Ambedkar would have abhorred Modi
As the PM honours the author of India’s Constitution, the socio-political inequality that Ambedkar campaigned against is as rampant as ever
Dr B.R. Ambedkar was born 124 years ago on April 14 and Google has honoured him with a doodle — a fitting gesture. Ambedkar was a fierce advocate of education and knowledge and he would have enjoyed the gamut of information technology. Of the oppressed castes of India (dalits), Ambedkar wrote: “Education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight.”
Born into a dalit family, Ambedkar, by dint of raw talent and determination, earned the best education, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1927. Learning had earned him a place in the heart of his community, which saw in his success their possibility. As India’s first minister of law in Jawaharlal Nehru’s government, Ambedkar authored the Constitution in 1950, which gives pride of place to education as the pathway for dalit freedom. What irked Ambedkar as much as the oppression experienced by dalits, was the way in which politicians used dalits for their own ends. The Congress party, the main vehicle for India’s freedom movement, was tinged with Hindu supremacy as far as Ambedkar was concerned. Condescension towards the grievances of dalits moved Ambedkar to argue that they should take an independent stance and form their own political group rather than allow themselves to be used in the struggles for someone else’s gain.
None of Ambedkar’s initiatives worked to break the hegemony of the Congress and its leader, Gandhi. Yet Ambedkar’s push oxygenated a dalit politics to the left of the Congress, which germinated in fits and starts in the years that followed.
During Ambedkar’s life, the Hindu Right was simply not powerful enough to endanger the growth of independent dalit politics. Ambedkar nonetheless warned his comrades to stay clear of that platform. In 1923, Ambedkar captured the essence of the Hindu right as a “purely political” movement “whose main object and aim is to combat the influence of the Muslims in Indian politics”. To do so, Ambedkar wrote, the Hindu right has to “preserve its political strength”.
Garlands and good words
India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi is this week honouring Ambedkar. No Indian leader can ignore the immense contribution of Ambedkar to the Indian republic, nor the resilience of Ambedkarism in Indian politics. But Modi’s own party is precisely the kind of political platform that Ambedkar abhorred. Garlands and good words will be placed on Ambedkar’s pedestal by the Hindu Right, which has nothing but disdain for his liberation agenda. State elections are on the horizon for Bihar and later in Uttar Pradesh — both with sizeable dalit populations, which is perhaps why the Hindu Right, eager to sweep these polls, is making overtures to Ambedkar.
On January 25, 1949, Ambedkar said that while the Indian Constitution stipulated the equality of all people before the law, all people were still not equal in two senses: “On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality, which means elevation for some and degradation for others. On the economic plane, we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty.”
“On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions,” he noted perceptively. “How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.” These are questions for today. Their perceptiveness indicates why Ambedkar is still essential for India — not merely as a figure to celebrate, but as a political philosopher for India’s current struggles.