BR Ambedkar: Flawed Genius

IT IS DIFFICULT TODAY TO IMAGINE THE SCALE of what Babasaheb Ambedkar accomplished. To be born into an ‘untouchable’ family in 1891, and that too as the fourteenth and last child of a poor Mahar subedar in an army cantonment, would normally have guaran­teed a life of neglect, poverty, and discrimination. Not only did Ambedkar rise above the circumstances of his birth, but he achieved a level of success that would have been spectacular for a child of privilege. One of the first Dalits ever to enter an Indian college, he became a professor (at the prestigious Sydenham College) and a principal (of no less an institution than Bombay’s Government Law College). One of the earliest Indian students in the United States, he earned multiple doctorates from Columbia University and the University of London, in econom­ics, politics, and law. An heir to millennia of discrimination, he was admitted to the bar in London and became ‘India’s James Madison’, as the chair of the Constitution Drafting Committee. The son of illiterates, he wrote a remarkable number of books, whose content and range testify to an eclectic mind and a sharp, if provocative, intellect. An insignificant infant scrabbling in the dust of Mhow in 1891 became the first law minister of a free In­dia, in the most impressive cabinet ever assembled in New Delhi. When he died, aged only sixty-five, he had accumulated a set of distinctions few have matched; only one remained, the Bharat Ratna, and that was awarded posthumously before his centenary.

Dr Ambedkar’s greatness cannot be reduced to any one of these accomplishments, because all were equally extraordi­nary. Think of what he was born into, what he endured, and who he became, and even this bare outline of his life should take one’s breath away. And yet many feel posterity has yet to get the measure of the man.

Whereas some of those who seek to stand on Ambedkar’s shoulders today acknowledge his role in fighting discrimination against Dalits, and others honour his Constitution-making, they do not engage with the totality of his political and economic vision. Ambedkar’s concerns and doubts about Indian democ­racy, his contempt for Hindu majoritarianism, and his leftist view of political economy and labour rights are usually con­veniently overlooked by his professed admirers. They prefer instead to do exactly what he warned against—to worship him as an idol, an act of ‘bhakti’ rather than the critical engagement he might have welcomed.

Reviewing Ambedkar’s colossal achievements requires us to neither restrict him to his role as the great emancipator of India’s Dalits, nor to glorify him as a saint above criticism, but rather to embrace his life and his ideas as a whole (including some 17,500- odd pages of Ambedkar’s writings and speeches), the activism and the politics, the triumphs and the failures that marked his extraordinary impact on India’s public consciousness.

But an honest survey of Ambedkar’s life and impact must look at the flaws in his record as well. The criticisms directed at Ambedkar for his role in working with the British to eman­cipate the Dalits have lost their sting. What then can he still be reproached for?

There are four areas on which Ambedkar can legitimately be faulted. The first was his blind spot about Scheduled Tribes— who deserved his support as others ostracized by Indian society as Dalits were, but whom he tended to regard dismissively as ‘savages’ in need of ‘civilizing’. He refers to them leading the life of ‘hereditary animals’, and even warns ‘the Hindus’ that the ‘ab­origines are a source of potential danger’. Later, in his address to the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation conference in Bombay on 6 May 1945, while discussing the issue of proportionate repre­sentation, Ambedkar is patronizing at best, and offensive at worst:

My proposals do not cover the Aboriginal Tribes although they are larger in number than the Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians and Parsees…. [T]he Aboriginal Tribes have not as yet developed any political sense to make the best use of their political opportunities and they may easily become mere instruments in the hands either of a majority or a minority and thereby disturb the balance without doing any good to themselves. The proper thing to do for these backward communities is to establish a Statutory Commission to administer what are now called the ‘excluded areas’ on the same basis as was done in the case of the South African Constitution.

The very idea of a Dalit leader prescribing the confinement of other deprived Indian citizens to Bantustans is cringeworthy; but it is made worse by Ambedkar echoing the very language he objected to in Gandhi, when the Mahatma argued that the untouchables had not yet developed the political sense to use the vote, let alone make use of separate electorates that Ambedkar had demanded.

It demeans Ambedkar to have spoken with language border­ing on prejudice and racism about the Adivasi people.

A second criticism of Ambedkar relates to what Bhikhu Parekh calls his ‘quasi-Manichaean’ view of Hinduism and Hindu society. Whereas Christophe Jaffrelot sees Ambedkar ‘wavering between the aspiration to rise within Hindu society and the urge to sever his links with it,’ Ambedkar’s language about Hindus and Hinduism is too sweepingly scathing to admit any realistic possibility of his having sought the former:

Hindus are a…race of pygmies and dwarfs, stunted in stature and wanting in stamina. It is a nation 9/10ths of which is declared to be unfit for military service. This shows that the Caste System does not embody the eugenics of modern scientists. It is a social system which embodies the arrogance and selfishness of a perverse section of the Hindus who were superior enough in social status to set it in fashion and who had authority to force it on their inferiors.

Equally savage was his declaration that ‘Hindu civilization is a diabolical contrivance to enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy.’ And on occasion he could be devastating: ‘There can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu there cannot be.’ In a 1942 speech he confessed, ‘I thought for long that we could rid the Hindu society of its evils and get the Depressed classes incorporated into it in terms of equality… Experience has taught me better… we no longer want to be part of the Hindu society.’ But there were many Hindus whose lives, beliefs, and conduct did not conform to the Ambedkar stereotype; several who rejected caste and refused to respect caste rules in their per­sonal lives; and many others who reached across caste divides to support Ambedkar and the Dalit cause. His sweeping denuncia­tions of Hinduism left no room to admit such Hindus, nor the Hinduism of spiritual enquiry and philosophical debate, nor the Hinduism of the Bhakti movement, of Chokhamela and Kabir and Ramdas. The philosophy of ‘acceptance of difference’ preached by Vivekananda; Adi Shankara’s acknowledgement that the Atman in a Chandala (a Dalit) is no different from the Atman in a Brahmin; the eclectic, pluralist Hinduism practised differently in millions of Hindu homes—all these have no place in Ambedkar’s blanket denunciations of Hinduism. It can be argued that he was denouncing Hindu society, not the Hindu faith, but in fact Ambedkar conflated the two, attributing the ills of Hindu society (hierarchical discrimination in particular) to the religion that in his view sanctified these ills, and thereby damning the entire faith in the process. One can understand and forgive Ambedkar his bitterness, as Mahatma Gandhi did, be­cause of what he had suffered and watched other Dalits endure; but such a black- and-white dismissal of a great religion and the complexities of its adherents, while politically pardonable, was intellectually unworthy. This simplistic, homogenizing denigra­tion of a great religion was emotionally entirely comprehensible but too unsubtle for a man of otherwise rigorous intellect, and undermined the credibility of his analysis.

THE THIRD CRITICISM RELATES TO HIS CLASH with Gandhi—not his disagreement with the Ma­hatma, which he was perfectly entitled to have, but the ungraciousness of his manner of expressing it, including even after Gandhi’s death. Ambedkar can­not be faulted for honestly disagreeing with Gandhi on varnash­rama in Hinduism, the political representation of the Depressed Classes, incompatible economic philosophies, ‘village India’, and the role of the state in empowering the underclass, all of which were issues on which the two stood poles apart. His surrender to the Mahatma’s ‘emotional blackmail’ over the 1932 Poona Pact also long rankled with Ambedkar. All these are legitimate grounds for disagreement and debate. But Ambedkar’s ungracious and conspicuous silence on the Mahatma’s death was unworthy of a man of education and sensitivity, who would normally have been expected to acknowledge those intentions and contributions for which most Indians were grateful. He spoke of Gandhi with bit­terness and acrimony for nearly a quarter of a century afterwards, denouncing him in two books—with the titles Mr Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables and What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables—spurning the older man’s entreat­ies, refusing to acknowledge Gandhi’s role in ensuring Ambedkar a place in independent India’s first cabinet and in being awarded the chairmanship of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, and uttering personal remarks that should have been beneath a man of his stature. A BBC interview Ambedkar gave in 1955 was especially churlish: ‘I know Gandhi better than his disciples [do]. They came to him as devotees and saw only the Mahatma. I was an opponent, and saw the bare man in him. He showed me his fangs.’ Ambedkar was almost alone in mistrusting Gandhi’s sincerity: ‘He was absolutely an orthodox Hindu. He was never a reformer. He has no dynamics in him, you see. [H]e wanted that the untouchables would not oppose his movement of Swaraj. I don’t think beyond that, he had any motive of uplift.’

Ambedkar’s hostility stands in contrast to Gandhi’s extensive record of striving for the abolition of untouchability and his overt expressions of respect for the Dalit leader. As an admirer of Ambedkar’s, I find it disappointing that he could not rise above his own bitterness to show any generosity of spirit towards the Mahatma

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Ambedkar’s hostility stands in contrast to Gandhi’s extensive record of striving for the abolition of untouchability and his overt expressions of respect for the Dalit leader. In a letter to Ambed­kar dated 6 August 1944, Gandhi acknowledged their ‘different views’ and the fact that ‘we see things from different angles’, but sought engagement nonetheless; ‘I would love to find a meeting ground between us. I know your great ability and I would love to own you as a colleague and a co-worker.’ With great humility the Mahatma went on: ‘I must admit my failure to come nearer to you. If you can show me a way to a common meeting ground between us, I would like to see it.’ But Ambedkar could not rise above his antagonism, quoting Gandhi’s view on caste with what even an admirer admits was ‘venomous disdain and contempt’. Ambedkar concluded his scathing appraisal of the social, politi­cal, and psychological consequences of Gandhi’s faith in the Hin­du varna system with the devastating words: ‘Democratic society cannot be indifferent to such consequences. But Gandhism does not mind these consequences in the least.’

This criticism from the present writer comes from one who, on the key question of the Mahatma’s romanticized idealism about self-reliant village republics in India versus the enlightened urban modernism of Ambedkar, comes down firmly on the latter’s side. Gandhi called modern cities an ‘excrescence’ that ‘served at the present moment the evil purpose of draining the life-blood of the villages’. Ambedkar disagreed: he considered, as we have seen from a Dalit point of view, Gandhi’s ideal village to be ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communal­ism’. As he explained it:

Indian villages represent a kind of colonialism of the Hindus designed to exploit the Untouchables. The Untouchables have no rights. They are there only to wait, serve and submit. They are there to do or to die. They have no rights because they are outside the village republic and because they are outside the so-called republic, they are outside the Hindu fold. This is a vicious circle. But this is a fact which cannot be gainsaid.

In his focus on social justice, Ambedkar preferred to rest his hopes not on the village but the city. Ambedkar argued that ‘strange though it may seem, [the] industrialisation of India is the soundest remedy for the agricultural problems of India’. In Ambedkar’s view, industrialization was the best means of wean­ing surplus agricultural labour into employment outside of agriculture, thus taking the pressure off land and preventing its fragmentation, while developing the necessary technology and processes of mechanization to increase agricultural productivity and incomes. His emphasis was accordingly on urbanism, mod­ernism, and industrialization as the way forward for India, a far cry from the self-governing village republics that Gandhi envisaged in Hind Swaraj. On this, in my view, Ambedkar was right and Gandhi was wrong, and it was the former’s point of view that prevailed; but that made it all the more incumbent on the winner to show magnanimity to the great man whose ideas he had vanquished in the Constituent Assembly. As an admirer of Ambedkar’s, I find it disappointing that he could not rise above his own bitterness to show any generosity of spirit towards the Mahatma.

The fourth and final criticism that must be aired is of Ambed­kar’s statism—his absolute faith in the institutions and mecha­nisms of a strong central government to bring about the empow­erment of the Dalits, to the exclusion of the moral and spiritual reforms that Gandhi had sought, and without heed to the need to bring people along with him in the adventure of changing time-old traditions and practices. Ambedkar saw the state as an instru­ment to transform society, using the coercive instrument of the law; the state, for him, was the agent of enlightenment, whereas Indian society was regressive and backward. His disdain for vil­lage India made him a centralizer, directing top-down transfor­mation to overcome the prejudices and hidebound ways of the ossified villages. His omission of local self-government from the provisions of the Constitution was pointed out at the time, by Gandhians in the Constituent Assembly, but the lacuna was only effectively addressed with the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Constitutional Amendments in the early 1990s.

The image of Ambedkar, in his suit and tie, issuing ‘progres­sive’ modern diktats to ignorant dhoti-clad bigots covered in the dust and grime of their rural backwardness, is not a reassuring one, evoking the authoritarian fantasies of other modernizing autocracies, rather than the evolutionary change, anchored in local realities, that a democracy requires for its development. Ambedkar once even suggested that the best way to summarily eradicate the caste system and untouchability was if India could produce an Atatürk or a Mussolini. It was this kind of thinking that lay behind his proposals to get the state to regulate the the­ology and practice of the Hindu religion, an appalling idea that reveals the extent to which he allowed his obsession with anni­hilating caste to erode his better judgement.

And yet none of these criticisms can vitiate the scale of his achievements. They are the human flaws of a driven human be­ing, animated by passion and outrage, who overcame overwhelm­ing odds to expand the realm of the possible for his people. Even death neither stopped his prolific output nor ended his influence; he has grown ever larger in the national imagination since.

(This is an edited excerpt from Ambedkar: A Life by Shashi Tharoor)

About The Author

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor is a Congress MP. He is the author of, among other titles, The Struggle for India’s Soul: Nationalism and the Fate of Democracy and Ambedkar: A Life

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