Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 231
structures (both traditional and modern) in which the underprivileged
and the poor are trapped." With applrently
no justification to be deduced from anything he had just
said, he wanted to use "the democratic idea as a means of
rendering the state into a socially purposive instrument"
whose legitimacy and indispensable authority would be
clear to all.
But who are the underprivileged and poor?
No antiauthoritarian history (or revolutionary social
transformation) ofIndia could overlook the issue of caste,
one of the most toxic systems of social hierarchy ever instituted
in the world, comparable in its entrenched effects to
the foundational racism of the u.s. state-a comparison not
lost on the Dalit Panthers, who modeled themselves on the
Black Panthers, combined with a splash ofNaxalism and a
generous infusion of Ambedkarism, when they formed their
group in 1972. The Dalit's new political visibility after the
MandaI Commission's report in 1980 was one of the features
identified as transforming the terms of the Nehru-era political
discourse.34 "To this new brand of vernacular leaders;'
Menon and Nigam write, "the ideological battles between
Left and Right might have appeared . .. as insubstantial
differences within a modernist bloc ofprivilege."35
Yet Dalit movements weren't necessarily antiauthoritarian,
although some were indeed radically egalitarian.
(Some weren't even that, seeking not an end to the hierarchy
but instead a better rung on the ladder for a particular
group.) From the anarchist perspective, Dalit and feminist
movements may be objectively, even ifnot subjectively,
revolutionary in their efforts at dismantling interlocked,