‘Social Media Is the Second Ambedkar’: Bhim Army and Social Media Mobilisation in North India

Abstract

Understanding the increasing Dalit activism on social media through the lens of publics and counter-publics, this paper shows how the Bhim Army, a popular on-ground Dalit organisation in North India, makes use of two social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, to further its organisational agenda, and to recruit, inform and mobilise. Using insights from digital ethnography and interviews with Bhim Army leaders, this paper also builds on the theoretical and methodological understandings of social media usage by marginalised actors and intervenes in the debates regarding the role of social media in social movement mobilisation, as well as the frameworks of organisational activities on Twitter and Facebook. Finally, it shows how the different techno-architectural make-up of the two platforms produces different kinds of mobilisations and functions.

Keywords:

• Dalit mobilisation
• digital methods
• Facebook
• social media
• social movements
• social networks
• Twitter

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Gilles Verniers, Christophe Jaffrelot, Neelanjana Sen, Tom Wilkinson and Ajinkya Mujumdar for their comments and support through various stages of this paper, and to all the members of the Bhim Army who made time to speak with me. I also want to thank the readers and editorial team of South Asia for their encouragement and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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41. Interview with Instagram page Dalit Desk, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CH2rSYVnhnB/?hl=en.

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43. Ibid.

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59. The ‘Great Chamar’ board is a signboard installed before a village in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 2017 which was a matter of great controversy. Upper Castes objected to the use of ‘great’ in front of the caste name Chamar, which is often used as a slur by upper castes: Shoaib Daniyal, ‘Ambedkarite 2.0: Saharanpur's Bhim Army Signals the Rise of a New, Aggressive Dalit Politics’, Scroll.in, May 13, 2017, accessed May 24, 2023, https://scroll.in/article/837494/ambedkarite-2-0-saharanpurs-bhim-army-signals-the-rise-of-a-new-aggressive-dalit-politics.

60. Chamars (also called Jatavs in some areas) are a sub-caste within the Dalit community in North India generally associated with the traditional occupation of leatherwork and disposing of dead cows in the village. They are also the most populous Dalit sub-caste as well as the most prominent caste politically. Many Dalit movements in the state have been headed by Chamars, including the Bhim Army.

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