Politics of rediscovering Ambedkar

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi recently trudged off to Mhow as part of the Congress' effort to celebrate the 125th centenary of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birth. More than ten years ago Rahul’s mentor, Digvijaya Singh, then chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, too had engaged with Mhow, the birth place of Ambedkar. After having done nothing to further the extant Bhima janmbhumi project for a decade, suddenly Digvijaya Singh woke up to remember Ambedkar by renaming Mhow as Ambedkar Nagar in June 2003.

The Congress party, it seemed, had discovered that Ambedkar was great. The people, however, told them to forget it. That particular gesture from the Congress and Digvijaya was lost on the public. In the elections that followed people voted out Digvijaya and his party. Not only that, the re-naming went waste. Mhow railway station today continues to be known by its old name as does the bus stand. Today, only historians willing to recall strange pieces of information from the past remember this particular effort of the Congress to get closer to Ambedkar.

The problem is, politics is frequently about tropes. It is a gesture, a renaming, an image, a figure, a phrase that conveys grand meanings to a public looking up to the leader. Finding a good trope, though, is not always easy. Sometimes it is people who voice their choice clearly and leaders then are compelled to follow. Ambedkar is one such trope who has been foisted on the political establishment of India by a reverential public. How that happened is an interesting story worth retelling.

Few today know that in the early 1970s the government did away with Ambedkar Jayanti in the name of reducing the number of public holidays. Instead a holiday was declared in the name of Lokmanya Tilak. When a few SC employees of the government protested in Pune, they were quickly suspended and subjected to disciplinary proceedings.

Two recalcitrant employees, DK Khaparde and Kanshi Ram, decided to take matters further. They started a movement for the employees. They insisted that their actions addressed all the backward and minority communities’ employees.  The vehicle to spread the words and thoughts of Ambedkar among those who cared to listen was a little known organisation called the BAMCEF. The BAMCEF was essentially in the nature of a discussion group. Much that was discussed here was around the theme that Ambedkar’s thought was the only way forward for a more equitable and modern India.

This organisation continued to work among employees even while being entirely ignored by the media and non-Dalits in general. Apparently a group of people, howsoever large, who were not creating nuisance for everyone, were of little interest to anyone.

Finally In the 1980s, demanding a more active engagement with electoral politics, Kanshi Ram decided to break away. He formed the now well-known BSP. With aggressive slogans like "Tilak tarazu aur talwaar, inko maro juté char", he espoused a new strategy for politics in India — the politics of defeat. Not being in a position to win any election his party planned on making the winning candidate lose. This was creating nuisance of the most visible kind; that too in the name of Ambedkar. Kanshi Ram’s BSP was defeated. But that particular effort to empower the Dalit voter seemed to provide new strength to the Dalits. Ambedkar statues, not very artistically done, began to be seen in villages and mohallas across the country. Often they had been set up at the initiative of Dalit leaders and through funds collected from among the Dalits. Minimally such assertion meant that all political parties were forced to take fresh cognisance of Ambedkar. The government promptly elevated Ambedkar’s birthday to the status of a national holiday. Even his death anniversary became the object of much bowing and scraping by important political leaders.

Ambedkar’s centenary year in 1991 had gone by relatively unnoticed. PV Narasimha Rao’s government did earmark a crore rupees for distribution among NGOs under the title "scheme for the celebration of birth anniversary of great saints". Little was heard of these efforts. No lasting idea or institution came of them. Most of the commemoration of Ambedkar on that occasion was confined to official stuff like the documentary made on him by the Films Division or some eminently forgettable publicity material disseminated by the DAVP. The government of Maharashtra brought out the collected works of Babasaheb Ambedkar and of Jotiba Phule.

Universities did set up chairs in Ambedkar’s name, but appointed academics of indifferent worth to them.