New Delhi: Facing fire over his flippant remarks in parliament about Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the resurgence of his anti-caste advocacy in contemporary politics, Amit Shah accused the Congress of “distorting and twisting” his statements, and circulating “mischievous” videos. The Union home minister also refused to resign from his position, even as opposition forces have amped up the volume of protests, putting prime minister Narendra Modi in the dock, and urging him to fire Shah from his cabinet.
For an idea of Shah’s understanding of the controversy, let us take a look at what the Bharatiya Janata Party veteran said and the spirit in which he made those remarks.
“Abhi ek fashion ho gaya hai – Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar. Itna naam agar bhagwan ka lete to saat janmon tak swarg mil jata (It has become a fashion to say Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar’. If they took god’s name so many times, they would have got a place in heaven),” he said in his Rajya Sabha speech.
Shah’s tone and tenor was one of aggression. But while this register is a hit in campaign speeches, in trying to highlight Congress’s alleged neglect of social justice while paying lip service to Ambedkar, he stretched the rhetoric a little too far. In the moment, at the Rajya Sabha, Shah appeared to have little awareness of the fact that his statement would trigger such a ruckus over the way he himself ended up belittling the anti-caste icon.
However, what has gone unnoticed is that Shah misconstrued, and also lied about, Ambedkar and his opinions on two vital counts that shouldered his entire argument against the Congress.
Also read: Amit Shah’s Ambedkar Remark Keeps Parliament on Boil: Congress, TMC Move Privilege Notices
Ambedkar and his views on Article 370
Immediately after making his remark that invoking Ambedkar’s name has become fashionable in current times, Shah cited three reasons on why Ambedkar left the cabinet of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He said Ambedkar was opposed to Article 370, Nehru’s foreign policy, and his failure to fulfil promises made to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
That Ambedkar was opposed to Article 370 is far from the truth. The Sangh Parivar has been peddling the lie ever since the Modi government ended the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. The Indian vice president of the time, M. Venkaiah Naidu, too, used a fake quote by Ambedkar in an opinion piece published in The Hindu to assert the untruth in the public domain.
Naidu cited a conversation between Ambedkar and Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah from S.N. Busi’s 2016 book Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: Framing of Indian Constitution to argue that removing Article 370 was a matter of social justice.
“Mr Abdullah, you want that India should defend Kashmir. You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply you food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India, but you don’t want India and any citizen of India to have any rights in Kashmir and Government of India should have only limited powers. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India, and I, as the Law Minister of India, will never do. I cannot betray the interests of my country,” the citation read.
A fact-check by The Wire at the time had showed that the original source of the quote was an article written by RSS leader Balraj Madhok in Organiser, the organisation’s mouthpiece.
“The quote (that Naidu uses) is mentioned in Volume 4, page 472 of my book. I took it from an article titled ‘Article 370 – With Role of Dr BR Ambedkar in Shaping Peaceful Jammu and Kashmir State’ by an engineer, H.R. Bhonsa. Bhonsa’s article appeared in Dalit Vision, dated 20 February 2013,” Busi told The Wire.
“Bhonsa had picked the quote from Balraj Madhok’s article published in (the RSS mouthpiece) Organiser, in its Deepawali edition of 14 November 2004,” Busi added.
Madhok, like all Hindu nationalists of the time, was a vocal opponent of Article 370. Busi said that he may have had a “political agenda” in mind while writing the article.
The same untruth was also advanced by the then Union parliamentary affairs minister Arjun Ram Meghwal in an Indian Express op-ed on August 20, 2019 – also by citing Busi.
Contrastingly, a closer look at Ambedkar’s writings compiled by the Union Ministry of External Affairs shows that far from supporting the abrogation of Article 370, he had advocated a “zonal plebiscite” in Kashmir valley, if that is what was required to resolve the Kashmir dispute. He believed that the Kashmir dispute should be resolved immediately to cut India’s disproportionately hefty defence budget.
Ambedkar told Parliament in 1950:
“All that they (the Government of India) are dealing with is the (Kashmir) question of military allotment. The question of plebiscite is in no way new in the history of the world. One need not go back to the ancient past to find precedents for settling questions of this sort by plebiscite. After the First World War, I certainly remember there were two questions to be settled by plebiscite. One was the question of Upper Silesia and the other was the question of Alsace-Lorraine. Both these questions were settled by plebiscite, and I am sure that my hon. Friend Shri Gopalaswami Ayyangar (then a minister in-charge of Kashmir affairs), with his mature wisdom and sagacity, must be knowing of this. It is not possible for us to borrow something from the line of action taken by the League of Nations with regard to the plebiscite in Upper Silesia and Alsace-Lorraine which we can usefully carry into the Kashmir dispute and have the matter settled quickly so that we can release Rs. 50 crores from the Defence Budget and utilise it for the benefit of our people.”
From 1951 onwards, Ambedkar began to believe in the idea of a plebiscite quite forcefully, as can be seen in his words in the 1951 ‘Election Manifesto of the Scheduled Castes Federation’, at a press conference on October 27, 1951 at Jalandhar in Punjab, and in a few essays that he wrote in subsequent years.
Shah’s assertion that Ambedkar was also opposed to Nehru’s foreign policy may be true but he clearly spun it in his favour to make an inaccurate argument. Ambedkar opposed Nehru’s policy towards Kashmir in a way that may only come back to haunt the BJP. He thought that any unilateral outreach work in Kashmir by the government of India can be a potential threat.
This is what he says in a 1953 parliamentary debate on India’s foreign policy, criticising Nehru’s efforts to build infrastructure connecting the rest of India and Kashmir:
“The key note of our foreign policy is to solve the problems of other countries, and not to solve the problems of our own. We have here the problem of Kashmir. We have never succeeded in solving it. Everybody seems to have forgotten that it is a problem. But I suppose, some day, we may wake up and find that the ghost is there.”
“And I find that the Prime Minister has launched upon the project of digging a tunnel connecting Kashmir to India. Sir, I think, it is one of the most dangerous things that a Prime Minister could do. We have been hearing of a tunnel under the English Channel to connect France with England. We have been hearing it for 50 years, I think someone has been proposing, and yet the English have never done anything to carry out the project, because it is a double-edged weapon. The enemy, if he conquers France, can use the tunnel and rush troops into England and conquer England. That might also happen. The Prime Minister, in digging the tunnel, thinks that he alone would be able to use it. He does not realise that it can always be a two-way traffic, and that a conqueror who comes on the other side and captures Kashmir, can come away straight to Pathankot, and probably come into the Prime Minister’s house – I do not know.”
Ambedkar’s views on ‘Hindu nationalism’
Even as Shah attacked the Congress, he invoked Ambedkar to hammer down his moot point that the BJP and its “cultural nationalism” has finally accorded the respect that the constitution deserved – as opposed to the Congress that merely understood the constitution through a colonial lens.
“Those who understand India will never be able to understand Bharat. If you look at Bharat from India’s lens, then you will never be able to understand Bharat in your life. That is why they (opposition) have named its alliance INDIA,” he said. He then elaborated on how the Modi government decolonised “Bharat Mata” from western influences.
He spoke about how the BJP-led government promulgated indigenous criminal laws by scrapping “160-year-old” laws, freed roads and monuments from its colonial nomenclatures as he also cited how Race Course Road and Rajpath were changed to Lok Kalyan Marg and Kartavya Path, initiated primary education in mother tongues, installed the Sengol in parliament, built a national war memorial and PM Museum, celebrated icons like Shivaji, Birsa Munda and Subhas Chandra Bose, and planned to put in place a Uniform Civil Code by doing away with personal laws.
Let us, therefore, look at how Ambedkar viewed the Hindutva method of imposing “Hindu” or “cultural” nationalism in independent India.
The most categorical statement by Ambedkar is in his own book, Pakistan or the Partition of India (1946, pages 354-355) where he said, “If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country…Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost.”
Writing for The Wire, historian Prabodhan Pol cited a party manifesto published by the Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) in 1951, authored by Ambedkar himself. The manifesto clearly argued, “The Scheduled Caste Federation will not have any alliance with any reactionary party such as Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS”.
Pol also quotes from Ambedkar’s newspaper Janata, his anti-caste movement’s mouthpiece where a Dalit activist from Nagpur P.D. Shelare complained about “the caste segregation actively practised in some local units (shakhas) of the RSS in Nagpur, particularly during meals.” Shelare said that words such as “nationalists” have acquired ironical and duplicitous meanings in India against such a backdrop.
Ambedkar’s newspapers like Bahiskrut Bharat, Janata, and Prabuddha Bharat consistently presented views against Hindutva organisations like Hindu Mahasabha for being founded on “sectarian principles of Brahminism and anti-Muslim politics”.
“Janata and Prabuddha Bharat held consistently critical views about Hindutva and its leading ideologues like V.D. Savarkar. For example, Savarkar’s ‘Patit-Pavan’ temple, which was built exclusively for untouchables in Ratnagiri received biting flak from the Janata. On the other hand, his emphasis to use Sanskritised words in Marathi was also argued as a typical fanatic attempt to sanitise Islamic influences,” Pol wrote in his article.
Similarly, writing for The Print, the editor of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 17 to 22, published by the government of Maharashtra, Hari Narke, quoted Ambedkar extensively on his views on organisations like the RSS. One of his quotes in parliament on May 14, 1951 said, “May I mention the R.S.S. and Akali Dal? Some of them are very dangerous associations.”
In a Frontline article, noted jurist A.G. Noorani quoted Ambedkar from the Memorandum on the Rights of States and Minorities (March 24, 1947) that was submitted to the constituent assembly’s advisory committee on fundamental rights, minorities, etc. thus:
“Unfortunately for the minorities in India, Indian nationalism has developed a new doctrine which may be called the Divine Right of the Majority to rule the minorities according to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for the sharing of power by the minority is called communalism, while the monopolising of the whole power by the majority is called nationalism. Guided by such political philosophy the majority is not prepared to allow the minorities to share political power, nor is it willing to respect any convention made in that behalf as is evident from their repudiation of the obligation (to include representatives of the minorities in the Cabinet) contained in the Instrument of Instructions issued to the Governors in the Government of India Act of 1935. Under these circumstances there is no way left but to have the rights of the Scheduled Castes embodied in the Constitution.” (B. Shiva Rao, Select Documents , volume 2, page 113).
Shah and the Hindu Code Bills
While misleading the parliament, Shah curiously also spoke about Hindu Code Bills and blamed the Congress for bringing in an “anti-Hindu” bill that sought to scrap all Hindu traditions, even when Nehru allowed Muslim personal law and practices like triple talaq to continue.
This may be counted as another blooper from Shah’s Rajya Sabha speech. Nehru had appointed Ambedkar to chair the subcommittee to develop the Hindu Code Bill, and Ambedkar eventually resigned from Nehru’s cabinet on September 27, 1951, in protest after the Hindu Code Bill was defeated in parliament.
The Hindu Code Bill proposed reformist laws against conservative practices like polygamy, patriarchal inheritance laws among Hindu communities, endogamous marriages, caste discrimination and so on, while aiming to create a modern and progressive Hindu society.
The bills were introduced by Ambedkar in the constituent assembly in October 1947, while Nehru became its biggest campaigner in the 1952 general election. However, Ambedkar’s initial drafts of it were strongly opposed by Hindutva groups and leaders like Savarkar, resulting in its defeat. One can say that the resistance to the bills by Hindu nationalist organisations was primarily responsible for Ambedkar’s resignation, apart from Congress’s failure to get the drafts passed in parliament.
The BJP has used the debate on constitution in parliament as a platform to gain control over the political narrative, after it faced reverses in the Lok Sabha elections owing to the impression that the BJP may use its majority to change the constitution. However, its top leaders have ended up peddling lies and untruths about India’s constitutional history in the process. It could have chosen to say that the current crop of its leaders have attempted to correct the mistakes of their predecessors, but it clearly did not – even when patting itself on the back for a number of measures that the Modi government has taken to empower marginalised communities politically and socially.
As the debate on constitution has now taken a sharp turn with opposition forces demanding Shah’s resignation and pushing the Modi government against a wall, the BJP may just end up tying itself in knots like never before.
