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By the late 1990s a right wing government in the shape of a BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had come to power for the first time in the Indian State of Maharashtra The Shiv Sena: a militant party that formed in the 70s primarily to oppose the forming of immigrant labour unions and continues to carry out attacks on South Indians and Muslims; and the BJP: a populist party with a broad national reach Their alliance would carry till 2014 On 11 July 1997, members of India’s Rapid Action Police Force opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Dalit protesters in Mumbai’s Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar Colony, killing 10 and injuring 26   ‘Dalit’, which has come to mean ‘the oppressed’, is the term adopted by those who over thousands of years have been treated as ‘untouchable’ by the Hindu caste system The term ‘Dalit’ was espoused by Dr BR Ambedkar (1891-1956), an economist, lawyer, and pivotal architect of India’s constitution following Independence He was a Dalit himself, and led several social reform movements on behalf of the ‘untouchables’ Ambedkar disavowed Gandhi’s name for the group, Harijan, or ‘people of God’, in part because it enveloped a diverse community into the larger project of the Hindu nation-state  Among Ambedkar’s political strategies for Dalit resistance against state fundamentalism was the mass conversion of his followers to Buddhism For Ambedkar and his followers, to fully shed caste required the total disavowal of Hinduism   At Ramabai Colony, Dalit residents had been protesting the desecration of a local Ambedkar statue They had surrounded a local police station in Pantnagar, before the police fired into the crowd  Within days of the massacre at Ramabai, Vilas Ghogre, a beloved poet-singer and organiser of Dalit labourers in the slums close to Ramabai, committed suicide Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s 2011 documentary, Jai Bhim Comrade, begins at this tragic intersection and expands outward, examining the pervasive forces of caste discrimination and caste-based violence in India, their infiltration into class dynamics, notions of nationhood, and the possibility of a Dalit-Left unity in India   Vilas Ghogre, a Dalit who combined Ambedkarite politics with Marxism, was known to Patwardhan as