I am a person of intensity and half-hearted endeavours hardly excite me. As a Bahujan woman, this is how I feel about love, and the representation of my community in Indian media. Our lives make it to the news for all the wrong reasons – caste-based atrocities, discrimination, rapes and murders. Bahujans are reduced to tragedies like being killed for sporting a moustache or riding a horse, disagreeing with power structures or showing dissent. Rarely will you come across anything encouraging the scientific temperament that Bahujan intellectuals exhibit and engage with.
Not that the issues reported are far from the truth, but they certainly aren’t the whole truth. Traditional media often overlooks Article 51A (Clause H) of our Constitution, which emphasises that it is the fundamental duty of every citizen to develop a scientific temper. It is this scientific temper that helps foster secularism, humanism and a spirit of enquiry and reform. But no, it really isn’t part of the conscious invocation of popular media.
According to a 2018 Oxfam report, 88 per cent of leadership positions in Indian media houses were occupied by ‘upper’ caste individuals. No positions were held by Dalits. The number was zero even five years later in 2023.
Ambedkar and Indian media
Curious as I was, I approached Ashok Das, editor of the Dalit Dastak Magazine, with a question: How receptive is Indian media to the ideas of Bhimrao Ambedkar?
“Dr Ambedkar has contributed to the making of India in various capacities – women empowerment, maternity leaves, labour laws; [He has contributed] to economic development, parity and social justice, yet the traditional media outlets have narrowed down his work to a certain gaze and typecasting, he told me, adding that Ambedkar is invoked at opportune moments like “Whenever anything on reservation, caste discrimination, Constitution, caste atrocity, social identity is discussed. But that’s just that”.
The News Beak founder Sumit Chauhan, who has also worked with India News, Zee Media Corporation Limited and ABP News, told me that he had to quit his job in traditional media due to many personal and professional conflicts. They also consistently discouraged him from working on stories concerning the Dalit-Bahujan community, he said. According to Chauhan, corporate media is essentially caste media and its narratives are far removed from Ambedkar’s ideas about equality, fraternity and social justice. Indian media is treading on a different, anti-national path, he stressed. Dalits on social media lack the technical infrastructure of a BJP IT cell, but they still help in nation-building and promoting the ideals of solidarity Ambedkar stood for.
Earlier, people used to make crass jokes about Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Mulayam Singh Yadav and took jibes at Dalits for “exploiting” reservation. But today, Bahujans are challenging these biased attitudes by carving their own space, said Chauhan. “The News Beak YouTube channel has 912k subscribers; I have 252k followers on X (formerly Twitter) and about 122k on Instagram. This for sure has strengthened my voice and given me a platform to speak my truth.”
Ashok Das begs to differ, though. According to him, Laxman Yadav, who served as an ad-hoc assistant professor at Delhi University’s Zakir Hussain College for 14 years, was unceremoniously dropped from his position despite scoring the highest marks in the selection process.
“He was replaced by a teacher with no teaching experience and much lower qualifications,” he said. Das then went on to cite the case of Ritu Singh, a 28-year-old educator from the Dalit community. The former ad-hoc psychology professor, who had joined DU’s Daulat Ram College in 2019, protested for nearly 192 days outside the Arts Faculty against alleged caste harassment and illegal termination of services within a year.
“Although social media did get her issue noticed, she didn’t necessarily get any social justice. Traditional media can build pressure because of its bigger reach and nationwide circulation,” stressed Das. When progressive intellectuals seek to understand India, he added, they do so with an ideological gaze typically aligned with MK Gandhi or Bal Gangadhar Tilak. This trend also underscores the dismal representation of marginalised people in the newsroom. “Therefore, until progressive intellectuals aren’t ready to look at India from an Ambedkarite gaze, much will not change.”
Bhumika Saraswati, a Delhi-based award-winning independent journalist, filmmaker and photographer, said that she documented Ritu Singh’s protest every day because she knew nobody else would. “Often, when I read about resilient stories of Dalit women fighting against systematic oppression, there was a lack of visual documentation. This was my attempt at visualising and preserving our history on social media,” she said. According to Saraswati, caste-privileged people love to document Dalit stories of atrocity, pain, and torture and win awards for it, “but rarely do they document the stories of our resistance, especially the stories of Dalit women resisting”. Social media really helped her in this regard because she didn’t have to wait to pitch or anticipate a response for something as important and urgent as this. “I believed my Instagram was a good enough medium. I consider this a success because at a time when our stories are forcibly invisibilised, making them visible is a protest and a victory in itself.”
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Battling a deep-rooted bias
It is clear that the media has been historically biased against marginalised communities. When Ambedkar reached out to Tilak to publish a paid advertisement of Mooknayak in his paper, he was denied.
In fact, Ambedkar’s very push to start his own newspapers suggests that he was deeply aware of the social and political context of his time and was eager to bring to public knowledge the atrocious nature of the caste system. He started Mooknayak on 31 January 1920, his first paper that ran for three years before being shut. Later, he went on to establish three more newspapers – Bahishkrut Bharat (1927-1929), Janata (1930-56), and Prabuddha Bharat (1956).
And yet, we’re expected to be grateful that there’s at least some conversation about the Dalit-Bahujan mass in mainstream media today. Social justice is the spirit and vision of the Indian Constitution; Ambedkar wanted to create a casteless, classless society based on the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice.
Harnessing the power of social media
Social media has definitely changed the game, challenging the dominance of TV channels and newspapers. “Social media has democratised storytelling. It has empowered Dalits and Adivasis, who have been historically marginalised and silenced, to assert their agency, narrate their lived realities, challenge dominant narratives, and highlight issues that were previously overlooked or ignored by mainstream media outlets,” said Babita Gautam, editor and co-founder of online publication Dalit Desk that boasts 44k followers on Instagram.
Platforms like the Dalit Desk have successfully disrupted the status quo, challenging the dominance of upper-caste perspectives in media spaces. “By amplifying marginalised voices and shedding light on their struggles, these initiatives are reshaping the media landscape, fostering greater diversity, inclusion, and social justice,” she stressed.
Manish Sagar, who runs an account called ‘Bahujan Lives Matter’ on Instagram, emphasised the revolutionary aspect of social media.
“In 2018, India witnessed a massive protest which none had any clue of. The Bharat bandh by Dalits against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by the Supreme Court, churned into an organic movement on April 2nd 2018 that was generated as a result of a WhatsApp forward. Bharat Bandh is one of the biggest examples of how revolutionary WhatsApp forwards can be,” he said.
Sagar recalled that no particular face had led the movement; it was driven entirely by the community.
On 14 September 2020, a young Valmiki woman from Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras was allegedly raped by four men belonging to the Thakur caste. “It was a casteist crime,” said Sumit Chauhan.
The Hathras case was completely ignored by traditional media for days until some young YouTubers, with no media training, reported about this issue, Chauhan shared. “We too reported on this story for nearly a week, until the mainstream media covered it and it became a big story,” he said.
The girl succumbed to her injuries just days later, and on 29 September, the UP police cremated her body without her family’s consent after barricading them inside their home.
I wanted to tie these ends together because, while researchers have studied the development of traditional offline social movements, little has been written about how social media is organising online activism that moves offline.
Consequently, one can draw the inference that issues of social justice – such as Hathras, Bharat Bandh, the suspension of Ritu Singh, Dalit Asmita Yatra or PhD scholar Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder – came to the limelight because of social media journalism.
Leading the path of Ambedkar doesn’t come without challenges, said Babita Gautam. “Lack of funds forces us to prioritise certain stories over others. In contrast, legacy media outlets enjoy more substantial resources and a wider audience reach.”
This humongous task of social justice doesn’t come without age-old casteist parameters of merit, she added. Individuals from Dalit backgrounds must prove their ‘credibility’ and ‘merit’ to show that they haven’t succeeded because of reservation only.
“This constant scrutiny demands that we [Dalit-run media organisations] uphold rigorous fact-checking standards, sometimes even surpassing the standards expected of others in the field,” said Gautam. The predominantly upper-caste makeup of legacy media personnel, she stressed, “seldom faces similar questioning of their merit, despite occasional lapses in journalistic integrity as evidenced by instances such as the widely circulated misinformation about microchips in Rs 2,000 bills aired on national television”.
According to Manish Sagar, social media is far better than traditional media in this regard – even though it definitely has limitations like information overload, fake news, misunderstanding and disinformation.
However, “Within the limits of our resources, it’s affordable and practical for Dalits to start a social media account or a YouTube channel rather than starting a media house, newspaper or magazine, which requires big funds and infrastructure. Dalit Dastak, which was primarily a print magazine is now in digital too,” he added.
‘Bahujan Lives Matter’, ‘Ambedkar Dhamma’, ‘Dalit Desk’, ‘Dalit_history’, ‘Dalitjournal’, ‘Dalit Camera’, ‘Delete Project’, ‘Bahujanweekly’, ‘Bahujan_memes’ are some well-known social media handles that help disseminate the ideas of Ambedkar. Additionally, YouTube channels like ‘Tathagata Live’ play a crucial role in spreading Ambedkar’s message.
The limited space that Dalits occupy in mainstream media can be very well attributed to the anti-caste movement and the persistent advocacy of Bahujan intellectuals. As a result, the Gen Ys and Gen Zs who were raised within the realm of the anti-caste movement, familiar with figures like Jyotiba Phule, Periyar, Ambedkar, Savitri Mai et al, felt and lived a dichotomous life in their own country. But these young people also became the most active users of this new media landscape, doing what mainstream media and fundamentalists didn’t expect.
They used social media to counter questions about their personhood and assert their identity – by sharing facts, art, information, dance, love, and poetry. This phenomenon created an underground scene where artists like Bakery Prasad, Priyanka Paul, Artdekar, Big Fat Bao, Shrujana Sridhar, Divya Kandukuri, Bhumika Saraswati engaged audiences by talking about issues that really affected them and were rooted in Ambedkarite thought. Despite the persistent algorithm challenge, social media has genuinely emerged as a powerful tool for sharing lived experiences.
Jyotinisha is a writer and filmmaker. She tweets @jyotinisha. Views are personal. This article is part of Dalit History Month series.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Well written indeed…very illuminating. Thanks so much