Trans-religious lower-caste alliances- bases, demands and issues

Recent scholarship on the Muslim lower-caste movement in India has highlighted that one of its chief aims has been to build lower-caste solidarities that cut across religious lines. This article aims to study the intended foundations of such trans-religious lower-caste alliances within Indian civil society, as well as the challenges they face on-the-ground. It explores the empirical ways in which extant Dalit and Other Backward Classes activist networks and Muslim lower-caste (Pasmanda) activisms interact and intersect with each other. Drawing on an ethnographically informed and archival research approach, this paper argues that although there are multiple commonalities for trans-religious lower-caste unity, various sociopolitical factors constrain the empirical intersection of these networks within civil society. In other words, although there are many common factors around which low-caste activists from different religious backgrounds rally, such as demands for greater public representation or the ongoing threat of violence, on-the-ground exchange among them remains in its early stages. The reasons behind this can be attributed to the specific challenges/hurdles that the Pasmanda movement has encountered and the different sources of intergroup tensions within the larger aggregate of lower-caste groups.