The Priesthood of Blue: How Ambedkarites Learned to Worship What Was Meant to Destroy Worship

There is a discomfort that must be stated without diplomatic cushioning: the current exhaustion of anti-caste politics cannot be blamed entirely on the ingenuity of the state or the opportunism of the right wing. A significant part of the crisis is internal. A section of Ambedkarites—particularly those who now occupy the circuits of academia, NGOs, digital platforms, and institutional activism—have, over time, transformed a radical intellectual and political tradition into a liturgical order. B. R. Ambedkar, who spent his life dismantling scriptures, is now installed as scripture; a thinker of annihilation becomes the centerpiece of a new orthodoxy.

What was once strategy has hardened into habit. The statue, the jayanti, the portrait, the slogan—these were historically tactical instruments in a hostile social terrain. But tactics, when repeated without transformation, become rituals. And rituals, when institutionalized, produce priesthoods. Within sections of Ambedkarite circles, one increasingly observes not a politics of critique but a politics of guardianship: who speaks correctly, who represents Ambedkar authentically, who performs reverence with sufficient intensity. The question is no longer “how do we dismantle caste?” but “who owns Ambedkar?” This is a subtle but decisive shift—from material struggle to symbolic custodianship.

Scholars like Gopal Guru have long warned about the dangers of reducing Dalit politics to recognition without restructuring, where dignity is sought in visibility while material hierarchies remain intact. Anand Teltumbde has been even more unsparing, pointing to how sections of Ambedkarite politics risk sliding into identity fetishism, where the assertion of symbols substitutes for the transformation of economic and social relations. The critique is not that symbols are irrelevant, but that they have begun to operate as ends in themselves, detached from the very conditions they were meant to contest.

This detachment produces a peculiar conservatism within a movement that otherwise speaks the language of radicalism. The Ambedkarite public sphere, in parts, has developed an allergy to internal critique. Any questioning of symbolic excess is quickly read as betrayal, as dilution, as ideological impurity. What emerges is not a democratic intellectual culture but a defensive one—where repetition is mistaken for commitment and dissent is disciplined in the name of unity. In such a climate, the movement becomes predictable, and what is predictable is easily appropriated.

It is precisely this predictability that allows the state to step in with ease. When politics is reduced to symbols, the state can out-symbolize the movement. It can build bigger statues, organize grander commemorations, issue more official recognitions. And because the movement itself has over-invested in the symbolic, it finds itself unable to contest this appropriation without undermining its own practices. The result is an awkward complicity: the same forms that once signified resistance now circulate seamlessly within state power. The critique collapses because it shares its language with what it seeks to oppose.

Here one might recall Pierre Bourdieu, who reminds us that symbolic capital can become a trap—offering recognition that conceals domination. Or Antonio Gramsci, who shows how hegemonic power thrives not by crushing opposition but by reorganizing it within its own logic. But the sharper edge of the problem lies closer home: the willingness of sections of Ambedkarite politics to remain within that symbolic economy, to derive legitimacy from it, and to police it rather than transcend it.

There is also an affective dimension that cannot be ignored. For historically oppressed communities, Ambedkar is not merely a thinker; he is a figure of profound emotional and civilizational significance. This emotional investment is both understandable and politically generative. But when affect hardens into sanctification, critique becomes difficult. The figure who enabled questioning becomes insulated from it. And once critique is suspended, politics begins to stagnate.

The tragedy, then, is not that Ambedkar is being appropriated—it is that he has been made appropriable. A politics that anchors itself excessively in symbols, that confuses visibility with victory, and that treats internal critique as heresy inadvertently prepares the ground for its own neutralization. The state does not need to invent new strategies; it merely has to mirror what already exists, scale it up, and strip it of its antagonism.

To say this is not to abandon Ambedkarite politics, but to take it seriously. For if B. R. Ambedkar meant anything, it was precisely this: that no idea, no symbol, no authority should be beyond interrogation. A movement that forgets this risks becoming what it once opposed—not in content, perhaps, but in form. And in politics, form has a way of quietly becoming destiny.