Political representation in legislatures, bureaucracy, judiciary, media, corporate India; local-body governance.
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Jantar Mantar, Delhi, July 21, 2026 — the same protest ground where Dipke led the Cockroach Janta Party's demonstration weeks earlier. No verifiably-licensed photo of Dipke himself, or of his own late-June protest specifically, was found; this is the real location, a later date. — Alnitak-Alnilam-Mintaka / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
India's biggest youth movement is led by a Dalit founder who never mentions caste, and carries Ambedkar's biography to his protests. Both facts matter.
When the Cockroach Janta Party's own founder named himself Dalit, the movement's own base turned on him with the language of merit — exposing exactly the gap between votes harvested and power shared that Ambedkar warned about.
West Bengal's new government cut OBC reservation from 17% to 7% and struck 77 mostly-Muslim communities from the list, citing a real court ruling against the previous government's procedure. The remedy for a procedural violation became a tool for wholesale erasure.
West Bengal's Dalit voters turned out at a historic 93.71% despite a mass voter-roll purge — and received zero substantive policy commitments from any major party. Ambedkar diagnosed exactly this gap between franchise and power in 1949.
Zero of 121 leadership roles in India's newsrooms are held by a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe journalist — and the data shows the loss isn't at the classroom, it's at the hiring door.
