New Delhi: For a 29-year-old Dalit machine operator from Gujarat’s Surat, freedom from caste-based discrimination did not come with a change of faith alone. It took two long years of protests and paperwork after he embraced Buddhism for the state to officially recognise his decision.
On 14 May this year, his family was among 80 Dalit households that finally received government approval to convert—a milestone that marked the end of a prolonged struggle.
Their journey began on 14 April, 2023, the birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar, when more than 100 Dalit families across Gujarat renounced Hinduism, the faith into which they were born, and collectively embraced Buddhism, the religion Ambedkar adopted as a path to “dignity and equality”.
“Eighty families converted to Buddhism that afternoon. These were Dalits who have been discriminated against and failed by the society and government over the years,” said the machine operator, who converted with his family of five and did not wish to be named.
“Years ago, when Ambedkar converted to Buddhism, lakhs of people followed him. He had studied all religions and found that Buddhism alone stood for equality, with no discrimination,” he told ThePrint. Adding, “We don’t believe we converted to Buddhism—we believe we reverted to it.”
The 80 families are not alone. Over the past three years, small groups of Dalit families have quietly converted to Buddhism across Gujarat, citing widespread discrimination and growing violence against them. Entire families, from newborns to young parents and grandparents, have converted together, most of them from the working class, ThePrint has learnt. Many are also young graduates working in different factories across Gujarat.
According to Surat District Magistrate Sourabh Pardhi, 256 Hindus converted to Buddhism in 2023, 172 in 2023 and 84 in 2025. The administration has no data available on how many were Dalit Hindus.
The Indian Express had reported that at least 2,000 people converted to Buddhism in Gujarat in 2023 alone. According to some media reports, an estimated 40,000-50,000 applications for conversion remain pending across the state. But official recognition of these conversions has been slow because of red tape and administrative resistance.
While the conversion process during last year’s 14 April gathering was easy for the Dalit families, the problem began afterwards when they had to inform and get permission from the district magistrate to convert officially. Pardhi told ThePrint that the approval process involves verification by local police to rule out forced conversions. In case of any doubt, a proper hearing is conducted to ensure that the person is converting voluntarily. “Approval usually takes around three to nine months. There is no fixed time period for it,” he said.
According to the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 (GFR Act), any attempt to convert individuals through force, allurement or fraudulent methods is considered illegal.
In April 2024, the Gujarat government took note of Dalit Hindus converting to Buddhism in the state, and said both the person converting and the person getting them to convert must inform the district magistrate and get permission, according to provisions of the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 (GFR Act). This law has made the process of conversion more “complicated” for people, said at least three converts.
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‘Not a coincidence, a pattern’
Despite the complicated process, many Dalits say growing violence and discrimination against them drove them towards Buddhism. “It got worse under the RSS and BJP,” a worker at a diamond factory in Surat told ThePrint.
He added that for many Dalits, remaining within the Hindu fold has become “unbearable,” while Buddhism offered a path to reclaim dignity and self-respect.
He said the thought of converting to Buddhism came naturally to him. It began with growing up hearing the term “aparichit”, the historically marginalised group called “untouchables” in Gujarat.
As a teenager, he began reading Ambedkar’s writings and questioning caste hierarchies embedded in Hindu society. In 2018, his commitment deepened when he joined the Swayam Sainik Dal (SSD), a social organisation founded by Ambedkar that continues to work for Dalit rights and equality.
The 29-year-old machine worker said his initial understanding of being a Dalit began in school when students from his community had to carry their own utensils to school.
He became more aware of the discrimination in his first job when people from his community were not allowed to use the utensils in community kitchens.
Over the years, he began to realise that better job opportunities would always be out of his reach since he was rejected many times after being asked his caste before he ended up in a diamond factory in Surat. “I am a machine operator, but I just earn about Rs 20,000. I have been working here for seven years now,” he said.
His circumstances and regular news reports about attacks on Dalits across India made many like him realise that all of it was “not a coincidence but a pattern”.
“My Ambedkarite friends told me that it is best to convert to Buddhism. That was when I began learning more about it,” he said.
On 14 October, 1956, Ambedkar formally embraced Buddhism in Nagpur, along with around 3.65 lakh followers, as a “rejection” of the caste system. He believed conversion was the only way for Dalits to attain true freedom and dignity, free from caste-based oppression.
Nearly two decades before his actual conversion, Ambedkar had already declared his intent and urged the Mahar community in Mumbai to follow him, laying the ideological groundwork for what became a historic moment in Dalit assertion.
In one of his speeches, Ambedkar had declared, “Main Hindu dharm mein janam liya, yeh mere haath mein nahi tha. Lekin Hindu rehna, yeh mere haath mein hai (I was born a Hindu, that was not in my control. But to remain a Hindu, that is in my control).”
“Most Dalits in Gujarat live by this line,” said the machine operator quoted earlier, reflecting the deep resonance Ambedkar’s words continue to hold within the community.
He and several other local Dalits from the community believe that “mass conversions” have increased in recent years after seven members of a Dalit family were brutally assaulted by a group of people on the pretext of cow protection in Una town in Gujarat in July 2016. The video of the incident went viral, resulting in statewide protests in the following months.
“I made my family understand through the texts of Babasaheb (Ambedkar). I told them that the system of religion will always keep discriminating against us,” said the machine operator, quoting Ambedkar. “Any religion based on a system of graded inequality will always discriminate against one caste while enabling another to dominate. In Hinduism, this structure is not incidental, it is foundational.”
‘Internally, always a Buddhist’
A 32-year-old machine operator employed with a Surat-based company dealing in diamonds, told ThePrint that while he had already converted during the ceremony over a year ago and was now a practicing Buddhist, it was only now that he was able to officially call himself a Buddhist. “Internally, I was always a Buddhist. I desperately wanted to join Buddhism because there is no hierarchy in the religion,” he said.
Over the years, he said, that people from his community were not allowed to work in senior positions in offices, grooms were not allowed to ride horses, men were not allowed to have moustaches, and rapes and sexual harassment of women were common. He said the SSD, of which he is a member, taught people that conversion was necessary to convert and organised the gathering in April 2023, where he converted with his family of nine.
He said all members who were going to convert that day filled out an online conversion form before the ceremony and the magistrate was supposed to give permission within a month. The process required full-fledged police verification of the reasons for conversion.
“Even our verification was not done until May 12 this year,” he said, adding that due to all this, the process went on and on for around two years before they finally got official permission on 14 May. “We had to protest and then we were forced to tell the magistrate that we were going to file an RTI. After constant requests, we managed to finally convert.”
He said that while he might not be accepted completely as a Buddhist and people might continue calling him a Dalit, the conversion would have a good impact on his nine-year-old son, the youngest in the family to convert. “He won’t have to explain anything and he can just tell people that he’s a Buddhist.”
Also Read: How a pragmatist Ambedkar persuaded and convinced Dalits to convert to Buddhism
Decades of mobilisation
Dalits in Gujarat have experienced persistent caste-based violence over the decades, but incidents rarely lead to sustained mobilisation, Professor Ghanshyam Shah, a prominent scholar on caste and social movements and a retired Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor, told ThePrint.
“As far as atrocities are concerned, they have remained relatively high over the years,” he said. “When the atrocities happen, there is a reaction. But emotions fade quickly.”
Commenting on recent conversions to Buddhism, Shah said the trend was not widespread but largely confined to the Vankar community (traditionally weavers), a Dalit sub-group with relatively better access to education and urban life. He said the Vankars had a more reformist outlook, but even within Dalits, caste hierarchy persists. “They continue to see themselves as higher than other Dalit castes, and this has created alienation.”
Shah acknowledged that the 2016 Una assault, where Dalit men were assaulted, briefly unified Dalits across sub-castes and regions.
“There were movements that lasted six or seven months,” he said, but they eventually fizzled out, unable to translate collective anger into sustained political action. “I’m not sure there was a significant increase in conversions after Una, though the mobilisation was real.”
Delving into the historical context, Shah said that Gujarat was among the earliest states to witness anti-Dalit sentiment in the form of anti-reservation agitations, beginning in 1981. These protests, led by ‘upper castes’, were in direct response to Dalit upward mobility, especially in central and north Gujarat, where some had begun accessing higher education and land rights, Shah told ThePrint. “Dalits were finally getting land during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency-era land reforms, and that didn’t sit well with dominant castes,” he explained.
During the same period, the Dalit Panther movement, though born in Bombay, had spread into Gujarat, encouraging Dalits to occupy government land held by ‘upper castes’. The backlash was swift and brutal, Shah added.
D.D. Solanki, founder of Yuva Bheem Sena, an organisation providing legal support to members of the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities, told ThePrint conversion has become a mission for Ambedkarite Dalits due to daily discrimination, including being barred from drawing water local hand pumps.
“Nobody forces Dalits to convert, they read Ambedkar and they decide to convert,” he said.
Violence against Dalit women
Former JNU professor Shah told ThePrint that Gujarat had a history of exploitation against Dalit women. “At one point, in the 1970s, it was almost customary for ‘upper caste’ men to sexually exploit Dalit women,” he said.
In one of the most recent cases, a Dalit woman was reportedly raped in front of her minor children by a man who entered her house in Agra forcibly in May 2023. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, violence against Dalit women and girls increased 78 percent nationally between 2014, when there were 5,149 reported incidents, and 2022, when there were 9,163 reported incidents.
A 31-year-old private school teacher who recently converted to Buddhism told ThePrint that as a woman, she was treated badly over the years and had grown up witnessing complete segregation in society. “Even our temples were separate.”
What made the situation worse was the sexual harassment women from her community face even today, especially in villages. “I have Dalit friends who live in villages. There, higher caste people discriminate against Dalit women, especially when they are menstruating,” she said.
She added that as a woman, she was always against the idea of ghoonghat, the covering of heads by women and also women not being allowed to speak up. “I refused to cover my head with a ghoonghat,” she said.
According to the 2011 census, Dalit women account for about 16 percent of India’s women and historically, rape has been used by ‘upper caste’ groups to shame the community.
The woman added that Dalit women often become “easy targets” since the men from higher castes believe that Dalit women “deserve it”.
“This is why we believe in Buddhism. It teaches us that women are equal,” she said.
She converted because she wanted her three-year-old son to grow up in an environment away from any discrimination. “I will leave something for him, so that he understands the struggle of his people. But I won’t let him become a part of the struggle,” she said.
She is among a group of women working under SSD who go door to door to make Dalit women aware of their rights and the need to get educated. “We need more educated Dalit women. If she is educated, her children will be too,” she said.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
Also Read: Why Dalit conversion to Buddhism hasn’t taken off, and how it still can
They read? That’s a lie🥲
Discrimination doesn’t exist in Buddhism. Hence converted Dalits are not entitled for reservation. Though they are entitled for benefits available to minorities.
Only Dalits can force Hinduism to reform.
Most welcome!
As long as they do not convert into the desert cult, everything is acceptable. The fact that they are choosing an Indic faith to convert to is good news indeed. These people must be saluted and congratulated for their wisdom.