The Black Hole of Ultra-Individualism: Where New Atheists and Dalit Thinkers Find Common Ground

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Two intellectual movements, neo-atheism and Dalitism, have come to occupy a central place in Kerala’s intellectual sphere in recent times. Today, a significant number of Dalit intellectuals identify as atheists. Alongside these two dominant currents, what lingers is the diminishing presence of communist ideology, no longer a flame, but the residual heat of a once-burning oven.

In addition, Hindutva ultra-nationalism, intoxicating Kerala’s social mind with casteism and religious hatred is flaring up, turning society into a marooned consciousness.

While the Malayalee continues to live either as a producer or consumer of these four streams of thought, the backdrop is marked by the steady rise of the state’s neoliberal policies—policies that deepen inequality, breed insecurity, and trigger both physical and mental collapse across individual and social strata.

The approach of neo-atheists and certain Dalit thinkers to neoliberal policies appears largely similar. For instance, neo-atheists opposed the farmers’ protest, presenting neoliberal market competition as a progressive model, even though the protest was directed against agricultural market reforms that sought to open Indian farm produce to corporate control.

On such issues, Dalit intellectuals often remained silent or regarded these struggles as falling outside the scope of their political and intellectual concerns. In the end, they also support the neoliberal policies. Similarly, neo-atheists fully endorsed projects like the K-Rail and Adani’s port in Kerala. A significant section of Dalit thinkers in Kerala also welcomed the K-Rail project. In short, neo-atheists and many Dalit intellectuals appear to share common ground in their stance on the neoliberal development agenda, even when it involves dangerous privatisation and mass evictions.

However, these two closely aligned intellectual camps diverge sharply on the issue of reservation and the Hindutva-driven conspiracy to dismantle it. While Dalit thinkers in Kerala may not oppose neoliberal state policies outright, they are staunch critics of Hindutva politics, which today serves as the primary vehicle for implementing those very policies. The net result is this: there is now a clear split on one side, neo-atheists and Dalit intellectuals who oppose Hindutva politics; on the other, neo-atheists who embrace its ideology and reject caste-based reservation.

The latter section of neo-atheists can aptly be described as unadulterated and open supporters of right-wing Christian-Zionist racial nationalism and neoliberal state policies. The reason for this division lies in India’s deep-rooted tradition of caste-based inequality. As a result, a section of Dalit thinkers and neo-atheists view Hindutva politics as belonging to the enemy camp. In other words, if we bracket off the issue of Hindutva and its role in caste oppression, the tension between neo-atheism and Dalit thought largely disappears.

The ruling Hindutva forces have proven the most effective enforcers of neoliberal policies, which is a key reason why some unadulterated neo-atheists have embraced them.The second reason is that new atheists are actively engaged in globally spreading Islamophobia by portraying Muslims as enemies of humanity. As Hindutva ideology in India amplifies neoliberal policies and reinforces their very pillars of state violence, centralised power, corruption, and moral depravity, the new atheists divert public attention from these issues by waging a shadow war against Muslims, portraying them as the original culprits.

The neoliberal economic-cultural structure, which upholds neither equality nor equity, provides fertile ground for the vigorous growth of Hindutva politics-an ideology that justifies social inequality and inequity as divine ordination, claiming God created humans in a hierarchy. New atheists reject the notion that inequality is divinely ordained, instead presenting it as a conclusion supported by evolutionary science. 

They theorise that although humans compete, this competition leads to the survival of the fittest; ultimately, only those deemed to possess the highest ‘quality’ will endure. This forms the basis of their model society. Hence, they idealise the neoliberal political economy, which allows only the strongest to survive as a scientific and complete social order. On the other hand, many Dalit thinkers champion neoliberalism because they sincerely believe it can deliver social justice to the Dalit community by dismantling India’s caste system. In other words, what colonialism was in the past, neoliberalism is now operating globally. Believing British colonialism and Western education once helped undermine caste, Dalit intellectuals in Kerala place hope in neoliberal corporate development as a path toward freedom from present-day caste tyranny.

It is a fact that British rule introduced changes serving their political and economic interests in India. For example, they won major battles since Plassey in 1757 and suppressed the First War of Independence in 1857 by recruiting Paraiyars and other marginalised Dalit communities. What the British did followed precedents set by rulers like Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, Shivaji, Akbar, Ranjit Singh, and the Bahmani Sultans, who built their military systems by recruiting across caste and religious lines.

Contrary to this earlier approach, as Ambedkar observed, after 1857 the British strengthened their political domination by aligning with powerful castes. For the same reason, they stopped recruiting Dalits and disbanded the Paraiyar regiment. On the other hand, Sikhs and Gorkhas, considered loyal and non-rebellious by the British, were extensively enlisted. Muslim inclusion was also drastically reduced after the Mutiny. Even so, Paraiyars were temporarily reabsorbed later, especially during the World Wars when demand for soldiers surged.

Therefore, Ambedkar reminded us that the British showed no genuine concern for marginalised communities. Colonialism, globally, spread its influence by aligning with powerful groups and reinforcing their cultural dominance. On one hand, British rule encouraged Hindu nationalism; on the other, it supported elite Muslim nationalism.They aimed to secure a labour force through promoting social equality to liberate labourers from feudalism. At the same time, they glorified dominant castes culturally.This indicates the British policy remained superficial, never confronting the caste system’s fundamental incompatibility with human rights. Had they sincerely dismantled caste bondage, caste discrimination would not have remained so poisonous post-independence. Instead, caste dominance was politically stabilised through reforms like the zamindari system and codifying Hindu-Muslim laws from the late eighteenth century. Through this restructuring, colonial imperialism performed its state function: the Brahmanic Hinduisation of India’s marginalised majority.

By portraying caste slavery in the agrarian economy as uncivilised, colonial rule lured oppressed castes into tea plantations and overseas labour camps, ‘freeing’ them into wage labour. Yet this wage slavery was no less unfree and inhuman than caste oppression​, but its cruelty only recently came to light. Even today, wage labourers in Kerala’s plantations are victims of a powerful nexus between factory owners, trade unions, and the state.

Therefore, it is a colonial delusion to believe in the neoliberal age that the postmodern reincarnation of colonialism will liberate Dalits. Perhaps the delusion offered by modernity’s grand narrative, encompassing both colonialism and neoliberalism, represents a golden opportunity for identifying with the evils of the power class.

The fundamental flaw in our Dalit thought may be that, by welcoming European domination while focusing solely on Indian social conditions, it overlooks grave global colonial atrocities. Many colonial rulers were Social Darwinists like caste ideologues​, preserving dominance by claiming the Chaturvarna system was divine. These rulers justified power through the science of Biology, portraying non-whites as subhuman beings at evolution’s lowest level. Globally, in their societies and invaded lands, colonial powers entrenched themselves by spreading ‘scientific’ racism.

Furthermore, the Aryan race theory, a colonial template for scientific racism, was systematically promoted in India. It was this racist cultural project that inspired figures like Savarkar to formulate Hindutva as a racial supremacy doctrine by fusing racial ideology with Hinduism.

European colonial powers achieved equality, freedom, wealth, and democracy at home by trampling on and diverting internal struggles for these very ideals in their colonies, often reinforcing and exploiting existing social inequities. Not only India, but also Africa and the Americas, stand as powerful examples of this historical dialectic where European colonial powers built equality, freedom, and wealth at home by crushing both existing and emerging struggles for justice in the colonies, often by weaponising local social divisions. Therefore, the Euro-American development model, which is now manifesting as neoliberalism, offers no Dalit-exclusive paradise.

Joining the global and domestic domination of the marginalised, and claiming a share in resource plunder by following Euro-American models, this is the grim reality behind promises of Dalit emancipation via neoliberalism. As access to power and plunder is limited, only a Dalit minority will rise through this model as Hindutva elites position themselves as neoliberal partners. Hindutva politics readily consecrates a Dalit as India’s President. Both new atheists and a section of Dalit intellectuals tend to idealise the Euro-American economic system shaped since colonisation. Even before Hindutva’s rise, those who are proud in the name of tradition, no model has surpassed the Euro-American one since British rule. Hindutva’s only change is replacing the political structure with religious or racist autocracy. In other words, none surpass them in deception, rebranding brutal human rights violations (worse than colonialism) as “Swadeshi”, as seen in replacing the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Communists, too, often acted as spokespersons for the Euro-American production-consumption system born of colonisation. Hence, when socialist systems collapsed, they became competitive imitators of the Euro-American model.

Why does the Euro-American model remain a promised land even for those holding contradictory ideologies? Why do new atheists, a section of  Dalit intellectuals, Hindutva nationalists, and communists alike-despite divergent worldviews-end up imitating it, treating the West as an ideal?

First, it promises material abundance to each individual, regardless of background or oppression.Secondly, it tempts each individual with the illusion of an equal chance to attain this abundance.Thirdly, all desirable material abundance is absorbed into a united front bound by shared obsession with power, included in a global system of power-wealth sharing and relentless competition. Lastly, it grants those chasing prosperity the chance to become colonists themselves​, replicating the domination they once opposed.

The Euro-American system produces a single dominant class​,​ composed of those willing to create new colonies, plunder freely, and pursue material prosperity at any cost. Its most tempting mantra is: You are always welcome to become a colony master.

At the model’s heart lies the belief in the individual’s right to pursue material progress being elevated to salvation or a secularised Kingdom of God​, primarily through conquering, colonising, and extracting wealth from other lands and peoples. The colony master’s right is founded on the unfreedom of colonised people and nature. However, our real attention must turn to the model’s gigantic and unresolvable internal failures—failures it cleverly hides by promoting the illusion of individual material progress. This ‘development’ constructs personal colonies of so-called freedom, depending systematically on the unfreedom of others and exploited places.

A three-party alliance endures in the Euro-American paradises of individual freedom: the omnipresent legal state claiming to nurture freedom; the ever-active market supplying products and services for its fulfilment; and the citizen realising freedom through relentless consumption.

The colony, its people denied equality, fraternity, and rights, its resources relentlessly extracted, remains hidden behind modernity’s curtain. Yet this unseen world sustains the three-party alliance (citizen, market, state) proudly performing on modernity’s stage. This stage is the ideal society for new atheists, the promised path for a section of Dalit thinkers, and the secret beloved of religious nationalists and communists​, though they publicly scorn her.

Since the three-party alliance disregards a truly humanistic worldview​, such as Narayana Guru’s principle: “the path giving me spiritual joy must offer the same joy to others”—there is no escaping the consequences of its absence, individually and societally. Therefore, in America, where the Constitution grants ultimate priority to individual liberty and personal happiness​, we find the greatest number of citizens suffering poor mental health. As the state-market-citizen alliance strengthens daily, its intrusion into family, neighbourhood, friendship, and community life fractures emotional bonds, scattering individuals into isolated, atomised existences.

It is now widely recognised that ultra-individualism nurtured by this alliance, promising absolute freedom and personal joy, is the primary cause of the social and mental health crisis crippling the developed world, leaving it without a solution. Ultra-individualism, disregarding human relationships by falsely believing state and market can replace societal intimacy, proliferates restless citizens like kites with broken strings drifting helplessly. The very circumstances fracturing family, friendship, and social well-being cannot support those collapsing from isolation and loneliness. Key reasons for the loneliness epidemic include the erosion of joint families, the decline of neighbourhood ties, and the loss of communal spaces. This epidemic is exacerbated by converging forces: unchecked urbanisation, labour migration, workplace insecurity and strain, widening inequality, relentless individualistic competition, the surge in chronic illnesses, and accelerating climate change consequences.

Escaping modernity’s black holes that are distorted like broken mirror fragments requires a serious inquiry into the historical, cultural, economic, and technological foundations of ultra-individualism, which has caused global disregard for social and mental well-being. The new atheists glorifying Euro-American societies as ideal worlds, along with some of the Dalit intellectuals travelling the same path, find themselves caught in an ultra-individualism black hole, a worldview failing to acknowledge the reality of otherness.

Cover image: Container terminal in Hamburg, Germany. Photo courtesy: culturico.com

The Malayalam version of this article was published in Padabhedam Magazine, 2025 New Year Issue