Library of V.R. Narla in Ambedkar Open University

Whatever his critics might say – and he had lots of critics, bitter critics, vicious critics and even vengeful critics – Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was a great man. Indeed, he counts among the half-a-dozen really great men thrown up by India during the past two or three centuries. The greatness of a man has little or no relationship to the number of followers he attracts, to the offices he attain or the power he wields. Much less has it got anything to do with the riches he accumulates. It is rarely, if ever, that riches can be accumulated without resort to highly dubious means. In my life I have known quite a few new rich men and the moment I got a true insight into their character, I found most of them to be the polished version of the murderous Thugs and Pindaris who ravaged India in the first half of the nineteenth century.
What, then, is the real test of a great man ? It is his readiness to stand alone, if need be, against the whole world in defence of what he deems to be his own ideas and ideals. To him, there can be no compromise in any matter that involves basic principles, no knuckling even under the heaviest of pressures, no shortcuts to lessen the length or the tedium of the lonely journey, no half-way house to rest so as to get a second breath; he should always be on the march, upward and onward, until he reaches his goal or falls by the wayside with no regrets, no remorse, with nothing but undimmed faith in the ultimate triumph of what he believes to be best for man and man’s future as man. Thus a really great man is ever a lonely pilgrim.
Such a pilgrim was Ambedkar. That which Bergson was calling elan vital and Bernard Shaw “the life force” was kind to Ambedkar. It was more than kind; it was generous. It endowed him with a robust physical frame, with a round and impressive face, with large, bright an penetrative eyes, a razor-sharp intellect, a ready propensity to reach out to what seemed to be unattainable, and most important of all, with a darning, defiant spirit. But Hindu Society was cruel to him. For ages and ages, which stretch even beyond the remote and hazy beginning of recorded history, that society was cruel, abominably cruel, to every section and every segment of the caste in which he was born. It treated the people of that caste as subhuman. Indeed, while it saw a god in a fish, a tortoise and a boar, and a goddess in a cow, while it worshipped even serpents and fed them with milk, it treated some fellow-men, of whom Ambedkar was one, as worse than quadrupeds and reptiles. In other countries and in other times, there are certainly many instances of man’s inhumanity to man, but it is left to India and to Hinduism to treat some of its own children as “unapprochables, unshadowables and unseeables.” “Most parts of the world”, as Ambedkar said, “have had their type what Ward calls the lowly. The Romans had their slaves. The Spartans their helots, the British their villains, The Americans their Negroes and the Germans their Jews. So the Hindus have their Untouchables. But none of these can be said to have been called upon to face a fate which is worse than the fate which pursues the Untouchables. Slavery, serfdom, villeinage have all vanished. But unsociability still exists and bids fair to last as long as Hindustan will last. The Untouchable is worse off than a Jew. The sufferings of the Jew are of his own creation. Not so are the sufferings of the Untouchables. They are the result of a cold, calculating Hinduism which is not less sure in its effect in producing misery than brute force is. The Jew is despised is not denied opportunities to grow. The Untouchable is not merely despised but is denied all opportunities to rise.”
But nothing whatsoever could stop Ambedkar from rising to the top. And he utilized his rise not to help himself but to help his community as well as his nation. From the every position of vantage which he came to occupy in his tumultuous life, he launched well-directed and massive attacks on the citadel of Hindu society. The breath its walls, he had to cannonade ferociously. When the odds were so heavy against him, he had per forced to hit hard, neither giving nor receiving any quarter. Without taking into consideration the nature of the struggle he had to wage and the conditions under which he had to wage it, to call him rude and vituperative is hardly fair. Given his background, he had every right to lash out even more sharply background, he had every right to lash out even more sharply against those who for ages had subjected his community to the foulest of indignities and inequities.
You cannot wage a battle for social justice without at the same time formulating for yourself a social philosophy. And this is exactly what Ambedkar had to do. I do not agree with all that he had written on the origin and growth of the caste system. Nor do I subscribe to his view that Buddhism can put an end to the evil system of caste with all its “gradations and degradations.” I have also many mental reservations with regard to his ideas about socialism and communism. But I am one with Ambedkar in thinking that the very basis of Hinduism is its “graded inequality.” “There is not only inequality in Hindu Society”, as he stated, “but inequality is the official doctrine of the Hindu religion.” So Hinduism, to quote him once again, “is incompatible with liberty, equality and fraternity, that is with democracy. “Yes, indeed. You cannot be a Hindu a democrat at the same time. Much less can you be a Hindu and a socialist at the same time.
Speaking on the occasion of the third reading and the adoption of the Constitution of India, Ambedkar (who had a big hand in drafting that Constitution) said among other things :
“Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other’s to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without frenternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them. We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian society. One of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which means elevation for some and degradation for others. On the economic plane, we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in object poverty. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote, one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man. One value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions, How long shall we continue to deny in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
We did not pay heed to Ambedkar’s warning and allowed the contradiction in our society not only to continue but to grow further. For this folly we had to pay a heavy price in the form of relapsing into slavery, a more abject slavery than the one we suffered under the British, during the dark and dreadful fays of the Emergency imposed by Mrs. Indira Gandhi. “Despotism”, as Ambedkar warned us as early as 1943, “does not cease to be despotism because it is elective. Nor does despotism become agreeable because the despot belongs to our own kindred. “To our eternal shame, we allowed in less than thirty years after throwing off the British yoke an “elective despotism” to be clamped down on us by “a despot belonging to our own kindred.” A matter of greater shame is the fact that there are still large sections amongst us who are swearing eternal loyalty in power had abrogated all our fundamental rights including the right to live, who imprisoned more than 100,000 people without trial, and who allowed scores of detenues to be tortured to death in jails. Surely, all these were no basic defects on our approach to life. On this point too Ambedkar did say something very pertinent. “In India”, he said. “bhakti or what may ne called the path of devotion or hero-worship plays a part in politics of any other part of the world. Bhakti in religion may be road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
Like our mental habit of bhakti, our belief in what is called prarabdha or fatalism also leads inexorably to dictatorship. On the authority of Bryce, Ambedkar had drawn our attention to the grim fact that there is what is called the fatalism of the multitude; it is the “tendency to acquiesce and submit to despotism due to the sense of helplessness arising from the belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movements cannot be turned by individual efforts.” Hinduism , more than all other religions, fosters that tendency and it can easily lead to dictatorship. To the best of my knowledge, the only major Indian who drew our attention decades in advance so unerringly to the perils of “elective dictatorship” Inherent in our mental make-up was Ambedkar.