No government office will have chief minister’s photos, there will be pictures of Bhagat Singh and B.R. Ambedkar,” announced Aam Aadmi Party’s Bhagwant Mann in his victory speech in Sangrur. Meanwhile, in AAP’s national office in Delhi, big placards with a simple message: “Babasaheb aur Bhagat ka sapna ab poora hoga” — Babasaheb and Bhagat Singh’s dreams will be fulfilled now — hung above deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and jubilant volunteers while they chanted: “Babasaheb tera sapna poora, Kejriwal karenge poora”.
AAP’s chant closely resembled Bahujan Samaj Party’s slogan: “Babasaheb tera mission adhura, Kanshiram karenge poora”. Quick to observe evolving political strategies and a keen watcher of AAP politics, ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, in his analysis of election results wrote that Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar were the two chosen icons of AAP as these are “the two least polarising figures in our politics.” This is a remarkable turnaround for a figure whose portrait wasn’t unveiled in Parliament until as late as 1990 and who was too polarising a figure in 1978 that when it was proposed to rename Marathwada University as Ambedkar University; it sparked violence. That even a post-ideology party accused of perpetuating ‘upper caste’ politics and ignoring social justice policies is iconising Ambedkar and organising a much-publicised grand musical on his life and teachings might be surprising. But attention to post-1990 politics tells us otherwise.
Iconisation of and engagement with Ambedkar
Commenting upon the resurgence of Ambedkar as an icon, Professor Ajit Jha of Delhi University remarks: “Ambedkar’s iconisation got its first major impetus by the first Lok Sabha defeat of the Congress party in 1977. It may look strange today but, by and large, Dalits were overwhelmingly with the Congress till then. Non-Congress parties’ outreach to Dalits involved iconisation of Ambedkar. Ambedkar re-emerged as a symbol of Dalit self-respect with greater intensity.” He added, “The second leap occurred when the Mandal Commission report on reservation in government jobs was implemented by the VP Singh government. Again, there was ferocious opposition. Though that reservation was not about Dalits, principles of reservation were involved and casteist arguments were advanced in anti-caste garb by opponents of caste-based affirmative action. Ambedkar emerged as the most important icon of the Mandal movement due to the clarity and quality of his ideas and his struggles against caste.”
This change has seen him being conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1990 and his birth anniversary declared a public holiday. Beyond politics, even in the judiciary, Anurag Bhaskar’s work shows that the elite-dominated Supreme Court’s reference to Ambedkar increased seven-fold from the pre-1990 figure.
Over the years, all political parties and political elements of the ‘upper’ castes came to terms with the new reality and they tried accommodating and manipulating lower castes wherever possible and forging partnerships with them wherever necessary. This resulted in Ambedkar emerging as the most important icon of Indian politics, at times surpassing even Gandhi.
These days, all political parties want to remember Ambedkar but differently. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ‘Sangh Parivar’, Ambedkar is primarily the author of a few chapters of “Pakistan or the Partition of India”; for Congress, Ambedkar is someone who was “made” the chairman of the Drafting Committee by the Congress party; for Communist parties, Ambedkar is the founder of the Independent Labour party.
Also Read: Ambedkar said tyranny of majority is no democracy. Indians must read him again
The Grand Musical: A window to AAP’s appropriation
How does AAP commemorate Ambedkar? The musical now showing in Delhi – Babasaheb: The Grand Musical – show on the life and journey of the Dalit icon organised by the AAP government gives us a window to examine this question.
Running into 120 minutes, the musical begins with a scene where the “sutradhar” asks some difficult questions to people mistreating a sweeper while preparing for a programme on Ambedkar. After that, the narrator, a self-styled academic from Columbia University, narrates the life and journey of Ambedkar to the young Dalit sweeper who was dejected by the mistreatment meted out to him.
Set on a resplendent stage whose edges highlight the titles of Ambedkar’s many books, the musical does not lose a single opportunity to worship him. The irony is not lost when the narrator reads Ambedkar’s iconic quote on the perils of bhakti (hero worship) for public life. Most of the musical and dance sequences — colourful and elegant in their own right — tend to exceptionalise the singular might of his intellect, his struggles for equality, his difference from the tides of the day and age, and the need to dedicate oneself to the path shown by him.
In this process, however, it does sanitise Ambedkar of his oppositional positions to present him as an iconic nationalist ‘aam aadmi’, best known and seen through his educational credentials.
This affects the quality of the narration, and instead of correcting the historical epistemic injustices against Ambedkarite thought, it exacerbates their neglect in the public psyche. In the case of the Mahad satyagraha, one of the most important landmarks in our social history; what we get is a totally avoidable dance item on jal, which eclipses the meaning of the Mahad satyagraha in Ambedkar’s journey. Ambedkar was concerned about the axiom of equal citizenship and public access, not so much with predicative aspects such as water rights, health concerns, et al.
Soumyabrata Choudhary, in his book, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, shows how Ambedkar asserted an axiom of absolute equality during the Mahad satyagraha. This revolted against the presumption of inequality that was rooted within the caste order. Ambedkar says no. As opposed to that, ‘axiomatic equality’ is far more rational apart from being far more emancipatory. This idea of ‘axiomatic equality’ had an electric effect on the Dalits of Maharashtra, who led many sustained struggles, many running for years for temple entry and right to public places in various cities and kasbahs of Maharashtra. In its enactment of Mahad Satyagrah, the grand musical makes the burning of Manusmriti conspicuous in its absence.
While depicting Poona Pact, the grand musical couldn’t resist the temptation of indulging in one of the favourite pastimes of our era: Reimagining facts to run down Jawaharlal Nehru. It shows an argument between Nehru and Ambedkar about the need to focus on the political question before addressing the social question. Historical documents show that it was not Nehru but Madan Mohan Malviya with whom Ambedkar was in negotiation for the Poona Pact. This changing of roles aside, the musical, through verbiage, sidesteps the question at the heart of the Poona Pact debate: Separate electorates. Instead, Ambedkar is shown rueing that his stand at the round table conference was misinterpreted and a rumour campaign was run against him. A rich dialogue on the question of political representation of Dalits has been reduced to a “battle against fake news”.
The starkest case of sanitisation is the apologetic reference to Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. Attempts at sanitisation stem from a false assumption that there’s no space for disagreements in iconisation projects and that every act of the icon needs to be either worshipped or defended. It fails to acknowledge the fact that even without discounting the impact of the nudge of the Indian State against conversions, it can be safely said that there are millions of Dalits in India who identify with Ambedkar but have not subscribed to his views on conversion out of Hinduism. Indians do celebrate their human icons, attempts at deification and sanitisation are completely unnecessary.
Also Read: Ambedkar and Gita: There is a reason why Narendra Modi will never mention them together
Dalit: A word of proud self-reference
“The Marathi word Dalit, like the word Black, was chosen by the group itself and is used proudly; and even in the English press, the unfamiliar Marathi word had to be used. None of the normal words — Untouchable, Scheduled Castes, Depressed Classes, Gandhi’s euphemism, Harijan — had the same connotation. Dalit implies those who have been broken, ground down by those above them in a deliberate and active way,” writes Eleanor Zelliot in her collection of essays titled From Untouchable to Dalit. Whereas in the musical, the word is constantly used in a denigrating manner, thus betraying both Dalit sensibilities and history.
Not only does the narrative lose political clarity but fails to affect corporeal and emotional registers.
The depth of humiliation Ambedkar felt and the urgency for the abolition of caste it spurred in him is missing from the musical. Take, for example, Ambedkar’s struggle to find accommodation in Baroda. Reminiscing about it 18 years later, Ambedkar wrote: “This scene of a dozen Parsis armed with sticks lined before me in a menacing mood and myself standing before them with a terrified look imploring for mercy is a scene which so long a period as 18 years has not succeeded in fading away. I can even now vividly recall it and never recall it without tears in my eyes.”
Ambedkar also wrote how he felt lonely in that Parsi inn and how he longed for human company. On many occasions, he wept profusely. Poignant passages from Waiting for a Visa, depicting his struggle to find lodging in Baroda, will leave even the most biased of Ambedkar’s critics teary-eyed, and in many cases, it might work as a flash of vision explaining Ambedkar’s anger and urgency. While all this lends for a moving depiction, what we have in the grand musical is a stale ‘struggle-against-all-odds’ enactment. Also instructive is a small but important deviation from the original story. It was Ambedkar who proposed to the caretaker of the Parsi inn that he could enter a Parsi name on the register and had also offered him some extra money to let him stay. The musical shows the caretaker as the proposer of the name change strategy and completely omits the overt financial deal. Such wholly unnecessary attempts at sanitisation fail to show the emotional, vulnerable Ambedkar and in turn, miss a great opportunity to make him deeply relatable.
Commemoration and iconisation done out of political compulsions harm Ambedkar’s own project to create a united, humanist and egalitarian socio-economic and cultural order for India.
We have seen in the case of other icons of freedom of movement, most notably Gandhi, how sanitisation leads to the hollowing out of great figures. This risk is more pronounced in Ambedkar’s case. His direct, no-holds-barred attack against the scourge of caste makes him a shining light in the battle for equality. In the grand celebration of a truly remarkable life, AAP’s attempts at reducing the radical content of Ambedkar’s thought to just the display of his book titles inhibit a deep engagement with Ambedkar and without it, the slogan on placards in AAP’s national office: Babasaheb aur Bhagat ka sapna ab poora hoga might just remain a slogan.
Amit Kumar is the general secretary of Youth For Swaraj. He tweets @_AmitKumar01.
Prannv Dhawan is a student at National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. He tweets @prannv99.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Srinjoy Dey)