B
R Ambedkar, whose birth anniversary falls on April 14, is known as the leader of
the Dalits and one of the architects of the Indian Constitution.
What is less known is that he
was the tallest intellectual among the leaders thrown up by the independence
movement, a man whose idea of India remains relevant
today.
Ambedkar’s
educational qualifications alone would mark him out from his peers. He obtained
his doctorate in the social sciences at Columbia University in the US. He then
proceeded to London, where he registered for a bar-at-law degree as well as an
MSc and a doctorate at the London School of Economics. He had to cut short his
studies and return to India when his scholarship ran
out.
Having saved up a little
as a professor at Sydenham college, Ambedkar returned to London four years later
to complete his DSc in economics. While waiting for his thesis to be processed,
he spent a few months at Bonn University reading economics. In the meantime, he
had started studying French and German on his own. Partly, all this was about
making a point: for Dalits, higher education is the route to
empowerment.
Ambedkar’s
wide-ranging academic background provided the basis for an astonishing mass of
scholarly output. A website lists 56 books and monographs published by Ambedkar.
These cover a host of topics:
the origins of caste and untouchability, Hinduism, Marxism, Buddhism, the Indian
currency and banking, the partition question, linguistic states and the British
constitution, to name only a few. And all this in the midst of a hyper-active
political career that included membership of the Viceroy’s executive
council and a stint as cabinet minister in independent
India.
To read Ambedkar is to
encounter a forensic and original mind. An example is his analysis of the
origins of untouchability. Ambedkar rejects the notion that untouchables
belonged to a subjugated race or that they were associated with inferior
occupations.
He posits that
untouchability arose from the confrontation between Hinduism and Buddhism. The
Buddhist opposition to animal sacrifice resonated well with the then agrarian
communities and posed a serious challenge to
Hinduism.
Hindus upped the ante
by imposing a taboo on beef-eating even though they had been beef-eaters
themselves for long. People who subsisted on dead animals could not go along
with the taboo and stood condemned forever in
consequence.
Ambedkar is often
portrayed as a man who sought to divide Indian society by seeking to negotiate
separately with the British on behalf of the Dalits as Jinnah did for the
Muslims. Such a portrayal does him scant justice.
First, in seeking to safeguard
the interests of Dalits, Ambedkar was merely reacting to the profound divisions
created by the practice of untouchability, whereby Hindu society had condemned
millions to an inferior
status.
Secondly, Ambedkar saw
the struggle for a better deal for Dalits as part of the incomplete project for
the creation of an Indian
nation.
India, he felt, was not
yet a nation. It was merely a set of peoples — Hindus, Muslims and Dalits
— living together in a geographical area. Liberty or independence by
itself could not mark the completion of the Indian project, it merely marked the
beginning.
It was only when
Indian society embraced the ideas of equality and fraternity as well that India
could develop a sense of nationhood. This would require, among other things,
challenging the varnsashrama dharma that lay at the core of Hinduism.
Ambedkar subscribed to the
ideal of a socialistic society but he did not see communism as the route to
salvation. He disliked the violence and totalitarianism inherent in communism,
he was disappointed that Indian communism was blind to caste and, importantly,
he was alive to the role of competition in fostering economic
growth.
A socialistic society,
he felt, must be created not through coercion exercised by the state but by
Indian society accepting its responsibility towards the underprivileged. The
clamour today for reservations in the private sector shows that Indian society
is still far from fulfilling this
responsibility.
Gandhi’s
use of Hinduism as a uniting principle for India served the purpose of achieving
liberty for Indians. Nehru laid the political and economic foundations of the
Indian nation-state.
The time
is now ripe for the creation of a genuine social democracy along the lines of
what obtains in much of Europe, one in which religion is confined to its
appropriate sphere and economic growth becomes more, not less, inclusive. For
the realisation of such an ideal, Ambedkar emerges as the authentic Indian icon
of the twenty-first
century.
(The
author is a professor, IIM Ahmedabad)
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