Reconfiguring Resistance under Repression: Dialectics of the Anti-Caste Movement in India

This article theorizes how resistance movements sustain themselves under prolonged repression through a dialectical reconfiguration of strategies, drawing on the contemporary anti-caste movement in Maharashtra, India. Caste in India is a deeply entrenched system of graded social hierarchy that historically organizes communities into unequal and hereditary status group - leaving individual no room for structural mobility within the system. In recent decades, caste hierarchy has operated within an evolving political economy marked by the consolidation of Brahminical Hindutva alongside neoliberal capitalist restructuring. This study investigates how such a movement persists and reconfigures itself in an increasingly repressive political environment. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory and qualitative interviews with activists, cultural performers, and organizers, the article conceptualizes resistance as a resilient and dialectical process rather than a linear cycle of protest, decline, and revival. It addresses a central concern in Resistance Studies: how movements maintain continuity, deal with repression, and reorganize strategies when civic space contracts. The analysis traces mobilizations following major caste-based atrocities in Maharashtra, including Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar (1997), the Khairlanji massacre (2006), and the Bhima Koregaon violence (2018). The movement witnessed repression of the activists that include surveillance, tagging them as extremists and criminalizing them, hostile media narratives, the cooption by NGO - which negatively affected the movement. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay among diverse resistance forms: street protest, constitutional symbolism, cultural performance traditions (shahiri), commemorative rituals, digital counter-publics, legal strategies, and everyday restraint.The result reflects the movement’s adaptation in the changing socio-politico-economic environment. The emergence of decentralized leadership and the growing prominence of Dalit women illustrate efforts to sustain collective action under strain. By theorizing resilience as a dialectical relationship between repression and resistance, this study expands understandings of how movements endure under systemic domination and offers an empirically grounded framework for analyzing the interaction of multiple resistance forms. While rooted in the Indian anti-caste struggle, the analysis contributes to broader debates on maintaining resistance movements under conditions of shrinking democratic space.