On August 15, 2016, thousands of people belonging to Scheduled Castes from across Gujarat took a collective public oath to reject caste-imposed occupations, including discarding dead animal carcasses and manual scavenging. They demanded land in lieu of centuries of their unpaid labour, threatening more agitations.This historic event happened in Una, a town in the Gir Somnath district in Saurashtra region, where four Dalit men were tied up and assaulted publicly a month prior. Dominant caste gau rakshaks alleged that these men were spotted slaughtering a cow, but the truth was that they were performing a caste-imposed occupation; they were handed over a dead cow and they were doing what was needed to dispose of the carcass. This occupation has been forced on SC communities across the country, and is institutional.Something that had never happened before followed in a state that has been loyal to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 1995. The Dalits brought the BJP government in Gujarat to a standstill, coming out in huge numbers across districts. This was in spite of the mainstream media completely blacking out the mass movement. I saw Dalit groups dispose of carcasses of dead animals in government buildings in open defiance. This is from a state which had documented 100 forms of untouchability that was being practised at the time, and probably still continues now. This is also a state which had over the years forced loyalty from a deeply segregated and unequal society across caste lines, bringing them together as “Hindus” while orchestrating anti-Muslim spectacles, such as the 2002 violence. This is despite the fact that Gujarat’s social development indicators are abysmal, and the only ones who have really gained out from BJP’s rule are the traditional capitalist castes, making communalism nearly imperative to breed loyalty. A year before the Una incident, the Patidars – a dominant caste of Gujarat – had organised a statewide agitation against the BJP, demanding reservation. Hardik Patel had emerged from this campaign. It was followed by Alpesh Thakore, who created the Other Backward Classes’ Kshatriya Thakor Sena, and OSS (OBC, SC, ST) Ekta Manch to counter the Patidar demands. Eventually, both Alpesh Thakore and Hardik Patel joined the BJP. Both of their movements saw mobilisations in lakhs across the state, yet none of them broke loyalties to question the almost “unvanquishable Modi’s BJP”, as most people there termed it, the way the Dalits of Gujarat did, in spite of being a much smaller number in population. Jignesh Mevani emerged from the Una movement, organising a statewide rally culminating in the town on August 15, 2016. Thousands of Dalits took the pledge that day. They didn’t just break away from the BJP loyalty, but also from a country that demanded caste slavery as national duty.Dehumanisation of Dalits continuesIn India, Dalit leaders I’ve spoken to from across the country during various agitations say that it is natural for them to be the most defiant. Even as Dr B.R. Ambedkar set safeguards to ensure equality, and compliance against caste atrocities and caste-based sexual violence, dehumanisation of Dalits in all forms of work continue to this day. Even senior politician Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress president and leader of opposition of the Rajya Sabha, wasn’t spared. After his participation in a rally at Uttarakhand’s Haldwani, a group of Brahmins from the state carried out a purification ritual publicly. Such incidents are so regular that Dalits have, time and again, had to militate against the violence, with nearly no support from other groups or the media.When the Mandal Commission was deliberating on reservation, a strange alliance was starting to form between Dalits and OBCs, even though these two communities had always been at loggerheads. OBCs had turned into the foot soldiers of Brahmanism, they made sure Dalits were mistreated in line with the diktats of caste hierarchy, just so that some OBCs could enjoy piecemeal benefits doled out by Brahmins. This new shift worried the BJP to no end, who were trying to mobilise the largest group in the country as ‘Hindus’ in order to position them as a coalition that would eventually target Muslims across the country. BJP worked extra hard at this time to create inroads into major OBC groupings. Take for example, the Tulu region in southern coastal Karnataka. The communalism project has been running at the behest of the Saraswat Brahmins, the Arya Samaj, and eventually, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), since the 1800s. There were many attempts to turn the Tulu population against the Beary Muslims for decades, but it only became successful when the Sangh started to mobilise all OBC groups around Ram Mandir. The 1980s saw Hindu Samajautsavs, which were pioneered by Udupi’s seer Vishwesha Theertha, with OBCs being given centre stage as caste leaders here. This mobilisation eventually led to massive participation of the region in the Babri Masjid demolition. It is in the years that followed that these groups started different experiments, some where they beat up women to protect “Hindu culture”, others where they antagonised Muslims, something that had never happened in a region which documents Beary Muslims’ coexisting for more than 15 centuries. These new groups made sure that the region followed the guidelines of the RSS and its loyalty program; even land acquisition of farm lands or coastal lands couldn’t be questioned. Everything was anti-Hindu.Such loyalty programs have existed forever and form the benchmark of accumulating political power in any nation state. Yet, critique as a means to question this loyalty also existed. That changed with the BJP. It was either blind loyalty or nothing.The CJP movementThis program took a hit this July, when a national movement swept a dissatisfied country off its feet. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth movement that was sparked off by a sarcastic retort to the Chief Justice of India’s comment by a Dalit Maharashtrian, Abhijeet Dipke, is now spreading its veins through the country. What started off as a movement against mismanagement of competitive exams such as the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) is now seeing many young students in government schools demanding that they be provided the facilities that they are owed. In a video that has now gone viral from Alwar, Rajasthan, a bunch of girl students are seen blocking the gate. One of them is seen pointing at her teachers as she asks, “If your children were studying here, would this school be in such bad shape?”There is an important thread here that one needs to draw on loyalties, dissent by Dalits, OBC mobilisations, and the now-popular “cockroaches”. Post 2014, political loyalty in India has been simplified to answering a binary choice question: Do you support the BJP or the Congress? This shifts depending on states that have strong regional parties – such as Tamil Nadu – but otherwise, the simplification of electoral choice is very much real. Nationally, the BJP positioned itself as a party protecting majoritarian interests, and blamed the Congress for being “anti-Hindu”.This didn’t happen easily. The Congress’ claim to rule India began with their role in the freedom struggle, but what kept them in power were towering personalities and feudal lobbies across the country, not mass consensus. They were not as invested in promoting uniform ideological moorings in their followers.MajoritarianismThe RSS had to work really hard to restructure the country along religious lines, away from a largely non-bigoted mindset. India has had its own religious churning over the last 20 centuries, but modern India turned into a society that was largely tolerant of people from all minority religions. The most common form of discrimination that existed was caste – not religion. This discrimination was religion-agnostic: Indians across faiths looked down on those who they considered untouchable or from other lowered castes and tribes. India’s segregated society and its politicians spoke of class disparity, poverty, lack of resources, borders, but seldom ventured towards addressing the root of the issues, or how those who hold power further the issues. During this churning, the RSS singularly worked on creating a majoritarian identity in India, nothing else. By the time Modi and his friends started controlling BJP, this narrative had become common; India’s development was stalled at the behest of the Congress, and this happened due to the Gandhi family and the party favouring “outsider” Muslims and Christians, over “insider” Hindus, as alleged.How could Hindus fix this, according to the BJP? They had to unequivocally pledge their loyalty to BJP, surrendering their common sense in the process. The loyalty was manufactured in a way that it drew strength from seeing a brutal state in action. India’s imagination had moved from a docile Bharat Mata with the Indian flag, to the angry Hanuman. This surrender also meant that those loyal to the BJP would no longer gauge the country’s progress based on social development indicators, progress in facilities associated with health or education, equitable growth of the economy or anything rational; if the PM said you can beat a global pandemic by banging plates together to realign the planets, a loyalist just did so. Resilience that emerged in the form of public spectacles against this loyalty were managed by setting the police after them, or using mainstream media to portray these as “anti-national” interests – disloyal to Hindu interests. Finding nuance in this is difficult as is the case with anything sectarian, since the surrender was complete. Institutions that are supposed to keep a check on the government were also doctored, so much so that even judges sitting in the highest courts of the country smiled in compliance.Different versions of exploitationBefore 2014, instances of such surrender existed but very rarely, nationally. The Congress did not have the wisdom to see the danger in the communal programs that the RSS was running since the 1980s in almost every region, downplaying them as unimportant. They instead focused on exploitative pursuits such as mining across the country. For instance, Operation Green Hunt was a brainchild of the Congress, and was implemented in Chhattisgarh at first, alongside local BJP actors, at the core of which was displacing the Adivasi population, going to the extent of creating Salwa Judum, a state-sponsored civil militia. Land and resources in areas that fall under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution were annexed illegally to corporations over the dead bodies of hundreds but India barely flinched. Protests in the Congress era were managed just as violently, but more strategically – almost like a façade. However, in the BJP era, the might of the state has been used to publicly dehumanise those who dissent. This has been done by the state and loyalists alike. The result is that it has turned completely personal. The notion of how one comes together as a country, and for what, has itself been very complicated in India. From the time of Ambedkar to Gandhi during Independence; to the 1990s when Brahmins set themselves on fire demanding an end to reservation, and now, when the country’s majority prefers to look away if a Muslim is getting lynched, or when the ruling government orchestrates an ethnic cleansing program in Manipur, the country has never spoken as one, even at the most trying times.Education, too, has been one of the most contentious issues in India. With the CJP uprising, however, it feels like we are at a crossroads. Will such a young movement be able to steer it towards a more nuanced, informed direction than the ones this country has seen so far?Past uprisingsIt is not like India has not seen other massive protests in the last 12 years.The nationwide agitation after the death of Rohith Vemula, the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, the farmers protests – each of these got caricatured into Dalit, Muslim or Sikh so that the state apparatus could discredit them with slurs, followed by brutal incarceration. The truth is also that these protests still created massive churning.The manner in which caste came to be spoken about changed with the Rohith Vemula protests, forcing mainstream society to finally speak about caste disparity. It was only after 2015 that there was a shift even in the way the media reports caste violence. Similarly, the anti-CAA protests saw Muslims openly questioning the state’s Islamophobic agenda.Apart from these, the last few decades have also seen big protest mobilisations in states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu by dominant intermediate castes for reservation and other caste-specific perks.Very similar to the CJP template is a protest that happened in Tamil Nadu, which is the pro-Jalikattu (a traditional sport with Hindu symbolism) protests from 2017. Here, the crux was going against the Union government, which allowed for all people – be it ruling caste or oppressed castes – to come together. Lakhs of people protested for days at the Marina beach, and it ended with police violence and state repression. Jalikattu was allowed but does that mean that the sport can now be conducted by anybody else also? No. The protests preserved the caste capital of the Thevars, a coalition of three MBC castes, who are spread across different parts of Tamil Nadu. Apart from being numerically big, they also rule the roost in almost every sphere of the state. Caste-based groups demanding reservation would never participate in, let’s say, the Rohith Vemula agitation, even though they claim their fight is also for access. One has to dig deeper to understand why. Many dominant castes unleash violence on castes lower than them, and often derive their social entitlement from being land owning. But, many of these groups are also educationally backward. OBC communities, which are often reduced to being foot soldiers of the RSS, have not been focused on education as much as Dalits did. For Dalit families across the country, upward mobility in terms of class was only visible through education, even in a casteist society. Some OBCs chose the same path, while others, pushed by caste leaders across parties, went in the opposite direction, that is staying rooted in their caste identity to feel a false sense of superiority. This is especially true now, when unemployment is at the highest that the country has ever seen. Unemployed OBC youth continue to be mobilised by RSS and its affiliate groups along caste lines to reconnect with their caste, projecting this as “Hindu culture”. But in reality, this translates these young people taking out their frustration of a state that has failed them on Dalits, who are easy targets. Or Muslims, who the BJP has now successfully branded as “Bangladeshi immigrants” taking away jobs. These fissures are maintained by the Sangh to ensure that all these groups never come together as one, and keep their loyalty to the BJP. Yet, Abhijeet Dipke’s play on a comment by the CJI became an instant hit across all groups. This is not just because of its social media positioning but also because young people in India have been feeling the pinch of the incompetence of this government. To add to this, that such a comment would come from the highest court of India, against whom allegations of bias have been piling up, only took the ball all the way into the goalpost. A reckoning was here, and in months, it blew up at Jantar Mantar. A bigger spectacle emerged. The façade that the BJP had carefully manufactured over the decades tore into pieces, almost piercing through a veil that was kept intact by its priced assets; BJP’s loyalists. Establishment media swung into action, trying to cover up the acts of the police state, justifying them while demonising student protestors. Very few seemed to be paying attention to the loyalists. For the first time, they were not the loudest. Young people who are probably yet to cast their first votes were calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi names that no PM has ever been called across the country.Dipke’s best decision was choosing Delhi over Maharashtra, and rightly so. The CJP has been projected as an urban middle class grouping, but the truth is this is the group that needs politicisation, too, especially in the north, where Brahmins have controlled the popular narrative around education through anti-reservation posturing. Diagonally opposite is the south, where medical aspirants like S. Anitha travelled all the way from Ariyalur to New Delhi, bringing her cause in front of the highest court of the land. Her reality required her to do so.Students like her, spread across many oppressed caste and tribe identities, are already aware of what the system is doing against them but the ignorance of the urban middle class is real. Why Tamil Nadu is against NEET was hotly discussed at the CJP protests, with Anitha’s brother attending the protests himself, explaining how the purpose of such exams is to curtail access for children studying in rural India, especially those from SC or ST.The most oppressed communities across the country have shown their dissent to BJP through these 12 years. But if a real dent has to be made against BJP, not just the OBCs but also other ‘general caste’ communities have to turn. Reform and dissent are a collective responsibility, and a deeper reckoning among these communities is the need of the hour.The CJP protests worked because apart from oppressed communities who always show up, others showed up too and that means there is a politicisation happening of a class that has typically been pro-BJP. The CJP, in that sense, is an experiment for us to understand if the silent as well as privileged middle class can be reformed to break their loyalty to ignorance and a divisive agenda; and pledge it to a new collective cause.The BJP has sensed this, and it is now creating a counter movement with anti-reservation groups – the most powerful coalitions in the country when it comes to speaking about education. Even before the CJP protest ended in Delhi, mainstream TV media channels positioned debates emphasising the evils of “reservation”, through Brahmin students. From the Mandal commission protests in the 1990s, against reservation, there has never been any movement that has taken the right approach to the question of reservation, or what equitable access to education means for everybody. This is a question the CJP cannot ignore and this is what will probably decide if they will succeed or not, in actually humbling the BJP. This politicisation process that those who support the CJP are now facing is probably the bigger challenge than even what they did in Delhi.Greeshma Kuthar is an independent journalist and lawyer from Tamil Nadu.