Dalits make up nearly 20 percent of the Indian population—and many of them are angry at Modi’s government. Last week, hundreds of thousands of them flooded the streets nationwide, protesting ongoing discrimination against them. But their mistreatment within society was rampant even before Modi’s BJP took power in 2014. Between 2007 and 2017, crime against Dalits increased by 66 percent and the rape of Dalit women doubled, according to the National Crime Record Bureau. And now Dalit anger—which manifests in regular protests, strikes, and social media furor—stands to make a major impact on India’s national elections next year.

Perhaps that’s why Modi is trying to win them over—not only as voters, but also as potential party members. The prime minister has been sending Buddhist monks out on the campaign trail and has even attracted some Buddhist politicians to his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He’s also been publicly praising Ambedkar.

In 1954, Ambedkar wrote a “blueprint” for the spread of Indian Buddhism in which he recommended printing a compact “Buddhist Gospel” like the Bible and “a ceremony like Baptism” for converts. In 1955, he founded the Buddhist Society of India. In 1956, he publicly converted to Buddhism alongside half a million others. Six weeks later, however, he died.

One of his descendants, Rajratna Ambedkar, became the Society’s president three years ago. In response to growing demand, he has vigorously rebooted its program of mass conversions. “Almost every day now, mass Buddhist conversions are taking place across India,” he told me. After helping convert 500 people in Shirasgaon last month, for instance, he woke up early the next morning to drive to the city of Surat, where he converted another 500 people that night.

Still, in a country of over 1.2 billion people, the number of registered Indian Buddhists remains tiny at about 8.4 million. About 87 percent of them are Ambedkarites or converts, and the rest are ethnic Buddhists in the Himalayan provinces or Tibetan refugees who followed the Dalai Lama to India. But accurate statistics on Buddhist converts are hard to find because many are not registered as such on the census.

“Often the [census] surveyor doesn’t even ask about religion once he hears a Hindu-sounding name,” said Shiv Shankar Das, a former researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has studied the neo-Buddhist movement. Modern Ambedkarites hope to change this: “We are trying to convince the Indian government that we are not Dalits anymore, not part and parcel of Hinduism,” said Rajratna Ambedkar.

Ambedkarite Buddhism is an increasingly popular option for dissatisfied Dalits because converting from Hinduism to Islam or Christianity is now illegal in several states. Buddhism is considered a “sub-sect” of Hinduism in Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, which is a useful loophole for conversion—and a hindrance, because it’s a major reason why the Hindu establishment doesn’t fully recognize Buddhist identity today. Over the course of Indian history, Buddhism has been uneasily absorbed into the Hindu fold, with some arguing that Buddha was really an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. This is a fiercely contested notion, one that converts to Ambedkarite Buddhism specifically pledge to reject.

In its focus on caste-based inequality, Ambedkarite Buddhism shares concerns of the historical Buddha, the prince whose groundbreaking rejection of Hindu castes, the Vedas, and Vedic rituals spurred his philosophical journey. But Ambedkaritism diverges from the mainstream Buddhist schools, like Theravada and Mahayana, which have developed over the past two millennia. Ambedkar summarily dismissed everything from the Four Noble Truths to meditation to the doctrine of rebirth, deeming them non-canonical interpretations that arose after the Buddha’s lifetime. Contemporary Ambedkarite institutions, like the Nagaloka Center in Nagpur, focus instead on training social activists.