The mask fell suddenly.
On the second and concluding day of the ‘Constitution at 75’ debate in the Rajya Sabha, as home minister Amit Shah delivered his closing speech, he said: “These days, there is a fashion. Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar. If you took the name of God this many times, you would attain heaven for the next seven lives.” All of us listening in the Rajya Sabha were taken aback. Many MPs quickly sat up, shocked by Shah’s biting, mocking tone. He sounded brusque and insulting.
Reciting Ambedkar’s name in a sing-song manner six times sounded like Shah was ridiculing the father of the Indian Constitution. His tone was sneering, like a send-up of those who do chant Ambedkar’s name and teachings as a manifesto of social justice.
By calling Ambedkar a “fashion” and repeating his name as if it was a superficial catechism or a gimmick, Shah revealed his disdain for Ambedkar’s ideas in full public view. The truth was clear for all to see: The Sangh Parivar stands in perpetual conflict with Ambedkar’s radical modernism and his resounding rejection of Hindu social hierarchies. Hindutva is fundamentally opposed to Ambedkarism.
BJP-RSS led by the ‘twice-born’
As a lifelong student of Ambedkar, my first novel, The Gin Drinkers (HarperCollins 2000), sprang from an academic and journalistic realisation of India’s brutally unequal society. I continue to be inspired by Ambedkar’s unflinchingly modernist and progressive vision. He despised superstition; he had no time for romanticised notions of “village India” and demanded that Hinduism be brought in consonance with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
In 1927, Ambedkar launched a movement to drink water from the Chavdar Lake at Mahad and burnt the Manusmriti. This was a powerful cry against the vile practice of untouchability. He levelled a cultural, political, and ideological challenge to Brahminical Hinduism and its notions of “Brahmin purity” and “Dalit pollution”.
In the book, Homo Hierarchicus (1966), French anthropologist Louis Dumont wrote that the Hindu caste system is not just about social classes. It is also a set of ideas in which a Dalit person, by their very existence, is seen as violating so-called Brahminical “purity”.
It is this atrocious mentalité that Ambedkar sought to smash into pieces. “The Hindu civilisation … is a diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy … What else can be said of a civilization which has produced a mass of people … whose mere touch (can) cause pollution,” he wrote in The Untouchables.
The BJP was founded (among others) by the north Indian Brahmin Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The BJP was a successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded by the Bengali Brahmin bhadralok Syama Prasad Mukherjee. Since its inception, the party has been known as a Brahmin-Bania club, drawing support from the non-metropolitan upper castes.
The RSS leadership has been almost totally dominated by Brahmins. Its founder, Dr KB Hedgewar, and most impactful ideologue, MS Golwalkar, were both Brahmins.
The RSS-BJP works to propagate Hindu cultural supremacy. The suit–and–tie–clad Ambedkar sought to blast away at this idea. He called for the annihilation of caste against the Hindu nationalists who exalted the varna system.
The Chaturvarna is “the most vicious system”, Ambedkar wrote in Annihilation of Caste. He displayed his Western wear and Constitutional values against those who boasted their dhoti and sacred thread as markers of social prestige. The early RSS had no truck with Ambedkar.
The varna system was, as historian Christophe Jaffrelot says, a “mainstay of Hindu identity”. Ambedkar’s anti-Brahmin movement was in fundamental conflict with this worldview.
The BJP, at its core identity, ideology, and inheritance, is thus at loggerheads with Ambedkar. The party has always been upper caste or “twice born” dominated. It is only in the last 20 years that the Sangh Parivar has sought to expand its footprint in newer demographics and actively cultivated Dalit and OBC communities. In the 2014 general elections, the BJP’s vote share among OBCs rose exponentially, a direct result of assiduous and active outreach by the Sangh Parivar.
Also read: Congress & BJP rejected Ambedkar once, idolise him now. He never wanted blind worship
Wooing Dalit & OBC votes
In the 1990s, the BJP sought to actively woo UP’s Dalits, embarking on several “Hindukaran” programmes. In the mid–1990s, the BJP formed coalition governments with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1995 and 1997. But the alliance was extremely uneasy.
The BSP’s founder Kanshi Ram had famously propagated the slogan, “Tilak, tarazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote chaar (Brahmin, Bania and Kashtriya, hit them with shoes).” For the early BSP, the power of the Dalit vote was a steamroller to crush both the BJP and Congress. “Chalega haathi, udegi dhool, na rahega panja, na rahega phool [When the elephant (the BSP symbol) walks, dust rises and wipes out the hand and the lotus].”
There were thus deep structural tensions in the BJP-BSP alliance. The BJP could never accept Mayawati, a Dalit woman, as chief minister and the relationship soon fell apart.
The RSS-BJP has repeatedly shown that it is unable to come to terms with Dalit assertion. Conflicts on the ground invariably spill into politics. In a horrifying 2016 attack, Dalit youths were savagely flogged in Una, Gujarat by a group apparently acting for “cow protection”. Last week in Bulandshar, a Dalit groom was pushed off his horse by members of upper caste communities. In 2016, following the suicide of Hyderabad University student Rohith Vemula, the Modi government was seen trying to prove that Vemula was not from a Dalit background.
In 2018, when a Supreme Court bench diluted the provisions of the SC/ST Act 2018, the RSS-BJP were again the focus of Dalit youth’s anger. When Gurgaon was renamed Gurugram after guru Dronacharya in the Mahabharata, controversy arose: In the Mahabharata, Dronacharya demands that the lower caste Ekalavya cut off his thumb so he may no longer practice an upper-caste sport like archery.
The BJP has never appointed a Dalit chief minister. There has never been a Dalit RSS Sarsanghchalak. Look at how the BJP treated Chirag Paswan, son of LJP founder and Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan. Chirag started as an NDA ally, but when he failed to win the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, his party was broken up under his nose and he was unceremoniously evicted from his government bungalow.
Chirag is now back with the NDA because the Modi government needs every ally to shore up its numbers. The BJP pays ritual obeisance before Ambedkar’s portraits and inaugurates many a memorial, but doctrinally and existentially, the Sangh Parivar is on a collision course with Ambedkarism.
Also read: Opposition has the lost art of parliamentary etiquette & repartee. Remember Jaitley, Swaraj
OBC-isation efforts
The BJP has, on occasion, been successful in mobilising the non-Jatav Dalits, as it did in 2014. But in 2024, the post-poll CSDS survey showed that there has been a 5 per cent decline in Dalit support to the Modi-led BJP. This is perhaps the result of the Opposition’s slogans that the BJP would overturn the Constitution and thus, reservations.
The upper caste identity of the BJP has been shed somewhat by its highly successful OBC-isation efforts. PM Modi himself is an OBC face, as are many other senior leaders like Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Yet, while the BJP appointed Ram Nath Kovind as President, it has chosen not to share power on an equal footing with Dalits as it has done with OBCs. For the BJP, Dalits are a vote bank to be appeased by ritual tokens, not equals in power-sharing.
Amit Shah’s insult of Ambedkar has opened up this age–old fault line between Hindu nationalism and Ambedkarism once again. Shah may insist that his words were taken out of context, but the home minister has no place to hide.
Ambedkarite campaigns have ensured that today, every citizen is aware of the horrifying social, psychological, and material cruelties heaped on Dalits down the centuries. Ambedkar’s courage and heroism gave voice to a long–simmering roar for justice, which now echoes throughout India.
No one who is progressive-minded and believes in the Constitution can forgive Shah for his disdain for Ambedkar. No amount of headline management, blame deflection, finger-pointing at Rahul Gandhi, or other weapons of mass distraction will work.
Amit Shah must immediately apologise. Fully and publicly.
Sagarika Ghose is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
The print is now hub of political propaganda with zero facts.
Don’t allow her to publish more articles in future
Sagarika Ghosh has a shrill, ear piercing and shrieking tone in her repeated denunciations of Modi and Shah. She’s incapable of thoughtful debate and is limited to anti-Hindu polemics. She can’t deny the fact that Ambedkar had nothing but contempt for Gandhi and Nehru. On the other hand, Ambedkar never attacked Savarkar, the man!
Like how Sagarika is free to ridicule Modi and RSS, they are free to ‘ridicule’ Ambedkar.
Sagarika your husband is a Brahmin, and also your kids since they take on the surname of the father would also could be classified as Brahmin. Do you openly display your vile hatred of the Brahmins over the dinner table, what about your extended family. Do you spew venom and filth at them as you are doing now.
Whatever little respect Mr. Rajdeep Sardesai commanded amongst the people and in the media fraternity, this lady is out to destroy that. With a spouse like that, one really does not need an enemy.
One wonders though as how this lady passed herself off as a “journalist” for decades? All thanks to Mr. Pranab Roy and Ms. Radhika Roy.