Smouldering Dalit fires in Bihar, India

Abstract

In the 1980s, Jehanabad district was the epicentre of a Maoist-led armed struggle against landowning classes in Bihar. The Maoist cadres organized the landless Dalit labourers against upper caste landlords around the issues of land, wages, caste discrimination and sexual abuse of Dalit women. The heightened period of Dalit mobilization and struggle of the 1980s, however, gave way to a period of their demobilization in the late 1990s. In this article I explore the Dalit experience of structural cleavages that gave rise to their initial support for the Maoist movement as well as analyse the reasons for their later demobilization. Central to this discussion is an analysis of the Maoist trajectories of armed struggle and mass mobilization and its implications for Dalit participation in the Maoist movement.