SOME THOUGHTS ON DR. AMBEDKAR
T.G. JACOB
Part I
The subject of this important seminar is very much part of the larger question of the status of Dalits in contemporary India which itself has a tremendous background of discourses.
In modern Indian history the larger questions of Dalit identity had engaged the attention of the leading actors on the Indian political theatre in an intense manner.
The three leading political forces that intervened in this all important question were: 1. The Gandhian stream of thinking, 2. The Ambedkarite stream of thinking, and, 3. the Communist stream of thinking. Our objective is to present a comparative evaluation of these three approaches in their broad contours.
This objective is limited in its scope. There were many other perspective variants on the question. For example there was the pan Dravidian perspective of Periyar, there was the rich analytical stream cut open by Mahatma Phule, there was the outright militancy of Ayyankali, there was the reformist agenda of the socialists represented by Lohia, and the different offshoots of Ambedkarite thought like the Dalit Panthers. The topic is vast which demands sustained investigations to arrive at relevant analytical conclusions. This can very well be a task that ought to be pursued by dedicated researchers in the present and future.
Due to the incomplete nature of the investigations into the Dalit question our present attempt is bound to be general and sketchy.
Part II
It was the realistic view of the necessity of forging the broadest resistance against colonialism that compelled Gandhiji to denounce pernicious social evils like untouchability. He understood very clearly that the caste system and casteism as an ideology are highly corroding divisive factors in the Indian body politic and social fabric. His was a humanist approach based on persuasion and non violence rather than rebellion and forcible overthrow of the caste system.
Dr Ambedkar called for annihilation of caste rather than reforms to mitigate the evil. This central slogan advanced by him was based on the evaluation of the caste system as a highly resilient one not easily amenable to reforms and as such was contradicting the Gandhian position. Hence his call to the most significant and most oppressed minority to reject Hinduism and embrace the atheistic and rationalist faith of Buddhism.
The Poona Pact as a compromise and what led to it? During the 1930s Dr Ambedkar’s political influence was mostly confined to the Mahars of Maharastra and had not attained a pan sub continental dimension. That was probably the most important factor that made him endorse the Poona Pact on the face of Gandhi’s fast unto death against the communal award of MacDonald (1932).
What exactly was the Poona Pact?
The Constitutional provisions of reservations. The oversimplified view that Dr Ambedkar was the architect of the Constitution is only a canard aimed at legitimizing the dilution of the Dalit question. Ambedkar himself was fully aware of the content of the Constitution as overwhelmingly a plagiarism of the 1935 Government of India Act with as few additions (and deletions) as possible. In fact he himself veered to the opinion of burning the very same Constitution which he allegedly drafted!
Ambedkar was only doing a technical job of putting together the articles of the 1935 Act with a few additions in the nature of cosmetic changes. Not only Ambedkar, but also many important and serious Gandhians also believed that the Constitution as it was adopted did not reflect the ground realities.
Part III
The Communist Party of India, formed in Russia in 1920, had emerged as a significant force among the working class and peasantry by the early 1940s, the most crucial period of Indian freedom struggle. Being a proclaimed liberationist force its approach to the caste question also is important. Moreover, in its main areas of operation it did enjoy the support of the Dalits to a significant extent.
The CPI’s position on this millennia old raging question was very simple. In fact, it was too simple.
To put in a nutshell, the CPI position was that caste is a social evil that is bound to vanish with the development of the forces of production and changes in the relations of production. This was a deterministic position belonging to the genre of mechanical materialism. They believed in a single stage socialist revolution under the leadership of the working class in spite of the stark ground reality of rampant feudal relations of production predominantly based on the caste system.
It is the Eurocentric orientation of the communist leadership that decided the approach towards the caste question as well as other important issues. Marxism itself was a product of European Enlightenment and Karl Marx can possibly be called the last great philosopher of the Enlightenment school which began with the development of merchant capitalism in Europe. His analysis and conclusions concerning the inevitability of socialist revolution was based on the political economy of capitalism as it developed in Western Europe.
The theory of knowledge adopted by the communist leadership was handed down by the international communist movement with the Russian party and the Comintern at its head. The theory of single stage socialist revolution under the leadership of the miniscule working class did not really necessitate any serious investigation into the concrete conditions existing in India and that was why they did not bother about burning issues like caste. They considered Gandhi as an obscurantist and casteism as something purely transitional in nature which will disappear in the march towards socialism. The issue was not something that deserved attention on its own merits and hence Ambedkar’s thought could be ignored. In fact, this was what they did.
Part IV
What we see now is that the constitutional provisions of reservations and the enactment of laws against the oppression of Dalits have by and large failed to achieve dignity of life and equality for the Dalits as a community. Rapid urbanization resulting from development of productive forces has only succeeded in the ghettoization of Dalits and other oppressed minorities in the urban areas. Caste atrocities have increased rather than getting mitigated. The Gandhian solution was not accepted and implemented, and the communist wishful thinking has proved an absolute misfit to the reality. In fact, the Communist parties themselves have been co-opted in to the casteist framework. Annihilation of caste remains as distant as ever. Only a powerful social and economic revolution can realize this great dream of Ambedkar. Of course, the task is far from easy. Juridical fights are necessary but cannot be the final solution. This much is proved by the continuing discrimination against the Dalits in spite of any number of laws and Constitutional guarantees.
Part V
The post-47 period when one-man one- vote and universal adult franchise became the operating mechanism of parliamentary political system the Dalits, a significant minority, attained great importance as a vote bank. This was true for all the established political parties but truer for the leading party at the all India level, the Congress.
Gradually a shift occurred in this vote bank politics when the Dalits became conscious of their bargaining position. The tendency to form their own political parties set in. This tendency became more and more pronounced in three leading States of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Bahujan Samaj Party became a powerful regional political force in North India, particularly in the most populous State of UP.
The setting in of alliance politics did play an important role in this crystallization of Dalit parliamentary politics. But it has united as well as divided Dalit politics. The illustrations are UP and Maharastra.
Apart from an increasing role in parliamentary politics, another major development is the increasing recognition, both in India and abroad, that Dalits rights are human rights and violations of these rights are violations of human rights. This development is both cause and effect of an increasing body of what has come to be known as Dalit literature. The exposure of Dalit issues has certainly attained much greater dimensions than the earlier years.
This positive development has to be read along with the institutionalization of exclusive Dalit politics, even when the Dalit politics as being practised now is not qualitatively different from the politics dominated by the oppressor castes. The space is getting enlarged. Whether it will enable Dalit liberation is not a question that is amenable to linearity because the path of liberation is bound to come across many powerful obstacles, both internally within the community and externally.
(Presented at a seminar on Status of Dalits and Dalit Leaders in Rural Local Governance in Gandhigram Rural Institute, Deemed University, Dindigul, on 12th March 2011)