Describe Ambedkar’s notion of an ideal society.

A form and a method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed. That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test … Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Volume 17, Part 3

It is April 14, the birth anniversary of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956). The day has been turned into an occasion for political parties to remember and pay lip service to one of India’s unparalleled leaders, a multifaceted personality, the chief architect of Indian Constitution, a statesman, economist and a social revolutionary. He had his education at some of the world’s premier institutions such as London School of Economics, Columbia University, and University of London.

The occasion has become a ritual where parties vie with one another to garland his statue rather than make his dreams of creating an ideal society with people following principles of equality, liberty and fraternity a reality. Fondly called as Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary celebrations have travelled as far as Austria, Hungary, Canada, United States and the United Kingdom.

Ambedkar emphasised the significance of institutionalizing legal and political measures to brazen out the social distinctions, inequalities and injustices of a caste-ridden society. He drafted various articles to protect the dispossessed classes against oppression from the dominant. 

Faith in democracy :

It becomes important to remember Dr. Ambedkar as the democratic exercise of elections in some States are just over. Dr Ambedkar said: “Democracy is not a form of government, but a form of social organisation.” He firmly believed that political democracy could not succeed without social and economic democracy. Prominent political theorist and subaltern studies scholar Partha Chatterjee calls Ambedkar an unalloyed modernist who strongly believed in science, history, rationality, secularism, parliamentary democracy, and above all modern state as the site for actualisation of reason.

Prof. Chatterjee describes Ambedkar as a “staunch advocate of the interventionist modernising state and of the legal protection of the modern virtues of equal citizenship and secularism.” In fact, Ambedkar used parliamentary democracy and other idioms of modernity to assimilate the subaltern sections of society as against the nationalist construction of modernity.  In south India, EVR Periyar was another leader who invested in the idea of the modern to represent the cause of the oppressed.

But at the same time Ambedkar had his doubts over political modernity in not representing the cause and created adequate space for claiming the rights through legal enactments. Dr. Ambedkar’s national status was proclaimed much later by the Indian state during the 1990s during the first phase of Mandal. This, along with the emergence of Dalit movements during the same period, saw a proliferation of statues across the nation outnumbering any other leader in Indian history.

The emergence of this new trend of installing statues for Ambedkar in public spaces in cities and villages symbolised self-assertion of Dalits. Dalit writers and intellectuals based in Madurai also agree that the celebration that we’ve been seeing on Ambedkar’s birth anniversary and the consciousness to espouse ideas of Ambedkar have flourished on a large-scale during the recent past with the rise of Dalit movements during the post-1990s, and also the through efforts of Communist parties in bringing about structural changes.

Installation of statues has played a greater role in supplementing the assertion of Dalits and spatial equality, for long denied, made visible this time not as a mark of a social position within a caste hierarchy but as a new political identity. Thus, statue of Ambedkar has become a new deity on the horizons of the modern urban spaces. This also resulted in attacks on the statues which became routine such as the atrocities against the Dalits leading to violent clashes. Urban historian Professor Janaki Nair says that the proliferation of Ambedkar statues and how these symbolic structures helped in the assertion should not be perceived wrongly.

She says that Ambedkar’s legacy should not be seen within the ambit of ‘de-ordering’ of public spaces through statues and other signs but it is a multi-faceted one like Buddhism, constitutional politics, and human rights for oppressed castes and women, and more.

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