He stood out, he spoke up.
The Indian National Congress could neither ignore him, nor make him one its own.
But Time will concede this much to that party: The great play of India’s freedom struggle, with characters of Ramayanic turn and Mahabharatan twist, enacting what could be called a triumphant tragedy in several Acts ended with three dramatic scenes.
These were, first, the formidable Congress-powered Quit India Movement that had shown beyond all doubt the Indian people’s determination to free themselves from the Raj, then, the Second World War making Empire obsolete and Britain’s allies – the USA and the USSR – supporting independence for India and, finally, the entering upon office of the Attlee-led Labour government in London which found Brtitain’s hegemony over India too great an embarrassment to handle. It had to let go.
When all these global players, the people of India foremost among them, were being as big and defining as the moment demanded that they be, the Congress was not going to be small-minded or petty. It knew that making history on Indian soil was not its monopoly nor were India’s political geography or demography in its hands. Indraprastha was not, never has been, peopled by the devas alone. No sura comes without an asura to match and , even more curiously, those two – the celestial and the nether-born, are wholly and routinely inter-changeable within the same personality. The political Indian’s personality traits change like the sky, depending on the time of the day, the month of the year. The Congress knew it had to overcome the droughts in its political imagination, the floods in its brimming self-esteem. It had, in fact, to make up for all of its many weaknesses, by deploying the scattered resources of India.
By the time a Constituent Assembly needed to be formed for the coming India, the new India, the India of the dreams of the struggle, the Congress realised that India was far bigger, far more complex, than the struggle for its freedom, that politics was about more than political parties and the making of a Constitution for India could not be done by an enlarged form of the Congress Working Committee. Let us grant that this realization that it must search for, find and work with other intellectual and aspirational resources, was mature, was wise.
The outsider
A pre-eminent resource lay rather stunningly concentrated in one man – intellectually as pre-possessing as he was politically overwhelming, a figure the mortal devas and the suras had as much declined to embrace as he, caring a piffle for such mythical categories, had with a wave of his hand, disdained.
Dr Ambedkar’s having obtained not one but three post-doctoral degrees in the USA and England and been called to the Bar was not lost on the statesmen, barristers and intellectuals in the Congress’ helm like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajagopalachari and Rajendra Prasad. Nor was the fact that here was a man whose rich collection of books on being shipped back home from London had been sunk by a German torpedo on the high seas and who had taken that loss in his stride for the simple reason that he carried something of an Alexandrine library of works on politics, economics, history, literature and the law in his brain.
They also knew that Dr Ambedkar also carried in his brain something else – a narrative parallel to theirs about the chemistry of social discriminations in India, its origins and its ramifications. And an urge, again distinct from theirs, but as intense, to set India’s wrongs right in terms of a morality that did not invoke the old celestials or a nationalism that did not invent new ones. He believed not in a nostalgic cosmology for his political beliefs but in a no-nonsense ecology of the stony valleys and thorny ridges of Indian life as lived every day.
And there was no one who could really relate world thoughts, international philosophical trends and patterns in jurisprudential evolution to India’s conditions. Gandhi had his Tolstoy, Thoreau, Ruskin as ethical lodestars and Nehru had his Fabius Maximus, Marx and Laski as political inspirations. But Ambedkar had his Jefferson, Lincoln and his Bryce, he had other Irish reference points, German and of course British, not just for spiritual or emotional sustenance, or political propulsion but as brick and mortar for the tangibilities of nation-building.
The deprived, when they are not being further ground under, get to be patronized, co-opted. No one could dare try either of those procedures with Dr Ambedkar. And so he was requested, urged, with a certain inevitability to head the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly. Did the Congress lack draftsmen, wordsmiths? It did not. Was there any shortage of willing Barkises? One can be sure a scramble if not a stampede would have occurred if the Chairmanship had been ‘opened’ for volunteers.
But where was there to be found this combination of academic brilliance and a living experience of deprivation ? Was there in any other this blend of a mind that knew the higher realms where the eagle soars but also where the cobra digs its fangs. Others had a vague sense of other Constitutions, an equally nebulous sense of their social objectives, conflicted by the Congress’s many pole-stars – Gandhi’s sarvodaya and Nehru’s socialism, Patel’s belief in a strong centre and Congress Chief Ministers’ desire for greater powers for the states and increased shares in the country’s financial resources.
The Congress recognised in Ambedkar one who was not imprisoned by one or the other of its own shibboleths, one or another of its own pressure groups, and who could, without any vulnerability to lobbies, move the Constituent Assembly towards a document that would balance the nation’s various needs, sentiments and goals. The balancing of the powers of the President of the Union vis-à-vis the elected Government, the Unionist vis-à-vis Federative aspects of the Constitution, the crafting of the Union, States and Concurrent Lists, were all matters in which his in-born objectivity was crucial, irreplaceable.
But above all in him was also found one who had a clear understanding of the goal of social justice. Where others empathized, he had experienced, where others visualized, he knew in his veins , the need for that justice. If Congress leaders and those of other parties felt for the hurts of the outcastes and untouchables as India called them, for those of the poor and working classes, here was someone who did not have to feel for them, for he was in a sense the hurt itself. And being capable, at the same time, of being able to see beyond the personal hurt at the larger privations and deprivations of the country. Gandhi spoke for the people of India when he publicly appreciated on 3 Feb 1947 (from east Bengal) Ambedkar's refusal to boycott the Constituent Assembly, to which in the first instance he had been sent from Bengal by the Muslim League, which soon boycotted the CA.
On different pages
We must not stint, however, in according credit to the Grand Old Party for giving the role it did to Dr Ambedkar for they were on different pages, and political propriety did not require it to entrust it to one from outside its fold. The co-sharing of responsibility went beyond Constitution-making when Prime Minister Nehru invited Dr Ambedkar to become India’s first Minister for Law and Justice. But the decorum – or prudence – was short-lived.
It would not be wrong, I believe, to assume that as minister, Dr Ambedkar was made to feel he was there on sufferance, that he had overstayed his welcome in the government. And he did the only self-respecting thing that he could have done when on the matter of the Hindu Code Bill, he resigned his ministerial office. The Congress let him go without resistance and, a thousand pities, it opposed him in the first election that Dr Ambedkar ever fought in North Bombay, in 1952. Congress was Congress and it was able to defeat Dr Ambedkar. As is this was not bad enough in the bye-election that arose in 1954 in Bhandara, the Congress again opposed and defeated him.
I would also like to share here a retrospective dream : Congress should not only not have let Dr Ambedkar leave the ministry, it should have offered to him, in 1952, the newly-created office of the Vice President of India. There was a felicity to the President of the Constituent Assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad becoming the first President. But should not the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, described on all hands as the architect of the Constitution, have become our first Vice President ? Than the philosopher-statesman Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, there could not have been a more inspiring person to hold that office and he brought a stature and a lustre to it as only he could have but at that point in time, Dr Ambedkar’s inauguration of the position of Upa Rashtrapati would have made a huge difference to the spirit and the pace of social justice and of affirmative action in India. A retrospective wish or dream to be taken seriously should of course have some connection to practical possibilities as they existed at the time.
National pastime
And so today, if the Congress thinks it wise – and prudent – to commemorate Dr Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary let us not grudge it its moment of glory under that anniversary’s sun. Its posthumous praise of Dr Ambedkar will ring truer if it were to add to it regret over its decision to oppose the leader in the only two elections to the Lok Sabha that he contested. But if it cannot get itself to do that handsome thing, let the Congress at least be aware that the country has not forgotten the missed opportunities missed by it in 1952 and 1954. Our memories are short, they are not non-existent.
Exploitation of the charisma of the great dead is not the monopoly of one party alone, it is a national political pastime. Dr Ambedkar’s name has become a kamadhenu which all manner of self-promoters seek to milk. Those he would have chased away from his presence with a single withering look, come up to his portraits bearing garlands and wearing smiles with what can only be called gall. Some of these belong, unbelievably, to the Right. When in the Constituent Assembly men from the extreme Right pleaded endlessly for the Constitution to open with the words ‘Bharat that is India’, instead of ‘India that is Bharat’, Dr Ambedkar , his patience exhausted, said, "Mr Chairman, how long is this to go on? There is work to be done!" Likewise, seeing the religious, communal and economic Right today competing with the rest of us to mark his birthday, Dr Ambedkar , had he been alive, would have said ‘Stop this pantomime, there is work to be done !’. Alas, he is not alive and we see being enacted, in terms of these Ambedkar jayanti celebrations by them, what can only be called a farce. The Right – by which I do not mean any particular party or individual but religious revivalists, social status-quoists and economic monopolists in general – may say ‘Dr Ambedkar belongs to us too’. But is it respect for the great man that motivates them ? And as for politicians there is one compelling reason why they queue up to honour Babasaheb Ambedkar : It is not love of the great man as much as love of the electoral dividends which identification with that icon can bring.
The sectarian Right anywhere believes in two kinds of dictatorship : that of , literally, a Supremo and then, that of a community. The Right in India is no exception. It believes the people of India , with their tradition of looking up to a preceptor, a neta, will democratically uphold an individual’s dictatorship. It also thinks that the Hindu majority in India will want its Raj, a Hindu Raj, to prevail.
Let that Right, before it seeks to appropriate Dr Ambedkar, ponder this observation of Dr Ambedkar’s made in the Constituent Assembly on 29 November, 1949:
And it must also ponder, very carefully, the following which Dr Ambedkar said on November 5, 1949:
I do not have to tell this audience that Dr Ambedkar meant by “vanish”, was that the minorities will not want to perpetuate themselves as a political "other"; he was not envisaging their vanishing in terms of cultural or religious practices and belief. The man who so determinedly adopted the Buddhist way of life in the last months of his life would have flayed the notion of Ghar Vapsi as abhorrent to the ethos of India.
Who owns Ambedkar?
Dr Ambedkar has been exploited by some politicians from the Dalit community itself. If these persons think they have a greater right than others to invoke Babasaheb , they may have a point. But if they think they have a greater right than others to exploit Babasaheb then, I am sorry to have to say, they do not have a point; they are mistaken. Seeing computer-doctored photographs of contemporary politicians, born decades after Babasaheb passed away, standing beside him in morphed pictures, is common. It is also rather sad. These individuals should have more originality to them, more self-reliance, and less trickery. We are forgetful of history, but we are not so innocent of it as to imagine that these gentleman and ladies were close to the icon. It needs to be said here that the late Kanshiramji never tried any such stunt.
Dr Ambedkar quoted Jefferson in the Constituent Assembly once to say each generation is a new country. We are now that new country. There is a new generation of “us”. The hard truth is that despite this being so, our new country still has its old prejudices around, its old persecutions. Our cities and larger towns may not practice untouchability as of old, but in the villages and even in our cities, unseen, invisibly, there is a sense of Dalits being Dalits, a category apart. Only India could have thought of something as creatively correctionist as a Schedule listing Scheduled Castes and Tribes and only India could have reduced the word to a slang abbreviation that I shall not repeat. This is not used in harmless jest as other slanged abbreviations areas , for instance TamBrahm or Gujju or Mallu. It is used with a certain derision. This is a shame on us. We are and we are not yet a new country.
Gandhi’s coinage of "Harijan" played its part, it played its part and has rightly faded away. Its right and proper successor "Dalit" too will hopefully one day become redundant with the word being used as an adjective rather than as a proper noun, a reminder of what once was. But that day is far from now. Reservations in education and employment have done wondrous good for its intended beneficiaries. My state of Tamil Nadu is an example of the transformation the policy of reservation has brought to human lives. Reservations must stay for the foreseeable future but there is such a thing as voluntarism. I know some remarkable Dalits who have said in different words “I am a Dalit but I am not in any sense deprived and will not avail the leg-up”. I salute their self-calibration. Second, third and further generations on, children and grand-children of those who have rightly received the benefits of reservation, may ask themselves if they should not now relinquish their quota rights for others from less advantaged sections of the community to avail.
The dispossession of our rural poor, including Dalits , especially tribal Dalits, in the name of industrial development and mining and forest use, is a travesty. It is a violation of our Constitutional obligations towards this minority community. The compensation clauses introduced in the Land Acquisition Act by the previous government were a step, delayed as they were, to protect some of those rights. Any dilution of those provisions would be unethical and should be objected to by all Indians, not just Dalit Indians. Compensatory justice is not about compensation, it is about justice which like peace is indivisible.
It is important now to let Ambedkar be accessed as the mental phenomenon that he was, for the whole of India, and not just for that section of its population whose immiserations he sought to remove. It is important that no section of India confines him and, equally, that none refrains from engaging with his open intellect. Speaking for myself, for several years, I thought of Ambedkar as a giant of a man who spoke, as no one else did or could have for Dalit India and who drafted, as no one else did or could have, the Constitution of India. These, his twin achievements, I thought were what assured him his place in history. It is only in my mid-life when I came to see the range of his works that I realised Ambedkar was a Renaissance figure, no less, who unlocked doors and windows fastened not just by sectarian prejudice, but by much more – by intellectual inertia, by mental fatigue and by what can only be called ideational sissiness. To typecast such a man as a spokesman, howsoever formidable, for one section of India alone, for one interest, and one cause, or to label him as the chief architect, howsoever formidable, of one legislative edifice, one enactment, is to deny and impoverish ourselves as his legatees.
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s is a legacy of so broad a scope as it helps us see ourselves in civilisational terms , not just as Indians but as a major segment of humanity, dynamic in one part and moribund in another, self-fulfilling in one and self-demeaning in another, poised to play a role in world affairs in one but sinking into mind-crippling localisms in another. He cannot be monopolised any more than he can be marginalised. He cannot be fenced-in any more than he can be fenced-out. For, like Gandhi he was a climate that made for seasons, not the flying flavour of one brief Spring.
There is no denying the deep and defining differences between the way Gandhi viewed the problem of India’s Depressed Classes, and the way Babasaheb did. There is no understating the differences between them on the structure of Indian society. All humans are fallible. Gandhi, I believe, was in error when he defended varnashrama but opposed untouchability; Ambedkar was right on that. Gandhi, I believe, was right in opposing separate electorates for Dalits and advocating reserved seats instead ; Ambedkar, I believe, was in error there. And insignificant "I", could be in error in drawing these two conclusions. But on this I know I am not wrong: More than half a century after they left this world a sadder place the liberal Indian who wants to end both discrimination and recrimination will find these two leaders on the same, not opposite pages, within the same not opposed narratives, the same not contrary discourses for India’s civilisational evolution in an ambience where sectarianism endangers our pluralism, bigotry , our secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar are twin inspirations to us today as we battle against bigotry and majoritarian-ism.
Let us offer to Babasaheb Ambedkar, as to Mahatma Gandhi, not the worship he would have been impatient with but the respect he so uniquely deserves. Let us not burden his legacy with the load of an unthinking discipleship but a solidarity that takes up his unfinished tasks and the new challenges that threaten them.
The former governor of West Bengal made these remarks at the unveiling of a portrait of Dr Ambedkar in the Supreme Court library on April 14.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
The Indian National Congress could neither ignore him, nor make him one its own.
But Time will concede this much to that party: The great play of India’s freedom struggle, with characters of Ramayanic turn and Mahabharatan twist, enacting what could be called a triumphant tragedy in several Acts ended with three dramatic scenes.
These were, first, the formidable Congress-powered Quit India Movement that had shown beyond all doubt the Indian people’s determination to free themselves from the Raj, then, the Second World War making Empire obsolete and Britain’s allies – the USA and the USSR – supporting independence for India and, finally, the entering upon office of the Attlee-led Labour government in London which found Brtitain’s hegemony over India too great an embarrassment to handle. It had to let go.
When all these global players, the people of India foremost among them, were being as big and defining as the moment demanded that they be, the Congress was not going to be small-minded or petty. It knew that making history on Indian soil was not its monopoly nor were India’s political geography or demography in its hands. Indraprastha was not, never has been, peopled by the devas alone. No sura comes without an asura to match and , even more curiously, those two – the celestial and the nether-born, are wholly and routinely inter-changeable within the same personality. The political Indian’s personality traits change like the sky, depending on the time of the day, the month of the year. The Congress knew it had to overcome the droughts in its political imagination, the floods in its brimming self-esteem. It had, in fact, to make up for all of its many weaknesses, by deploying the scattered resources of India.
By the time a Constituent Assembly needed to be formed for the coming India, the new India, the India of the dreams of the struggle, the Congress realised that India was far bigger, far more complex, than the struggle for its freedom, that politics was about more than political parties and the making of a Constitution for India could not be done by an enlarged form of the Congress Working Committee. Let us grant that this realization that it must search for, find and work with other intellectual and aspirational resources, was mature, was wise.
The outsider
A pre-eminent resource lay rather stunningly concentrated in one man – intellectually as pre-possessing as he was politically overwhelming, a figure the mortal devas and the suras had as much declined to embrace as he, caring a piffle for such mythical categories, had with a wave of his hand, disdained.
Dr Ambedkar’s having obtained not one but three post-doctoral degrees in the USA and England and been called to the Bar was not lost on the statesmen, barristers and intellectuals in the Congress’ helm like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajagopalachari and Rajendra Prasad. Nor was the fact that here was a man whose rich collection of books on being shipped back home from London had been sunk by a German torpedo on the high seas and who had taken that loss in his stride for the simple reason that he carried something of an Alexandrine library of works on politics, economics, history, literature and the law in his brain.
They also knew that Dr Ambedkar also carried in his brain something else – a narrative parallel to theirs about the chemistry of social discriminations in India, its origins and its ramifications. And an urge, again distinct from theirs, but as intense, to set India’s wrongs right in terms of a morality that did not invoke the old celestials or a nationalism that did not invent new ones. He believed not in a nostalgic cosmology for his political beliefs but in a no-nonsense ecology of the stony valleys and thorny ridges of Indian life as lived every day.
And there was no one who could really relate world thoughts, international philosophical trends and patterns in jurisprudential evolution to India’s conditions. Gandhi had his Tolstoy, Thoreau, Ruskin as ethical lodestars and Nehru had his Fabius Maximus, Marx and Laski as political inspirations. But Ambedkar had his Jefferson, Lincoln and his Bryce, he had other Irish reference points, German and of course British, not just for spiritual or emotional sustenance, or political propulsion but as brick and mortar for the tangibilities of nation-building.
The deprived, when they are not being further ground under, get to be patronized, co-opted. No one could dare try either of those procedures with Dr Ambedkar. And so he was requested, urged, with a certain inevitability to head the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly. Did the Congress lack draftsmen, wordsmiths? It did not. Was there any shortage of willing Barkises? One can be sure a scramble if not a stampede would have occurred if the Chairmanship had been ‘opened’ for volunteers.
But where was there to be found this combination of academic brilliance and a living experience of deprivation ? Was there in any other this blend of a mind that knew the higher realms where the eagle soars but also where the cobra digs its fangs. Others had a vague sense of other Constitutions, an equally nebulous sense of their social objectives, conflicted by the Congress’s many pole-stars – Gandhi’s sarvodaya and Nehru’s socialism, Patel’s belief in a strong centre and Congress Chief Ministers’ desire for greater powers for the states and increased shares in the country’s financial resources.
The Congress recognised in Ambedkar one who was not imprisoned by one or the other of its own shibboleths, one or another of its own pressure groups, and who could, without any vulnerability to lobbies, move the Constituent Assembly towards a document that would balance the nation’s various needs, sentiments and goals. The balancing of the powers of the President of the Union vis-à-vis the elected Government, the Unionist vis-à-vis Federative aspects of the Constitution, the crafting of the Union, States and Concurrent Lists, were all matters in which his in-born objectivity was crucial, irreplaceable.
But above all in him was also found one who had a clear understanding of the goal of social justice. Where others empathized, he had experienced, where others visualized, he knew in his veins , the need for that justice. If Congress leaders and those of other parties felt for the hurts of the outcastes and untouchables as India called them, for those of the poor and working classes, here was someone who did not have to feel for them, for he was in a sense the hurt itself. And being capable, at the same time, of being able to see beyond the personal hurt at the larger privations and deprivations of the country. Gandhi spoke for the people of India when he publicly appreciated on 3 Feb 1947 (from east Bengal) Ambedkar's refusal to boycott the Constituent Assembly, to which in the first instance he had been sent from Bengal by the Muslim League, which soon boycotted the CA.
On different pages
We must not stint, however, in according credit to the Grand Old Party for giving the role it did to Dr Ambedkar for they were on different pages, and political propriety did not require it to entrust it to one from outside its fold. The co-sharing of responsibility went beyond Constitution-making when Prime Minister Nehru invited Dr Ambedkar to become India’s first Minister for Law and Justice. But the decorum – or prudence – was short-lived.
It would not be wrong, I believe, to assume that as minister, Dr Ambedkar was made to feel he was there on sufferance, that he had overstayed his welcome in the government. And he did the only self-respecting thing that he could have done when on the matter of the Hindu Code Bill, he resigned his ministerial office. The Congress let him go without resistance and, a thousand pities, it opposed him in the first election that Dr Ambedkar ever fought in North Bombay, in 1952. Congress was Congress and it was able to defeat Dr Ambedkar. As is this was not bad enough in the bye-election that arose in 1954 in Bhandara, the Congress again opposed and defeated him.
I would also like to share here a retrospective dream : Congress should not only not have let Dr Ambedkar leave the ministry, it should have offered to him, in 1952, the newly-created office of the Vice President of India. There was a felicity to the President of the Constituent Assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad becoming the first President. But should not the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, described on all hands as the architect of the Constitution, have become our first Vice President ? Than the philosopher-statesman Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, there could not have been a more inspiring person to hold that office and he brought a stature and a lustre to it as only he could have but at that point in time, Dr Ambedkar’s inauguration of the position of Upa Rashtrapati would have made a huge difference to the spirit and the pace of social justice and of affirmative action in India. A retrospective wish or dream to be taken seriously should of course have some connection to practical possibilities as they existed at the time.
National pastime
And so today, if the Congress thinks it wise – and prudent – to commemorate Dr Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary let us not grudge it its moment of glory under that anniversary’s sun. Its posthumous praise of Dr Ambedkar will ring truer if it were to add to it regret over its decision to oppose the leader in the only two elections to the Lok Sabha that he contested. But if it cannot get itself to do that handsome thing, let the Congress at least be aware that the country has not forgotten the missed opportunities missed by it in 1952 and 1954. Our memories are short, they are not non-existent.
Exploitation of the charisma of the great dead is not the monopoly of one party alone, it is a national political pastime. Dr Ambedkar’s name has become a kamadhenu which all manner of self-promoters seek to milk. Those he would have chased away from his presence with a single withering look, come up to his portraits bearing garlands and wearing smiles with what can only be called gall. Some of these belong, unbelievably, to the Right. When in the Constituent Assembly men from the extreme Right pleaded endlessly for the Constitution to open with the words ‘Bharat that is India’, instead of ‘India that is Bharat’, Dr Ambedkar , his patience exhausted, said, "Mr Chairman, how long is this to go on? There is work to be done!" Likewise, seeing the religious, communal and economic Right today competing with the rest of us to mark his birthday, Dr Ambedkar , had he been alive, would have said ‘Stop this pantomime, there is work to be done !’. Alas, he is not alive and we see being enacted, in terms of these Ambedkar jayanti celebrations by them, what can only be called a farce. The Right – by which I do not mean any particular party or individual but religious revivalists, social status-quoists and economic monopolists in general – may say ‘Dr Ambedkar belongs to us too’. But is it respect for the great man that motivates them ? And as for politicians there is one compelling reason why they queue up to honour Babasaheb Ambedkar : It is not love of the great man as much as love of the electoral dividends which identification with that icon can bring.
The sectarian Right anywhere believes in two kinds of dictatorship : that of , literally, a Supremo and then, that of a community. The Right in India is no exception. It believes the people of India , with their tradition of looking up to a preceptor, a neta, will democratically uphold an individual’s dictatorship. It also thinks that the Hindu majority in India will want its Raj, a Hindu Raj, to prevail.
Let that Right, before it seeks to appropriate Dr Ambedkar, ponder this observation of Dr Ambedkar’s made in the Constituent Assembly on 29 November, 1949:
“…it is quite possible in a country like India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this new born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.”/'
And it must also ponder, very carefully, the following which Dr Ambedkar said on November 5, 1949:
“I have no doubt that the Constituent Assembly has done wisely in providing such safeguards for minorities as it has done. In this country both the minorities and the majorities have followed a wrong path. It is wrong for the majority to deny the existence of minorities. It is equally wrong for the minorities to perpetuate themselves. A solution must be found which will serve a double purpose. It must recognize the existence of the minorities to start with. It must also be such that it will enable majorities and minorities to merge someday into one….the minorities in India have agreed to place their existence in the hands of the majority…They have loyally accepted the rule of the majority which is basically a communal majority and not a political majority. It is for the majority to realize its duty not to discriminate against minorities. Whether the minorities will continue or will vanish must depend upon this habit of the majority. The moment the majority loses the habit of discriminating against the minority, the minorities can have no ground to exist. They will vanish.”
I do not have to tell this audience that Dr Ambedkar meant by “vanish”, was that the minorities will not want to perpetuate themselves as a political "other"; he was not envisaging their vanishing in terms of cultural or religious practices and belief. The man who so determinedly adopted the Buddhist way of life in the last months of his life would have flayed the notion of Ghar Vapsi as abhorrent to the ethos of India.
Who owns Ambedkar?
Dr Ambedkar has been exploited by some politicians from the Dalit community itself. If these persons think they have a greater right than others to invoke Babasaheb , they may have a point. But if they think they have a greater right than others to exploit Babasaheb then, I am sorry to have to say, they do not have a point; they are mistaken. Seeing computer-doctored photographs of contemporary politicians, born decades after Babasaheb passed away, standing beside him in morphed pictures, is common. It is also rather sad. These individuals should have more originality to them, more self-reliance, and less trickery. We are forgetful of history, but we are not so innocent of it as to imagine that these gentleman and ladies were close to the icon. It needs to be said here that the late Kanshiramji never tried any such stunt.
Dr Ambedkar quoted Jefferson in the Constituent Assembly once to say each generation is a new country. We are now that new country. There is a new generation of “us”. The hard truth is that despite this being so, our new country still has its old prejudices around, its old persecutions. Our cities and larger towns may not practice untouchability as of old, but in the villages and even in our cities, unseen, invisibly, there is a sense of Dalits being Dalits, a category apart. Only India could have thought of something as creatively correctionist as a Schedule listing Scheduled Castes and Tribes and only India could have reduced the word to a slang abbreviation that I shall not repeat. This is not used in harmless jest as other slanged abbreviations areas , for instance TamBrahm or Gujju or Mallu. It is used with a certain derision. This is a shame on us. We are and we are not yet a new country.
Gandhi’s coinage of "Harijan" played its part, it played its part and has rightly faded away. Its right and proper successor "Dalit" too will hopefully one day become redundant with the word being used as an adjective rather than as a proper noun, a reminder of what once was. But that day is far from now. Reservations in education and employment have done wondrous good for its intended beneficiaries. My state of Tamil Nadu is an example of the transformation the policy of reservation has brought to human lives. Reservations must stay for the foreseeable future but there is such a thing as voluntarism. I know some remarkable Dalits who have said in different words “I am a Dalit but I am not in any sense deprived and will not avail the leg-up”. I salute their self-calibration. Second, third and further generations on, children and grand-children of those who have rightly received the benefits of reservation, may ask themselves if they should not now relinquish their quota rights for others from less advantaged sections of the community to avail.
The dispossession of our rural poor, including Dalits , especially tribal Dalits, in the name of industrial development and mining and forest use, is a travesty. It is a violation of our Constitutional obligations towards this minority community. The compensation clauses introduced in the Land Acquisition Act by the previous government were a step, delayed as they were, to protect some of those rights. Any dilution of those provisions would be unethical and should be objected to by all Indians, not just Dalit Indians. Compensatory justice is not about compensation, it is about justice which like peace is indivisible.
It is important now to let Ambedkar be accessed as the mental phenomenon that he was, for the whole of India, and not just for that section of its population whose immiserations he sought to remove. It is important that no section of India confines him and, equally, that none refrains from engaging with his open intellect. Speaking for myself, for several years, I thought of Ambedkar as a giant of a man who spoke, as no one else did or could have for Dalit India and who drafted, as no one else did or could have, the Constitution of India. These, his twin achievements, I thought were what assured him his place in history. It is only in my mid-life when I came to see the range of his works that I realised Ambedkar was a Renaissance figure, no less, who unlocked doors and windows fastened not just by sectarian prejudice, but by much more – by intellectual inertia, by mental fatigue and by what can only be called ideational sissiness. To typecast such a man as a spokesman, howsoever formidable, for one section of India alone, for one interest, and one cause, or to label him as the chief architect, howsoever formidable, of one legislative edifice, one enactment, is to deny and impoverish ourselves as his legatees.
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s is a legacy of so broad a scope as it helps us see ourselves in civilisational terms , not just as Indians but as a major segment of humanity, dynamic in one part and moribund in another, self-fulfilling in one and self-demeaning in another, poised to play a role in world affairs in one but sinking into mind-crippling localisms in another. He cannot be monopolised any more than he can be marginalised. He cannot be fenced-in any more than he can be fenced-out. For, like Gandhi he was a climate that made for seasons, not the flying flavour of one brief Spring.
There is no denying the deep and defining differences between the way Gandhi viewed the problem of India’s Depressed Classes, and the way Babasaheb did. There is no understating the differences between them on the structure of Indian society. All humans are fallible. Gandhi, I believe, was in error when he defended varnashrama but opposed untouchability; Ambedkar was right on that. Gandhi, I believe, was right in opposing separate electorates for Dalits and advocating reserved seats instead ; Ambedkar, I believe, was in error there. And insignificant "I", could be in error in drawing these two conclusions. But on this I know I am not wrong: More than half a century after they left this world a sadder place the liberal Indian who wants to end both discrimination and recrimination will find these two leaders on the same, not opposite pages, within the same not opposed narratives, the same not contrary discourses for India’s civilisational evolution in an ambience where sectarianism endangers our pluralism, bigotry , our secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar are twin inspirations to us today as we battle against bigotry and majoritarian-ism.
Let us offer to Babasaheb Ambedkar, as to Mahatma Gandhi, not the worship he would have been impatient with but the respect he so uniquely deserves. Let us not burden his legacy with the load of an unthinking discipleship but a solidarity that takes up his unfinished tasks and the new challenges that threaten them.
The former governor of West Bengal made these remarks at the unveiling of a portrait of Dr Ambedkar in the Supreme Court library on April 14.
