The post Commemorating 135th Birth Anniversary of Ambedkar, the Biggest Ideological Enemy of RSS! – P J James appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.
]]>14 April 2025 is the 135th birthday of Babasaheb Ambedkar (celebrated as Ambedkar Jayanti or Bhim Jayanti), the architect of Indian Constitution. However, while the people are observing Ambedkar Jayanti, under the government led by BJP, the political tool of RSS, world’s largest and longest-running fascist organisation, India has become a full-fledged fascist regime. Today, those who are opposing RSS fascism, including even those who vehemently opposed Ambedkar in his lifetime, are seeking the provisions of the Constitution drafted by Ambedkar as their defence mechanism and ‘last resort’ in the anti-fascist struggle. Ironically, being frustrated by opposition to the Hindu Code Bill, in a Rajya Sabha session in 1953, Ambedkar had even expressed his disapproval for the Constitution which he drafted, and openly said: “People always keep on saying to me “Oh you are the maker of the constitution”. My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do, I did much against my will…I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody.”
Of course, by this statement, Ambedkar, despite being the author of the Constitution, was sharing his grave concerns about the large gap between the republican promises of the Constitution and the concrete realities of caste-ridden Indian society. Through this statement, he was also pointing out the prime orientation of the Constitution towards protecting the interests of the propertied class against the working and oppressed peoples of India, for whom Ambekar fought throughout his life. Still, he was afraid of the ever-present possibility of loss of the democratic freedoms and rights which are there in the Constitution, in the near future. And today, we are experiencing that eventuality raised by Ambedkar, and every threatening move by Hindutva fascists is now being challenged and questioned by all anti-fascist sections quoting the provisions of the Constitution, painstakingly incorporated by Ambedkar.
When RSS, whose founding in mid-1920s was coterminous with that of the fascist organisations of Europe, started its Hindutva offensive with Manusmriti-based Sanatan Dharma as the guiding ideology that treats Dalits and women as subhuman, it was Dr Ambedkar, who came forward publicly burning Manusmriti, which he characterised as “bible of slavery of untouchables”, in the Mahad Satyagraha on 25 December 1927. Ironically, when the Constituent Assembly adopted the Indian Constitution drafted under the leadership of Ambedkar, based on which India became a Republic in 1950, the RSS had no qualms to propose the same Manusmriti that Ambedkar had set on fire two decades back, as Indian Constitution. Again, prompted by extreme concerns of lack of gender justice in Hindu religion, when Ambedkar drafted the Hindu Code Bill, that gave Hindu women the right to divorce and inheritance to ancestral property, the terrified RSS burnt the effigy of Dr Ambedkar at the Ramlila grounds in Delhi on 12 December 1949.
Being the deadly enemy of India’s caste system, Dr Ambedkar stands ahead as the undisputed leader of India’s most oppressed untouchables and lower caste sections comprising vast majority of the working and toiling people, together with his utmost dedication to women’s empowerment and gender equality. While the ‘cultural nationalism’ of RSS identified Indian nation synonymous with Manusmriti-based Brahmanical casteism, according to Ambedkar, both Manu code and Brahmanism had made the life of the untouchables and women worse than that of animals. While Hindutva leaders today are trying to appropriate Ambedkar with the aim of hoodwinking the oppressed caste people, it is a historical fact that Ambedkar had never compromised with caste-based Brahmanical Hinduism, which he defined a “veritable chamber of caste horror”. For Ambedkar, a caste-based Hindutva nation together with its stigmatisation of Muslims and targeting them as main enemy of the nation, meant a situation where the twice-born Brahmanical castes would be prevailing upon Dalits, and all oppressed sections including women. Therefore, he noted: “If Hindu Raj becomes a reality, it will undoubtedly be the greatest misfortune of this country. Whatever Hindus may say, Hinduism is a threat to liberty, equality and fraternity. This is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj should be prevented from being established at any cost.”
Revealingly, when Ambedkar warned about the danger of a Hindu Rashtra, the Hindutva appeal was not that much powerful in the political mainstream, as it is today. As is obvious, during the 1930s and 1940s, when the anti-British struggle was at its zenith, the credibility of RSS was at its low ebb due to its altogether betrayal of the independence struggle and castigation of Muslims as the principal enemy of the nation, in addition to RSS’ role in the political developments following Transfer of Power. However, now the situation is basically different and extremely dangerous. Today, RSS, leading the Sangh Parivar through innumerable open and secret organisations have already established its stranglehold over the entire macro and micro spaces of Indian society with deep-rooted Hindutva fascist tentacles in the country’s political-economic and cultural spheres. With RSS control over the entire civil and military administration, judiciary, police, education, scientific research, history writing, art and literature and so on, the “Hindu raj”, that Ambedkar cautioned and fought against throughout his life starting from burning of Manusmriti almost a century ago, has unfolded in its full-fledged vigour now.
In this situation, compared to the liberal political spectrum, it is the solemn duty of the Communist leaders, who stamped Ambedkar as anti-communist and “imperialist stooge”, to make a self-critical evaluation of their approach to Ambedkar including a re-evaluation of their analysis of Indian caste system. Of course, the document “Draft Platform for Action” prepared by CPI in 1930, when it was working from underground, had put forward a position on the anti-imperialist people’s democratic tasks including the need of abolition of caste by focusing on the concrete Indian situation taking both class and caste in the proper perspective. And it was based on this understanding on caste that the cordial and comradely relation between Communists and Ambedkar prevailed throughout the 1930s. And, if that unity between Ambedkar and Communists, based on an objective understanding of the concrete question of caste, and concomitant strategic united front between working class and oppressed, had continued, the history of India would have been different by this time.
And, it was in such a context when both communists and Ambedkar were working together, that Dr. Ambedkar, in his “Annihilation of Caste” reiterated: “If the Socialists wish to make Socialism a definite reality, then they must recognise that the problem of social reform is fundamental and that for them there is no escape from it.” And invariably, the then Communist leadership also accepted this position of Ambedkar. However, this cordial relation between both took a dramatic turn when the mechanical, reductionist and Eurocentric approach to ‘class’, in gross disregard of its inseparability from caste in India, came to dominate the CPI leadership from the 1940s onward. Though Communists continued to oppose caste-oppression and caste-discrimination, the documents of CPI (and later that of CPI (M) and other Communist groups too) since its first Congress in 1943 became silent on annihilation or abolition of caste.
As already stated, the usurpation of mechanical materialism in the Communist leadership since the 1940s, was manifested in its erroneous evaluation of caste as a super-structural and cultural issue. The copy-paste method of applying European class analysis in the case of caste-based Indian society, totally ignoring the dialectical relation between class and caste, had done immense damage from the perspective of the toiling and oppressed people. In other words, the Communists failed to have the badly needed concrete class analysis of caste-ridden Indian society where, everything including land holding, division of labour and thereby wage structure, surplus value extraction, wealth appropriation, political power, cultural hegemony and so on, are caste-based.
Evidently, this position of erstwhile Indian communist leadership was not in conformity with the Marxist approach. For, in most of Marx’s writings including his magnum opus ‘Capital’, he had clearly noted about the Indian caste system. And, Marx was very much aware that the ‘mode of production’ that he formulated with respect to the then capitalist Europe, was inappropriate for India, where the entire ‘social formation’ was basically different from that of England or Europe. This prompted Marx to formulate the concept of ‘Asiatic mode production’ though it was altogether abandoned by mainstream Communist discourse. In the series of articles written by Marx to the New York Daily Tribune in the 1850s, there were frequent references to the Indian caste system. More specifically, in an essay written in 1853 on “The British Rule in India”, Marx had depicted India’s caste system as the “most decisive impediment to India’s progress and power”. Instead of developing this Marxist approach to caste in the specific case of India, the Indian Communists, in the main, were eager to camouflage caste by stamping those who speak about caste as ‘casteist’.
On the other hand, regarding caste, Ambedkar, who was critical of Indian communists, was near to Marx, though Ambedkar, especially as leader of Independent Labour Party, had his own way of interpreting class struggle and struggle against caste including the integral relation between both. Of course, Ambedkar’s approach to class was different from that of Marx. However, when compared with the purely ‘economistic’ class approach of the then Indian communists, Ambedkar’s understanding of class-caste relation and interpretation of caste as an “enclosed class” was far ahead.
Of course, Ambedkar had his own differences with many of the theoretical formulations of Marxism such as ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, etc. However, he was not an anti-Communist, as labelled by the then Communist leaders whom Ambedkar called “Brahmin boys” pointing out their caste-Hindu approach. In fact, an objective evaluation amply reveals that Ambedkar who was very cordial with Indian communists till the end of 1930s, became hostile to them only because the communists changed their Marxist approach from the forties onward. At the same time, Ambedkar was friendly with the leaders of the International Communist Movement. Ambedkar held Stalin, who was the son of a shoemaker, in high esteem, and when he died in 1953, Ambedkar even observed fast as a tribute to Stalin.
To be precise, Ambedkar, who had little confidence in the casteist Indian political leaders, always tried to uphold the interests of Dalits by bargaining with the British. Ambedkar, who considered “social tyranny” as several-fold oppressive than “political tyranny”, had serious doubts on the future of Dalits after the retreat of colonialists. Ambedkar was true since there is no let up in untouchability, caste oppression and discrimination, even today. While the self-professed communists prophesied that advance of modernity will wither away caste, what we witness today is the further strengthening of caste in manifold ways. Even caste is safely seated on the throne of modern science and technology, and is even exported to Silicon Valley, considered to be the citadel of modern ‘fronter technologies’. Contrary to the mechanical view of even self-professed revolutionary communists who identify caste with Indian feudalism, economic transformation and technological advancement that undermine feudal relations, instead of weakening caste, are all providing it new avenues to cut across socio-economic systems and migrate to emerging fields. In all these, Ambedkar’s analysis of caste and proposals based on it were more scientific and concrete compared to then Indian Communist leadership.
Amidst the present-day bouncing back of casteism including untouchability and caste-oppression in manifold ways, in the name of Hindu unity, all-out efforts are also in full swing on the part of RSS to win over the oppressed caste leaders and neo-Ambedkarite sections who do not subscribe to Ambedkar’s ‘annihilation of caste’. Coupled with this, an ingenious move is also going on to deconstruct oppressed and lower caste organisations and integrate them into the broad Hindutva bandwagon. In the process, even Dalit leaders are highlighted as ‘shown pieces’. As a result, when the Modi regime, through the 103rd Constitutional Amendment for totally upper-caste oriented Economic Reservation (EWS) that undermined the caste-based reservation, and thereby altered the character of Indian Constitution drafted by Ambedkar, little resistance was there. Here, it is painful to note that a party like CPI (M) was the pioneer of the idea of economic reservation in India. Latest strategic move in this direction has been the “sub-caste reservation” which is dividing and disorienting the untouchables and diverting their attention away from the badly needed ‘Caste Census’.
At this critical juncture, when the country is observing Ambedkar Jayanti, Left and progressive forces who stand for a basic democratisation of Indian society have to make a concrete evaluation of the great contributions of Dr. Ambedkar in this regard. More specifically, it is high time on the part of the Communists to make a self-critical assessment of their approach to Ambedkar, which is inseparably linked up with a proper rectification of their erroneous understanding of the most inhuman Indian caste system too. This is the only way for building up the indispensable unity between the super-exploited workers and all the caste-oppressed people, which alone can form the strategic base against the horrors of strengthening corporate-Hindutva fascism in India.
Courtesy: this article is published by countercurrents. Com on 12th April 2024