Ambedkar's samata is not samrasata and his world view is not the neo-liberal, social Darwinism that it is being made out to be.
If the number of statues, memorabilia, pictures and posters, songs and ballads, books and pamphlets, or the size of congregations in memory of him were the parameters to measure greatness, there may not be any other historical figure that can rival Babasaheb Ambedkar. Newer and newer places are getting added to the list of his memorials wherever congregations take place every year. He has been such a phenomenon that after a while it would be difficult for people to believe that such a person—who had to struggle to drink water from a public water source, open for cats and dogs—ever walked on this planet. Even the gods in heaven, if they exist, would be jealous of him. What might be behind this miracle? There is no doubt that he has been a messiah for Dalits, initially only a section of them and now most of them. It is natural for them to be beholden for what he did for them, single-handedly and single-mindedly. True though, it would be pure naïveté to believe this to be the lone and only cause. The catalytic role played by the ruling classes in constructing and promoting Ambedkar as an icon has been a major one, and mutually reinforcing too. The recent overtures of the Sangh Parivar to claim Ambedkar are blatant enough to make Dalits understand the underlying dynamics.
Making of the Icon
The Congress, representing the political Hindu, was the main adversary of Ambedkar. Recall, Gandhi’s tooth-and-nail opposition to Ambedkar’s attempt to secure separate electorates for Dalits during the Round Table Conferences in 1932 and eventually blackmailing him into signing the Poona Pact that annulled the prospective independent political existence of Dalits. After the transfer of power, the Congress tendentiously saw to it that Ambedkar did not enter the Constituent Assembly. But it soon made a volte-face. Folk-tale type of explanations notwithstanding, it was Gandhi’s strategic genius to get Ambedkar elected to the Constituent Assembly when he had no way left to enter it and then make him the chairperson of its drafting committee. Although Ambedkar played the statesman in exchange for safeguarding Dalit rights in the Constitution, this newfound affinity did not last long. Ambedkar had to resign from the Nehru cabinet on the issue of retrogression over the Hindu Code Bill. Later, Ambedkar had even disowned the Constitution saying he was used as a hack—that the Constitution was of no use to anyone, and that he would be the first person to burn it. He called the Congress a “burning house” which could be entered by Dalits only at their peril. But that did not deter scores of “Ambedkarites” from joining the Congress to serve “Ambedkarism.”
The Congress skilfully carved out a class of rich farmers out of the most populous band of Shudra castes in rural areas with such euphemistic policies as land reforms and Green Revolution. While this class remained its ally for the larger part, it developed its own political ambition, floating regional parties and gradually capturing local- and state-level power bases. Electoral politics became competitive bringing to the fore vote blocks in the form of castes and communities, both skilfully preserved in the Constitution in the name of social justice and religious reforms, respectively. It was from here that the conscious co-optation drive of the ruling parties began, of course, first with the Congress. Ambedkar’s core concerns were overshadowed and he was systematically idolised into a nationalist, a quasi Congressman, and as a statesman and the maker of the Constitution. This propaganda killed many birds with one stone: it won over the Ambedkarite masses, accelerated the exodus of opportunistic Dalit leaders to the Congress, disoriented the Dalit movement to embrace identity politics and gradually de-radicalised Ambedkar. Slowly, other parties also had to enter the competition in projecting their own Ambedkar icon.
In order to widen its appeal and diffuse its ideology, the Sangh Parivar also floated second-generation outfits to deal with strategic and emergent issues. Samajik Samrasata Manch (a social assimilation platform) was launched to woo Dalits into its fold. The RSS—born in 1925, around the same time as the Dalit and communist movements—initially banked on its imagined Hindu majority but failed to make a mark either socially or politically until it got 94 seats in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections, riding the anti-Congress wave.
‘Saffronising’ Ambedkar
Initially, scandalised by Ambedkar’s anti-Hinduism, it tacitly despised him and banked upon non-Ambedkarite Dalits as later professed by Bal Thackeray. However, having tasted the meat of political power, it realised it could not ignore Ambedkar who had grown into a pan-Indian Dalit icon. It planned to saffronise him, picking up some of his stray statements sans context and mixing them with its Goebbelsian lies. The first of the strokes of saffron on Ambedkar was in comparing the incomparable, Hedgewar with Ambedkar, calling them the “two doctors,” as though Hedgewar, just a licentiate medical practitioner with a diploma that comes after matriculation, and Ambedkar, with two doctoral degrees from world-renowned universities, were comparable. What could really be similar between them?
While Ambedkar’s pragmatism left behind numerous inconsistencies, nobody can miss the central theme of his life which was to usher in what he himself verbalised as his ideal society based on “liberty, equality, fraternity,” insisting on their simultaneity. He saw annihilation of castes and socialism (the annihilation of classes) to be its prerequisite; democracy their main constitutent and Buddhism as the moralising force.
The RSS’s world view is diametrically opposed to this on every count. The saffron Ambedkar is a nationalist; the real Ambedkar argued that because of the consciousness of caste, Hindus cannot constitute a nation, and specifically warned that the “Hindu nation” would be calamitous. The RSS’s Ambedkar is a great Hindu despite his vow that he would never die a Hindu. It projects Buddhism, which Ambedkar embraced after discarding Hinduism, as just a sect of Hinduism, brushing away the entire history that it symbolised—the shraman revolt against Hinduism and bloody counter-revolution of the latter that completely erased Buddhism from the land of its birth.
Claims that Ambedkar wanted Sanskrit to be the national language, a saffron flag as the national flag, and that he commended the RSS for its good work, and that he was for ghar wapsi, try to dwarf Ambedkar to the level of VHP monkeys and do not deserve to be even commented upon. Sangh Parivar intellectuals have been saying that Ambedkar was against Muslims, quoting stray sentences from his Thoughts on Pakistan. This book was written in a polemical style, Ambedkar donning the robes of both an advocate for Hindus as well as for Muslims. Unless one diligently reads it, one could miss many of the arguments. I have exploded this lie in 2003 in my book, Ambedkar on Muslims: Myths and Facts. But again, going by his liberal persona and a plethora of other references where he praised the Muslim community to the extent that Islam would appear to be his preference for conversion (Mukti Kon Pathe 1936), he cannot be portrayed as a petty-minded, anti-Muslim person. The RSS better understand that it could cheaply project some Dalit stooges on its stage, but it would never be able to show Ambedkar as a communalist.
Neo-liberal Compulsion
The competing Ambedkar icons offered by various political manufacturers in India’s electoral market have completely overshadowed the real Ambedkar and decimated the potential weaponry of Dalit emancipation. While these icons differ in shades, they all paint Ambedkar in neo-liberal colour. One Ambedkar-icon nearly dislodged Gandhi as the mascot of the state, which had worked right from 1947 through the 1980s. Gandhi suited the regime in managing the polity, camouflaging its anti-people strategic intent, its welfarist rhetoric and its Hindu rate of growth. But the regime began to lose its sheen as the capitalist crisis mounted, impelling the rulers to adopt neo-liberal reforms. The rhetoric of aggressive development, modernity, open competition, free market, etc, necessitated the projection of a new icon which would assure people, particularly those of the lower strata whom it would hit most, of the possibility of a transition from rags to riches with the adoption of the free-market paradigm. None other than Ambedkar fitted the bill. It was the same strategic requirement as seen by Gandhi at the time when a Constitution had to be drafted for the newly-born, anaemic India. The social Darwinist ethos of neo-liberalism had a particular resonance with the supremacist RSS ideology, which is what catapulted the BJP to the stratosphere of political power.
While all parties have used an Ambedkar icon for wooing Dalits, RSS has exploited it the most, with the BJP, right from the 1990s, commanding more reserved seats than the Congress. The neo-liberal regime badly required balladeers from among the Dalits and it got them. A significant Dalit middle class, led by some of its heroes belaboured during the initial years to convince Dalits how neo-liberalism would be beneficial to them, how Ambedkar was a neoliberal and how Dalits have made fantastic progress with these policies unleashing a “revolution” of the Dalit bourgeoisie. This middle class finds particular affinity with the BJP, and it is therefore that most Dalit leaders today are in the BJP fold (see my “Three Dalit Rams Play Hanuman to BJP,” EPW, 12 April 2014). This year, with extraordinary efficiency, the BJP government bought an innocuous building in London for Rs 44 crore just because Ambedkar stayed in one of its apartments as a student; it cleared the remaining hurdles in the grant of the Indu Mill land for the grand Ambedkar memorial in Mumbai and planned an equally grand Ambedkar International Centre at Delhi.
All these manoeuvres intoxicate Dalits, 90% of whom are relatively at the same levels of living as they were at the beginning of the last century or worse, as they had hopes then and now they have none. They would n0t understand that Ambedkar’s samata is not samrasata or that Ambedkar’s world view is not the neo-liberal, social Darwinism that is out to kill them. They do not even understand that a few hundred crores on Ambedkar memorials is pittance as compared to the over Rs 5 lakh crore the government stole from their share in budgets in just a single decade! <
