Dalit Panthers Nagpur Protest March (June 5, 1973, day after Golwalkar's death)

On the evening of June 5, 1973—the day M.S. Golwalkar, the second leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), died in Nagpur—nearly a hundred members of the Dalit Panthers' Nagpur chapter gathered at Indora Chowk to protest and celebrate. Led by Saroj Meshram (then 17 years old), Prakash Ramteke, Bhimrao Naik, Babban Katane, Suresh Waghmare, and Suresh Ghate, the group organized an impromptu march through the heart of the city toward the RSS headquarters in Mahal locality and the RSS office at Reshimbagh. Armed with sticks and torches, participants chanted slogans—"RSS Murdabad! Golwalkar Murdabad! Brahminism Murdabad!"—and some distributed sweets in commemoration. Despite the proximity to the RSS seat of power, no counter-response was mounted from either location.

The Dalit Panthers, founded in 1972 by Namdeo Dhasal, J.V. Pawar, Raja Dhale, and other Dalit and Buddhist activists, were a militant anti-caste organization modeled on the American Black Panther Party. They had emerged in response to decades of violence and discrimination against Dalits despite the constitutional abolition of untouchability in 1950. Golwalkar, who had led the RSS for 33 years and transformed it from a regional to a pan-Indian organization, had been a staunch advocate of the caste system, writing in his manifesto that the four-fold division of Hindus was at "the very core of our concept of nation." The Dalit Panthers' gathering in Nagpur on June 5, 1973, was thus both a direct rejection of Golwalkar's ideology and an assertion of the Panthers' vision of radical caste liberation connected to broader struggles against class, gender, and labor exploitation.