“Hindu right wing’s recent attempts to appropriate the legacy of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar is against the grain of history and necessitates revisiting his uncompromising analysis of the caste system and Sanatana Dharma,” said N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi and Sons Ltd., on Tuesday.
Delivering his address as the chief guest at the 75th annual convocation ceremony of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences here, Mr. Ram said that caste continued to be a challenge in contemporary India and that it was in this context that Dr. Ambedkar stood taller than he ever was.
Earlier last month, when the country celebrated Dr. Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, several public rallies and book launch functions in his honour were organised by right wing groups, whom Dr. Ambedkar blamed for unalterable or rigid social hierarchy.
He added that caste continued to be an institution of oppression and social discrimination and to get rid of it, Ambedkar’s views on the implications of the hegemony of the Shastras must be read, re-read, and made part of a national debate.
These views, said Mr. Ram, place Ambedkar in confrontation with the strong proponents of such views but also the big social questions he raised, notably on Sanatana Dharma, were underestimated by those at the forefront of India’s Congress-led freedom struggle.
Differences with CongressDwelling on Ambedkar’s differences with the Congress on the issue, Mr. Ram referred to the latter’s never-delivered 1936 presidential speech and the radical Annihilation of Caste to which the writer Arundhati Roy, in a long introductory essay, has provided fresh meaning and context.
In Annihilation of Caste , Dr Ambedkar pointed out that :the lower classes of Hindus” were “completely disabled for direct action on account of a wretched system.”
He asserted: “There cannot be a more degrading system of social organisation … It is the system which deadens, paralyses, and cripples the people from helpful activity.”
He also spoke about Dr. Ambedkar’s uneasy relationship with two of the tallest Congress leaders of his time — Mahatma Gandhi, who famously declared that “Dr. Ambedkar is a challenge to Hinduism”, and the former Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who, as Prime Minister, badly let down his Minister of Law on the Hindu Code Bill in the early 1950s.
Mr. Ram added that while Dr. Ambedkar was sharply and emphatically opposed to Gandhism and to the Congress’s ideology, he held views in common with Nehru although on certain social issues.
