By Amit Kumar, TwoCircles.net
Growing up in Bokaro Steel City in Jharkhand meant a lot of things, but one thing that never escaped us (or rather, was never allowed to go unnoticed) was that we were honest, hardworking, upper-caste people who had ‘left’ their privileges behind.
In the largely migrant community (non-Tribals in a Tribal region) one of our neighbours, when we lived in the government quarters allotted to the steel plant employees, was a family who never participated in any of our (Hindu) festivities. An Ambedkarite.
They got along well with everyone else, however, and to our knowledge, that family never had an issue or a quarrel with anyone.
One thing that stood out to me was that their home had just four framed photos of varying sizes of Babasaheb Ambedkar. “He is their god, they worship him,” was my mother’s answer. That family, at least in our street, was referred as members of the “Arjak/Arajak Samaj”. Many years later, I learnt that the word “Arajak” was the Hindi word for anti-socials/anarchists. In 199os, to me, was nothing else but a term I learnt was used to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’.
And if you lived in Bokaro, the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ extended to all sections of the society: Hindus vs Muslims, Locals vs ‘Biharis’, Steel plant employees vs Private workers, people in government quarters vs the ‘slums’, even ‘Local Bengalis’ vs the ‘Bhadralok Bengalis’. The ‘anarchists’ were markedly different from all of us, we were told and taught.
My father, however, explained to the 12-year-old me, that the family respected, and not worshipped, Babasaheb Ambedkar, especially for what he had done for the ‘untouchables’ of the country. A proud Savarna, my father nevertheless did remind me that had it not been for Ambedkar, we, as a nation ? would have been worse off than we were under the British. Not that I understood what he meant then. But I am surprised that he understood Ambedkar in this way that was not and is not common among other Savarnas.
Which makes me wonder: if Ambedkar did mean so much to all of us, how did he become a hero only of the Dalits?
Over the past week, the dismantling of a Lenin Statue in Tripura after the BJP came to power grabbed headlines across the nation. The liberals, the anti-BJP front and the ‘concerned’ citizens all criticised the step taken allegedly by BJP workers. Here’s the thing though: when a Lenin statue is brought down, the differentiators are clearly visible. It’s the liberals/communists/academicians/progressives/everyone else against the Tilak-wearing, Saffron-hugging ‘patriots’. But when it comes to Ambedkar, who is the enemy?
From Haryana to Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, from Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra and even in Kerala and Tamil Nadu off late, scores of Ambedkar statues have been vandalised, and if truth be told, this is neither new nor the end of it. Broken busts, broken glasses, cow dung thrown on statues, busts on the ground, black paint thrown on his face, the forms of vandalism are numerous and equally grotesque. Who targets Ambedkar, the man who gave this fragile union of states its constitution?
And more importantly, why does this issue not make non-Dalits angry? Why do these incidents remain footnotes in newspapers and three-paragraph stories on websites that talk about everything from celebrities to cars? If they appear in the news at all. In just the past one week, statues of Ambedkar were vandalised in Meerut and Haridwar. Before that, scores of Ambedkar statues were vandalised in Panipat, Kurukshetra, Sonipat and Jind in Haryana. Vandalising Ambedkar statues is everyday business. Take the 1997 Ramabai Nagar incident in Mumbai which is over 20 years old now. Violence erupted from an act of vandalism against an Ambedkar statue. People who were killed in the subsequent police firing were all Dalits. The current protesters against the increasing and unchecked vandalism of Ambedkar statues are also almost exclusively Dalits. So where are the upper-castes and where is their dissent?
‘Every Ambedkar statue installed across the country has a history of pain and sacrifice’ said a well-known Ambedkarite a few years ago on his Facebook page. The statement might look simple, and honest: but there is no denying the fact that the statement is above-all, a true reflection of our society and its deeply-casteist nature. Upper-caste hegemony is well-known, well-documented, and well-ignored by the same people who benefit from it. And for Dalits, there is no hero bigger than Ambedkar. This explains why, when the Chalo Una rally took place in August 2016, following attack on Dalits of Una for allegedly selling cow meat, the rally and its leaders garlanded Ambedkar statues installed in every town and village that had his statue. From larger towns like Ahmedabad to even small villages, garlanding an Ambedkar statue remained a common theme. Dalit women’s solidarity marches begin from the Ambedkar statue in a village and move from Ambedkar statue to Ambedkar statue across states. These are acts of protest, but also acts of assertion; an attempt to show the rise of Dalit voices. And when it comes to championing the Dalit cause, no one came close to Ambedkar.
But Ambedkar was a statesman, a constitutional giant, a human rights champion, a labor and civil rights leader – not just an anti-untouchability advocate. So again, the same old question: why does he mean so little to everyone else? Why is there no outrage from political parties when an Ambedkar statue is vandalised? Why don’t the local non-Dalits rise up in outrage? Where are the TV channels? If Padmavati, a corny Bollywood movie based on an equally corny fictional story can ignite such heated albeit pointless debates over freedom of expression and whatnot, then how does vandalising the statue of the man who gave ALL of us the Constitution, amongst other things, not make us angry?
The answer is simple, almost too simplistic: the non-Dalit population does not care what happens to the legacy of Ambedkar. The legacy of Ambedkar actually makes us uncomfortable.
Yes, we will thank him for the Constitution, but we will always keep him behind the soft-on-caste Gandhis and the Nehrus. His sharpness, his intellectualism, and his criticism of the fundamental ideas of Hindu society hits us too close to the gut. It becomes too personal. And asks us to take authentic action, which is not easy.
We, the upper-castes, do not feel comfortable to outwardly hate Ambedkar either (not so much as say, a Jinnah or other Muslim leaders) but we try to compensate by doing things like taking every opportunity to blame him for the ‘reservation problem’, the SC/ST problem, and so on. We will also never talk about his role beyond the making of the Constitution. We will, through various attempts (like the RSS officially does) try to push falsified ideas like that he hated only casteism, and loved Hinduism as a whole.
The reasons for attacks on Ambedkar statues, regardless of who carries it, is pretty simple. Since only Dalits consider him as a hero, vandalising an Ambedkar statue will only ‘hurt’ Dalits, never others. And at a time when Dalits across the country have risen in defiance, there are few figures better than Ambedkar to target. It gets to the heart of assertion. An attack on Ambedkar attacks the heart of the assertion.
Also, notice that many attacks on these statues have happened in villages, smaller towns, and Dalit colonies, where it is harder to get the police to notice or take action. These attacks are done in the dark and almost no one ever claims the responsibility for it. As a result, they rarely if ever make news even in local papers. The statue may be there to remind us of our past, but it does precious little to change the present. Even now, the truth is that it is a child’s play to vandalise an Ambedkar statue and get away with it. Take Haryana for example: in our recent story on “How Jind in Haryana became a hellhole for Dalits”. The people we spoke to said that every time a statue is vandalised, the police promises action but does nothing. In fact, no one has yet been arrested in Haryana for vandalising an Ambedkar statue, the locals said.
The attitude of the Savarnas to the attacks on Ambedkar statues is an apt reflection of our society: over the past four years at least, the ‘Hindutva’ issue has transformed into this massive blanket which covers every issue, from freedom of expression to Dalit assertion under it. But the vandalism of Ambedkar statues cannot be categorised as a ‘Hindutva’ problem because it is not. It is an all-Savarna problem.
The vandalism of Ambedkar statues, if anything, is only a brute reminder to Dalits that their assertions will come at a great price. The only thing that seems sure as of now, is that the Savarnas will remain silent over these issues. The Lenin statue in Tripura is more important, probably because Lenin is a nice, famous, and well-removed foreigner. He represents a non-threatening progressiveness for Savarnas – one in which they aren’t called to be held accountable for their own roles as oppressors. In Lenin, they see a hero who spoke against imperialism and capitalism–two ideologies that Savarnas criticise even as they continue benefiting from it. But in Ambedkar, they see a man who challenged their privileges. And whoever wanted to let go of their privilege?