Hindu Nationalists Were Not More Favourable to Ambedkar Than Congress, History Shows

A few days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in one of his X posts wrote, “If the Congress and its rotten ecosystem think their malicious lies can hide their misdeeds of several years, especially their insult towards B.R. Ambedkar, they are gravely mistaken!”.

This post suggested that the Hindu nationalist movement – whose key figure today is no one but the prime minister himself – has supported Ambedkar more than the Congress. Historical evidence contradicts this interpretation. 

In fact, Hindu nationalists attacked Ambedkar repeatedly in response to his attempts at emancipating the Dalits from the caste system which, he convincingly argued, was inherent in Hinduism.

Congress and Hindutva leaders vs. B.R. Ambedkar

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

In 1932, Hindu nationalists did not lag behind Congress to fight the Communal Award through which the British government had granted a separate electorate to the Scheduled Castes (SC). In fact, they went further than Mahatma Gandhi, who forced Dr. Ambedkar to give up the separate electorate system by fasting unto death, putting him under tremendous pressure. 

Not only did Madan Mohan Malaviya, one of the key North Indian leaders, lead the opponents to Dr. Ambedkar during the negotiations that resulted in the replacement of a separate electorate for SCs by reserved seats, but another key leader from Maharashtra, B.S. Moonje, promoted an alternative to the Communal Award in order to isolate Dr. Ambedkar as early as 1931.

Moonje, a Nagpur-based ophthalmologist, was an important figure of the Hindutva movement, not only in the Central Provinces but also at the national level. An influential personality of the Hindu Mahasabha, he was the mentor of K. B. Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). 

Also read: Who Insulted Dr. Ambedkar?

During the 1931 Round Table Conference – before which he had traveled to Roma to meet Benito Mussolini – Moonje tried to counter Ambedkar’s leadership over SC communities by siding with another Dalit Maharashtrian, G.A. Gavai, who was appointed to the Working Committee of the Hindu Mahasabha. 

Furthermore, Moonje used Gavai as a middle man to relate to M.C. Rajah, who had represented the Untouchables in the Imperial Legislative Council since 1927. Rajah declared that a separate electorate system would cut off SC communities from the rest of society – one of Mahatma Gandhi’s arguments. 

In March 1932, Moonje and Rajah signed a pact according to which reserved seats should be preferred rather than a separate electorate – which, again, was what Mahatma Gandhi was asking for, and obtained, finally.

Hindu Mahasabha’s opposition to Ambedkar

Besides the Communal Award episode – where Hindu nationalists were certainly not more favourable to Ambedkar than Congress – the question of conversion was a major bone of contention for more than two decades between 1935 and 1956.

In October 1935, during a meeting of the Depressed Classes Association in Yeola, Ambedkar declared, “Unfortunately for me I was born a Hindu Untouchable. It was beyond my power to prevent that, but I declare that it is within my power to refuse to live under ignoble and humiliating conditions. I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu”. 

Less than a fortnight after the Yeola meeting, a delegation from the Hindu Mahasabha of Bombay met Ambedkar, in vain, to dissuade him from leaving Hinduism. The Hindu Mahasabha then convened an extraordinary session in Bombay on October 29, 1935, with 1,000 delegates attending under the chairmanship of Madan Mohan Malaviya. 

C. Kelkar, one of the chief figures of the Hindu nationalist movement in Maharashtra, protested against Ambedkar’s ingratitude towards Gandhi, who, he said, had concerned himself with the Untouchable problem since 1932. 

Here again, Hindu nationalists were not closer to Ambedkar than the Congress but, on the contrary, rallied behind Mahatma Gandhi. Kelkar elaborated on the same theme in December, at the annual session of the Hindu Mahasabha. The Mahasabha co-opted Dalit leaders at the time to isolate Dr. Ambedkar, including Jagjivan Ram who was to become the main representative of the SC communities in the Congress party.  

Also read: Amit Shah’s Rajya Sabha Speech Didn’t Just ‘Insult’ Ambedkar, It Also Peddled Lies About Him

Ambedkar’s rapprochement with Congress

If the Hindu nationalist movement and Congress were more or less together against Dr. Ambedkar in the 1930s, things changed in the 1940s. In 1946, Ambedkar – who had lost his parliamentary seat, located in East Bengal, because of Partition – was elected to the Constituent Assembly with the support of the Congress, including the president of this assembly, Rajendra Prasad.  

In 1947, Ambedkar joined the Nehru government because of no one else but Mahatma Gandhi. He was then appointed at the helm of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution with the full support of the Congress. 

‘Worshipping False Gods,’ Arun Shourie, Harper India, 2012.

While Arun Shourie, in his book Worshipping False Gods, written one year before he joined the Vajpayee government, claimed that Ambedkar was not truly responsible for shaping the Indian Constitution, the Congress leaders of the time – including Rajendra Prasad and Nehru, but not Vallabhbhai Patel, Narendra Modi’s preferred Congress leader – supported Ambedkar in his task of drafting the Indian Constitution. They let him do it alone to a great extent and recognized his remarkable achievement in this capacity. 

In November 1948, T.T. Krishnamachari – who was to join Nehru’s government four years later – declared, “The burden of drafting this Constitution fell on Dr Ambedkar and I have no doubt that we are grateful to him for having achieved this task in a manner which is undoubtedly commendable”.    

Rajendra Prasad himself was all praise. “Sitting in the Chair, and watching the proceedings from day to day, I have realized, as nobody else could have, with what zeal and devotion the members of the Drafting Committee, and especially its Chairman, Dr. Ambedkar, in spite of his indifferent health have worked. We could never make a decision which was or could be ever so right as when we put him on the Drafting Committee, and made him its Chairman. He has not only justified his selection but has added lustre to the work which he has done.”

Certainly, the relations between Ambedkar and the Congress deteriorated in the early 1950s, when the most conservative party leaders, including Prasad, refused to support the Hindu Code Bill that was so dear to him, but the ruling party was definitely responsible for allowing Ambedkar to gain the status of a true statesman between 1947 and 1951. Additionally, Nehru, finally supported the Hindu code bill that became law. 

In contrast, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, the president of the newly-formed RSS-supported Jana Sangh, arraigned Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill. For the Hindu nationalists, to give more rights to women would pose a threat to the traditional form of marriage and the family and therefore undermine society’s stability.

But the tensions between the Hindu nationalists and Ambedkar intensified and reached a breaking point a few years later, due to the conversion issue that had never been such a bone of contention for the Congress, and Nehru in particular. 

What Savarkar said against Ambedkar in 1956     

After Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in Nagpur on October 14, 1956, along with thousands of his followers, V.D. Savarkar – who had been president of the Hindu Mahasabha between 1937 and 1942 – wrote a long article in the Deepavali Special issue (dated October 30, 1956) of Kesri, the marathi newspaper that B.G. Tilak – the mentor of Moonje – had founded in 1881.

Instead of claiming, like Modi, that Congress opposed Ambedkar, Savarkar – who is still the tutelar figure of the Hindutva movement in general and of the Prime Minister in particular – wrote that “Prime Minister Nehru and others are directly or indirectly financing giving active support to the campaign for the propagation of Buddhism” which found expression in the mass conversion of October 1956.

More importantly, Savarkar argued – in the most disrespectful manner – that no matter what, conversion to Buddhism would not make any difference for Ambedkar’s followers: 

“Dr. Ambedkar loudly declared that he would route out Hindu Dharm out of Bharat and will establish Buddhism as the greatest of all religions. Doesn’t matter how loud he shouts, it’s useless. Buddha himself preached for 40 years yet Sanatan remained, he could not uproot it,” Savarkar wrote.

Attacking Ambedkar’s “immature wisdom and pure misdirection”, Savarkar explains his stand in great detail – and in a rather illogical and even contradictory way. 

Also read: Would Narendra Modi Consider Dr B.R. Ambedkar an ‘Urban Naxal’?

On one hand, he insisted that “today untouchability is literally dead in most of India” because “in the cities, the innate casteism has been eradicated and the chain of rotibandi (having food on one table) has also been broken”. But on the other, he claimed that Dalits will not see any improvement in their condition after converting to Buddhism:

“These millions [sic], especially our Mahar brothers, who were initiated into Buddhism at Nagpur, when the pomp of the ceremony is over, when they return to their villages and settle down in their ten-by-ten, five-by-five huts, they will find that the momentary excitement of the ceremony has subsided, and that merely by becoming Buddhists, their untouchability has not ended”.

Savarkar repeats this idea on several occasions in his article: “It is improbable that our Mahar ‘untouchable’ brothers who have become Buddhists in Nagpur today will be considered ‘touchables’ just because they became Buddhists when they return from our villages”. 

For him, the new Buddhists will not escape the caste system so easily, primarily because Buddhism is part of Hinduism. While this idea was found before in the traditional vision of Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, Savarkar reformulated it in a different perspective because he’s not talking about Hinduism, really, but about Hindutva. 

For him, as the pioneering ideologue of Hindu nationalism, Hindus are not a community of believers, but a people defined by the blood running in their veins and the territory they belong to. Buddhists are parts and parcels of this nation because they are the descendants of the same Vedic fathers as the Hindus – presented as “a race” in Hindutva, who is a Hindu –  and are rooted in the same sacred land. 

Indeed, Savarkar insists that, in contrast of Christianity and Islam, which were not born in India, Buddhism is assimilated to Hinduism – like Jainism and Sikhism – in the Indian Constitution. 

In other words, for Savarkar, Ambedkar thought he would escape Hinduism by converting to Buddhism, but he was bound to remain a prisoner of Hindutva. It is very useful here to cite him at length for making sense of his argument and capturing his sarcastic tone – that Modi too is using today.

An excerpt from Savarkar’s article

“Ambedkar had been shouting again and again for the last 20-25 years that even if I was born in Hinduism. But I promise. I will not die in Hinduism. Even after being initiated into Buddhism in a ceremony held in Nagpur, burning with Hindu hatred, Dr. Ambedkar did not hesitate to once again denounce Hinduism and repeat the above broken promise that he would not die as a Hindu. 

But he is now in such a dilemma that if he is not going to jump again to some different religion and spend the rest of his life in Buddhism, then he will die as Hindu! Because the leap he took to go out of the Hindutva area failed and he got trapped and fell back into the boundary of Hindutva. The boundary area of Hinduism which is accepted today by the late Lala Lajpatrai, Swami Shraddhanand, Ramanand Chatterjee, Bhai Parmanand Prabhri and other Hindu Dhurandhars, which has been included in the Constitution of the entire Hindu system like the Hindu Mahasabha for the past 20 years and which is as historically true as it is by strictly measuring the actual facts, is possible from both the extreme and the extremes. The unique definition that separates Ambedkar is that the one whose fatherland and holy land is Bharatkhand is a Hindu! 

If Ambedkar had been a gentleman born outside the Indian subcontinent and had become a Buddhist, he could have found a small loophole in this definition of Hinduism and how he is out of it. But Ambedkar and all his Mahar followers who became Buddhists at Nagpur are now Indian Buddhists. That is, they cannot deny that Asidhusindhu India is their fatherland, the fatherland where generations of their traditional millennial ancestors have lived. 

Similarly, no one can deny that the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha, Bharat Khand is his janmabhumi (place of birth) and also karmabhumi (the land of his work), that’s why whether he is a Hinayana or a Mahayani or a Vajrayani of the world, Buddhists actually consider Bharatkhand as their holy land. 

Of course, till Ambedkar is an Indian Buddhist, and his homeland and holy land is inevitably Asidhusindhu India, so he will inevitably be included in the border area of Hinduism. As long as Ambedkar is a Buddhist, it is not possible for him to transgress that boundary. May God give him a long life! But we are all mortal. That is why when Ambedkar’s death comes, he is a Baudh, that is why he will have to die as a Hindu. 

His promise that I will not die as a Hindu will be such a failed promise in the end! What has changed because of his adoption of Buddhism is that they have abandoned the Vedic sect of Hinduism and accepted Buddhism as a religion, if they want to call it a religion, which is a non-Vedic sect within the circle of Hinduism. 

Your transgressive leap has fallen into the boundaries of Hinduism, doctor. There is no doubt that Ambedkar also knows this in his heart. That is why Ambedkar inserted phrases that were not in the initiation ceremony of traditional Buddhism at the initiation ceremony in Nagpur and repeatedly said that ‘I am renouncing Hinduism, I do not believe in Vishnu, Buddha is not an incarnation of Vishnu. Even if a stubborn child rejects the parents from whom he was born in a fit of frustration, says they are not his parents, it is impossible for him to change his parents. Ambedkar used to say ‘I am not a Hindu, I am not a Hindu’ in a fit of Hindu hatred he will remain Hindu, since his religion has Indian roots, it is impossible to break the bond of Hinduism”.                

Buddhists as anti-national: The ‘dark corner’ of Ambedkar’s mind according to Savarkar

While Savarkar is minimising the impact of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism, he invites his followers not to underestimate its disrupting potential. 

In the past, he says, this religion has undermined Indian unity and the country’s national integrity because Buddhists have joined hands with invaders. For him, in 1956, the real danger comes from the destructive motivations he attributes to Ambedkar:

“Ambedkar did not convert just because he developed deep devotion to Buddhism.  Another Hindu rashtra ghatak political ambition is hidden in a dark corner of his mind. It is that if they can increase the number of Buddhists in India, under his own peethacharya, then he can establish an independent Buddhist state, an independent Nagrajya, by joining hands with a group of other separatist tendencies like that in Jharkhand.”

Why this suspicion? Because, according to Savarkar, Buddhists have already been anti-national in the past:

“The history of the Buddhist era which was reopened by him [Ambedkar] should be read once again that even from the foreign invasions of the Yavanas, Shakas, Kushans, Hunas to the invasion of the Muslims […] Indian Buddhists had joined hands with those foreign people. Hindu state treason had been done to establish mleccha states in Bharat.”

The idea that Buddhism has sealed the fate of India’s sovereignty is not new. It is found in the autobiography of Bhai Parmanand, the Arya Samajist leader who structured the Hindu Mahasabha in Punjab and whose son, Bhai Mahavir, became a key leader of the Jana Sangh

To sum up: while Savarkar does not appreciate the emancipatory potential of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism – for him, it will make no difference in social terms for the Untouchables – he denounces the political risk inherent in the so-called anti-national orientation of the Buddhists in the past, and Ambedkar today.

To counter the influence of the first Indian Dalit leader, Savarkar, interestingly, was eager to promote alternative Scheduled Castes leaders, including Jagjivan Ram, the rising star of the Congress party, whose potential he emphasises in his article without mentioning the party he belonged to.

If, instead of rewriting history in a revisionist way, today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders had read the prose of the founding father of the Hindu nationalist movement, they would have realized that Savarkar – like others, including Kelkar and Malaviya – were not less against Ambedkar than Congress leaders in the 1930s-40s. 

But things changed after independence. They continued to fight against Ambedkar because of his revolt against the caste system in the 1940-50s, when the latter was on the Congress’s side on many occasions during these two decades. Sometimes, fact checking helps.