New Delhi: A day after a protest march organised by the Cockroach Janta Party turned violent in Delhi, several accounts on X launched casteist attacks, claiming the demonstration was “rooted in Ambedkarism” and warning “general category people” to stay away from the party.
On Monday, thousands of students took to the streets of Delhi against the NEET paper leak, and demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. In the afternoon, the protests turned violent, when the police lathi charged and shot tear gas shells at the protesting students.
An account on X, with the username ‘Nyaksha’, wrote that the government and CJP is not on the “GC (general category)” side.
“As for CJP, its core ideology is rooted in Ambedkarism, so it will always work against GC interests,” it wrote.
Commenting on the tweets, Subhajit Naskar, a Dalit professor at Jadavpur University, said, “Two things are very difficult for the casteist campaigners against reservation and affirmative policies to digest. One, that the Cockroach Janata Party has been conceptualised by a Dalit young man. And second, that this movement is spreading across the youth, cutting across caste, privilege and age”.
On the casteist remarks on X, Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad refused to comment, saying, “I don’t want to give importance to them”.
‘CJP protesters are Ambedkarites’
An X account, ‘Wokeflix’, with more than a lakh followers, called the protesters “Bhimtas”.
The account posted a video on X claiming that there were “zero“ NEET aspirants in the protest.
The post has about 1.6 lakh views and nearly 10 thousand likes.
Another X account claimed, “It is a Universal Truth that where there are Ambedkarites, there is violence, unrest, and anti-national activities.“
Some accounts started claiming that most protesters were Dalit, just after the demonstration turned violent.
An X account, ‘Alpakanya’, with nearly 30,000 followers, wrote, “‘Reservation was Ambedkar’s biggest mistake’ – she is stating pure facts, fully agree,” the account wrote alongside a video of an old lady talking about reservation.
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A protest spearheaded by a Dalit
The Cockroach Janta Party led a street protest on 6 June in Delhi after Abhijeet Dipke came back from the US. A week later, since 13 June, they have been protesting at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
“Abhijeet Dipke has been very clear that he is a Dalit and that he has high regard for Dr Ambedkar. They have consistently carried Dr Ambedkar’s image to assert that this is a constitutional and democratic protest–perhaps a more democratic response than what the government is giving,” said Naskar.
Calling it an “organic movement”, Naskar said the movement has received support from influencers, actors, and politicians.
“The response from these casteist accounts, under the garb of being anti-Modi or anti-government, is absolute hogwash. These are actually right-wing Brahminical accounts, but they are camouflaging themselves as people who simply want an equal society by removing reservation,” he said.
Vaibhav Wankhede, a Dalit writer, told ThePrint that this is an attempt to reduce every public protest to “only Ambedkarites”.
“[Asking] general category citizens to stay away is nothing but casteism dressed up as a political strategy. it only serves one purpose: to divide people who should be asking harder questions about unemployment, paper leaks, student suicides, shrinking opportunities, and the steady erosion of public institutions as an Ambedkarite,” Wankhede said.
Dipke had also faced casteism on X after revealing his Dalit identity.
Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule, a senior research scholar at IIT-Delhi and John Dewey Emerging Scholar, US, told ThePrint that such comments are made to “delegitimize the protest”.
“It shifts the public debate away from state accountability and forces people back into their traditional social silos. It allows critics to dismiss an urgent, material crisis as a ‘fringe, motivated agenda’ rather than addressing the structural rot in our educational system,” he said.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)