Religion-Related Mobilisation Frames As a Counterforce Against Far-Right Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case of Ambedkarite Online Activism

Socio-political activism and mobilisation efforts against caste-based discrimination are integral to the cultural history and heritage shared by Dalit and Bahujan communities across India. Their activities emerged as a reaction to hundreds of years of caste inequality and discrimination in social, political, economic, and religious interactions. With the wider availability of the Internet and new technologies in the 21st century, digital media has gained much importance in propagating anti-caste discourses and efforts, especially among the younger and college-educated generation of Dalit-Bahujans and Ambedkarites. Drawing on the legacies of Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram, activists primarily aim at creating change in Indian society, utilising digital media as a new type of protest repertoire for addressing the caste-religion relationships and the rise of far-right Hindu nationalism in India.

This paper focuses on the mobilisation discourses of contemporary Ambedkarite anti-caste activists through analysis of textual production published on the prominent Ambedkarite online blog platform Round Table India: For an Informed Ambedkar Age (RTI). The case study utilised a combination of structural topic modelling and content-based frame analysis on public textual contributions from 2010 to 2023, comprising approximately 3,000 documents with metadata from more than 1,000 authors all around India. The paper presents major topics, mobilisation frames, and grievances that dominate the current debate in Ambedkarite communities, how they evolve through time, and the role of religion in them – specifically Buddhism, which has been at the centre of one of the largest Dalit-Bahujan socio-political protests in history since the 1950s. With its central question of whether and how activists employ religion-related framings in mobilisation discourse, the paper addresses the current socio-political situation in India, interactions between Hindutva discourse and its anti-caste counterforces, and the overall role of religion in the mobilisation strategies of social movements.