These are challenging times for India. At no period in its existence as an independent country have the egalitarian principles on which it was founded been under greater stress. Majoritarianism is on the rise and the sceptre of overt caste-based politics with strident demands for a caste census, loom large over our country.

In these fraught times there is one person from the past we can turn to for succour and guidance, BR Ambedkar, whose 133rd birth anniversary falls on April 14 this year. He was too blunt and direct for his time but perfect for today’s population of restless and impatient Indians half of whom were born in this millennium.

The story of Ambedkar’s rise from impossible circumstances of deprivation and humiliation resonates with today’s youth contemptuous of privilege, pedigree, or inherited wealth. The well-known Indian artist Riyas Komu’s 2019 work titled ‘Fourth World, Ambedkar in the Cradle of HumanKind’ a permanent installation at Nirox Foundation, Johannesburg South Africa amplifies the point by taking Ambedkar’s message of resistance and struggle of the discriminated and dispossessed against atrocities and violence unleashed on them to the rest of the world.

Cosmopolitan Indian

With doctorates from Columbia University and LSE, Ambedkar was better educated and more cosmopolitan in his thinking than any other member of the Constituent Assembly. Like his other famous contemporaries Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and Nehru he also trained and practised as a lawyer.

He was one of the few to challenge Gandhi, earn his respect while remaining his life-long critic. That he held his space and successfully fought his corner in the charged and hostile political arena of his time says a lot about Ambedkar’s tenacity and will.

Ambedkar was deeply committed to India, going as far as to state that while he had “directed for these many years bitter and virulent attacks on Hindu Society and its numerous evils”, he would “direct attack a hundred-fold more bitter, more virulent, more deadly against the Britishers than I have done against Hindus if my loyalty is going to be exploited for crushing my own people and taking away from them last dry bone from which they draw their sustenance.”

As Chairman of the drafting committee of India’s Constitution he played a pivotal role in giving the country a deeply humane document that remains a bulwark against authoritarianism while providing succour to the underprivileged. Here, as the discussions in the Constituent Assembly amply bring out, Ambedkar’s extensive experience in working as a legislator, which neither Gandhi nor Nehru had, counted.

Ambedkar entered the Bombay Legislative Council as a nominated member in 1927 and as an elected one in 1937. He engaged with the Simon Commission which the Congress boycotted, in 1928 and, as Ashok Gopal notes in his book, A Part Apart - The life and thought of BR Ambedkar, he served on the State Committee to enquire into the conditions of the Depressed Classes. Ambedkar was one of eight Indians nominated by the Viceroy on the 13-member Defence of India Council in 1941.

Ambedkar’s spoke, wrote and protested with passion about the plight of the historically marginalised and discriminated. It is through his efforts, starting with the Poona Pact of 1932 which he arrived at with Gandhi that 16 per cent of all seats in the Lok Sabha, 84 today, are reserved for the Scheduled Castes.

Constitutional methods

It is a tribute to Ambedkar that his fight for justice for his people was conducted constitutionally complementing Gandhi’s own non-violent freedom struggle. As he observed in a discussion in the Constituent Assembly quoted in a volume Makers of Modern India edited by Ramachandra Guha, “If we wish to maintain democracy, not merely in form, but also in fact what must we do? The first thing in my judgement we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution.”

Ambedkar’s bottom-up view of India with all its inequities and injustices enabled him to see the country much more realistically than Gandhi did. He shared none of the latter’s idealistic view of the Indian village referring to it in a speech to the Constituent Assembly on 4th November 1948 as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.” In many ways so many of India’s villages remain so to this day.

The abolition of caste was something Ambedkar fervently believed was necessary to make India into a nation. As he observed in a speech, he never delivered but later published “you cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up morality. Anything that you do will crack and never be whole.”

Ambedkar was clear on the responsibility the majority has towards the minorities in India. As he observed in the Constituent Assembly, when the minorities in India “have loyally accepted the rule of the majority,” it is “for the majority to realise its duty not to discriminate against its minorities.

Ambedkar’s philosophy of resistance and struggle against injustice and violence have a timeless universal appeal marking him out as the principal philosopher of our time and the next even more so than Marx and Communism. Need one say more?

The writer teaches public policy and contemporary history at IISc Bengaluru

comment COMMENT NOW