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India Dumps
Ambedkar
The great man has been reduced as an inspirational figure for only
lowered castes
WSN Bureau
 If you read about a seminar on Ambedkar, it is almost a given fact
that some Dalit organization will be among those behind it. If an
Ambedkar statue is being raised in Uttar Pradesh, it cannot be by
Samajwadi Party or even by Congress. Why does the BJP not ever talk
about Ambedkar’s vision? As
India
marked its 60th year as a Republic, the fact remains that the
ruling castes and the brahamanical system has done all they could to
dump B R Ambedkar, who could have been a truly revered national
icon. The great man today stands reduced to an inspirational figure
for just one caste.
Unfortunately, empathise as we do with that caste, some of the blame
lies even with this marginalised, lowered caste for reducing
Ambedkar to this caricatured stature where even his praises are sung
by leveraging the fact of him being the father of the Indian
Constitution. For God’s sake, he was much more than that. This
“Father of the Indian Constitution” theme suits the
Gandhi-Nehru-Sonia-Rahul reading of the history. Ambedkar was not
part of the “Sovereign Socialist Democratic” establishment that
Gandhi-Nehru represented.
He differed wth Nehru to such an extent that even taking his name
alongside the Indian pantheon
of establishment-recognised leaders will be blasphemy.
Ambedkar’s dream step of altering the oppressive caste system
through the Hindu Code Bill was frustrated by Nehru. Ambedkar’s
plans to induce into Indian polity the idea of gender equality in
the male-affirmatory laws of property inheritance and marriage
through this bill saw the entrenched brahamanical forces arraigned
against him. Nehru wanted to preserve the so-called “magnificent
structure of Hindu Culture”. Ambedkar wanted to demolish the system
that kept women oppressed and certain castes lower.
He was made to resign as law and then was made to taste defeat.
Never was Ambedkar absorbed into the ruling classes. Indian history
recall in popular memory never includes the fact that Ambedkar had
to fight against Mahatma Gandhi in 1932 for awarding separate
electorates for the untouchables.
 He was made to withdraw his campaign and settle for reservation only
when Gandhi went on a fast unto death and a riot situation was
clearly on the cards. Ambedkar was the 14th of a teeming brood of
children. He must have realised early on that if he didn’t struggle,
he wouldn’t survive. Add to it his dirtpoor dalit origins and you
have the classic underdogturninginto- the-ultimate-fighting machine
situation.
He entered the arena, equipped with an instinctive insight into the
injustice of the colonial system, inherited after
Independence, by a bunch of Oxbridge educated upper caste feudals.
The Constitution that Ambedkar built word by word is really a
monument to hope. It promised redemption to a people whose faith in
themselves
had dimmed under centuries of alien rule. And cultured in the matrix
of caste system, a great number of Indians - particularly scheduled
castes and tribes - thought they were unworthy of a better lot in
life. The document Ambedkar held up was a critique of both a
colonial philosophy of exploitation and
India’s own brand of casteist slavery. The essence of fundamental
rights, be it equality of opportunity or prohibition of
discrimination on grounds of religion, caste or sex; and directive
principles, be it the rights of citizens to an adequate means of
livelihood, or that children be protected against ‘moral and
material abandonment’ - can be reduced to just two words: be fair.
Either because of repetition or because we can’t care less, the
fundamental rights and directive principles are now sounds without
meaning. The sheer numbers of people outside their ambit argue
against the effectiveness of the empowering institutions. The man
who wrote them, despite
his genius, was cruelly discriminated against most of his life owing
to his caste and straitened circumstances. He knew what it was to be
hurt to the quick simply because he was born in the wrong family.
 He was equally aware how easy it was for those in power to
perpetrate injustice by doing something, or just by doing nothing.
The sensitivity of the wounded and the courage of the
soldier inform Ambedkar’s writing in general. The Constitution is an
extension of his writing, his personality. In fact, parts of it
could be read as a kind of a biography in disguise. What Ambedkar
suffered over a hundred years ago - he was born in 1891 - and fought
all his life, incredibly remains the lot of nearly 400 million
Indians living below the poverty line. Not surprisingly, half of
that massive number is made up of scheduled castes and scheduled
tribes. Hundreds of thousands of children - some of them surely as
talented as Ambedkar - remain on the vermicular margins of society.
It is from these margins that voices against the atrocities being
committed by
India are being heard the loudest. Across
India,
Naxalites, Maoists, tribals are fighting the to keep a great deal to
promises and has not not delivered even a fraction of what was
promised. The fight for the land in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand
between champions of development and its hapless victims puts paid
to Ambedkar’s secret dread that this is more a feral than a federal
nation, and that its growth is skewed in the direction of
exclusivity, not inclusivity. The appalling pockets of poverty of
urban India and the out-of-sight-living-dead in its villages have no
real explanation. Clearly, the people who were supposed to give the
light have walked away with the fire.
How good is it to hear that
India is the fourth largest economy after the
US,
China, and Japan when in absolute terms over 400 million Indians
live a bestially primitive life? The reason why India’s many
achievements do not cohere into the assurance of a recognizable
pattern is because there is always a fouryear- old child splitting
stones right outside your window.
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Dalits in India
Democracy is deepening in
India with the unprecedented prosperity of the few and the
persistent poverty, illiteracy and poor health of the many! The
deafening sarkari and corporate crowing about the statistical
decline in poverty sounds silly and sinister when inequalities in
terms of health, wealth and education are getting wider. At least it
comes as a cruel joke to those who cannot send their little ones to
school, nor can take their diseased dear ones to hospital. This
state of being unfree, of coping without bare minimums of life is
not only their own loss: it is the national loss of labour and
intellect of a magnitude that shows the true face of the state and
its collusion with the dominant to keep a vast majority of people
humiliated and subjugated. A decent, democratic society gives its
citizens more than just the right to vote it provides some basic
freedoms and justice economic, political, and social to every
citizen. No wonder, those devoid of such basics are still waging
their freedom struggles. Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of
democratic aspirations among the suppressed majority women, dalits,
adivasis, lowered castes, Muslim masses, and the other oppressed.
Dalit ideology and politics, at its best, is wedded to the idea of
restructuring the society along democratic-egalitarian line. It
means smashing up caste and dismantling the brahmanical grammar of
hierarchy and hegemony. Which means transforming society through
changing attitudes and reeducating minds. In short, it means an
Indian revolution minus the bayonets. Committed to this cause, a
fledgling dalit intelligentsia has announced their arrival on the
intellectual landscape.
Debarred for centuries from the world of learning and letters,
Ambedkar’s daughters and sons are angry. To them, nothing can be
more inhuman and profane than the Vedicbrahmanic tradition often
made synonymous with and presented as the Indian tradition that
shamelessly celebrates na shudray mati dadyat (do not give education
to the toiling castes) and striyohi mooldoshanam (women are the root
cause of evils). Much to their Kafkaesque horror, the dalits see the
metamorphosis of the old intellectual tradition that conspired to
treat shudras and women as subhuman creatures into the new
epistemologies which continue to validate and valorize the
varnashrama dharma under the veneer of “our beautiful philosophies”.
Not surprisingly, the new grammar of elite-led knowledge-production
and education system carry forward in several visible and invisible
forms the regressive spirit and substance of the old. Of course, the
language and idioms of the caste-class elite have changed and
acquired the required democratic façade but not their Manuvadi
mindset. No wonder, the dalits are asking compelling questions about
the politics of knowledge-production and its role in maintaining the
oppressive status quo.
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3
February 2010
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