Turning Ambedkar Upside Down: The Fracture of a Revolutionary Imagination
April 14 is Ambedkar Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Over the past two decades, mainstream political parties have fiercely competed to appropriate Ambedkar’s legacy, seeking to win over the sizeable Dalit electorate. Across ideological divides, his iconic stature is routinely invoked during election campaigns, and institutions are erected in his name. Yet, these gestures stand in sharp contrast to the reluctance displayed by the ruling parties in terms of enacting substantive measures for empowering Dalit communities.
Since the 1990s, India’s rapid social, political, and economic transformations have forced mainstream parties to reckon with Ambedkar’s enduring relevance. Even his staunchest historical opponents now perform rhetorical acrobatics to align themselves with his legacy. Yet, this appropriation rarely translates into meaningful action. Mainstream ruling parties across the spectrum have diverted or diluted funds earmarked for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe welfare schemes. In most cases, they have undermined affirmative action in practice.
Like politics, the scholarly world, spurred by the same shifts in the 1990s, has rushed to “discover” Ambedkar as a potent lens for understanding inequality in India. The 1990s exposed the inadequacy of existing analytical frameworks to explain India’s changing sociopolitical landscape, compelling scholars to turn to Ambedkar and the anti-caste thought. However, this scholarly embrace remains fraught: Ambedkar’s writings are frequently flattened into palatable soundbites, and his radical critiques of Brahminism are sanitised across political and ideological spectrums. As for the Dalit movements, they are reduced to “symbolic politics” rather than a systemic challenge to caste and class power.
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Many analyses undermine Dalit mobilisations as irrational by exclusively focussing on the symbolic reverence toward Ambedkar. Many analyses tend to dismiss Dalit mobilisations as irrational by reducing them merely to symbolic acts of reverence toward Ambedkar. Such narrow representations overlook the complex and strategic nature of Dalit political assertion and fail to acknowledge the persistent struggles Dalits face in claiming space within the public sphere. These struggles are deeply rooted in structural exclusions, as Dalits are often deliberately marginalised within political, institutional, and discursive frameworks, making their efforts at visibility and representation both challenging and necessary.
The distortion is starkly evident in the writings, which epitomise a dual tendency to flatten Ambedkar’s intellectual legacy while dismissing the post-Ambedkar Dalit movement as politically narrow-minded. Dalit politics, in much of mainstream discourse, is frequently reduced to a mere caste-based conglomeration, a sectional pursuit for identitarian visibility or symbolic representation. This reductionist view trivialises the historical and ideological complexity of Dalit mobilisations. Furthermore, such an understanding erases the radical, transformative vision that animated early political articulations of Dalits, particularly those led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Rather than being understood as a legitimate and profound critique of India’s deeply hierarchical social structure, Dalit politics is often framed as a fragmented identity struggle, detached from ‘broader’ questions of justice, democracy, and equality.
One of the primary reasons for this impoverished reading is the systematic marginalisation of Ambedkar’s intellectual and political contributions in historical writings. For a long period of time, Ambedkar was routinely invoked as an icon of the "Dalit cause." For decades, his contributions have been reduced mainly to symbolic references, with Ambedkar being invoked primarily as a representative figure of the Dalit cause. However, they rarely engaged with his comprehensive vision of social transformation. This iconization of Ambedkar without critical engagement reduces him to a symbolic presence rather than a thinker whose ideas continue to challenge the very foundations of caste, capitalism, and state power in India.
Ambedkar’s interventions were never limited to caste reform alone, as he rightly demonstrated the direct influence caste had in shaping economic, societal and political relations. Rather, his efforts were directed at achieving structural transformation that intertwined caste annihilation with economic justice and democratic reconstruction.
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Take, for instance, the Anti-Khoti legislation he advocated in the 1930s. This was not merely an act of social reform; it was a radical economic intervention aimed at dismantling exploitative agrarian relations that had caste at their core. The Khoti system, which enabled a layer of absentee landlords to extract rent from actual cultivators, reflected the fusion of caste and feudal economic power. Ambedkar’s move to abolish this system was an attempt to break these shackles of agrarian bondage, a strategy of material upliftment grounded in the pursuit of dignity and freedom for the oppressed. It was both an economic and a social act, showing how caste annihilation could not be achieved without dismantling exploitative economic structures.
After Ambedkar’s mahaparinirvana in 1956, the towering intellectual and political leader with a systemic vision of justice left a massive void. More significantly, the mainstream social and political climate that emerged in his succeeding era failed to cultivate or even acknowledge the depth of Ambedkar’s interventions. In such a scenario, the Ambedkarite imagination was either domesticated into the liberal constitutional mainstream or sidelined as a narrow identity assertion.
The structural critique that Ambedkar offered of Brahmanism, capitalism, and the failures of Indian democracy was either diluted or ignored altogether. This intellectual neglect has had lasting consequences. Dalit politics, shorn of its historical radicalism, is often seen today as fragmented or opportunistic, focused merely on quotas, representation, or symbolic recognition. While these demands are undeniably crucial in a deeply exclusionary society, isolating them from Ambedkar’s broader vision of social democracy results in a politics that is reactive rather than transformative.
Recent scholarship has often dismissed Ambedkarite masses as “merely emotional” or irrational, framing post-Ambedkar Dalit movements as deviations from his “original” vision. Such critiques echo a broader tendency to discredit symbolic assertions of Dalit dignity as distractions from “real” issues. Such portrayals reduce anti-caste politics to narratives of irrationality, distorting Ambedkar’s legacy and sidelining the lived resistance of Dalit communities. Ambedkarite assertions transcend such narrow frameworks.
The scholarly erasure ignores how the Ambedkarite movement has pragmatically navigated the caste-ridden eco-system to secure material gains, from enforcing job quotas and college admissions to advocating land rights for Dalit labourers. Writers who dismiss the symbolic power of Dalit assertion as irrational are unable to comprehend how acts like burning the Manusmriti or claiming access to the Mahad water tank ruptured caste hierarchies by directly confronting their ideological and spatial foundations. Far from empty gestures, such acts redefined Dalit selfhood and asserted a radical egalitarian ethos.
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The mass conversion to Buddhism is also far from being apolitical “hero worship.” The conversion offered the Ambedkarites a moral and cultural rupture from Hinduism, forging collective solidarity against the caste system's spiritual and material grip. Furthermore, unlike state-sponsored idolisation, which is epitomised by mass-produced statues of historical figures, the veneration of Ambedkar emerges organically through grassroots resistance. Statues erected by Dalit communities across the world, often with meagre resources, are not mere symbols but acts of defiance against hostile state authorities and a casteist cultural milieu. These efforts intertwine material struggles, like land rights and education access, with the radical reclamation of public space through Ambedkar’s iconography.
To reduce Dalit politics to “irrational” hero worship is to ignore how such acts dismantle the caste system’s psychological and spatial domination. This is nothing but a strong testament to Ambedkarite thought’s enduring power to redefine justice in postcolonial India. To reinvigorate Dalit politics, it is essential to return to Ambedkar – not just as a historical figure but as a philosopher of justice whose work offers tools to rethink caste, class, and power in contemporary India. Only then can Dalit politics reclaim its radical edge and reassert itself not as a sectional interest group but as a movement with the potential to redefine the contours of Indian democracy.
Prabodhan Pol is an Associate Professor of History at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, and Sumeet Mhaskar is a Professor of Labour Sociology at O. P Jindal Global University.
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