At the conclusion of the drafting of the Indian constitution, the chairman of the drafting committee, and its chief architect, Dr.B.R. Ambedkar noted: “On 26th January, 1950, we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.”
Seventy five years from then, these contradictions continue to plague the realm.
Socially, vast numbers of citizens remain ostracised on the ground. In large parts of rural India as well as remote urban corners, inter-marrying and even inter-dining among castes can draw heavy punishment.
The principle of “purity” – an esoteric concept which has little to do with hygiene – still afflicts highly educated and highly placed scions of the upper castes.
Not long ago, a judge of a higher court had the entire premises of the court “purified” with “Ganga jal” (holy waters of the Ganga river) because the preceding incumbent had been a Shudra.
Despite constitutional guarantees, Hindu places of worship often remain out of bounds for sections of Hindu society.
The list of exclusions is long and may not be belaboured.
Daily newspapers continue to give us stories of young men suffocating in poisonous drains while sent to clean them without the equipment they ought to have for the job, while the honourable prime minister once instructed the nation how these citizens know that they are performing a higher, spiritual function.
In economic life, some 80% of Indians have negligible representation at levels of control in structures of power, be it in educational institutions, bureaucracy, high-powered commissions, or any other state institution of clout, including law-enforcement and the judiciary.
Ambedkar’s prescient observation thus continues to be valid as Indian rockets hit the moon and as expatriate Indians achieve high proficiency and material status in foreign lands
In thus cautioning us at the threshold of the making of our constitution, when he stressed that were the goals of equality, and fraternity not achieved, not to speak of liberty, the whole democratic experiment could be in jeopardy, was Ambedkar declaring himself a potential ‘urban Naxal’?
If not, why is it then that when Rahul Gandhi and many millions of concerned and public-spirited citizens who hold fast to a constitutional regime underscore the very same posers that Ambedkar had left us with are dubbed “urban Naxals” and enemies of the nation by no less a person than Prime Minister Modi?
Is it the case of the state that the contradictions that Ambedkar had underscored have been resolved, leaving no residues of social and economic inequality?
If not, does the constitution forbid parties and individuals from raising these matters as the substance of their public duties and public ideals?
Dividing Hindus
Right-wing sophistry currently propagates that invoking these matters is motivated by the sinister conspiracy to divide Hindu society.
Question: was there a time when Hindu society was not divided?
Were that not so, why, pray, would no less than the chieftain of Sanatan society, Mohan Bhagwat express publicly the honest lament that for two thousand years “we” (meaning the upper castes) have treated them (meaning the Shudra samaj) like “animals”.
After that candid acknowledgement that it is not some others – and not the Muslims – who have caused divisions among Hindus but Hindus themselves, what doubt remains on this score?
It is not a likely caste-census advocated by most non-savarna segments of Hindu society which therefore threatens to divide Hindus; they have been already divided for millennia on end by the religious establishment and instructions of the twice – born.
If castes had not existed, why, pray, would Ambedkar have felt compelled to give us his treatise on The Annihilation of Caste, one which the custodians of Sanatan who are now up in arms against never really took up for implementation?
The fact is that these custodians do not ever mean to rid Sanatan society of caste divides, only to conceal them; this for the reason that so much of their hegemonic interest of the material kind rests on the internal divisions of he Hindu society.
Thus, should a caste-census truly happen, the unlovely skeletons of the Sanatan formation may tumble out, leading to the grievous distortion that, after all, it is not Muslims who are the enemies of Sanatan but the Sanatan arrangement itself.
What wonder then that a Rahul Gandhi or Akhilesh Yadav who seem to have such a census on their agenda have become the bêtes noires today of the Sanatan; and what better way to further malign them than to dub them “urban Naxals” who mean to dismantle the Sanatan state.
And, for the same reason, the Sanatan which at one time refused to accept the Ambedkar constitution finds it expedient to accuse the duo of using the constitution to their devious unravelling purposes.
Meanwhile, the minuscule leadership from among the non-Brahmanical castes who find themselves today in positions of authority have a difficult call to take: do they continue to collaborate with the Sanatan or do they go over to the side of those who seek to effect a scrutiny of facts on the Hindu ground.
That they seem at ease in keeping their counsel on the rabid sectarian blasts now unleashed by the right-wing without let or hindrance, or the least regard for the injunctions of the constitution is there for all to see. A secular Nitish Kumar seems to have no difficulty with the Hindu Swabhiman Yatra now being conducted across Muslim-inhabited areas of Bihar by a Union minister, Giriraj Singh, who has no doubt sworn an oath on the constitution never to discriminate between castes or creeds. And so forth.
Nor do institutions of state commissioned to uphold the foundational values of the constitution seem in any hurry to intervene as a gale of majoritarian invective greets the nation every day across the Hindi belt.
Even as a canny media relentlessly sees the virtues of current-day governance to the exclusion of any merit in critiques of its warts and moles.
Think: if Socrates was made to drink hemlock, what is a Rahul Gandhi or an Akhilesh Yadav? Ambedkar had said a constitution will be only as good or not as the people charged to implement it. A prophetic enumeration of our times indeed.
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.
