The enduring relevance of Ambedkar

He was prescient in his observations about personality cults and the perils of social and economic inequality.

Even as we celebrate his 135th birthday, B R Ambedkar continues to be extremely relevant to India’s society and polity. All sections of society, and particularly all political parties are scrambling to claim his legacy. And this scramble is increasingly getting cacophonic and frequently leading to squabbles. This does not mean that Ambedkar can be all things to all people.

It just means that people distort his writings, speeches and utterances to suit their ends. The best way to understand, interpret or report on Ambedkar is to quote him in the original. The reading and re-reading of Ambedkar unfailingly pays rich dividends and fresh insights. It is also simply remarkable how prescient he was in his writings and speeches.

Take for example one of his most famous speeches to the closing session of the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949, exactly two months before the adoption of the Constitution. In the concluding part of that speech, he says, “Let us not forget that this independence has thrown on us great responsibilities. By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong. If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves.”

He then goes on to describe three potent dangers to India’s nascent democracy. The first is the tendency to hero-worship or build personality cults in politics. He said, “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

These words ring more true than ever before. It is also ironic that the person who warned against cult worship, himself has become an object of cult worship. Any criticism of Ambedkar is simply unthinkable in the current milieu. Ambedkar’s republic is also degenerating into a republic of hurt sentiments, which invite criminal prosecution at the slightest perceived offence.

The second danger Ambedkar alluded to was his warning that political equality, enshrined in the Constitution, was increasingly in dissonance with rising social and economic inequality. He warned that if something wasn’t done to address rising (social and economic) inequality, those very deprived and oppressed people would blow up the magnificent edifice (of democracy) the founders had so painstakingly built. His warning came almost 20 years before the first instance of Naxal violence in the late 1960s.

Fast forward to recent times. The evidence of the incompatibility of democratic equality with economic inequality is everywhere around us. The rising welfare State and freebies or subsidies is a feeble attempt to bridge the inequality gap by taxing the rich. The re-election of President Trump in America is due to the failure of the capitalist system in democratic America to address rising economic inequality. The 2016 BREXIT vote in the UK too was predominantly by folks who felt left behind by the forces of globalisation.

Constitution: Intent and implementation

The third danger Ambedkar spoke of in that 1949 speech, was the need to protect the sanctity of constitutional methods. He said we must abandon the methods of civil disobedience, non-cooperation, and satyagraha, saying that these were nothing but the rejection of law and order. He might as well have added extra-constitutional methods like mob lynching, vigilante justice, encounter killings, and bulldozer justice. These methods are nothing but the “Grammar of Anarchy”, a phrase that he coined. If people adopt these methods, it would be a failure of not just the Constitution, but the State as well. The working of the Constitution needs the working of the organs of the State – the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. But how those organs work will, in turn, depend on the people and political parties. The working of the Constitution depends on the goodness or honest intentions of the people working it.

Ambedkar was particularly aware that constitutional provisions could easily be upended by a rogue administration. On November 4, 1948, he told the Constituent Assembly: “While everybody recognises the necessity of the diffusion of constitutional morality for the peaceful working of a democratic Constitution, there are two things interconnected with it which are not, unfortunately, generally recognised. One is that the form of administration has a close connection with the form of the Constitution. The form of the administration must be appropriate to and in the same sense as the form of the Constitution. The other is that it is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution, without changing its form, by merely changing the form of the administration and to make it inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution. It follows that it is only where people are saturated with constitutional morality such as the one described by Grote the historian that one can take the risk of omitting from the Constitution details of administration and leaving it for the Legislature to prescribe them. The question is, can we presume such a diffusion of constitutional morality? Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”. These were sharp words and warnings which are relevant to this day.

Thanks to Ambedkar, India adopted modernity via an extremely enlightened Constitution which is a living, throbbing document, open to amendments. But constitutional morality is not in our genes. It has to be cultivated as a habit. In our actions and administration, the spirit of the Constitution must not be forgotten. This is but one of innumerable exhortations of one of the tallest leaders of modern India, whose penetrating insights, unmatched scholarship, and radical ideas remain relevant and valid to the present day.

(The writer is an economist; Syndicate: The Billion Press)