On the evening of June 5, 1973, nearly a hundred members of the Dalit Panthers gathered at Indora Chowk in Nagpur. The city was sweltering. M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS chief who had led the organization for 33 years and transformed it into a pan-Indian force, had just died. The Panthers marched through the streets with sticks and torches toward Golwalkar's empty headquarters. Seventeen-year-old Saroj Meshram remembered it as a night when the heat could not stifle the heat of their own fury. They chanted slogans at both RSS buildings. No cadre emerged to meet them. The streets belonged, for a few hours, to the people the RSS had always defended the caste system against.
Fifty years later, this moment matters not for what the Panthers destroyed—Golwalkar was already dead, and the RSS proved durable—but for what they forced the RSS to stop saying.
The Dalit Panthers were founded in Bombay in 1972 by Namdeo Dhasal, J.V. Pawar, Raja Dhale, and other Dalit and Buddhist activists, modeled on the American Black Panthers. Dhasal was a poet and taxi driver from the Golpitha red-light district whose nine collections of visceral, vernacular verse shocked Marathi literary circles and scandalized the middle-class. "Poetry is politics," he insisted. The Panthers meant it literally. They were not street agitators. They were intellectuals who had read Ambedkar's work and declared themselves his inheritors. They organized on the proposition that [[Ambedkar's critique of political parties and nationalist democracy|ambedkar-critique-political-parties-nationalism]] applied to every institution defending the caste system—including the RSS.
Here is what Golwalkar believed. In his 1939 manifesto We, he had written that the four-fold Brahminical division of Hindu society was at "the very core of our concept of 'nation.'" In his later collected speeches [[Bunch of Thoughts]], he insisted that demanding caste-based reservations was "divisive talk" and called for "a complete halt to forming groups based on caste." He never questioned whether caste itself was divisive. For Golwalkar, the problem was not hierarchy. The problem was Dalits naming it.
By 1973, the Panthers were the only force in India saying publicly and with sustained, organized militancy that this was unacceptable. The Anti-Caste Movement had a long history. Ambedkar had spent his life building institutions and organizations toward the "annihilation of caste." But in the 1970s, the Panthers made caste the immediate, urgent, undeniable subject of street politics. They could not seize the state. They could seize the discourse.
What happened next is what the Caravan article in June 2026 documents: the RSS was forced to change its language. Not its ideology. Its language.
In the early 1970s, immediately after the Panthers emerged, M.D. Deoras, the third RSS chief, publicly rejected the caste system for the first time in the organization's history. He declared: "If untouchability is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." This was not Ambedkarite conviction. It was political necessity. The Panthers had made public defense of varnashrama untenable.
The RSS responded not by renouncing its ideology but by repackaging it. In 1983, ten years after Golwalkar's death, the organization founded the Samajik Samrasta Manch—the Organization for Social Harmony. The name was deliberate. Established on April 14, Ambedkar's birthday, the Manch institutionalized a new rhetoric. The problem was no longer "caste hierarchy"—which remained intact in practice. The problem was "social disharmony" requiring dialogue, welfare programs, and the integration of Dalits into Hindu nationalism. The rhetorical ground had shifted from defending varnashrama to advocating samajik samrasta: social harmony, not justice. Adaptation, not annihilation.
By the 2000s, this had matured into Hindutva's contemporary SC/OBC outreach strategy. The RSS and BJP now selectively quoted Ambedkar—especially his criticisms of Islam and communism—while systematically suppressing his explicit instruction that "without Hindu religion being destroyed, caste system will not be annihilated." They built statues in his name. They opened centers. They welcomed SC and OBC cadre into shakhas, offering dignity and formal address that contrasted with the social exclusion these communities faced. They built micromanaged programs across caste sub-groups. At the grassroots, the underlying work remained: strengthen the caste system, they told their cadre, because it was essential for Hindu society. The hierarchy persisted; only the conversation changed.
This could look like concession. The Panthers forced the RSS to stop saying what Golwalkar had said. That is an achievement. Subaltern movements reshape ideological terrain without taking state power. The language you can speak in public matters. What the RSS can say about caste in 2026 is constrained by the Panthers' 1973 street politics.
But consider what the rhetorical shift concealed.
The 2026 West Bengal Legislative Assembly Election is instructive. West Bengal has 60 scheduled caste communities comprising 23.51 percent of the state's population—the second-largest Dalit population of any Indian state. Yet across the April 2026 election, there was, according to reporting on the election, a broad consensus among Bengali upper-caste elites of the Left, Right, and Center that Dalit aspirations and autonomous Dalit politics should not re-emerge. The political silence was total. The Matua Scheduled Caste community, with histories of migration to districts like North 24-Parganas, was hit by electoral roll purges that removed millions of voters before the election. Of 68 reserved SC seats, the BJP won 51—75 percent—positioning itself as the sole defender of Dalit interests while every other party colluded in erasure. Substantive Dalit political power remained constrained. The conversation about caste had changed. The distribution of power had not.
This is what rhetorical retreat looks like at scale. The RSS no longer needs to defend varnashrama in public because the outcomes remain the same. Caste hierarchy persists. Dalit political demands remain illegible. The state does not enumerate caste. The courts do not aggressively prosecute atrocities. Every major institution—the judiciary, the civil service, the political class—operates on the assumption that Dalit questions are secondary to national unity.
What, then, did the Panthers actually achieve? They rewrote what could be said. They demonstrated that Ambedkarite organizing could reshape ideological terrain even without commanding state institutions. They showed that subaltern movements do not require state power to constrain the language of the powerful. In that, they were extraordinary.
But they also revealed a harder truth: controlling the conversation is not the same as controlling power. The RSS adapted. It absorbed. It repackaged caste liberation as "social harmony" and went on defending the hierarchy through every institution that mattered. Fifty years after the Nagpur march, the Panthers' intellectual heirs face the same problem their founders faced: the dominant forces are flexible on rhetoric and absolute on structure.
The question for today is whether the Anti-Caste Movement can push beyond reshaping what can be said to reshaping what can be done. The Panthers proved discourse is not immovable. Whether institutions are proves another matter entirely.