India is celebrating its 74th Republic Day. Several events will be held across the country, and many personalities will talk about the need to strengthen our republic and democratic values. It is also an occasion to remember Dr BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, and seek inspiration from him as an icon of humanness — not just for the depressed classes, but also for the globe at large.
The times are such that every political party across the ideological spectrum wants to claim Ambedkar, but only in pieces. Rarely has he been accepted as a whole. In fact, throughout India’s discourses of colonial and postcolonial political development, Ambedkar has been limited to his statutes. As soon as someone talks about his writings, speeches, or democratic ideas in their real sense, there is either complete silence, or antagonistic minds take initiative to erase or shun those thoughts. It may be recalled that on October 27, 1939, Dr Ambedkar had emphatically told BG Kher that “I am not a part of the whole; I am a part apart.”
It is a known fact that Indian society is structured on the basis of the caste system, which has created a culture of inequality and discrimination between the country’s people and communities. Even today, in what we call a modern and sophisticated era, we see disputes and conflicts arise between castes over reasons ranging from food choices and marriages to land acquisitions, to mention a few. Casteist social censorship has far from stopped yet, only the nature of that strife, dispute, and violence has changed.
The towering buildings in cities have swallowed up the rays of hope for the poor, and the working castes and classes. The stark inequality of the slums is invisibilised by the cosmopolitan world. Life in the villages is almost unimaginable. As far as India is concerned, the root cause of these inequalities is the caste system, which continues to be constantly fertilised through a number of mediums. Instead of destroying this inhuman system, dominant cultural agencies keep reinforcing and multiplying its force.
Given the scenario, how can a just society be established? For this, one will have to think through the humanistic approach presented by Ambedkar, and analyse how it has and can phenomenally change society. His theory of humanness has not yet been studied thoroughly. One can see that the mainstream society has framed his ideas mostly around the making of the Constitution or his fight for Dalit rights. But from leading the Mahad Satyagraha to accepting Buddha's Dhamma, Ambedkar’s journey was in pursuit of human rights, dignity, and self-respect.
Through his democratic reforms, he created a rightful ‘human’ space for the people who were treated as invisible, the communities who lived outside the villages and were considered inhuman. In ‘Ambedkar, Buddhism and Democracy’, published in The Wire on December 13 2017, Christophe Jafferlot mentions how Ambedkar had tried to raise £40,000 sterling in 1931 through his “Appeal on behalf of the Depressed Classes Institute”, asking “the Europeans and the Americans” to help a “deprived humanity” — a part of the human race. Often in his Marathi writings, Ambedkar used the word ‘manuski’, which translates to ‘humanness’ in English, Christophe states in his piece, adding that Ambedkar eventually found forms of humanism in the Indian civilisation through Buddha’s Dhamma.
Ambedkar was also very clear that for the success of democracy, constitutional morality is a must. He believed that for dialogue to happen, there is a need for opposition. He firmly stood for the elimination of tyranny between the majority and the minority, and wanted equality before the law and administration for all.
To feel sympathetic and empathetic about someone's suffering, there needs to be a feeling of oneness. This can be achieved by rebuilding the 'public conscience', which he defined as “conscience which becomes agitated at every wrong, no matter who is the sufferer, and it means that everybody, whether he suffers that particular wrong or not, is prepared to join him in order to get him relieved.”
Throughout his life, Ambedkar talked about the reordering of society on humanitarian grounds. His philosophy of ‘humanness’ has reached several people through the social justice movement, bhim geets, and Dalit literature. But it has to go beyond the Ambedkarite community. There is an urgent need to create a culture that fosters friendship or humanity in economic, political, cultural, and social streams.
What we see at present is that political power(s) have created a rift between society. So it is the responsibility of the country’s intellectual class to take Ambedkar's message of humanness forward, thereby strengthening his idea of a ‘social endosmosis’ — a natural flow and exchange of ideas, values, practices, knowledge, and energies between and across groups. Through the words of Dr Ambedkar, political democracy should lead the way to establish a social and economic democracy for the larger benefit of humanity.
Prashant Ingole is a doctorate holder from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Email: prashantingole23@gmail.com