Where Credit Is Due

Acknowledging Babasaheb Ambedkar as a national leader would be the best memorial.

No observer of the Indian political scene will be able to deny the power of symbolism or dare ask “what’s in a name?”. The entire gamut of agitations, protest campaigns and victory processions vis-à-vis the demand for memorials and statues, naming of airports, flyovers and streets, and of welfare schemes after a particular leader is a familiar part and parcel of Indian politics. On one single day last week, newspapers in Mumbai carried an advertisement by the Maharashtra government
expressing “gratitude” to the centre for handing over land for a memorial for Babasaheb Ambedkar, a news story of how Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) activists plan to popularise Narendra Modi in rural Maharashtra by collecting soil and iron for the 600-feet statue of Sardar Patel and of the Maharashtra government’s decision to lay the foundation for the 312-feet statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji. The cynical among us might link these feverish announcements and demands to the forthcoming general elections; those jostling for credit claim that all they want is to commemorate their leaders.
The announcement on handing over the land for the Ambedkar memorial led to a mutual congratulatory atmosphere between the Maharashtra and central governments; at both places the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) are allies. The different factions of the Republican Party of India (RPI) have agitated long for such a memorial. Many more voices joined them just before the municipal and local bodies’ elections of 2011. In the competition to take credit for the memorial, a most unseemly spat between the state government’s ruling partners has also broken out. When newspapers reported that the official announcement was in the offing, the race to take credit became keener. Different groups stepped up, marching to the site with the avowed aim of “taking it over” and one RPI leader even declared that he and his followers were prepared for police lathis and bullets! A NCP leader was quick to tell media persons that he was the first to raise the demand while “others have since joined in for credit”.
The centre’s decision to hand over land belonging to the National Textile Corporation for the Ambedkar memorial comes 57 years after his death. Ambedkar’s political differences with M K Gandhi over caste-based electoral reservations and with the Congress in general are too well known to be repeated here. Ambedkar has never been among those commemorated and honoured by the Congress, or other ruling parties, in all these years. It took a 16-year long agitation to rename the Marathwada University in Aurangabad after him, and even so only through a “compromise” formula.
A number of his intellectual followers have written and spoken out against the injustice of portraying him only as a leader of the dalits. Others point out that his followers are as guilty of the politics of “appropriation” and for the fact that he is popularly seen only as a dalit or neo-Buddhist icon. Ambedkar’s educational accomplishments along with his achievements as an author, journalist and as a leader and moulder of the emergent Indian nation, given the odds that he faced because of his caste, make for an inspirational legacy by any standards. He studied economics, law and politics, got his MA degree and PhD from Columbia University in the US, a DSc from London University, earned an entrance to the bar from Grey’s Inn and had enrolled in the London School of Economics. The attention paid to Ambedkar’s “politics” has overshadowed not only the story of his academic brilliance but also his forceful writings (scholarly and journalistic) on myriad other issues. Every year around 6 December – his death anniversary – the media takes token cognisance of his place in the hearts and minds of his followers (and political observers feel compelled to mention the lack of unity among the many factions of the RPI). In all media reports across languages, he is described as a “dalit leader” or “saviour”.
Perhaps what the entire country ought to recall, especially in these times of thin-skinned intolerance to perceived insults and attempts to project individuals as formidable leaders, is what he said before the Constituent Assembly in 1949.
The second thing we must do is to observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, 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’…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.