Opinion Express view on battle over Ambedkar: Debate his legacy, don’t indulge in sound-byte tokenism

In the wake of Parliament’s spirited debate over what the Constitution means, the government and the Opposition have now grappled — even literally — in the name of B R Ambedkar. Two BJP MPs, Pratap Chandra Sarangi and Mukesh Rajput, are in hospital. The party alleges they were shoved by senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. The main Opposition party in Parliament, in turn, has accused BJP members of obstructing Opposition leaders from entering Parliament and injuring party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and other Congress members. At the centre of the row is Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s remarks in which he referred to B R Ambedkar and mocked what he suggested was the Congress’s lip service to Ambedkar. This criticism is par for the Parliamentary course but Shah, not exactly known for the lyrical flourish, crudely framed his critique unbecoming of his stature in a party that regularly invokes Babasaheb in its post-2014 zeal. “There is a fashion to keep repeating ‘Ambedkar, Ambedkar’…if the Opposition had taken God’s name so often, they would have reached heaven,” he said calling out the Congress for not giving “Babasaheb his due”. For the Opposition bloc, recently fractured over how to take on the ruling party after the Maharashtra debacle, Shah’s remarks serve as an instant glue, at least for now; for the Congress, its outrage reinforces its new-found social justice plank.

Ambedkar wouldn’t have minded. In the more than 30 years of his public life, he contested the ideas and actions of almost every major political stream of his times, including the Congress and the Jana Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha. The Congress’s ideological clashes with him are well known. As is the fact that the opposition of the BJP’s forebears to the Hindu Code Bill pushed Ambedkar to resign from the Nehru cabinet. It’s, however, a testament to his prescience that six decades after his death, nearly every political party in the country professes to embrace Ambedkar. The growing tide of social justice since the 1990s and the imperative of every party to reach out to the marginalised and oppressed, mean that Ambedkar’s ideas today are part of the discourse on the Left, Right and the Centre. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often said that without Ambedkar he would not have been in office and the BJP regularly invokes Babasaheb in its outreach to the Dalit and marginalised communities. Likewise, Congress today claims to speak for his legacy. In recent years – especially during the Lok Sabha elections — Rahul Gandhi has often referred to “Ambedkar’s Constitution” to restore the party’s fraying links with the Dalit constituency. The Opposition’s campaigns for a caste census carry Ambedkar’s name.

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Clearly, his appeal and significance transcend his original constituency. That’s why competitive populism, even posturing, co-exist with campaigns for constitutionalism, human rights and social justice in Ambedkar’s name. The contesting claims to his legacy attest to the vibrance of democracy that he helped secure. Impassioned debates — even occasionally raucous ones — would have certainly made him proud but the unseemly push and shove and the deafening sound-byte tokenism don’t do him justice.