Dalit/black solidarity: Comrades in the struggle for racial/caste justice

Abstract

ABSTRACT India’s struggle for caste justice has been likened by many to the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Small wonder then, that the activists who spearheaded the movement for caste justice were inspired by the most famous of the activists in the United States, the Black Panthers of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. One of my most memorable encounters from my newsroom days in India in the early 1990s was with Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit activists who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement. This essay draws on that experience, as also some others with the Dalit movement and Dalit leaders in India and links their struggle for social justice with that of African Americans, from the Harlem Renaissance era to the present.