Appropriating Ambedkar: Why the BJP is on strong ground in its battle to co-opt the Hindutva critic

As Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary approaches on April 14, the relationship between his philosophy and Hindu religious politics is once more in focus. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party has transcended its old image of being a Brahmin-Bania outfit, doubts remain over the party’s commitment to Dalit causes. The overhang of Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the mistreatment of Dalits by cow vigilantes in places like Una have hurt the party. Recently, four BJP Dalit MPs from Uttar Pradesh voiced misgivings about the manner in which the state’s chief minister, Adityanath, has handled Dalit concerns.

Countering this narrative, Narendra Modi claimed last week that no government has honoured Ambedkar as fulsomely as the current administration. By way of illustration, he mentioned the nation-wide digital payments interface, called BHIM after Ambedkar’s first name. “Jai Bhim” is a slogan heard at all Dalit rallies, but most Indians, on hearing the word Bhim, are more likely to picture a hero from the Mahabharata than the chairperson of the Indian Constitution’s drafting committee. Exalting a legendary character from Hindu mythology while at the same time acclaiming a trenchant critic of Hindu society is a neat trick, and one drawn from the playbook of Hinduism itself. A central feature of the faith is its capacity to absorb dissent, and to evolve through a process of adopting and adapting.

To understand the process better, let us think of the spread of religion in terms borrowed from the world of finance. One way to gain control of a firm is through a hostile takeover. Christianity and Islam are masters of this mode. Though these religions expanded through peaceful, organic means to a greater degree than their fiercest detractors allow, coercion following conquest helped substantially in making them the two most populous faiths in the world. Among the procedures they employed were burning books of traditional knowledge, destroying or defacing shrines sacred to people of other faiths, and putting to death those suspected of prohibited beliefs. The most programmatic annihilation of divergent beliefs in the history of the Indian sub-continent occurred during the 250 years of the Inquisition in Goa, a period when even private worship of any god but the Christian one was a criminal offence, and all temples and mosques in the Portuguese domain were obliterated.

The history of Islamic and Christian zealotry is crucial to Hindu political parties and social organisations, who use cruel acts from the past – some real, many imagined – to justify their demand for a Hindu nation. The rational retort to this is that majoritarianism is antithetical to democracy, irrespective of what might have happened centuries ago. Rational responses, however, lack emotional power, and so secularists attempt to counter Hindutva by minimising or explaining away the bigotry of rulers like Aurangzeb, while searching for instances of religious vandalism by Hindus. It’s a doomed quest, for Hinduism developed very differently from Christianity and Islam. It did not even have a formal mechanism for conversion until modern Hindu activists emulated Muslim and Christian models.

Hinduism establishes control not through hostile takeovers but creeping acquisitions. This method is evident at every level of its functioning, from abstract philosophy, through myths and legends, to the push and shove for physical control of space. Let us consider the last feature first. There’s an old tree in your neighbourhood and one day you notice an idol placed in a niche in its trunk. A few weeks later, tiles appear in front of the idol where offerings can be placed. Then, a canopy materialises, and an enclosure for the deity, and soon there’s a full-fledged shrine in a public space, making money for whichever clever person installed the idol. Any move to remove it is said to hurt the sentiments of locals who now worship at the site. Why should it be a problem, anyway, they ask, it is not in anybody’s way.

Sacred space is also taken over through the same creeping acquisition. Think of Saibaba of Shirdi, whose legacy used to be shared equally by Hindus and Muslims. Once a statue of the saint was installed within the main shrine, prayer increasingly took a conventionally Hindu form. Nevertheless, as late as the 1970s, several thousand Muslims visited Shirdi each month to place a chaddar at the fakir’s grave, and Rishi Kapoor’s Akbar Allahabadi sang a qawwali in his praise in a blockbuster movie. That’s all over now. Shirdi has turned entirely Hindu, with Hindu bhajans, Hindu aartis and Hindu pilgrims.

Idol insertion, the favoured first move towards eventual acquisition, is an operation that has been conducted in a number of old forts and deconsecrated sites controlled by the Archaeological Survey of India, not to speak of a certain contested mosque in Ayodhya. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there is of the idol being deliberately and illegally placed at a site, it will be viewed as a miraculous occurrence that demands ritual acknowledgement. The erstwhile owners of the land will be pressured to adjust to the new reality. It’s like having a reservation for a seat in a train and finding an extra person sitting alongside you. There’s enough place, the person’s friends will say, please adjust. Made to feel guilty about simply asserting your rights, you accept the curtailment of your personal space. Before you know it, the friends are playing cards, listening to music, and unpacking smelly sabzis from tiffins. In similar fashion, with respect to the Ayodhya issue, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar can present himself as a rational and neutral interlocutor while asking Muslim organisations to give up their just claim.

The Borg

Within the Star Trek universe, there is a group of fearsome villains known as the Borg. Their signature message to communities they encounter is, “You shall be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” The Borg absorb other beings into their own collective by injecting them with nanoprobes. Every new assimilation alters the nature of the Borg as novel technologies and ideas are introduced to their hive mind. Hinduism developed in an analogous manner, although it generally eschewed the Borg’s confrontational approach. Hundreds of tribal gods and local deities were assimilated into the larger religious structure by being made aspects of Vishnu, Puri’s Jagannath the most famous of them. With each assimilation, Hinduism changed as well, which is why one cannot pin it down to a few essential markers. What began as the belief system of semi-nomadic pastoralists who worshipped no icons, conducted sacrifices involving animal slaughter, and placed Indra at the centre of their pantheon, evolved into the religion of a sedentary agricultural society based on idol worship, a tendency towards vegetarianism, and a new set of important gods and goddesses. During the process, it retained enough aspects of its early practices to be considered the same faith.

Powerful as the Borg are, a few beings can repel their assimilation techniques or are immune to their nanoprobes. The same is true of Hinduism. Among the most contentious of its assimilations was that of Gautam Buddha who in his teachings repeatedly criticised ritual sacrifice, which was the heart of Vedic practice. Buddhists have never accepted the Hindu assimilation of the Buddha as Vishnu’s ninth avatar, and Hindu texts tell two different stories about the role he plays. According to one account, still affirmed in certain Hindu circles, he is a false prophet, leading asuras astray and thus helping the gods defeat them. In the second one, he appears as a more conventional upholder of dharma with an emphasis on his attitude to animals, one that Vaishnava Hindus adopted.

Conversion to Buddhism

At some point in its conversion from serving a pastoral society to an agricultural one, an innovation was introduced into Hinduism that has few parallels elsewhere in the world. A section of the population was categorised as so impure that the very touch of its members, or even their shadow, was ritually polluting. I cannot think of any society in which a faction was denied the most basic rights for as long as Hindu society denied them to untouchables. Incredibly, through centuries of the worst oppression, most Dalits worshipped the very gods in whose name they were oppressed. No greater tribute can be paid to Hinduism’s powers of assimilation.

Finally, after centuries of attempted reform had come up short, and after his own decades of effort had provided paltry reward, Bhimrao Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with thousands of his followers, having come to believe that Hindu casteism was beyond redemption. He stressed the illegitimacy of the Buddha’s assimilation into the Dashavatara, asking his fellow converts to swear, “I do not and shall not believe that Lord Buddha was the incarnation of Vishnu. I believe this to be sheer madness and false propaganda.”

Unsurprisingly, Hindu political parties, which think of Hinduism as a glorious faith whose few imperfections are bugs rather than features, did not take kindly to Ambedkar’s move. When the Maharashtra legislature voted in 1978 to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar, caste Hindus opposed the idea so fiercely that the renaming could only happen 16 years later. In 1987, the Maharashtra government’s publication of Ambedkar’s Collected Works, including a previously unpublished manuscript titled Riddles in Hinduism, spurred the Shiv Sena to violent protests.

Since then, Ambedkar’s image has undergone an astonishing transformation. Every major party now swears by him, even though the position of Dalits in society has barely improved. The BJP cannot accept the essence of his politics since that would undercut the central animating ideas of Hindutva. So, Narendra Modi restates Ambedkar’s philosophy in the most general and anodyne terms, much the same way he praises Gandhi. Meanwhile, the Uttar Pradesh government has instructed departments to refer to Ambedkar by his full name, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, so that a subtle connection with Ayodhya’s mythic ruler can be established. A statue of Ambedkar erected in Budaun was painted saffron, only to be repainted blue by a Bahujan Samaj Party legislator.

The clash over colours suggests that the current tussle over Ambedkar’s legacy is less about ideology than symbolism, and the BJP is on strong ground in any such battle. If it has come to a battle of symbols, the sad truth is that Ambedkar’s own followers are to blame.

Hero worship

Ambedkar despised Gandhi not just for what he considered Gandhi’s affirmation of the caste system, but for the personality cult around the Mahatma. The rationally-inclined Ambedkar repeatedly returned to the theme of destructive hero worship in his writing. In the course of a tribute to Justice Ranade in 1943, he said:

“India is still par excellence the land of idolatry. There is idolatry in religion, there is idolatry in politics. Heroes and hero-worship is a hard if unfortunate, fact in India’s political life.”

Later on in the same address, he proclaimed, “I am no worshipper of idols, I believe in breaking them.”

In 1949, during a debate in the Constituent Assembly, he said:

“… In India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

In his address on Ranade, Ambedkar disparaged apotheoses, or humans being raised to the status of gods. Ironically, the most decisive apotheosis in modern political history involves Ambedkar himself. His memorial, a short walk from my home, is designed as a place of worship and received as such. The cult has grown over the decades, and his death anniversary each December 6 now draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Shivaji Park, who place flowers and light candles and prostrate themselves before his image.

Once a person ceases to be a person and turns into a god, his identity becomes more symbolic than real. Ambedkar is now a symbol and can be appropriated and assimilated as one. Hinduism has assimilated thousands of gods, and Hindutva is certainly capable of assimilating a few. On the bright side, episodes of Star Trek featuring the Borg demonstrate that, no matter what the assimilators say or do, resistance is not futile.