Communist theoretical blindness to caste cost it the Dalit constituency it should have won

Evidence

The caste–class question is not an easy one for political parties to address. The Communist Party’s theoretical obtuseness to caste has lost it what ought to have been its natural constituency. The Communist Party of India and its offshoot, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have more or less become bourgeois parties enmeshed in parliamentary politics. Those that split away from them in the late 1960s and independent Marxist-Leninist parties in other states (collectively known as the ‘Naxalites’, named after the first uprising in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal) have tried to address the issue of caste and to make common cause with Dalits, but with little success. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 358