From a Dublin base, an anti-caste influencer grows a global audience

Amit Wasnik moves along one of the side aisles of the hall at Christ Church in Sandymount. 

He brushes past the rows of unfolded chairs, greeting people as he walks, and glances around the big room.

Decorative torans with “Jai Bhim” are strung across the walls and neatly along the edge of a stage. In the middle of the stage is a white table with a line of three candles, and a garland of yellow and purple flowers draped around a framed portrait of the man of the hour, long gone but still celebrated: Dr BR Ambedkar.

Wasnik spots a figure moving towards him. Distinctive, with a bushy beard. Stylish sunglasses slid up on top of his head, and a colourful camouflage jacket.

“Hello Kapil!” Wasnik says to the man. 

Kapil Seshasayee hugs him, with a back-pat. “Nice to see you again, Sir. Jai Bhim, my friend.”

Wasnik and Seshasayee found each other online. 

Many have found fellow Ambedkarites the same way – through the edutaining and often comical reels put out by Wasnik, who lives in Dún Laoghaire and has since April last year been posting in earnest about the life and ideas of Ambedkar, and his unfinished mission to annihilate caste.

For Wasnik, social media remains a tool for emancipation and education about the continuing power of caste today, he says – for Digital Ambedkarism.

Wasnik counts more than 62,800 followers on Instagram. Taoiseach Micheál Martin has 62,300.

The rise of the Ambedkarite influencer mirrors a revival in attention and debate in recent years around the legacy of Ambedkar both within India and much further afield. 

Born in April 1891 into a community treated as “untouchables” – later, called Dalit – Ambedkar became an economist, lawyer, political thinker, social reformer, and chief architect of the Indian constitution.

The Saturday gathering on 18 October in the church hall in Sandymount was to mark Dhammachakra Pravartan Din – the day on which Ambedkar performed one of his most dramatic acts. 

On 14 and 15 October 1956 in Nagpur in India – months before his death – he led nearly half a million Dalits in stepping out of Hinduism, embracing Navayana Buddhism, and rejecting caste.

Seeking Ambedkar

Wasnik moved to Ireland about four years ago, to join the September 2021 intake at University College Dublin (UCD), settling in to study for an MSc in information systems.

He quickly noticed that the Hindu festivals of Diwali, Holi, and Ganesh Chaturthi were celebrated at the university, he said recently, at the Two Beans cafe on Lower George’s Street in Dún Laoghaire. 

But there was scant awareness of his traditions. Wasnik searched for books on Ambedkar in the UCD library, he says. “I found one.”

Textbooks at his school in a mixed neighbourhood in Chandrapur in Maharashtra, where Wasnik grew up, had also been short on details about Ambedkar and his anti-caste activism, he says. 

Ambedkar’s contribution was generally reduced to a paragraph, he says. A mention of him as chief draftsman of the constitution.

But Wasnik had grown up in a Buddhist family from a downtrodden community, whose grandparents, he says, had been at Nagpur the day of the mass conversion in 1956.

He had also lived amid casteism, seen others suffer it too.

A Brahmin history teacher in his early years would separate students from different castes if she saw them sharing tiffin boxes, he says. 

When Wasnik studied at a government engineering college in Chandrapur, he met a wider pool of students from oppressed communities who had received nothing from the system, he says.

“People who are living in such, kind of outskirts, or ghettos, who are not receiving electricity,” he says. But who were seeking out education, he says.

Students were judged largely by how they looked, by stereotypes and assumptions about what those differences meant, he says. 

“I don’t look like a very downtrodden-community guy,” said Wasnik.

He didn’t have marks from working in mines, bruises on his faces, or messy hair from the hours spent working a manual job before the college day started, he says.

Later, at a private college, Wasnik missed out one of the coveted work placements that, at Indian universities, are found through campus recruitment drives. 

A Brahmin lecturer held him back, because of attendance, he says. He had missed classes after a bad road accident, says Wasnik – but not even as many as his teacher had marked up.

He showed him his notes from his book for classes. He took in his parents to plead his case. “He didn’t accept. He simply threw me out of his cabin,” says Wasnik.

In subsequent years – while also working at a series of tech firms – Wasnik drew on the help of local Ambedkarites, with their commitment to education, to navigate the tangled bureaucracy that came with applying for one of the scarce and coveted National Overseas Scholarships for low-income students from marginalised communities.

Many students spend three or four years preparing themselves for the application for these scholarships, he says. “Filling out the form is basically rocket science. You can’t understand the jargon they use.”

“That was the start of me getting connected with these intellectual Ambedkarites,” says Wasnik.

Enter the Zoomers

At the Belfield campus of UCD, Wasnik started to talk about Ambedkar more, he says. “I then started getting kind of judgmental looks from fellow Indians.”

Liberal Indians may downplay the continued presence of caste in India, he says – even ignoring the origins of household practices in the system, which is based around a hierarchy of purity.

Some people won’t offer water to a cleaner who works in their house, or will set aside different utensils for them to eat and drink from, he says. They’ll argue it’s about cleanliness, says Wasnik. 

But he points out how such treatment originates in caste practices.  “Are you crazy? This woman is washing all your things. She is clean then but while drinking water she is dirty? It makes no sense.”

Caste politics is detectable in Ireland, said Amit Bansode, who was standing at the back of the hall in Sandymount on that Saturday in mid-October. “It is subtly there.”

Caste is so ingrained into Indian society, it is difficult to extinguish through a few generations, he says. “It will take a long long time.”

In workplaces in Ireland, people from privileged castes may undermine the work of colleagues from oppressed castes, says Pravin Kaware, who joins the conversation.

At gatherings of Indians, people may noodle around in conversations trying to pin down somebody’s surname, he says. “That’s the reason some of the families are trying now to change their names. So they can hide their identities.”

Says Bansode: “We don’t want to be judged immediately. You can judge based on our performance. But don’t judge just based on the name.”

Ambedkar is often quoted as saying that as Indians move, caste would travel with them. So too, though, have the anti-caste ideas, writings and radical politics of Ambedkar.

Wasnik says he began to talk to student societies at UCD about Ambedkar. He peppered assignments with Ambedkar’s ideas. 

“I was just trying to make people aware about him,” he says. 

He turned also to social media. “I started trying to make people aware with my Instagram as well,” says Wasnik. 

He made a video for Instagram with UCD political society, he says. 

It was a montage of all kinds of folks, greeting each other with a friendly “Jai Bhim” – a tribute to Ambedkar, whose given name was Bhimrao, which roughly translates as “Long Live Bhim”. 

“It’s not a casteist salute,” says Wasnik, of the phrase. “It’s more like an equality salute.”

After he graduated, Wasnik worked on his fledgling project Promise Watch, a tech platform to track political candidates’ promises and progress, but put that on pause when he got another job – and his attention again turned to the possibilities of social media, he says. 

In April 2024, Wasnik began to post regularly about caste and Ambedkar on Instagram. 

That month, a montage jumped on the “fill in the blank trend”, to show Ambedkarites talking about what that label meant to them. It was viewed 320,000 times.

In May, a satirical reel with a confused “Anti-Ambedkarite” being granted a shorter work day, came with text about how Ambedkar championed the eight-hour work day as labour representative on the Viceroy’s Council, a cabinet in pre-Independence India, and pushed for maternity benefits too. It got 972,000 views, and 53,700 likes.

On 10 November, Wasnik put out a meme-y dance to the hypocrisies and blindspots of casteist arguments, defending among other things, how Ambedkar tried to even up opportunity with affirmative action for government jobs. It got 1 million views – and 51,400 likes.

By jumping on social media trends, he can reel in people who may not pause otherwise, says Wasnik, and reach a larger audience. 

For Wasnik, social media is a tool that isn’t – so obviously – gatekept by people of privileged caste, he says. 

In India, the privileged caste – he chooses his words carefully – control media channels, he says. Global media, meanwhile, can be apathetic to issues around caste. Dalit communities have few outlets, he says. 

Seshasayee, who was at the church hall that day in Sandymount, says he has upped his own social-media game, by watching Wasnik’s approach. “His content is comedic but really informative at the same time.” 

Seshasayee is a musician. His music subverts Carnatic Indian classical performance, with its casteist history, in a way that is inspired by the real-world performances of TM Krishna, he says. 

“I’m doing a chronically online Zoomer version of what he is doing,” he says, of TM Krishna. “I like to think of my community as online.”

Just like Wasnik, Seshasayee leverages an online audience. But a different one, he says.

A chunk of Wasnik’s audience would be in India. Seshasayee is more of a diaspora guy, he says, reaching a different group by serving up Ambedkar’s ideas in his Glaswegian accent. 

But, like Wasnik, Seshasayee accentuates bits of Ambedkar that he thinks people will vibe with, he says. “I’ll take on a very meme-y format.” 

Like what a great dresser Ambedkar was, he says. “He had this thing where he was like, the fit needs to be amazing. He didn’t put it that way because he wasn’t a Zoomer.”

But he was trying, through his clothes, to give the finger to stereotypes, Seshasayee says, and people vibe with that. “I’m trying to bring details to it where I can.”

For those working in anti-caste activism, seeing this Gen Z spin on it and edutainment is a boon in the current times, says Suraj Yengde, an Indian scholar and author of the book Caste Matters. 

Almost like their own version of Black performers in the 1920s, say, in the United States, he says. “They also advocated for change.”

As far as Yengde has seen, within diasporic spaces online, there are a few voices on caste but many are anonymous, he says, and maybe don’t have the same savviness, sense of purpose, and boldness as Wasnik’s reels. 

“They are not as Ambedkarite,” he says.

Wasnik says the spirit of his social media is to be blunt, to not hide behind jargon. And also, to war with ideas and hypocrisies, rather than individuals. 

“I make sure that I don’t point out people,” he says.

Sat on one of the rows of seats in the Sandymount church hall, Wasnik said he wasn’t sure what he would share online from the day’s event yet. 

Videos take time to put together, he says.

Beside him, Sonam Bajpai, his wife, who is often in charge of the camera work, gives a jokey eyeroll and a big grin. It certainly does, she says.

A legacy

Through social media, Wasnik met a couple of families in Ireland, he says. 

They talked about starting an Ambedkarite group and meeting offline. The Ambedkarite Buddhist Society of Ireland grew quickly from a handful to more than 90 members, he says.

The group is open for all, he says. “It is not specifically meant for Buddhists. It is not specifically meant for somebody coming from Dalit community.”

It is for those who believe that there should be equality in India, and there should be equality in the Indian diaspora as well, he says. “We should always talk about equality. We should be against patriarchy, we should be against Brahminical patriarchy.”

In the Sandymount hall, Amit Bansode says coming together for Dhammachakra Pravartan Din is special. 

For him, it is not only to mark when their forefathers embraced Buddhism.

It is also a chance to talk, to support each other, and to recognise the shared hardship that they have been through, he says. “To build up some community.”

And, about passing on values around equality to the next generation and education, says Pravin Kaware. “That you should focus more on education so that education will help you to progress.”

“We want to pass on this legacy to our kids as well,” he says. “We want to share with them our roots, from where we came.”

Bansode says that they don’t want the lessons of their history, and the extreme struggles of the past, to be forgotten. “We want to make sure that our future generation does not go back to that.”

Akhil Ambi, also a member of the Ambedkarite group in Ireland who works these days at Wexford General Hospital, says he remembers first really learning of caste. 

“I come from a marginalised community, but I didn’t know about my community until I asked my father,” he said on the phone recently. 

“We never discussed about caste in my home,” says Ambi, who grew up in Kerala. 

One day at school, his teenage classmates were talking about their castes, he says. His turn came up and he didn’t know, he said, and he went home and asked his father.

“He told me we need to put up more work to compete because there is prejudice,” says Ambi.

His father had been a policeman but bullied at times by privileged caste officers, he says. “He was fighting within the system as well. But there are many police officers, who appreciated his sincerity and his hard work.” 

“He gave me an insight that this is the society that we live in and this is the thing that we have to look forward,” he says. 

Ambi points to atrocities of caste that still happen today – to the lynching of Hariom Valmiki, to the beating of N. Pachilin for riding an expensive motorbike, to the murder of Kevin P Joseph who fell in love. 

Ambi says that his father also taught him about Ambedkar though, he says, and his work for equality that today would appear progressive, feminist.

In the Sandymount hall, on a side table, was a small display of artworks. 

One bright yellow canvas shows Ambedkar leading a girl in school uniform towards an open door. In the girl’s hand is a briefcase, with the words: “Educate, agitate and organise.” 

It was one of Ambedkar’s rallying cries. “So that’s what I wrote there,” says Swapnali Bhosale, who organised the display.

Another painting shows a Buddha and a lotus and a caption in blue pen: “Give, even if you have a little!”

Bansode says that the symbols of respect around the room shouldn’t be mistaken for seeing Ambedkar as a God. 

People take different lessons from his writings and life of course, he says. “We don’t worship him in a God way. We think of him as very human.” 

For the day

Wasnik stepped up to the podium. On the paper in front of him were the 22 vows, the pledges administered by Ambedkar to his crowds of followers almost 70 years ago as they parted with Hinduism and embraced Buddhism. 

Ambedkar had thought about staying in Hinduism and how to emancipate Dalits from the oppressions of caste within the religion, said Wasnik earlier. 

But it seemed close to impossible, he said. “And that’s why it is a need to basically step out of this religion.”

The caste system is a hierarchy, built on four “varnas” of differing “purity”, from brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras. Outside of this, or underneath all, sit “untouchables”.  Caste is rigid, hereditary, and inescapable. 

But the question of whether casteism is central to Hinduism, or alien and opposed within texts of the religion, is a long contested one.

The vows to reject Hinduism and embrace Buddhism are sensitive, and deeply embedded in a context. Families can cross religions, and ascribed communities, and choose to navigate these sensitivities differently. 

At the event, Wasnik led those gathered, whoever wanted, through the recitation of the vows. “These vows demonstrate both social movement aspects and Buddhism,” he said.

Later, new members of the society went up to the dias, one by one, to introduce themselves. 

“Hi guys!” said Sawati Bodh, a manager at a dentists’ surgery in Dublin. “I’m so proud that I actually changed my surname and I became Bodh and it’s so perfect.”

Her brother had emailed her about the event, she says. She had forgotten, then remembered, and rearranged her day to make it, she says.

She was overcome the moment she spotted the Buddhist flags around the room, she said. “I’m so happy, so glad to see you guys.”

“Jai Bhim!” said Shivam Jatav, at his turn. He thanked Wasnik for organising, and paused for a moment. 

He looked out over the rows of seating.

“It takes a lot of courage what you do,” he said, directing his words towards Wasnik. “We also see you as someone who is changing the course of the digital presence of the Dalits.” 

Living together

Some of those present in Sandymount on that Saturday in mid-October had jumped the train up from Cork or driven over from Mullingar.

Seshasayee, the musician, had flown from Glasgow that morning – the furthest of all those gathered. He had arrived a little late, he says.

He had taken a wrong turn in Sandymount. Ended up at the wrong church. 

But a stranger helped out. They drove him over to Christ Church, he said. “I’ve a very high opinion of Ireland right now.”

Seshasayee told the story a couple of times.

Indians have, since even before the birth of the independent country in 1947, been thinking through questions of belonging, assimilation and integration.

Ambedkar was among them, teasing out the question of how to engender a kind of unity in diversity – although maybe not phrased quite like that.

He comes to the question in various ways and in different contexts. 

One of his novel interventions in the area, though, was his insistence and emphasis on the idea of “fraternity” in a country, says Vineeth Krishna, a senior research associate with the Centre for Law and Policy Research in Bengaluru.

The preamble of India’s constitution didn’t mention “fraternity” in an early draft, said Krishna, on a recent video call. “People argue that fraternity was added much later after the insistence of Ambedkar.”

In the end, its framers settled on a preamble that declares an aim to secure to all citizens justice, liberty, equality and “fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation”.

With that inclusion, Ambedkar was getting at how the country could have formal instruments of political equality and economic justice. “But if you did not have fraternity, the Republic won’t work,” says Krishna.

It was a feeling of brotherhood that had to be felt among all, he said. “Which, at least in my view, is the master idea for something like a unity in diversity.”

At the front of the Sandymount hall, Seshasayee sat on a chair with his right leg casually crossed over his left, revealing his checkered black and white socks. 

He leant over his shiny black guitar, and into the mellow riffs, slides, and runs of his piece “Exemption Hum”.

The anti-caste song was, he would tell Instagram later, inspired by the hymns written by Indians who converted to Christianity, combining choral traditions in songs of worship that they wrote for their own communities. 

Wasnik stood to the side of the audience in an aisle, next to a big window, with his phone’s camera pointed towards the show.