchand Thakur (1846-1937), Anukul Chandra Das Naskar (1894-1947), Basanta Kumar Das (1898-1984), Rajendranath Sarkar (1903-1979) are some of anti-caste stalwarts being pushed out of the mainstream by the Bengali upper caste historiographers.

The hostility of Bengali upper caste bhadralok intellectuals towards the Dalit reformist movement against casteism is a well calculated move to sustain the former's complete social and political dominance in post-colonial Bengal. The Hindu Mahasabha, Communists and Congress in undivided Bengal were deeply antagonistic towards autonomous Dalit politics. The political parties in post-colonial Bengal have also retained the narrative of Bengali exceptionalism entrenched in castelessness that depoliticised Dalit social and political aspirations in contemporary Bengal.

It is a well concerted effort of the upper-caste political class of Bengal to sustain complete political dominance of Brahmins, Baidyas and Kayastha bhadraloks. The possibilities of Ambedkarite Dalit autonomous politics once launched by Jogendranath Mandal remains a perpetual threat to the Right, Left and Centrist political forces. Therefore, radical Dalit political consciousness observed in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and some pockets of Southern India are consciously suppressed in the mainstream Bengali polity, society and academia.

Bengal: A caste conscious society

A Pratichi India Trust report of 2005 studied ''Cooked Mid-day Meal Programme in West Bengal - A study in Birbhum district'' found out explosive caste bias among the Caste Hindu Savarna Parents and their children’s attitudes towards marginalised caste students and Dalit mid-day meal cooks. The study has shown how Dalit and Adivasi students benefited immensely from mid-day meal scheme but the upper-caste students disliked the scheme while their parents had reservations about Dalit cooks cooking the mid day meal.

In fact. the practicing of endogamy is also high in West Bengal, with inter-caste marriages being very low in the state, a fact that doesn't sit well with its progressive claims. A mere 9.5% of the marriages happening in the state are inter-caste. The social backwardness of Bengali Dalit communities due to upper-castes’ hegemony is so stark that the state has never thought of implementing Scheduled caste special component plan like other states such as Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka.

It is only recently, that the the huge deletion of Dalit voters in Bengal through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise the of Election Commission of India (ECI) prompted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) top leadership of prime minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah to pacify them with the promise of citizenship and restoring their names once they come to power in the state. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) has since last few years started the corporate style 'Tapashilir Sanglap'(interaction with the Scheduled Castes) outreach campaign during election season, which is purely an electoral connect programme with Dalits.

Even though the BJP is very careful this time in addressing the Scheduled Castes of Bengal, they are trying to broadly mobilise the Hindu vote bank cutting across the castes. The communal campaign around 'ghuspaithiye' (infiltrators) is very willfully advanced by the BJP to mobilise and appropriate Dalits so that independent Dalit political agency never grows in Bengal.

The 2026 Bengal election is fought on high communal pitch so that the Dalit questions of representation and marginalities do not get any mainstream political recognition. There is a broad consensus among the Bengali upper caste bhadraloks of the Left, Right and Centre that Dalit aspirations and autonomous Dalit politics should not re-emerge.

Subhajit Naskar is a Political Scientist, who teaches at Jadavpur University.

Courtesy: The Wire 

Link of English write up: https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/the+wire+english-epaper-wireng/bengal+elections+2026+why+political+parties+are+averse+to+the+dalit+question-newsid-n710277313