65 years later the Dalit leader does not have a national monument in India. Image via Wikipedia

Ambadekarism is the antithesis of Gandhism.  Dr. Ambadekar was one of the greatest leaders of South Asia. He was a protege of Mohmmad Ali Jinnah who advised him to ask for Separate Electorates for the Dalits. He did, and under pressure from Jinnah, the British acquiesced to the demand. However Mr. Mohandas Gandhi was one of the biggest prponents of the caste system. He opposed Ambadekar tooth and nail, and even went on a hunger strike against the proposal to grant the Dalits–what would have amounted to liberation. Dr. Ambadekar was threatened from all quarters, and pressured into withdrawing his demand for separate electorate. Gandhi won, and the Dalits remain enslaved in Bharat. 450 million Dalits, untouchables and scheduled class residents of Bharat live in penury. According to the Hindu, Dr Ambadekar is the only national leader who does not have a memorial.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1893-1956). Born and raised as an untouchable, Dr. Ambedkar received his masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University, which later on also conferred upon him the Doctor of Law. Dr. Ambedkar also received a D.Sc. degree from London School of Economics, and the Bar-at-Law from the Grays Inn, London. Suffice to say, Dr. Ambedkar’s sharp intellect has provided us an insight into Gandhi, some of which we will like to share with you all. We recommend the following:1. Nichols, Beverley. Verdict on India. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944.

65 years later the Dalit leader does not have a national monument in India. Twins seperated at birth (Photo credit: Ravages)

The lack of the monument says a lot about the lack of respect for the Dalits in Bharat.

• Chandrakant Bhandhare, a government employee and Ambedkarite, who filed an RTI on February 23, 2011, had asked the Urban Development Ministry, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), and the Ministry of Home Affairs for details on the policy of granting land for Rajghat and memorials of national leaders in New Delhi and other areas in the country.
• “Why is there no memorial 56 years after Dr. Ambedkar’s death? Isn’t he a national leader? When I asked for information, I got a list of 14 national leaders who have memorials. There is no mention of Babasaheb in that list,” Mr. Bhandhare told The Hindu.
• He asked if Dr. Ambedkar, who was posthumously conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1990, was considered a national leader and if the government had any plans of allocating land for a national memorial of the Rajghat type for him in New Delhi and Mumbai.
• The CPWD said that Dr. Ambedkar was a national leader, but did not say anything on building a memorial for him.
• In a reply dated April 5, 2011, it gave the names and location of memorials dedicated to 14 national leaders — Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Charan Singh, Zail Singh, Jagjivan Ram, Devi Lal, K.R. Narayanan, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the former Prime Minister, Chandra Shekhar and the former President, Shankar Dayal Sharma.

65 years later the Dalit leader does not have a national monument in India. Image via Wikipedia

A book we highly recommend. Beverley Nichols, a famous novelist, musician, playwright, essayist, reporter, and a journalist visited British India. During this visit, he met Dr. Ambedkar, who told him:

“Gandhi is the greatest enemy the untouchables have ever had in India.”

In 1922, Mr. Gandhi was a defender of the caste system. Pursuing the inquiry, one comes across a somewhat critical view of the caste system by Mr. Gandhi in the year 1925. This is what Mr. Gandhi said on 3rd February 1925:

I gave support to caste because it stands for restraint. But at present caste does not mean restraint, it means limitations. Restraint is glorious and helps to achieve freedom. But limitation is like chain. It binds. There is nothing commendable in castes as they exist to-day. They are contrary to the tenets of the Shastras. The number of castes is infinite and there is a bar against intermarriage. This is not a condition of elevation. It is a state of fall.

In reply to the question: What is the way out? Mr. Gandhi said:

The best remedy is that small castes should fuse themselves into one big caste. There should be four big castes so that we may reproduce the old system of four Varnas.

In short, in 1925 Mr. Gandhi became an upholder of the Varna system.

The old Varna system prevalent in ancient India had the society divided into four orders: (1) Brahmins,whose occupation was learning; (2) Kshatriyas, whose occupation was warfare; (3) Vaishyas, whose occupation was trade and (4) Shudras,whose occupation was service of the other classes. Is Mr. Gandhi’s Varna system the same as this old Varna system of the orthodox Hindus?

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Beverley Nichols says “In Gandhism, the common man has no hope. It treats man as an animal and no more. The ideas which go to make up Gandhism are just primitive. The economics of Gandhism are hopelessly fallacious. Gandhism may well be well suited to a society which does not accept democracy as its ideal. Gandhism insists upon class structure. It regards the class structure of society and also the income structure as sacrosanct with the consequent distinctions of rich and poor, high and low, owners and workers, as permanent parts of social organization. From the point of view of social consequences, nothing can be more pernicious…. It is not enough to say that Gandhism believes in a class structure. Gandhism stands for more than that. A class structure which is a faded, jejune, effete thing–a mere sentimentality, a mere skeleton is not what Gandhism wants. It wants class structure to function as a living faith. In this there is nothing to be surprised at. For, class structure in Gandhism is not a mere accident. It is its official doctrine. The idea of trusteeship, which Gandhism proposes as a panacea and by which the moneyed classes will hold their properties in trust for the poor, is the most ridiculous part of it.”

Beverly dissects Gandhi’s inner thoughts with proof:

“The Shudra who only serves (the higher caste) as a matter of religious duty, and who will never own any property, who indeed has not even the ambition to own anything, is deserving of thousand obeisance…The very Gods will shower flowers on him.

Another illustration in support is the attitude of Gandhism towards the scavenger. The sacred law of the Hindus lays down that a scavenger’s progeny shall live by scavenging. Under Hinduism scavenging was not a matter of choice, it was a matter of force. What does Gandhism do? It seeks to perpetuate this system by praising scavenging as the noblest service to society! Let me quote Mr. Gandhi: As a President of a Conference of the Untouchables, Mr. Gandhi said:

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I do not want to attain Moksha. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them, in order that I endeavor to free myself and them from that miserable condition. I, therefore prayed that if I should be born again, I should do so not as a Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra, but as an AtiShudra…. I love scavenging. In my ashram, an eighteen-years-old Brahmin lad is doing the scavenger’s work in order to teach the ashram scavenger cleanliness. The lad is no reformer. He was born and bred in orthodoxy…. But he felt that his accomplishments were incomplete until he had become also a perfect sweeper, and that, if he wanted the ashram sweeper to do his work well, he must do it himself and set an example. You should realize that you are cleaning Hindu Society.

Can there be a worse example of false propaganda than this attempt of Gandhism to perpetuate evils which have been deliberately imposed by one class over another? If Gandhism preached the rule of poverty for all and not merely for the Shudra the worst that could be said about it is that it is mistaken idea. But why preach it as good for one class only?”

65 years later the Dalit leader does not have a national monument in India. Image via Wikipedia

There is a reason why Bharat cannot allow a national momument to Dr. Ambadekar. He is a Dalit!

• The Urban Development Ministry gave a vague reply with only details of Rajghat to which 89 acres was allotted in 1978, and about some land allotted for Indira Gandhi‘s memorial. The Ministry of Home Affairs said it had no information on the matter.
• In 2002, the then Maharashtra Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, headed a committee which decided on a four-phase development of a memorial for Dr. Ambedkar. But matters came to standstill after that.
• Republican Party of India (RPI) activists have been demanding a memorial for Dr. Ambedkar and last year things picked up momentum with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party trying to outdo each other with their fervour for a memorial.
• The demand became vociferous from all parties before elections to the local bodies got under way in December. In the winter session of the Legislature, both Houses, which witnessed a ruckus over this issue, decided that the entire Indu Mills land must be given up for the memorial.
• Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had promised the entire 12.5 acres of Indu Mills land for a memorial for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar in Dadar. In December 2011, the Prime Minister approved in principle the demand. An all-party delegation led by Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan met him in this connection.
• The Indu Mills is located near Chaityabhoomi at Shivaji Park, where the Buddhist Society of India has dedicated a memorial to Dr. Ambedkar, visited by lakhs of his followers every year.
• A secretary-level committee will decide the formalities of the handover of the land, possessed by the National Textile Corporation. The land was to be handed over by January 31.

Image via Wikipedia

Mr. Gandhi’s views on the caste system–which constitutes the main social problem in India–were fully elaborated by him in 1921-22 in a Gujrati journal called Nava-Jivan. The article is written in Gujrati. I give below an English translation of his views as near as possible in his own words. Says Mr. Gandhi:

1. I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because it is founded on the caste system.
2. The seeds of swaraj are to be found in the caste system. Different castes are like different sections of miliary division. Each division is working for the good of the whole….
3. A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization.
4. Caste has a ready made means for spreading primary education. Each caste can take the responsibility for the education of the children of the caste. Caste has a political basis. It can work as an electorate for a representative body. Caste can perform judicial functions by electing persons to act as judges to decide disputes among members of the same caste. With castes it is easy to raise a defense force by requiring each caste to raise a brigade.
5. I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity. That dining together creates friendship is contrary to experience. If this was true there would have been no war in Europe…. Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature. The only difference is that after answering call of nature we get peace while after eating food we get discomfort. Just as we perform the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking food must also be done in seclusion.
6. In India children of brothers do not intermarry. Do they cease to love because they do not intermarry? Among the Vaishnavas many women are so orthodox that they will not eat with members of the family nor will they drink water from a common water pot. Have they no love? The caste system cannot be said to be bad because it does not allow interdining or intermarriage between different castes.
7. Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as interdining and intermarriage.
8. To destroy caste system and adopt Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder. I have no use for a Brahmin if I cannot call him a Brahmin for my life. It will be a chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin.
9. The caste system is a natural order of society. In India it has been given a religious coating. Other countries not having understood the utility of the caste system, it existed only in a loose condition and consequently those countries have not derived from caste system the same degree of advantage which India has derived. These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.

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Dr. Ambedkar joined the Indian National Congress at the behest of Tilak and Jinnah. He was however unable to convince Mohandas Gandhi about abolishment of Untouchability. He wrote the Bharati consitution, but the best parts of it that granted the Dalits equality were taken out by Nehru. He died a broken man saying that his biggest blunder was giving in to Gandhi’s fake fast–Ambedkar retreated from his demand for separate electorate for the Dalits, even after the British had approved the measure. As a result of his blunder the 450 million Dalits, Untouchables, Scheduled classes, and Tribals today remain enslaved.

The BSP in 2010 slammed the Congress for omitting Bhimrao Ambedkar’s contribution in a booklet issued to commemorate its 125 years, saying the party’s “anti-dalit mentality” and “fake love” for the community have been exposed.

“There is no mention of the contributions made by Dr Ambedkar, dalit leader Babu Jagjeevan Ram and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in the booklet released by Congress on completing 125 years of its foundation,” BSP state president Swami Prasad Maurya said in a statement issued here.

Even if the monument is ever built, it would be a rallying cry for the bigots of the BJP and the racists of the VHP and the BJP.

Keywords: B.R. Ambedkar, Ambedkar memorial, RTI plea, Maharashtra memorials

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