New Delhi: To know the Sangh Parivar’s perspective towards BR Ambedkar, one can turn to perhaps the two most celebrated events Nagpur witnesses every year. On Vijayadashmi, the day the RSS Sarsanghchalak delivers his widely televised and analysed speech, thousands of Dalits from across the country gather at Diksha Bhumi — where Amebdkar had embraced Buddhism in 1956.
When the Sangh points out that Ambedkar had an option to adopt Islam but chose an Indian religion, they deliberately overlook the fact that he chose to desert Hinduism on the day the Sangh asserts its Hindu identity, at a place that is just a few kilometres away from the RSS headquarters. And that he chose Vijayadashami not for the legend associated with the Ramayana, but because Ashoka had embraced Buddhism on the day.
Mustn’t it be read as Ambedkar’s parting reply to the ideology against which he had struggled his entire life? With what moral ground can the Sangh ever embrace a man who asserted that “Hindu society is a myth…I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mohammedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean, and meanness is worse than cruelty?”
And yet, it is also true that over the last decade the Parivar has made several attempts to embrace Ambedkar.
Also read: Who Insulted Dr. Ambedkar?
To understand the Sangh’s changed stance, I once interviewed former pracharak (missionary) and Panchjanya editor Devendra Swarup. He was among the senior most Sangh veterans before he died at the age of 93 in 2019. Speaking on the record, he explained the circumstances that persuaded the Sangh to embrace first MK Gandhi and later Ambedkar. Expressing the Sangh’s innate reservations about the Dalit icon, he said: “Ambedkar and every Ambedkarite is anti-Hindu… (But) the problem before us is that since the Dalit movement has adopted Ambedkar as an icon, we cannot avoid him.”
Ambedkar’s emergence in Maharashtra’s and national politics exactly corresponds with the formation of the RSS in Nagpur in 1925 and its growth in Marathi-speaking areas. However, for decades the Maharashtrian Dalit stalwart found little appreciation from the Marathi-speaking Hindutva leaders, who had nothing but criticism for him during his life. As Christophe Jaffrelot wrote recently, several Hindu nationalist leaders had opposed Ambedkar and his thoughts during key stages of the freedom movement, as well as at the time of his embrace of Buddhism.
It was only around the emergence of ‘Kamandal’ politics, the rise of the BJP, and the split of the Dalit vote that the Parivar realised the political and social significance of the community. The biggest push came after Mohan Bhagwat was appointed Sarsanghchalak, as he sought to take a path slightly different from his predecessors, at least in speeches.
Comparing Ambedkar with two prominent ancient Indian philosophers, Bhagwat began his 2015 Vijayadashami speech with Ambedkar, naming him before the RSS founder KB Hedgewar and another eminent icon Deendayal Upadhyay. Bhagwat went on to term Ambedkar “a confluence of Acharya Shankar’s sharp Intellect and Tathagat Buddha’s unbounded compassion”.
Also read: Even in Death, Ambedkar Fulfilled His Wish of Conducting Dhamma Diksha in Mumbai
To such posturing, Swarup had a candid take. Terming the RSS’s love for Ambedkar a “political game”, he told me: “Many propositions that have been established within the Sangh are at an emotional level, there is not a serious intellectual thought process behind them. The way we have adopted Ambedkar confirms this.”
One can concede that what might have begun largely out of political expediency, has now come to gather some substance. But while the BJP and the prime minister may have initiated several projects for Ambedkar, they are impossibly removed from his philosophy. One of his famous vows was to never worship Hindu deities. Can the BJP ever tread the path he showed?
When Mayawati had been building Ambedkar memorials during her tenure as the UP chief minister, she often faced resistance. Years later, with Modi now PM, she demanded an apology from the RSS-BJP for their objection to the construction of these memorials.
If the Sangh now wishes to claim it has changed its ideology, let it demonstrate the genuineness of this change by respecting the foundational day associated with Ambedkar and submitting its rights over Vijayadashmi to the Dalits.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
