Such efforts by the Modi government to unleash the real revolutionary ideas of Dr Ambedkar to use the free market as a weapon to deal with social injustice, rather than convert social justice into a leftist slogan of rhetoric, has stirred up a hornet's nest. Vested interests, which have made a living for decades, using the victimhood and atrocities stories of Dalits, find the trend threatening their livelihood. So the empire of the old establishment has been striking back. Every stray incident has made it to the national headlines, and every atrocity incident has been made to fit into the stereotypes of “right-wing upper-caste Hindu nationalist” versus “marginalised suppressed Dalits”.

A case in point is the incident in Gujarat’s Una district in 2016, when four Dalit men were assaulted for skinning cow carcasses. As Uday Mahurkar, deputy editor of India Today, had reported, the incident took place on 11 July, and on the same day, a team of BJP’s state-level Dalit leaders arrived at the village and castigated the dereliction of duty on the part of the policemen, resulting in the arrest of the assailants the very next day.

Yet, a project was launched. Politician Jignesh Mevani rode a wave of propaganda, supported by the Congress, and soon the media narrative was about “Dalit versus BJP-RSS”. As Gujarati Dalit scholar Kishore Makwana has pointed out, “not one assailant was connected to the RSS, while anti-RSS forces are bent upon projecting it as an act by RSS men”.

In fact, voices like that of Mevani are old wine of colonial distortions in a new bottle of Dalit politics. They represent the classic case of pseudo-Dalits.

Yet these phenomena have a long chain of connections and their web of deceit needs to be understood in their sordid totality.

Dalit Voice, a magazine run by V T Rajshekar, a former Indian Express journalist, was launched in 1981. By 1990, Arthur Bonner, a former New York Times reporter, had identified Rajshekar as “the most outspoken and sharp-tongued defender of the untouchables and tribals of India”.

Rajshekar interprets the social problems that plague India through the framework of racial conspiracies. In his view, India itself is a conspiracy against what he calls in the tagline of his magazine “the persecuted nationalities denied human rights”. He is a quasi-inversed Nazi ideologue, in the sense that here the Aryans are the villains, forever conspiring against the Dalits, while the Zionists happily join hands with them. In his strange world, even Hitler was manipulated by “Brahminical Jews”. An article titled “Jews holding neck of USA kicked out one by one” (May 2007) declares that “the Jews are well aware of history and how the Brahminical Jews had manipulated Hitler himself and his German Nazis to persecute the Jews — finally leading to Holocaust”.

A month before this, Dalit Voice, in its editorial, had warned China to be cautious of Jews: “Just as the Brahmins created M K Gandhi, the Jews created Lenin. The difference is the Jews after creating communism also killed it in 1990.”

The term “Brahminical Jews” and identifying Brahmins as the “Jews of India” are not empty rhetoric for Dalit Voice. In its March 2004 issue, the magazine made the — incredible — claim that Brahminism and Zionism are “two faces of the same coin”. The same issue carried a report headlined: “Genetic research confirms Aryan invasion theory and origin of castes.” In fact, Rajshekar believes that Brahmins have Jewish origins — or is it the other way round? In December 2004, he wrote: “In our book Brahminism (Dalit Sahitya Academy, 2002), we have a separate Chapter IV, ‘Jews and Jews of India’… on the Jewish origin of Brahmins. The book also has two annexures (No 2 and 3) on the ‘Brahminical origin of Zionist thoughts’ and ‘Nazis, Jews and Jews of India’.”