Ambedkar was a self-made man in the profoundest sense of that term. Even his name was his own creation, for he was born a Sakpal, but decided to take a name based on that of his village (Ambavade) as Maharashtrian Brahmins did. He was born a Hindu Mahar, but died a Buddhist, converting with hundreds of thousands of his followers at a public ceremony months before his death. Once a child who was refused water in school because his touch would “pollute” the caste of the person serving it to him, he married a Brahmin. He wore Western suits in rejection of the traditional trappings of a society that had for so long enslaved his people. And he raged against the injustice of social discrimination. Not for him the mealy-mouthed platitudes of the well-meaning: he was prepared to call a spade a bloody shovel, and to do so in print. It was an attitude that Indian society was not prepared for, but at a time when Indians were fighting for their freedom from foreign rule, it was both appropriate and necessary that Indians should fight equally against domestic oppression.
Ambedkar rejected what he saw as the patronizing indulgence of the Gandhian approach to untouchability. The Mahtama called them “Harijans”—children of God. Arrant nonsense, said Ambedkar, aren't we all children of God? He used, instead, Marathi and Hindi words for the “excluded” (Bahishkrit), the “oppressed” (Dalit), and the “silent.” He publicly burned the Manusmriti, the ancient law-book of the caste Hindus. He was an equal opportunity offender, condemning caste consciousness in the Muslim community with as much vehemence as he savaged the Hindus. Ambedkar fought for his people, and he fought against injustice and oppression by whomever it was practiced. He was an enemy of cant and superstition, an iconoclast who had contempt for traditions that he felt deserved no sanctity.
It wasn't easy. As a nationalist, he was sensitive to the charge that he was dividing Indians at a time when they needed to be united against the British. When he demanded separate electorates for his people, Mahatma Gandhi undertook a fast unto death until an unconvinced Ambedkar, fearing mass reprisals if the Mahatma died, caved in. Gandhi, who abhorred untouchability, believed that the answer lay in the social awakening of caste Hindus rather than in building walls of separation. Ambedkar, who lived with the daily reality of caste discrimination, was not convinced that the entrenched practices of traditional Hinduism could ever disappear. In the end he opted out of the religion altogether, embracing the ethics of equality that Buddhism embodied.
Buddhism also inspired his faith in democracy, which infused his role as the Father of India's Constitution. Whereas some saw Ambedkar, with his three-piece suit and formal English, as a Westernized exponent of Occidental constitutional systems, he was inspired far more by the democratic practices of ancient India, in particular the Buddhist sanghas. Sangha practice had incorporated democratic voting by ballot, formal rules of precedence and structured debates, and parliamentary practices like committees, agreed agendas, and the tabling of proposals for the conduct of business. This in turn had its precedence in the system of governance that prevailed in the ancient Indian tribal republics like those of the Lichchavis and the Shakyas. “This democratic system,” Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly, “India lost. Will we lose it again?”
His skepticism was not cynicaclass="underline" he saw in the institutions of Indian democracy that he was helping to create the best guarantee for the future development and welfare of his own people, the oppressed and marginalized of India. He fought hard to introduce into the Constitution fundamental protections and guarantees of civil liberties for individual citizens, including freedom of religion and speech, economic and social rights for women, and the outlawing of all forms of discrimination. Ambedkar also convinced the Constituent Assembly that it was not enough to abolish untouchability: what was needed to undo millennia of discrimination and exploitation was a system of affirmative action to uplift the oppressed, including reservations of jobs in the civil service, schools, and universities. When the Constitution was adopted, Ambedkar rather typically remarked: “If things go wrong under the new Constitution the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile.”
The comment suggests a deep pessimism about human nature for which he can scarcely be blamed, after witnessing the humiliations heaped upon millions for no reason other than their accident of birth. But if there is one failure that can be ascribed to him, it lay in his impatience with established political structures as instruments of change. After independence, as a minister in Nehru's first cabinet, he might have got a great deal done through the Congress Party, but he denounced it as a dharamsala, or rest home, devoid of principle or policy, “open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communists and secularists, reformers and orthodox, and capitalists and anticapitalists.” In his own quest for political rigor he founded no fewer than three parties, each of which faded away. He was better at articulating powerful ideas than in creating the structures to see them through. But the Constitution of which he was the principal author remains the best instrument for pursuing his ideas. The leader and spokesman of a community left his greatest gift to all communities — a legacy that belongs to all of us, and one of which we are yet to prove ourselves wholly worthy.
28. Anchored in Himself
WHEN K. R. NARAYANAN WAS ELECTED AS PRESIDENT of India in 1997, there was a great deal of self-congratulation in the air. What was hailed most widely by politicians and pundits was not merely the triumph of a unifying figure at the helm of a fissiparous polity but that a Dalit — an “untouchable” outcaste — should ascend to the highest office in the land four weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. I was just as proud as the next man to see Mahatma Gandhi's wishes being fulfilled at this auspicious time, but I thought (and wrote at the time) that it did a disservice to President Narayanan to reduce him to a symbol of his caste, or lack thereof. The nation had much to congratulate itself about in his election — not because Narayanan was a Dalit, but because he possessed one of the finest minds to have been exercised in high office in our country.
Like many others who have followed our affairs of state, I too have a Narayanan story. It goes back to 1984, when a leading national journal asked me to review his book India and America, published at the end of his tenure as ambassador to the United States. I am normally allergic, both as a reader and as a reviewer, to collections of official speeches; I find them usually drab and unilluminating, the self-promotional attempts of functionaries to accord their routine reflections an unmerited permanence. But Narayanan's was a worthy exception to this rule, and I engaged with it at some length, finding much to praise and a few things to criticize.
I had never met Narayanan, and my review was pseudonymous. So I was all the more surprised when the editor of the magazine forwarded to me a letter received in the name of my alias, from none other than K. R. Narayanan himself. It was an uncommonly gracious letter, thanking me not merely for my kinder words but for my criticisms, saying how much he had learned from my comments and expressing a desire to meet me. This was so exceptional an experience for me as a reviewer that I shed my anonymity and wrote back to the author — by then vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a fitting position for an individual of such intellectual integrity. Our first meeting occurred a year or so later, when K. R. Narayanan, by then minister of state for science and technology, was visiting Geneva, where I was living and working at the time. The minister was as disarming in person as he had been in his correspondence: kind, soft-spoken, intellectually curious, morally engaging. A lifelong friendship was born.