Jatin Mathur
Since February 2025, Buddhist monks have been protesting, seeking to reclaim control of Mahabodhi. In 1892, an archaeological survey by Alexander Cunningham confirmed that Mahabodhi was originally a Buddhist site. Hence, this has led to a persistent demand through the Mahabodhi Liberation Movement that control of the site be handed over to Buddhists. For the last 76 years, the temple has been managed by an eight-member committee — four Hindus and four Buddhists — under the Bodh Gaya Temple Act, 1949, a Bihar state law.
Recently, it was reported that anti-social Caste Hindus assaulted Buddhist monks within the temple premises, and that monk Bhante Vinacharya has been missing for 3 days. Further communal slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” were raised at the protest site, putting the safety of the monks at risk.
Lokesh Bag writes on X, “Performing Hindu rituals by Brahmins at Mahabodhi Mahavihara on Buddha Purnima is a direct insult to the Buddhist community worldwide. It exposes a larger agenda to Brahminize and appropriate Buddhist spaces—an overt form of religious colonization.” This colonization is a modern counter-revolution against constitutional liberties and Buddhist consciousness among the Bahujan, similar to the historical counter-revolution by Brahminism against Buddhism as depicted by Ambedkar.
In this article, I examine the silences of progressive forces upon communalism directed at religious minorities, particularly Buddhists. The silences of progressive and liberal forces of revolution can be explained on social, political, and philosophical grounds.
Activist Savarna and Silent Left: These ideologies’ activism seems to lack objectivity in organising solidarity for the oppressed. They are often presented as radical or revolutionary by intellectuals, but cease to be critical when the oppressed do not possess numerical preponderance, making them politically irrelevant. When Hindutva nationalists take on religious minorities like Muslims and Christians, the Savarna-left-liberal intellectuals articulate a serious concern about secularism. Further, they generate an ethical and moral imperative upon minorities, Ambedkarite and other indigenous movements to join the struggle against communalism and capitalism. However, when these alternative social movements, especially concerned with Dalit-Bahujan identity, demand solidarity, they fail to reciprocate. What I argue is not a disregard of collective struggles or alliances beyond identities or ideologies, but an attempt to recognise and make visible the structures of bias, power, and silences of progressive movements.
Socially speaking, the failure of left and progressive forces to challenge this is not accidental but rooted in a sociological inertia: a discomfort with Bahujan Dhammic consciousness that challenges Marxist materialist orthodoxy.
Despite its anti-caste roots, Buddhism in India has often been redesigned by dominant caste groups as a “spiritual heritage” rather than a political revolt. Brahmanic takeover of Buddhist sites often results in their Brahminization, turning counter-culture into depoliticized religious spaces. The responsibility that Left intellectuals took to safeguard secularism depends largely on what they consider communal. This inability can be traced to their misrecognition of anti-caste dissent and the revolutionary character of counter cultures like Buddhism as a mere self-solacing spiritual movement. The Indian Left did not make a radical rupture from caste, nor did it give a revolutionary blow to Brahminism, which it inherited due to the social locations of revolutionaries.
Secondly, the Savarna political dominance within Left and progressive organizations in India structurally limits the solidarities for Bahujans, designing it as a fundamental rupture with class politics. The silence becomes strategic, motivated by the fear of losing intellectual and political privileges or alienating savarna allies. In a recent article, Vaibhav kharat (2025) noted how the Savarna caste-based hegemony over media has profound implications for issue prioritization and propagation. If an issue does not align with the Savarna caste interests, it is ignored/dismissed. Their selective voicelessness contrasts sharply with the media’s coverage of Hindu temple claims over Islamic sites.
Unreciprocal ideological confluences: Further, the staunch supporters of ‘Ganga-jamuni tehzeeb’ (metaphor for Hindu-Muslim unity), the liberals show no ‘Maitree’ (Friendship/support) to other struggles that Buddhists face today. Even attempts to create a joint socio-political action through the confluence of Ambedkarite and Left ‘Jai Bhim-Lal Salam’ fail when it meets with the question of Buddhism and its cultural appropriation by caste Hindus. Similarly, solidarities marked by ‘Jai Bhim-Jai Meem’, a solidarity among Ambedkarites and Muslims, finds no ground when Ambedkarites raise the question of Pasmanda and caste among muslims. All these confluences and their silences on the Buddhist identity and specific questions inform us about the unidirectional relationship among Ambedkarites and social movements for the oppressed and minorities. Further, the Left and progressive politics in India often subscribe to a class-first framework, which treats caste as a secondary contradiction. The control over Buddhist sites, a deeply caste-implicated issue, becomes invisible in their analysis. Ambedkar critiqued this as “abstract liberty” divorced from the realities of caste.”
Caste Hindus and Brahminism in general have not only affected Buddhists and Dalit-Bahujan by appropriation of their culture and creating Hindutva, a political manifestation of Brahmanism, but also by convincing Left-liberals to remain silent and hence a compromise with the solidarities of the Oppressed-Bahujans.
Philosophical grounds for silence: Lastly, the silence of the progressive forces can be traced to philosophical differences in the Bahujan-Ambedkarite imagination with Marxist ideology, while the Buddha Dhamma is an integral part of the former. Left and progressive circles have valorised Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar, but often remained silent about dignity and liberation through Buddhism. This reveals a philosophical discomfort with culturally framed emancipation. The metaphysical rejection of religion, even one as radical as Buddhism, forms an epistemic barrier that leads to the silencing of issues of control over its spaces. Progressive organizations inherit Eurocentric frames of enlightenment and revolution, which tend to delegitimize subaltern epistemologies and world views, including Buddhism. The resulting silence is not just political, but ontological, a refusal to see Buddhist culture and identity as a valid form of anti-caste knowledge and praxis.
The appropriation of Buddhist sites by Brahmin priesthoods and elite institutions mirrors the cultural hegemony described by Gramsci (1971), where ruling ideologies become common sense. The silence of progressive groups can be read as a tacit acceptance of this hegemonic narrative, revealing the immanence of Brahminical epistemic authority even within spaces claiming radical politics.
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Jatin Mathur, a Social Anthropologist and Sociology Master’s student at Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.
