When the honourable Union home minister blurted “Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar” in parliament last week, it was as though he had finally succeeded in ejecting something that had been stuck in the throat for long.
At one stroke, this revelation of a buried life cancelled out all the sophistry of claims the right-wing customarily makes about how they have venerated Ambedkar where the Congress did not.
To that, first the facts: it was the V.P. Singh government (supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left) which in 1990 bestowed the Bharat Ratna on Ambedkar. The question to ask the BJP is whether they could have dissented even if they had wanted to.
The fact is also that this canny move was in large part motivated by the need to neutralise the growing clout of the Dalit movement led by the late Kanshi Ram. Not to speak of the fact that the surest way to consign unpalatable ancestors to oblivion from day to day exigencies is to memorialise them; and few do this better than the Modi government has done.
We venerate goddesses galore only to do dirt on women in life. So with Ambedkar.
The crude fact of our modern history is that a constitution came to be drafted by a Shudra who had actually burnt the Manusmriti, a reactionary Brahminical text which, among other things, said that whereas the killing of a cow was a capital crime without pardon, the killing of a Shudra was not. This was the text that both Savarkar and the RSS had wished to become the constitution of independent Bharat.
Not only did the Sanatan organisations time and again burn Ambedkar’s effigies but actually enacted his funeral in 1949.
Also read: Amit Shah’s Rajya Sabha Speech Didn’t Just ‘Insult’ Ambedkar, It Also Peddled Lies About Him
Other unspeakable things that Ambedkar did: give credit to the Indian National Congress for the successful proceedings of the three-year long constituent assembly work, and the making of the constitution (speech made on November 25, 1949); lambast the Sanatan in his three-volume Riddles of Hinduism (1954-55) including unbearable critiques of both the Shastras and the Epics; pilot the Hindu Code Bill that introduced much needed reforms in Hindu personal law.
Ambedkar also said that although he could not have helped being born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu; true to that cutting resolve, he converted to Buddhism along with some 600,000 others in the very city in which the RSS has had its headquarters, Nagpur.
It is galling to the right-wing that a Shudra should have risen to such a decisive and consequential eminence, and left behind a legacy which the right-wing can ignore only at its peril politically.
Even more galling, a fact not sufficiently noticed, is the circumstance that “Jai Bhim” should have come to be a rival slogan to “Jai Shri Ram.”
Put the question another way: had Ambedkar been with us today, would he have gone with Rahul Gandhi or Amit Shah?
The fact is that despite the compulsions of politics, the Indian National Congress did make him chairman of the Drafting Committee, and include him in the first ever independent cabinet although he was not a member of the Congress.
The right-wing contends with force that Nehru left no stone unturned to have him defeated in the first ever elections.
But consider this: having chosen to fight elections as a political adversary, what else may the Congress have done but defeat him?
What would the BJP have done had it been in the shoes of the then Congress?
It is more than understandable that with the increasing political dominance in many parts of the republic of the Scheduled Caste social base, India should see a strong revival of the Ambedkar legacy.
A fallout of that legacy is the demand for a caste-based census nation-wide in order to determine the de facto composition of India’s contemporary social classes.
That the Congress today has come around so forthrightly in favour of this demand, indeed almost becoming its chief spokesperson, while the Ambedkar-memorialising BJP wishes to shy away from this course is a self-evident comment on who bears what sort of allegiance to the life and work of Ambedkar.
An Ambedkarite Congress-Left-Socialist politics seems therefore well-conceived and well-placed, both to unravel the ideological reality of the current right-wing, and to forge a social movement that may dislodge the revanchist and revisionist assertions of the neo-fascist right-wing.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
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.
