Ambekar would not have liked the Congress & BJP to idolise him

Ambedkar never wanted blind worship

Amid the ongoing ideological slugfest, I strongly recommend reading Ambedkar in his own words. For his acolytes, it is important to remember Ambedkar’s advice on independent thinking.

The legacy of Dr BR Ambedkar became the cause célèbre for MPs belonging to the BJP and Congress, who jostled with each other on the floor of the House during the 75th anniversary debate of the Constitution earlier this month. However, both parties, which today swear by his name, are known to have been rather ambivalent — if not openly opposed — to his politics and ideology, when he was active in public life until his Mahaparinirvan on 6 December 1956.

Ambedkar’s resurrection in the 1990s coincided with the adoption of the Mandal Commission recommendations by the VP Singh government. After this, the political mobilisation of Dalits changed Indian politics forever and the Ambedkar appropriation project by various parties took off.

But the years preceding and immediately following Independence were a different story.

“The general elections of 1952 did not go well for Ambedkar,” Dr Shashi Tharoor wrote in Ambedkar: A Life. “Partly this was because he underestimated the hold of the Congress Party, the political embodiment of the country’s nationalist movement, on the imaginations of the electorate, and partly because Ambedkar did not realize how unpopular some of his positions were in the eyes of the general public.”

In that election, Ambedkar contested from the Bombay North seat, supported by the Socialist Party. He lost to his former assistant, Congress candidate Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar. While the Congress went on to appoint Ambedkar as a member of the Rajya Sabha, he remained disgruntled, according to Tharoor.

“Ambedkar did not relish that position, resenting his dependence on his old enemies, and sought to enter the Lok Sabha again, in a 1954 by-election from a constituency called Bhandara. This time he fared even worse, placing third… A sullen Ambedkar remained in the Rajya Sabha,” Tharoor wrote.

Although he had been inducted as Law Minister in the first interim government by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ambedkar made it clear that he felt the role was not commensurate with his stature. During his time in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, he had held important portfolios like Labour and PWD but considered “the Law Ministry to be administratively of no importance”.

After the adoption of the Constitution, he found himself quite underworked—especially as the Hindu Code Bill, a reform he championed, was diluted and later deferred time and again. It is worth noting that one of the Bill’s most vehement critics was Jana Sangh icon Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee.

On 10 August 1951, Nehru wrote to Ambedkar about the “good deal of opposition not only inside the House but outside” and admitted that “with the best will in the world, we cannot brush aside this opposition and get things done quickly. They have it in their power to delay a great deal. We must therefore proceed with some tact and with a view to achieve results.”

Fed up with this wait-and-watch policy, Ambedkar tendered his resignation on 27 September 1951.

In his letter, he wrote: “For a long time, I have been thinking of resigning my seat from the Cabinet. The only thing that had held me back from giving effect to my intention was the hope that it would be possible to give effect to the Hindu Code Bill before the life of the present Parliament came to an end. I even agreed to break up the Bill and restrict it to marriage and divorce in the fond hope that at least this much of our labour may bear fruit. But even this part of the Bill has been killed. I see no purpose in my continuing to be a member of your Cabinet.”

That Nehru did not hold his colleague in high esteem is clear by his 6 October 1951 letter to BC Roy: “Ambedkar’s departure does not weaken the Cabinet very much…

As a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, Dr Ambedkar had first mooted and achieved a reservation of 8.5 per cent for Scheduled Castes in the civil services. This principle was accepted by the Constituent Assembly, and Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution authorised the state and central governments to reserve seats in government services for SCs and STs.

This was challenged in the 1951 Champakam Dorairajan case and led to the first amendment to the Constitution. Till this time, Nehru and Ambedkar were officially on the same page.

However, Nehru’s considered view on the subject is best reflected in his letter to the CMs on 27 June 1961: “They (Scheduled Castes and Tribes) deserve help but, even so, I dislike any kind of reservation, more particularly in service. I react strongly against anything which leads to inefficiency and second-rate standards.”

Three decades later, on 6 September 1990, his grandson and the sixth Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, also expressed his reservations on the Mandal Commission recommendations in Parliament. In his speech, he addressed Nehru as Panditji and VP Singh as Raja Saheb, terms that would be totally out of sync in today’s political climate.

It also bears recall that while the BJP often mentions Dr Ambedkar’s opposition to Article 370 — which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir — the entirety of his thoughts is never highlighted. Ambedkar’s position on 370 was sui generis — distinct from both that of Nehru and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. While Nehru had already referred the matter to the UN, Mookerjee averred there was no reason whatsoever to treat Jammu and Kashmir any differently from the rest of the country. Ambedkar, however, argued that “the right solution” to the J&K dispute was the partition of Kashmir.

“Give the Hindu and Buddhist part to India and the Muslim part to Pakistan as we did in the case of India,” he contended. “Or if you like, divide it into three parts; the ceasefire zone, the Valley and the Jammu-Ladakh Region and have a plebiscite only in the Valley.”

Ambedkar also outlined his reasoning in his resignation letter. If there was a plebiscite throughout J&K, he feared that “the Hindus and Buddhists of Kashmir are likely to be dragged into Pakistan against their wishes.”

Ambedkar also criticised the fact that India had been “staking our all on the Kashmir issue” when there were more pressing matters to deal with.

“We should be more deeply concerned with East Bengal where the condition of our people seems from all the newspapers intolerable than with Kashmir,” he said.

As Rodrigues wrote, Ambedkar was also concerned that “India has lost much goodwill, its social capital, at the time of Independence, in global forums, due to the foreign policy of the Nehruvian regime, in which J&K figured prominently.”

The BJP has often criticised the Congress for not awarding Ambedkar the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour. But after the VP Singh government conferred it on Ambedkar in 1990, the BJP’s (then) ideologue Arun Shourie offered a scathing critique in his 1997 book Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar and The Facts That Have Been Erased, which was republished in 2012.

A look at the slant it took is in order. The blurb on the 2012 edition reads:

“Over the last couple of decades, B.R. Ambedkar has come to be idolized as no other political leader has. His statue is one of the largest in the Parliament complex. Political parties have reaped rich electoral dividends riding on his name… Arun Shourie employs his scholarly rigour to cast a critical look at the legend of Ambedkar. With his distinctive eye for detail, Shourie delves into archival records to ask pertinent questions: Did Ambedkar coordinate his opposition to the freedom struggle with the British? How does his approach to social change contrast with that of Mahatma Gandhi’s? Did the Constitution spring from him or did it grow as a dynamic living organism?”

In this book, as an India Today review observed, Shourie tries to establish Ambedkar as “a collaborator of the British government and hostile to the freedom struggle”. It also presents Ambedkar as “unable to come to terms with the adulation which many of his contemporaries, primarily the Mahatma, commanded”.

Shourie’s view, in fact, resonates with Tharoor’s observations. So, aren’t the ideologues of both the BJP and the INC essentially saying the same thing?

Amid the ongoing ideological slugfest, I strongly recommend reading Ambedkar in his own words—his PhD thesis, his essays on caste, on linguistic states, and on Pakistan. For his acolytes, it is important to remember Ambedkar’s own advice on hero worship and independent thinking.

“No great man really does his work by crippling his disciples by forcing on them his maxims or his conclusions. What a great man does is to awaken them to a vigorous and various exertion of their faculties,” Ambedkar said in a 1943 address.

He goes on to say that the pupil only takes his guidance from his master, but is not obliged to accept every conclusion. “There is no ingratitude in the disciple not accepting the maxims or the conclusions of his master. For even when he rejects them, he is bound to acknowledge to his master in deep reverence: ‘You awakened me to be myself; for that I thank you’,” he said. “The master is not entitled to less. The disciple is not bound to give more.”

(Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration.)