The Indian National Congress could neither ignore him, nor make him one of its own.
But Time will concede this much to that party: The great play of India's freedom struggle, with characters of Ramayanic turn and Mahabharatan twist, enacting what could be called a triumphant tragedy in several Acts ended with three dramatic scenes. These were, first, the formidable Congress-powered Quit India Movement that had shown beyond all doubt the Indian people's determination to free themselves from the Raj, then, the Second World War making Empire obsolete and Britain's allies - the USA and the USSR - supporting independence for India and, finally, the entering upon office of the Attlee-led Labour government in London, which found Britain's hegemony over India too great an embarrassment to handle. It had to let go.
When all these global players, the people of India foremost among them, were being as big and defining as the moment demanded that they be, the Congress was not going to be small-minded or petty. It knew that making history on Indian soil was not its monopoly, nor were India's political geography or demography in its hands. Indraprastha was not, never has been, peopled by the devas alone. No sura comes without an asura to match and even, more curiously, those two - the celestial and the nether-born - are wholly and routinely interchangeable within the same personality.
By the time a Constituent Assembly needed to be formed for the coming India, the new India, the India of the dreams of the struggle, the Congress realised that India was far bigger, far more complex than the struggle for its freedom, that politics was about more than political parties and the making of a Constitution for India could not be done by an enlarged form of the Congress Working Committee.
A pre-eminent resource lays rather stunningly concentrated in one man - intellectually as pre-possessing as he was politically overwhelming, a figure the mortal devas and the suras had as much declined to embrace as he, caring a piffle for such mythical categories, had with a wave of his hand, disdained.
The Congress recognised in Ambedkar one who was not imprisoned by its own shibboleths, one or another of its own pressure groups, and who could without any vulnerability to lobbies, move the Constituent Assembly towards a document that would balance the nation's various needs, sentiments and goals. But, above all, in him was also found one who had a clear understanding of the goal of social justice. Where others empathised, he had experienced, where others visualised, he knew in his veins, the need for that justice.
The co-sharing of responsibility went beyond Constitution-making when Prime Minister Nehru invited Dr Ambedkar to become India's first Minister for Law and Justice. But the decorum, or prudence, was short-lived.
It would not be wrong, I believe, to assume that as a minister, Dr Ambedkar was made to feel he was there on sufferance, that he had overstayed his welcome in the government. And he did the only self-respecting thing that he could have done when on the matter of the Hindu Code Bill, he resigned from his ministerial office. The Congress let him go without resistance and opposed him in the first election that Dr Ambedkar ever fought in North Bombay, in 1952. Congress was Congress and it was able to defeat Dr Ambedkar. As if this was not bad enough, in the 1954 by-election in Bhandara, the Congress again opposed and defeated him.
And so, today, if the Congress thinks it is wise and prudent to commemorate Dr Ambedkar's 125th birth anniversary, let us not grudge it its moment of glory under that anniversary's sun. Its posthumous praise of Dr Ambedkar will ring truer if it were to add to it the regret over its decision to oppose the leader in the only two elections to the Lok Sabha he contested. But if it cannot get itself to do that handsome thing, let the Congress at least be aware that the country has not forgotten the opportunities missed by it in 1952 and 1954. Our memories are short; they are not non-existent.
Exploitation of the charisma of the great dead is not the monopoly of one party alone; it is a national political pastime. Dr Ambedkar's name has become a kamadhenu, which all manner of self-promoters seek to milk. Those he would have chased away from his presence with a single withering look, come up to his portraits bearing garlands and wearing smiles with what can only be called gall. Some of these belong, unbelievably, to the Right. The sectarian Right anywhere believes in two kinds of dictatorship - that of, literally, a Supremo and that of a community. The Right in India is no exception. It believes the people of India , with their tradition of looking up to a preceptor, a neta, will democratically uphold an individual's dictatorship. It also thinks the Hindu majority in India will want its Raj, a Hindu Raj, to prevail.
Let that Right, before it seeks to appropriate Dr Ambedkar, ponder this observation of Dr Ambedkar's made in the Constituent Assembly on November 29, 1949: "…it is quite possible in a country like India, where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new, there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater."
Dr Ambedkar has been exploited by some politicians from the Dalit community itself. If these persons think they have a greater right than others to invoke Babasaheb , they may have a point. But if they think they have a greater right than others to exploit Babasaheb, then I am sorry to say, they do not have a point; they are mistaken. Seeing computer-doctored photographs of contemporary politicians, born decades after Babasaheb passed away, standing beside him in morphed pictures, is common. It is also sad. These individuals should have more originality to them, more self-reliance, and less trickery. We are forgetful of history but we are not so innocent of it as to imagine that these gentleman and ladies were close to the icon. It needs to be said that the late Kanshiramji never tried any such stunt.
Dr Ambedkar quoted Jefferson in the Constituent Assembly once to say each generation is a new country. We are now that new country. There is a new generation of "us". The hard truth is that despite being so, the new country still has its old prejudices around, its old persecutions. Our cities and larger towns may not practice untouchability as of old, but in the villages and even in our cities, unseen, invisibly, there is a sense of Dalits being Dalits, a category apart. Only India could have thought of something as creatively correctionist as a Schedule listing Scheduled Castes and Tribes and only India could have reduced the word to a slang abbreviation that I shall not repeat. This is not used in harmless jest as other slanged abbreviation areas, for instance TamBrahm or Gujju or Mallu. It is used with a certain derision. This is a shame on us. We are and we are not yet a new country.
Edited excerpts from a speech by former diplomat and former governor of West Bengal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, at the unveiling of Dr B R Ambedkar's portrait in the Supreme Court Bar Association's library, on April 14, 2015, in New Delhi
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