Babasaheb Ambedkar Would Have Called Out Hypocrisy of Both BJP & Opposition

Babasaheb would have been quite bemused at the shouting match between the Treasury and Opposition benches.

On BR Ambedkar's 66th Death anniversary, It is appropriate to revalue Ambedkar’s political legacy.

Image: The Quint

There is more than a touch of irony to the current row between the ruling BJP and the Opposition on Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar. History tells us how virtually all political parties most notably the BJP and its predecessor cohorts along with the Congress have actually sought to undermine the Dalit icon who masterminded the Indian Constitution. The Sangh till a few decades ago were openly hostile to Ambedkar and his vision while the Congress and other parties quietly stabbed him in the back. 

Babasaheb, if alive today, would have been quite bemused at the shouting match between the Treasury and Opposition benches in both Houses of Parliament over which party loved him more.

Certainly, he would have been far more offended by the sheer hypocrisy of the BJP to try and appropriate his legacy than Home Minister Amit Shah’s banter about Ambedkar in a bid to browbeat the Opposition. He would have been the first to call out the farce of the ruling party putting him on a pedestal at a time when the three goals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” he enshrined in the Constitution have each been compromised far more by the Modi regime in the past decade than it has been by previous governments. 

Babasaheb's Prediction About Threats to the Constitution

The chief architect of our Constitution was not a dreamer but a hard-headed political philosopher who usually called a spade a shovel. Seventy-five years ago, when Ambedkar rose to speak in the Constituent Assembly after finishing his job as chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution to much applause from his peers, he was not interested in basking in self-glory but bluntly warned about the perils ahead for the document he helped create that would navigate India’s fledgling democracy. 

This is what Babasaheb had declared, showing amazing premonition about how the Constitution would be subverted by those responsible for implementing it in subsequent decades:

“…however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot.”

BR Ambedkar

In a hard-hitting speech listened in rapt Wattention by the hushed Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar went on to spell out the contradictions that faced this country as it sought to become an independent republic on 26th January, 1950 based on the newly drafted Constitution.  

“In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?” 

What Babasaheb Would Have Felt About Today’s India 

It is interesting to speculate what Ambedkar would have felt that with growing concern across the country about electoral malpractices ignored by a supine Election Commission even the principle of one man one vote may not ensure one vote one value. As for economic quality he would have been appalled that India today is one of the most unequal countries in the world, even worse than it was when the Constitution was drafted, with the top 10% of the population holding 77% of the total national wealth with the richest one percent of the Indian population owning 53% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half left with barely four percent of national wealth according to an article in The Hindu earlier this year. 

Babasaheb was particularly harsh about the lack of “fraternity without which equality and liberty would be mere coats of paint”. He went on to question the concept of an Indian nation without fraternity which in today’s ultra-nationalist hysteria would have been deemed as treason. 

“I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realise that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us. For then only we shall realise the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realising the goal.” 

The other dire prediction by Ambedkar that has huge contemporary relevance was about the danger of hero-worshipping political leaders. He quoted John Stuart Mill saving democracy by not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enable him to subvert their institutions”. Babasaheb went on to point out “This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. 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.” 

Party leaders of all hues today may pay lip service to Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar and the Constitution describing them as sacred but it is nothing more than mere posturing to grab petty political advantage from his iconic status amongst vast socially and economically oppression masses. Indeed it is a telling irony of history that those who trample daily on his idea of what India should become are forced to make him into a demi-god and worship at his feet. 

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)