Opinion Hypocrisy On Jayanti
Why the PM’s paeans to Ambedkar ring a little hollow
Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI Photo by Swapan Mahapatra 
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
While delivering the sixth Ambedkar Memorial Lecture in March, PM Narendra Modi made two amusing statements. He said that he was an Ambedkar bhakt and, assuring that reservations would never be touched, he said that even if B.R. Ambedkar himself came and demanded their revocation, he would not accept it.
Modi’s bhakti is understandable, but Ambedkar disliked bhakts, particularly in political life. At a meeting in Bombay in March 1933, Ambedkar was annoyed that superlatives were used for him. He reprimanded the organisers saying, “These ideas of hero worship will bring ruin on you if you don’t nip them in the bud. By deifying an individual, you repose faith for your safety and salvation in one single individual… If you fall a victim to these ideas, your fate will be no better than logs of wood in the national stream of life. Your struggle will come to naught”. In a lecture delivered on the 101st birthday of M.G. Ranade, he elaborately explained why he was against hero worship. In Nagpur, on the eve of his conversion ceremony, people came to greet him and began falling at his feet in reverence. Ambedkar, although not well, took his stick and hit one of them, shouting that he did not like their servile behaviour. If Ambedkar had been alive, even Modi would have been reprimanded that he had better focus on his constitutional duty to protect Dalits from the oppressive state he heads, rather than worship him.
In light of the heavy cuts in allocation of funds for development of Dalits, rampant suppression of the radical expression of Dalit students, institutional murders of promising Dalit scholars like Rohith Vemula, attitude of vengeance of the HRD ministry against Dalit students, and trampling of the Constitution with impunity, Modi singing paeans to Ambedkar seems hypocritical.
Ambedkar would never have approved of squandering public money on building grand memorials to him, while two Dalits are murdered and five Dalit women raped daily. Modi should know that the condition of Dalits has worsened since he became PM.
The second point Modi made is more intricate. Ambedkar is singularly responsible for reservations; initially for political representation and later in public employment and educational institutions. But when he won separate electorates for Dalits, Gandhi blackmailed him with his fast unto death into giving them up in the Poona Pact. There remained no theoretical possibility of a true representative of the Dalit masses getting elected. The earliest proof of this is provided by Ambedkar himself — he could never win an election in post-Independence India.
Reservations in public employment and educational institutions proved beneficial initially, but soon their limitations and negativities began surfacing. Reservations, instituted in colonial times, were cunningly used as an alibi to preserve caste in the Constitution as a weapon to divide Indians. Creating a separate schedule of tribes and having a vague provision to extend reservations to backward classes were part of this cunning. In its mechanics, reservations progressively kept helping its beneficiaries, and thereby created a class detached from the Dalit masses. Leave aside public-sector jobs, which have been consistently coming down since 1997 under pressure from neoliberal policies, effectively bringing reservations to an end, reservations in our premier educational institutions have been supply-starved because of these faulty mechanics. Reservations are unquestioningly seen as a benefit without a reckoning of the huge social and psychological costs they entailed on Dalits.
The biggest cost of reservations is the decimation of Ambedkar’s dream of the annihilation of caste. The psychological havoc it plays on the minds of Dalit children early on in schools — that they belong to some inferior species — reduces them to confirm the self-fulfilling prophesy. Reservations have also provided a cover for the ruling classes to neglect their obligation to provide for basic needs of people — public healthcare, education and employment.
If Ambedkar had been alive today to see the full unfolding of these policies, he would have certainly demanded their revocation. Modi, representing the ruling classes, inadvertently revealed that, come what may, they would never touch reservations. Dalit naiveté may take his statement to be a sign of great commitment. But it is time Dalits woke up from their emotional stupor and saw whom reservations really benefit and who pays for them.
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