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Abhijeet Dipke

Activist, digital political organizer, founder of Cockroach Janata Party

Abhijeet Dipke is a 30-year-old Dalit activist and digital political organizer from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra. He earned his undergraduate degree in journalism from Pune before pursuing graduate study in public relations at Boston University, graduating in 2025. Prior to his graduate studies, Dipke worked with the Aam Aadmi Party's social media team from 2020 to 2023, where he developed expertise in meme-based political campaigning and digital youth engagement during the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections. Dipke founded the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) in May 2026 as a satirical political movement responding to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant's remarks characterizing India's unemployed youth as "parasites" and "cockroaches." The CJP rapidly became a viral phenomenon, gaining over 20 million Instagram followers and attracting 46,000 signups within 48 hours, positioning itself as a youth-led digital political platform focused on Generation Z concerns around unemployment, education pressure, and government accountability. The movement's manifesto proposes significant reforms, including raising women's parliamentary reservation to 55 percent and preventing Chief Justices from receiving Rajya Sabha appointments after retirement. In June 2026, Dipke transitioned from digital activism to street-level organizing, leaving the United States to return to India and lead NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) medical exam reform protests, announcing his commitment with "#JaiBhim." He has positioned the CJP as a mechanism to mobilize youth toward concrete civic action, including filing Right to Information requests and demanding ministerial accountability.

Anand Teltumbde

Scholar, author, civil-rights activist, and management professor

Anand Teltumbde was born on 15 July 1951 in Rajur, Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, the eldest of eight children in a Dalit farm-laboring family. He holds a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering (1973) from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, an MBA (1982) from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and a PhD (1993) in cybernetic modelling from the University of Mumbai. He was later awarded an honorary D.Litt. by Karnataka State Open University. He is married to Rama Teltumbde, granddaughter of B.R. Ambedkar — a connection he has publicly stated he is careful not to trade upon, insisting his work must stand on its own intellectual merits. Before entering academia, Teltumbde held senior corporate roles: Executive Director at Bharat Petroleum and Managing Director at Petronet India Limited. He subsequently joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur as a professor before moving in 2016 to the Goa Institute of Management as a Senior Professor, where he established a Big Data programme. He also maintained a long-running column, "Margin Speak," in the Economic and Political Weekly, and contributed regularly to Outlook, Tehelka, Seminar, and Himal Southasian. Teltumbde is one of the most prolific and theoretically rigorous voices in contemporary anti-caste scholarship. His major works include The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid (2010), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2015), Republic of Caste (2018) — a collection of essays assessing Dalit political life in India — and Dalits: Past, Present and Future. His intellectual project seeks a synthesis of Ambedkarism and Marxism, arguing that neither caste-only nor class-only frameworks are sufficient for Dalit liberation, and that the caste system must be annihilated rather than merely reformed. He has been sharply critical of symbolic Dalit politics and of the appropriation of Ambedkar's legacy by rival electoral parties. In 2018, Teltumbde was implicated in the Elgar Parishad / Bhima Koregaon case, accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) of having links to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and of involvement in an alleged conspiracy against Prime Minister Narendra Modi — charges he has consistently denied. He was first arrested and released on 3 February 2019. After the Supreme Court dismissed his anticipatory bail on 16 March 2020, he surrendered to the National Investigation Agency on 14 April 2020 from Rajgruha, Ambedkar's former Mumbai residence. He was held as an undertrial for 31 months at Taloja Central Jail in Maharashtra. A Pegasus spyware infection of his phone had been documented in October 2019. More than 600 international scholars signed a joint statement condemning the prosecution as a "witch-hunt." The Bombay High Court granted him bail in November 2022, finding "no prima facie evidence" to sustain the charges. His brother Milind Teltumbde, a Maoist insurgent, was killed by security forces during the same period. Following his release, Teltumbde published The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir (Bloomsbury), documenting his incarceration, the conditions of Taloja Central Jail, the COVID-19 pandemic inside prison, and his fellow undertrial inmates. He also published The Caste Con Census (Navayana), a critical analysis of the arguments for and likely consequences of a national caste census. As of 2025–26, his bail conditions severely restrict his movement within India. In January 2024, the Government of Karnataka awarded him the Basava Puraskara.

Asang Wankhede

Legal scholar, anti-caste author, and poet; DPhil (Law) candidate at the University of Oxford

Asang Wankhede is a Dalit legal scholar, anti-caste author, and poet from a slum colony in Nagpur, Maharashtra. He holds a B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) from National Law University, Delhi (2016), and an LLM in Human Rights, Conflict, and Justice from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (2018, Distinction), where he read as a Felix Scholar. He subsequently pursued graduate legal study at the University of Oxford, completing an MPhil in Law (awarded without corrections) before embarking on a DPhil in Law, affiliated with Balliol College and Wolfson College. His doctoral research undertakes a doctrinal assessment of Indian constitutional law jurisprudence on the interaction of caste and poverty in affirmative action policy, with particular attention to the proliferation of reservation policies in favour of dominant upper-caste and middle-caste groups. In 2022, Wankhede published his monograph "Affirmative Action for Economically Weaker Sections and Upper-Castes in Indian Constitutional Law: Context, Judicial Discourse, and Critique" (Routledge, UK) — the first doctrinal analysis of upper-caste reservations in India. The book examines the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, which introduced an income- and asset-based standard for determining backwardness, and includes case studies of Maharashtra, Haryana, and Gujarat. The Bar Council of India subsequently designated it a compulsory reference book for Constitutional Law-I courses in Indian law schools. In 2024, he served as Lead Research Consultant for the Australian Human Rights Commission's National Community Consultations on Caste Discrimination. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal. Beyond his academic work, Wankhede has been active in Dalit student politics against institutional caste-based segregation and discrimination in university spaces. He writes opinion journalism for publications including The Wire, The Leaflet, The Quint, Outlook India, and Countercurrents, and contributes poetry — including "Ripples of Revolution," published for Ambedkar Jayanti — that draws directly on his experience as a Dalit from Nagpur. His research interests span discrimination law, comparative equality law, international human rights law, critical legal theory, and socio-legal studies.

Ashwini Deshpande

Professor of Economics, Founding Director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA)

Ashwini Deshpande is a Professor of Economics at Ashoka University, where she is the Founding Director of the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA). She also serves as a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics' International Inequalities Institute and is affiliated with the IZA network as a Research Fellow. Her research career has evolved significantly. Early in her academic trajectory, she focused on the international debt crises of developing countries during the 1980s, for which her doctoral dissertation earned the EXIM Bank Award for Outstanding Dissertation in 1994. Since then, her scholarly work has centered on the economics of caste and gender discrimination in India, affirmative action policies, and inequality across multiple dimensions. Deshpande is the author of two influential books published by Oxford University Press: "The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India" (2011, revised 2017) and "Affirmative Action in India" (2013). She has also edited collections on global economic and development perspectives. Her published research addresses son preference, gender gaps in education, caste-based wage disparities, social identity's impact on economic outcomes, and the effectiveness of affirmative action policies in reducing inequality. In recognition of her contributions to Indian economics, she received the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian Economists under 45.

B.R. Ambedkar

Jurist, Economist, Statesman, Social Reformer, Constitutional Architect

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar — born on 14 April 1891 in Mhow (present-day Dr Ambedkar Nagar, Madhya Pradesh) and known to his followers as Babasaheb — was born Bhimrao Ramji Sakpal into a Mahar family, one of the communities classified as "untouchable" under India's caste hierarchy. His father, Ramji Maloji Sakpal, served as a Subedar in the British Indian Army, and the family traced its Marathi roots to Ambadawe village in Ratnagiri district; Ambedkar later adopted the name of that ancestral village as his own surname. Despite his father's military standing, caste discrimination shaped his earliest years: as a child he was segregated in school classrooms, barred from touching shared water vessels, and denied access to spaces reserved for caste Hindus. He went on to become one of the most credentialed intellectuals of the twentieth century and the foremost theorist of anti-caste liberation in the Indian subcontinent. A scholarship from the Gaekwar (ruler) of Baroda enabled Ambedkar to study abroad. At Columbia University in New York (1913–1916), under the mentorship of economist Edwin R.A. Seligman, he completed an M.A. in economics; his 1916 seminar paper "Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development" remains a foundational text of anti-caste scholarship. He then enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1916, studying social theory under L.T. Hobhouse while simultaneously reading for the Bar at Gray's Inn. His LSE doctoral thesis, "The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution" — an analysis of British colonial monetary policy — was initially rejected in March 1923, reportedly as too radical, before being accepted in November 1923; it earned him a D.Sc. in Economics and was published that same year. He was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1923. He later returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in economics in 1927, making him the first South Asian to hold dual doctorates from both Columbia and LSE. Back in India, Ambedkar combined legal practice with unrelenting social advocacy. In 1920 he founded the weekly newspaper Mooknayak ("Leader of the Voiceless"), and in 1924 the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, whose rallying motto — "Educate, Agitate, Organise" — became the animating principle of the Dalit movement. In 1927 he led the Mahad Satyagraha, asserting Dalits' right to draw water from Mahad's Chavdar Tank, and publicly burned a copy of the Manusmriti. The 1932 Poona Pact — signed at Yerwada Central Jail on 24 September 1932 between Ambedkar and Madan Mohan Malaviya — resolved a nationally charged dispute over separate electorates for the Depressed Classes: rather than the independent constituencies Ambedkar had won through the Communal Award, the Pact substituted 148 reserved seats within a joint Hindu electorate, a compromise Ambedkar accepted under the duress of Gandhi's fast unto death but which he later described as a defeat extorted from him. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936 — it won 11 reserved and 3 general seats in the 1937 Bombay elections — and served as Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council (1942–1946). Ambedkar was elected to the Constituent Assembly in December 1946 and appointed Chairman of its Drafting Committee on 29 August 1947. He guided the framing of India's Constitution, adopted on 26 November 1949, integrating fundamental rights, the explicit abolition of untouchability (Article 17), and constitutional provisions for affirmative action for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. He served simultaneously as India's first Law and Justice Minister (1947–1951) under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Bombay State in 1952. He resigned from Nehru's cabinet in October 1951 when the government failed to pass his landmark Hindu Code Bill, which sought to reform Hindu personal law to guarantee women equal rights to inheritance, divorce, and property. After more than two decades of publicly investigating which religion offered the best path of liberation from caste, Ambedkar publicly embraced Buddhism on 14 October 1956 at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur. He received the Three Refuges and Five Precepts in a formal ceremony and administered 22 additional vows to his followers — vows designed specifically to sever converts from caste-embedded Hindu practice and to reject any assimilation of the Buddha into the Hindu pantheon. An estimated 500,000 followers converted alongside him. Ambedkar identified four criteria that Buddhism uniquely satisfied: compatibility with reason and science; a moral code grounded in liberty, equality, and fraternity; refusal to sanctify poverty; and grounding in legal or moral sanction. He died at his home in New Delhi on 6 December 1956 — less than two months after his conversion, and just three days after completing his last major work, The Buddha and His Dhamma. The Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, was conferred on him posthumously in 1990. The Dalit Buddhist movement he inaugurated transformed the religious demography of Maharashtra, where Buddhist communities — predominantly Mahar converts and their descendants — now represent approximately 6% of the state's population and roughly 77% of India's total Buddhist population.

Chinthada Anand

Pastor, Treasurer of Pastors Fellowship

=== NOTES === I verified the existing biographical information across multiple authoritative sources including the official judgment from Indian Kanoon, legal analysis from Supreme Court Observer, and journalism from The Leaflet and The Wire. The core facts are accurate and well-sourced: Chinthada Anand was born into the Madiga Scheduled Caste, converted to Christianity, served as a pastor for approximately ten years conducting Sunday prayer meetings in Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh, and held the position of treasurer in the local Pastors Fellowship. The incidents of alleged assault on January 3 and January 24, 2021, and the Supreme Court judgment on March 24, 2026, are confirmed across sources. I added two substantive journalistic sources (The Leaflet and The Wire) to complement the existing three legal sources. This brings the source count from 3 to 5, providing both official judgment text and critical legal analysis. Birthdate and deathdate remain unavailable in all public sources consulted—standard biographical information that may not be publicly documented for this individual. I noted that the existing document mentions December 2020 telephone calls, but my sources only explicitly confirm the January 2021 physical assault incidents; the December contact may come from the original FIR or court filings not fully detailed in secondary sources.

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