Ambedkar wasn’t just a Dalit leader; he was Bharat’s civilisational warrior

Every nation has its heroes—and villains. There is nothing wrong with it. The problem begins when there is an attempt to invent greater heroism or villainy merely to highlight greater wickedness or goodness in some of the chosen ones. This phenomenon isn’t just confined to Bharat’s ancient and mediaeval times. In the modern era, too, not long ago, those in the corridors of power seemed to believe, for instance, that Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘greatness’ won’t be substantial unless the contributions of his contemporaries on the other side of the politico-ideological divide were negated, if not totally nullified. This explains why history has been unkind to someone like Netaji Subhas Bose and Veer Savarkar.

Ironically, the list of also-rans includes someone who is officially deified today; Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar has the maximum number of statues erected after him across the country, barring, perhaps, Mahatma Gandhi. Yet, not many would have faced the kind of calumny he encountered when he was alive—and also after he was dead.

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When alive, Ambedkar was kept on the margins of mainstream politics. And post-demise, there was a grand Nehruvian design to confine him to being the leader of Dalits and untouchables. His intellectual brilliance, constitutional expertise, economic excellence, civilisational understanding and empathy for the idea of Bharat were stripped away. The Ambedkar that remained—or was allowed to remain—was merely the statues erected at all the major city squares of the country. Statues with no soul intact.

The real Ambedkar was a brilliant scholar and economist—Nobel laureate Amartya Sen would call him “the father of my economics”. Several institutions in modern India, such as the Reserve Bank of India and Central Water Commission, were the result of Ambedkar’s foresight. Yet, this double PhD holder from Columbia University and the London School of Economics was kept on the sidelines by the Nehruvian dispensation as a Dalit prop. This pushed him to resign from the Nehru Cabinet.

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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.”

One of the finest legal minds of his time, Ambedkar believed in both the democratisation of government as well as the democratisation of society. For him, the two had to complement each other if the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity were to work seamlessly in the country. Also, in his worldview, law and morality, constitutionalism and ethics went hand in hand. Yet, had the Congress had its way, Babasaheb wouldn’t have even become a member of the Constituent Assembly. He was made to lose the elections from Bombay 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.

The real Ambedkar was also Bharat’s foremost civilisational warrior. We are often reminded of his ‘I will not die a Hindu’ statement. We are often told how Ambedkar believed that no real reformation was possible in Hinduism, given its obsession with the “degrading and discriminatory” caste system. But we are not told about his views on other religions, especially Islam. He went to the extent of calling Islam a “closed corporation” as he objected to the “alienating distinction” it made between Muslims and non-Muslims.

No doubt, Ambedkar didn’t die as a Hindu, as he had prophesied. But contrary to what certain vested elements would want us to believe, he didn’t die out of the Indic fold either. He chose Buddhism, which was deeply rooted in Bharat’s Sanatana ethos. Above all, Ambedkar’s love for the Sanatana tradition was absolute. His personal sufferings, and also the discriminations being meted out to his fellow beings in the lower castes, didn’t blind him to the Sanatana realities.

Ambedkar was also an ace social anthropologist. His paper on caste at a conference in Columbia (1916) was believed to be the first serious academic study of the origins and practice of the caste system in Bharat. He used his anthropological lens to mock the Aryan invasion theory. He would have gained most from the Aryan-Dravidian divide, but he didn’t give it a hoot. “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 a paper published in 1918. At another place, he cited several instances where the rishis of the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda wished glory to Shudras, and on several occasions, a Shudra became the king himself. He also flatly rejected the theory that the untouchables are racially different from the Aryans and the Dravidians.

Ambedkar, born into an ‘untouchable’ Mahar family in 1891, grew up facing a life of extreme poverty and discrimination. But over the years, he could not just grow over poverty and deprivation but also see through Bharatiya society in totality. After all, 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. For every Parsi who berated him for his caste in Baroda, there was Naval Bhathena, another Parsi, who helped him immensely in life.

The time has come to stop seeing Ambedkar as a mere Dalit leader. He was Bharat’s civilisational warrior.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.