Ambedkar was patriot and admirer of India’s civilisational values — but Tharoor and Congress just won’t concede

A couple of years back, Arundhati Roy came up with The Doctor and the Saint, a book on the lives of Dr BR Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. In the book, Roy makes a pertinent point that “history has been unkind” to Ambedkar. “It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, the King of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence,” she writes.

History, however, has its own way of taking revenge. We have seen many cultures often deemed as dead coming back alive. And people literally resurrecting from the dead. Ambedkar was one such example. A man who struggled through his life, and post demise was a victim of the Nehruvian plot that conspired to wipe him out of public consciousness, Ambedkar in 2012 was voted the ‘Greatest Indian’, ahead of Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, in a poll conducted by two prominent television channels.

It is a sort of history’s revenge that the dead Ambedkar has become more powerful than when he was alive. Is it therefore any surprise that the Congress has suddenly sprung up to own him, forgetting how for decades he was kept on the margins of the national discourse? (Amebedkar was given Bharat Ratna in 1990, more than four decades after India got Independence and at a time when two generations of the Nehrus-Gandhis had already been feted with this award, and the third was set to receive a year later in 1991.)

The communists now find it fashionable to invoke him, little realising how the two distrusted and detested each other. The Right, which in the past preferred to regard him as “a false god”, is of late busy in appropriating Babasaheb. And, the country’s mainstream liberal brigade, which till recently could not see beyond Gandhis and Nehrus, just can’t get enough of him. (A few years back, Ramachandra Guha had told me how Ambedkar fascinated him and he would like to write a book on him soon!)

Tharoor’s new book

In this backdrop, Shashi Tharoor coming up with an Ambedkar biography is hardly a surprise. Ambedkar: A Life — published by Rupa — is a typical Tharoor book written with much flair and imagination. But it’s like a Bollywood potboiler; you enjoy till the time you read it, but in the end you wonder if it was worth your time and attention. The book tells you as much about Babasaheb as it doesn’t, leaving you pretty much in a five-blind-men-and-an-elephant kind of situation.

So, Tharoor tells us how Ambedkar was a brilliant, perceptive and well-read man — the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen would call him “the father of my economics” — and yet he was kept on the sidelines by the Nehru dispensation. Tharoor tells you all this, but keeps largely silent about Ambedkar’s resignation letter from the Nehru Cabinet.

Among the main reasons that made him resign was that Nehru kept him on the margins of administrative and economic governance, though there was hardly anyone more qualified to be an integral part of the India Story soon after Independence.

Ambedkar bemoaned in his resignation letter, “Many ministers have been given two or three portfolios so that they have been overburdened… I was not even appointed to be a member of the main Committees of the Cabinet such as Foreign Affairs Committee, or the Defence Committee. When the Economics Affairs Committee was formed, I expected, in view of the fact that I was primarily a student of Economics and Finance, to be appointed to this Committee. But I was left out.”

Tharoor tells us how Babasaheb lost his election from Mumbai for the membership in the Constituent Assembly. What he doesn’t tell is how the Congress went out of the way to ensure he is defeated and had it not been for the support of Jogendra Nath Mandal, a prominent Dalit leader from undivided Bengal, the “father of the Indian Constitution” wouldn’t have entered the august house in the first place.

After Partition, when Mandal migrated to East Pakistan, the Congress helped him retain his Constituent Assembly membership — but only after the party realised that Ambedkar outside the august house would be too big a critic of the Constitution to handle.

Tharoor tells us in detail how Babasaheb often reiterated that he was born a Hindu but he would never die as one. “I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu,” Ambedkar publicly said. He called Hinduism “a veritable chamber of horrors” and that the greatest barrier to the uplift of the Depressed Classes was Hinduism itself — a fact which Tharoor almost gleefully mentions in the book. He believed that no real reformation was possible in Hinduism, given its obsession with the “degrading and discriminatory” caste system. “There cannot be a more degrading system of social organisation than the caste system. It is the system that deafens, paralyses and cripples people from helpful activity,” Ambedkar said.

What Tharoor, again, tells in passing is Ambedkar’s views on other religions, especially Islam. Tharoor writes, “Islam seemed to him (Ambedkar) ruled out because it was a ‘closed corporation’ and he objected to the ‘alienating distinction’ it made between Muslims and non-Muslims, a feeling that was underscored after Partition, by the conduct of Pakistani Muslims at the time.” There’s not much beyond this regarding his views on Islam. Worse, Tharoor seems to mislead the readers by saying this views on Islam were coloured “by the conduct of Pakistani Muslims” during Partition, while the fact is that Ambedkar wrote Pakistan or the Partition of India in December 1940, seven years before the country’s division in the name of Islam.

Ambedkar, Hinduism and history

The fact is Ambedkar didn’t die as a Hindu, as he had prophesied himself. But when it came to looking for a new religion, he chose Buddhism — a religion deeply rooted in Indic ethos. As Tharoor himself writes in the book, “Buddhism was, he suggested, a kind of Hindu Protestantism. He once cited the words of the Welsh Indologist TW Rhys-Davids, who observed: ‘We should never forget Gautama was born and brought up as a Hindu and lived and died as a Hindu’.”

For all his anger and rage against Hinduism, a religion that gave him and his fellow beings in the lower castes innumerable instances of grief, discrimination and suffering, he didn’t blind himself to the realities of the Semitic religions. “Muslims in India are an exclusive group, and they have a consciousness of kind possessed by a longing to belong to their own group and not to any non-Muslim group,” wrote Babasaheb in support of the idea of Pakistan. But he didn’t stop there and, in fact, called for the transfer of minority populations between India and Pakistan, citing the precedent of Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. As Ambedkar wrote, “Those, who scoff at the idea of transfer of population, will do well to study the history of the minority problem, as it arose between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. If they do, they will find that these countries found that the only effective way of solving the minorities problem lay in exchange of population.”

Tharoor maintains complete silence on Ambedkar’s views on some of the most contentious chapters of Indian history. He, for instance, ridiculed the Aryan invasion theory at a time when even a hard-core nationalist like Bal Gangadhar Tilak couldn’t completely disown it. Ambedkar would have gained most from the Aryan-Dravidian divide. “Whether a tribe or family was racially Aryan or Dravidian was a question which never troubled the people of India until foreign scholars came in and began to draw the line,” Babasaheb wrote in Caste in India: Their Genesis, Mechanism and Development, a paper first published as early as in 1918.

In his book, Who Were the Shudras?, published in October 1946, Ambedkar states quite categorically that the “Shudras were Aryans”. He cites several instances where the rishis of the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda wished glory to them, and on several occasions, a Shudra became the king himself.

Ambedkar reaches a similar conclusion vis-à-vis outcastes in another book, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? (1948). He quotes two studies, “one in Maharashtra by (British administrator HH) Risley and another in Punjab by Mr Rose, and the results flatly contradict the theory that the untouchables are racially different from the Aryans and the Dravidians”.

One needs to understand that Ambedkar, a so-called Dalit leader, would have gained most out of the Aryan invasion theory, the Aryan-Dravidian divide or even the Aryan-non-Aryan discourse. It is sheer intellectual dishonesty to talk about Babasaheb’s “I-won’t-die-a-Hindu” statement, but ignore where he upheld the inherent strength of the Indic civilisation.

No doubt Ambedkar was angry with caste Hindus. He had reasons to be upset with them and the institution of the caste system. Tharoor himself mentions how despite being so close to the Baroda royalty, he couldn’t find a place to stay there. Now that’s humiliation, pure and simple. But then the sheer honesty and integrity in Ambedkar made him realise that for every Parisis who berated him for his caste in Baroda, there was Naval Bhathena, another Parsi, who helped him immensely in life.

For every upper caste Hindu who abused him directly or indirectly, there were people like Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the ruler of the Baroda princely state, and his second wife, a Brahmin by birth, who went out of the way to look after him.

Babasaheb not given his due 

The book is at its best when it talks about Ambedkar, the man, especially when it focuses on his relationship with his first wife. Calling him “an early feminist”, it tells us how Ambedkar’s “relationship with his first wife, Ramabai, founded upon friendship” and his “feminism within the home was certainly unusual for an Indian and practically unknown at the time for an Indian male”. The book spoke extensively about the role of women in Indian society, and often exhorted people to give “education to your children. Instil ambitions in them… Don’t be in a hurry to marry: marriage is a liability. You should not impose it upon children unless financially they are able to meet the liabilities arising from them…. Above all let each girl who marries stand up to her husband, claim to be her husband’s friend and equal, and refuse to be his slave”.

The book falters when it talks about Ambedkar, the politician. One expected Tharoor, being a senior Congressman, to address the big question of why Babasaheb was treated so badly by Nehru, the man he admires so ardently. And how the course of the country’s post-Independence could have been different had Ambedkar been given the leeway to work. Being a biographer of Nehru and someone well averse with Congress history, Tharoor was better placed to answer these difficult questions.

Babasaheb was one of the most brilliant minds of his era, but the Congress conspired to confine him to being a Dalit leader. A man who was the main force behind the Indian Constitution, who favoured a uniform civil code and opposed Article 370, and who grasped economy better than the best in the Nehru dispensation, deserved an apology from the Congress and all those who conspired to keep him on the margins. For all his support to the British and his fury against Hinduism, he remained a patriot and an ardent admirer of the Indic civilisation. Ambedkar desperately needs a fresh, unbiased look.

The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.

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