Indian communist parties’ avoidance of caste cost them Dalit support

Evidence

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. The few efforts they made to seize land from big zamindars and redistribute it to labourers failed because they did not have the mass support or the military firepower to see it through. Their sidelong nod to caste as opposed to a direct engagement with it has meant that even radical communist parties have lost the support of what could have been a truly militant and revolutionary constituency. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on why caste annihilation movements failed to scale; the Marxist refusal to treat caste as primary points to a structural explanation.
• QUESTION: Why exactly did Naxalites fail to convert Dalits despite land redistribution aims - was it caste blindness or organizational weakness?