Organisations

A school for Untouchable children became the home of a movement.

Babu Mangu Ram Mugowalia, born in Hoshiarpur district in 1886 and once a Ghadarite, came home to Mugowal after 16 years abroad and opened a school for children of the Untouchable community. On 11 and 12 June 1926, that school hosted the first annual meeting of the Ad Dharm movement, which asserted a separate identity for Punjab's Untouchables.

In the Punjab census of 1931, 418,789 people registered as Ad Dharmis.

In 1972, Dalits in Bombay took their cue from the Black Panthers.

On 29 May 1972, J. V. Pawar and Namdeo Dhasal decided to start a militant movement like the Black Panthers in America. They called it the Dalit Panther and announced it in Marathi newspapers. Pawar says reports of atrocities against Dalits drove them. That July, Raja Dhale and other young people joined, and their first public meeting followed on 2 October 1972.

Pawar writes that the Dalit Panther was disbanded within three years.

The survivors of Karamchedu would not go back. They built something new.

After the Karamchedu massacre of July 1985, the survivors built their own colony at Chirala, where Katti Padma Rao settled to organise them. On 1 September 1985, about three lakh Dalits and sympathisers gathered there to found the Dalit Mahasabha. The advocate Bojja Tarakam was its president and Padma Rao its general secretary.

Its first convention met at Tenali in February 1986.