Ambedkar is dead. Long live Ambedkar!
In the age of constant virtue signalling, Ambedkar is often reduced to a mere totem — a relic of the collective conscience that could never be
Sitting in a friend’s dining hall, a silent witness to the history of the subcontinent, in Lucknow, I was reminded of Dr BR Ambedkar in a rather bathetic manner. It was recalled during a chat over ghar ka khana that a certain politician arrived in Ambedkar Nagar, a city near Ayodhya, and commented casually that the father of the constitution was born there. The said politician was only about 857 kilometres off the geographical mark. Ambedkar was born in a military garrison in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. This city boasts outstanding sweet-shops and tailors, the marks of cities of any consequence.
Coming back to Ambedkar, there’s something disturbingly odd about how the politics of the day keeps exhuming the memory of an exceptional man. The appropriation of Ambedkar by those who care nothing about social justice in their private lives is an insult not just to the personality of India’s most famous economist-jurist but also to his public legacy. The reification of Ambedkar, the modernist, the pro-enlightenment constitutionalist as a card to be played expediently for electoral gains is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our times.
Members of both the ruling party and the opposition use Ambedkar’s name to prove that they are more Christian than Christ. Failed politicians invoke him to gain relevance; the strong ones want to consolidate their electoral and social chokehold by doing the same. Remember the 2024 parliamentary controversy, “Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar….”?
It’s not just the politicians who have strategically resurrected Ambedkar. The academicians are equally at fault. Dr Akash Singh, a scholar of Ambedkar studies, has shown how theorists like Partha Chatterjee “used” Ambedkar to “revitalize and legitimize” subaltern studies. Beyond the rhetoric, Ambedkar stayed marginalised for a long time in the post-colonial canon.
{{/usCountry}}It’s not just the politicians who have strategically resurrected Ambedkar. The academicians are equally at fault. Dr Akash Singh, a scholar of Ambedkar studies, has shown how theorists like Partha Chatterjee “used” Ambedkar to “revitalize and legitimize” subaltern studies. Beyond the rhetoric, Ambedkar stayed marginalised for a long time in the post-colonial canon.
{{/usCountry}}Surprisingly, the one person who did justice to Ambedkar during the former’s lifetime, even on the eve of his assassination, was Mahatma Gandhi. The man Ambedkar could barely stand for his alleged pusillanimity on the caste question. While acknowledging Gandhi’s call for the abolition of untouchability, Ambedkar said in 1925, “However, if one looks closely, one finds there is a slight disharmony... for he does not insist on the removal of untouchability as much as he insists on the propagation of Khaddar [home-spun cloth] or the Hindu-Muslim unity. If he had, he would have made the removal of untouchability a precondition of voting in the party”.
{{/usCountry}}Surprisingly, the one person who did justice to Ambedkar during the former’s lifetime, even on the eve of his assassination, was Mahatma Gandhi. The man Ambedkar could barely stand for his alleged pusillanimity on the caste question. While acknowledging Gandhi’s call for the abolition of untouchability, Ambedkar said in 1925, “However, if one looks closely, one finds there is a slight disharmony... for he does not insist on the removal of untouchability as much as he insists on the propagation of Khaddar [home-spun cloth] or the Hindu-Muslim unity. If he had, he would have made the removal of untouchability a precondition of voting in the party”.
{{/usCountry}}And Gandhi was taking notes. In the draft resolution composed by him the night before his assassination in 1948, Gandhi called for replacing the Congress, a party Ambedkar saw as representing only the interests of Caste Hindus, with Lok Sevak` Sangh. Decrying “untouchability in any shape or form in his own person or in his own family” was proposed as a prerequisite for all Hindu members of this new organisation.
Perhaps, because talk is cheap, Gandhi’s “Last Will” would have met the same fate as the tenets of our constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all human beings. Fit to be eulogised, meant for museums, never to be imbibed in spirit. Ambedkar is both a god and a false god, depending on who is describing him. And this very binary defeats the purpose of his life. A rejector of the Hegelian dialectical of ideas under the influence of his teacher, John Dewey of Columbia University, Ambedkar was a man of praxis. He had little patience for symbolism beyond basic signalling. In the age of constant virtue signalling, however, he is often reduced to a mere totem. A relic of the collective conscience that could never be.
In 1927, Ambedkar urged the marginalised people to “take a vow from this moment to renounce eating carrion ... Make an unflinching resolve not to eat the thrown-out crumbs”. Almost a century later, crumbs, carrion, and a metaphorical corpse of Ambedkar remain on the high table.
The only difference is that it’s not just the marginalised who are feeding at this table. And they all hail Ambedkar.
Ambedkar is dead. Long live Ambedkar!
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
