Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore how its turn toward transnational advocacy networks, commencing in preparation of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, affected political dialectics within the Dalit struggle and in particular the form of its engagement with the nature of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

While the nature of citizenship in India today is rapidly changing as the country follows a ("shining") path of increasingly unrestrained capitalist development, people's ability to claim rights is at the same time still heavily influenced by their position in the ever-changing but persistent relational logic of caste. In reaction, the Dalit struggle in its contemporary phase has aimed to make the latent caste-based gradation of citizenship in India visible and push the state to address the problem of caste discrimination in the everyday realities of claiming citizenship rights. In doing so, the Dalit movement often wavers between an anti-caste stance and the assertion of caste identity. This paper seeks to explore how its turn toward transnational advocacy networks, commencing in preparation of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, affected political dialectics within the Dalit struggle. In particular, it discusses how in the decade after Durban, the conceptual (re)framing and the organizational networking that were part of the globalization of the Dalit struggle influenced the pendulum between caste assertion and caste elimination characterizing its engagement with the nature of citizenship in India.