Ideas - How an 'untouchable' inspired resistance against inequality in India

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

In pre-independence India, activist B.R. Ambedkar said India would never be free unless caste was eradicated. Today, India is rife with an aggressive majoritarianism that sees India as a Hindu nation. Could Ambedkar have saved India from its fate? *This episode is part two in a two-part series. It originally aired on Oct. 6, 2020.

Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CVC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word, leave me alone.

The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Mahatma Gandhi may have been called the father of the Indian nation, the world's biggest democracy. But his vision for a free India was just one among many. Our difficulty is how to make the heterogeneous mess. take a decision in common and march in a cooperative way on that road which is bound to lead us to unity. Dr. Bimraal Ramji Ambadkar had a different vision for India.

We want untakeability to be abolished. India, like many countries in the West, is gripped by the politics of ultra-nationalism. In its case, Hindu nationalism. Jamia or then Shahin-Bah, been a few days, citizenship amendment bill to possession that's why Ambedkar's vision for a free India is all the more compelling now,

because while many of his contemporaries viewed the struggle against British rule as paramount, Ambikar trained his own sights on the oppression and tyranny within the nation, Hindu to Hindu. He was also a leader of the most sort of oppressed social class in India, formerly known as Untouchables, and today known by the name Dalits.

B.R. Embedkar was a thinker, an activist, lawyer, and agitator, whose fundamental question was, what does inclusion and fraternity look like to those whose essential humanity has so often been denied? I would call him a nationalist critic of Indian nationalism. In his search for a free and egalitarian India, Ambidkar concluded that the only way forward was to end the ancient Hindu caste system. Could you summarize what Ambedkar represents in the India of today?

He is probably one of the most discussed anti-colonial thinker. of our times. He has literally surpassed every other thinker you have. Ideas contributor Pialli Roy brings us this documentary about the life and ideas of Dr. B. R. Mbidkar. This is the second of a two-part series called The Idea of India. We want untouchability to be abolished, you see. But we also want, you see, that we must be given equal opportunities, you see, so that we may rise. to the level of the other classes. Mere washing off of untouchability is of no consequence.

We have been carrying on with untouchability for the last 2,000 years. Nobody has bothered about it. Who was Dr. B.R. Ambetkal? The short answer would be that with Mohandaske Gandhi and Ravindana Tago, he was one of the three greatest Indians of the 20th century. His contributions were rich and diverse. He was a scholar, a lawyer, a social reformer, a writer, an activist. Ram Chandar Guha is a biographer and historian based in Bangalore.

Gandhi was upper caste. So his reform was out of guilt. Ambedkar was born in the most oppressed section. His reform was out of, you could say, emancipation. Gandhi believed in moral and cultural reform. Ambidkar believed much more in economic and political reform. Gandhi believed in the country. power of the individual and civil society, Ambekar believed in the power of the state.

He's one of the founding fathers in a sense of the modern Indian Republic. He oversaw the writing of the Indian Constitution. He was chairman of the drafting committee of the constitution. He was also a leader of the most sort of oppressed social class in India, formerly known as untouchables, and today known by the name Dalits. He is responsible for their politicization, mobilization, organization into a force of resistance against inequality. I am Ananya Vajpei. I am a scholar and a writer. I'm based in New Delhi at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. The sort of current climate of political opinion, which is seeking to redefine the Indian Republic in more majoritarian terms, as really a nation of and for Hindus and not of all communities equally. I mean, that goes against both Gandhi and Ambaitkir's, you know, legacies and their teachings and their struggle, really, their message.

even though their messages were different from one another, it nevertheless, you know, what is happening today militates against both of those visions of both religious equality and caste equality that were articulated by Gandhi and Ambaitkir, respectively. There are some disabilities which are very harmful. For instance, people can't take water, and people can't have land, you see, to cultivate.

and earn their livelihood. But the other things which are far more important, you see, namely that they should have the same status, you see, in the country, and that they should have the opportunity to hold high offices so that not only their dignity will rise, but also they will get what I call strategic positions from which they could protect their own people.

Mr. Gandhi was totally opposed. Totally opposed. I would place him in the tradition of insurgent, global thought around the question of democracy, of a kind of radical thinking around the problem of democracy and indeed a kind of radical humanism, if you will, that puts him in the same lineage, the same tradition of people like Du Bois, people like France Pannon, and a number of others, right? who actually both, of course, are political figures or social figures, our leaders, who have people, you know, behind them, if you will. But they are also engaging with traditions of thought, right?

Kind of enlightenment, post-enlightenment thought. And they're innovating on those traditions. And this is where I think Ambedkar comes into the picture. My name is Anupamarao. I teach at Barnard College at Columbia University, and I'm a historical anthropologist who's been working on questions of caste, gender, and broadly speaking social thought and social history in South Asia for the 19th and the 20th centuries. Gandhi and Ambikir, of course, were locked in a kind of profound agonistic relationship from certainly the late 1920s onwards, but in a

sense they were also intimate enemies, right? They were constantly also learning from each other, and each of them was transformed by their engagements with the other. So what he does is to say, well, if we actually think of the notion of formally equality and take that seriously, we're confronted with a problem. We've got excluded groups, we've got vulnerable groups, we've got dispossessed and marginalized communities who do not have ways to enter the domain of political recognition. They are so socially stigmatized, they are so invisibleized, that they cannot participate in a political space that is governed by, let's say, notions of educational or property rights that initially allow you to enter the domain of political representation of voting and so on.

So, um, Bidker says, how do we actually make this constituency, you know, consequential? let's actually hold the idea of equality, right? Equality for all. Ambedkar is a father figure for Dalits. He is the ultimate guide. Every community needs a figure who can direct them. Ambedkar was born in a contonement town in central India in 1891 and later moved to what is now Maharashtra.

His family were died. untouchables as they were then called. And Ambitkar is that guy who offers cultural, moral, spiritual guidance for ballots. My name is Suraj Yangde. Currently, I'm a postdoc at Harvard's Kennedy School as well as a fellow and this is associate with the Department of African and African American Studies also at Harvard University. I'm an author of Cast Matters and a co-edictor.

a co-editor of the Radical Inambedkar critical reflections. He is that energy booster. He just injects confidence in our desperate conditions and in our traumas. We remember him his life. We look up to his image and get an inspiration. Dalit children couldn't easily get an education. So Embedkar's father, a strict military man, supervised his studies. Ambedkar proved to be an exceptional student.

He became the first Dalit to matriculate from the Bombay province. And he didn't stop there because matriculation during that time was probably the highest achievement one could do. And then, you know, you get a job like a clerical or any kind of job and you, you know, get married and sustain your life. But then he didn't stop there. And, you know, he went on to pursue his bachelor's from the Bombay University. he was again the first Dalit to graduate with a BA or in any degree from that province.

He could have easily stopped there, but his hunger for knowledge was so desperate. So he went, I mean, he was of course offered a suggestion if he wants to pursue education abroad. And he applied to Colombia and he got through Colombia in 1913, class of 1916. takes another steamer to London, gets admitted to London School of Economics, and enrolls for another DFL program, which is a Ph.S.D. program. Doesn't stop there. Gets enrolled at the Grays Inn for Barat Law course, becomes a barrister. Doesn't stop there.

Tries to get into third Ph.S.U. Program at University of Bonn in Germany to study Sanskrit. Of course, he couldn't finish the bond. because he had too many responsibilities back home. What is that kind of furious, obsessive quest for? It is the quest to enter and make knowledge, right? Not to be excluded even from thinking. Because the untouchable actually doesn't appear in the caste system, right? The untouchable is even outside of that order.

So, um, Beecher's anger, when he discovers that the untouchable is the kind of unthought, right, of the Hindu social order. You don't even give me the recognition of thinking about me. You have indisibilized me so totally. I will remake the order of thoughts. People at one time would not allow the untouchables to travel by railways, you see, because of pollution. But now they don't mind, because the railways won't make a separate arrangement.

But because they travel together in the train, it doesn't follow. You see? That their life in the villages vis-a-vis the Hindus has in any sense changed. You see? Whenever the Hindu and the untouchable allies at a railway train, you see? You see, they assume their old robes. Those roles emerge out of the Hindu social order, which is virtually unique in the world in how it's set up

a rigid social hierarchy of haves, have sums, and have-nots. A caste is essentially a community defined mostly by occupation. There are thousands of castes that exist across much of South Asia and in the Hindu diaspora. And they're linked together and ranked according to rules around ideas of purity and pollution. Brahman's, the priests, are at the top, followed by the Kashatria's, warriors, then the Vaishias or merchants. Then at the very bottom are the Shudras, the lower caste laborers. But outside of this hierarchy are Dalit communities, or untouchables, as they were once called.

At one time, a higher caste person could not touch a Dalit, in case they were ritually polluted. To be born a Dalit, and you are born into it, is to be condemned to whatever stigmatized and degraded labor is associated with your caste. cleaning latrines, scavenging, or working with animal carcasses. But the caste system is much more than a mere division of labor. It determines where you are born, whom you marry, how you live, where you die, and how you are remembered. In traditional Indian society, even at the time that Amaker was growing up, you had all these other rules that followed from the idea of untouchability.

you couldn't eat together. There was no commensality. You know, you couldn't marry a cross-cast. So there was strict endogamy. In some communities, even the shadow of an untouchable shouldn't fall upon you. So they were literally not allowed to walk

on the same roads as other communities and other cast. In some places in the south, women of untouchable communities were not allowed to be fully clothed. They had to be bare-breasted. These kinds of behaviors, these kinds of rituals, and these kinds of symbols of exclusion and othering are extremely scarring, not only for those who are the victims, but for the entire society. The humiliation Ambedkar faced being a Dalit, in his case as a member of the Mahar caste, began in childhood. He would face it again

once he returned from the West. In his book, Waiting for a Visa, he writes about the time his father was working in another town, and Ambedkar and his siblings arrived by train to visit him. As is usual among the Hindus, the stationmaster asked us who we were. Without a moment's thought, I blurted out that we were Mahars. He was stunned.

His face underwent a sudden change. We could see that he was overpowered by a strange feeling of repulsion. As soon as he heard my reply, he went away to his room, and we stood where we were. Fifteen to twenty minutes elapsed. The sun was almost setting. Our father had not turned up, nor had he sent his servant, and now the station master had also left us. We were quite bewildered, and the joy and happiness which we had felt at the beginning of the journey, gave way to a feeling of extreme sadness. After half an hour, the station master returned and asked us what we proposed to do. We said that if we could get a bullock cart on hire, we could go to

Corregal, and if it was not very far, we would like to start straight away. But my reply to the station master that we were Mahars had gone round among the cartmen, and not one of them was prepared to suffer being polluted, and to demean himself carrying passengers of the untouchable classes. We were prepared to pay double the fare, but we found that money did. not work. No doubt. Whatever he did in his life that came from his experiences, he was a progeny of those great people, of those Mahars of Western Maharashtra, who had a rich legacy of this world. He came from the richness of those people. He came from the richness of those people. whose life was condemned to shame as well as condemned to pain. So he is not an individual only. He is having an inventory of his past and he's nostalgic about his ancestors.

He's nostalgic about his people and that's why he gets so emotional about when it comes to the cause of Dalits. So his fraternity is the fraternity of Dalits. These experiences fueled Mbedkar's work. He took up non-violent civil disobedience, Satya Graha, which was made famous by Mahatma Gandhi, even though Ambedkar was never willing to call him Mahatma or a great soul. As a politician, he was never a ma'amama, and I refused to call him Mahatma. You see, I've never in my life called him Mahatma.

He doesn't deserve that title, not even from the point of view of his morality. He tried Gandhian methods of Satyagra, right? And he led these so-called tank and temple entry movements, right, where he would use the methods of boycott, of civil disobedience, of non-violent protest, and he would lead large numbers of untouchables, and he would say, we're going to try to enter into upper caste temples. where untouchables are not allowed to enter. We're going to go and en masse,

we're going to try and drink water from public tanks and wells, which really should be open to people of all castes, but which upper caste control, right? We're going to walk on these roads, we're going to enter into these precincts, we're going to use these public resources and these common goods, because these are civic issues, these are not religious issues. And he was repeatedly,

I mean, he made an entry and he created a kind of sensation in politics locally in this way. But he was also repeatedly thwarted. Right. And then he entered into this series of legal disputes with those who control these tanks and temples and roads and wells and these various other disputed, you know, sites that he was trying to, in a sense, breach and make actions. and make accessible to untouchables. And he began to lose these court cases because upper caste interests would simply claim that these were private property.

Why should civil disobedience not work for untouchables? If it's working for Indians vis-à-vis the British, why should it not work for untouchables versus caste imbos? But it doesn't work out that way. I mean, it's not easy to challenge this kind of social power. It's actually harder to challenge forms of social power than it is to challenge forms of political power. This is the big lesson of modern India, right? When you were able to overthrow empire, but you're not able to overthrow the caste system. Think about that. Ambedkar took the idea

of fraternity to heart. He believed that Indian society needed the sense of fraternity to overcome its tragic history of caste. His eating came not from the French Revolution, but from the teachings of the Buddha, who he said gave the highest place to fraternity as the only real safeguard against the denial of liberty and equality. The opposite of untouchability is fraternity. And so if you have to form a society without untouchability, you need a society based on fraternity. And fraternity is just not merely a concept of.

of the co-existence on mutual respect, but it is also a deeply spiritually informed energy. He derives that from his teacher, Buddha, because for Buddha, maitri, friendship, is something that is more valuable than any political work one could do. If I'm friends with Piaali, I can go 100 miles with her than being a person who is not a friend but a stranger in this cause.

The importance of friendship is very, very central to how we imagine. And you know, friendship is such a beautiful concept. It doesn't have gender. It doesn't have sexuality. It doesn't have boundary. It doesn't have age. It doesn't have any of the artificial divides that we have created. It actually connects us on a human to human basis.

So fraternity is something that Ahmedkar is constantly wrestling with, and this is just not a political proxy for him, but it's also a deeply philosophical and religious question. Ambedkar may have found failure in the Gandhian method of Satyagraha, but understood that he had to bring his cause to the attention of the most important political figure in India. Gandhi was against untouchability, but saw the caste system as a person.

well-intentioned form of consensual social contract, where each group made a distinct contribution. Ahmedkar disagreed. Hinduism cannot exist without caste. Gandhi, untouchability was an execrecence on the caste order. Varanashramadharma, the caste order, is a fully functioning, well-intentioned, well-oiled mechanism of social contact, consensual social contact, between different groups, each of whom performs their own given tasks. What does Ambedkar say? Ambedker says, these social tasks are conscripted, dictated, defined by caste order. A Dalit cannot become a Brahman, does not have access to learning.

The Dalit cannot even become a merchant. So Ambedkar begins to challenge this idea that caste can exist or that caste can exist as a consensual model for thinking about society. So that's the challenge that Ambidkar is beginning to place on the notion of what caste is, because he says caste is related to Hinduism. Hinduism is not just a religion. It is actually then about the way in which social power operates. Gandhi was more than 20 years older than Amitkar.

He entered public life earlier than Ahmedkar. He achieved national prominence but before. prominence much before, Ambek. He was an upper caste. He was an upper caste who sought to abolish untouchability. He was a guilt-ridden upper caste social reformer, but it came to the question of caste. Ambedkar, on the other hand, was an emancipator of his own people, more direct, more radical in his attack on this obnoxious hierarchical system called caste. So in his life, he had an ambivalent, changing relationship towards Gandhi. Ambekul felt that he had a ambincent, changing relationship towards Gandhi. Ambaker felt that this cult of hero worship was also there on Gandhi.

So, you know, he felt that Indians revered Gandhi too much. And he was, you know, the young, brilliant, self-made radical trying to show Gandhi his place. I also say that the Hindus have not shown a change of heart in regard to our problem. And so long as they remain adamant, we would believe neither the Congress nor the Hindus. We believe in self-help and self-respect. We are not prepared to have faith in great leaders and Mahatmas. Let me be brutally frank about it. History tells us that Mahatmas, like fleeting phantoms,

raised dust but raised no level. Why should the congressman oppose our movement and dub me a traitor? Gandhi-ji, I have no homeland. Ambedkar's words are from a 1931 transcript, from a meeting between him and Gandhi. That statement, Gandhi-ji-ji-have-no-h homeland, it hit me every time I hear it. It's just emotional because, wow, you know,

it's a cry. Like, I have no home. Please listen to me. I really have nowhere to go. This was meant to be my ancestors' land. Now you have colonized. have taken away from us and now we are made as homeless. Ambedkar is coming from that understanding.

And that moment of fleeting phantoms who have raised the dust is basically nipping the Mahatmaism in bird. And that's where Ambedkar's Gandhi-ji, I have no homeland, becomes important because Dalits are the homeless citizens of India. So in actual sense also, Dalits don't have love. land, the lids don't have any place to call their own. Now, if you don't have anything that you call on your own, that you can call that belongs to you, how can you claim you belong to that

place? There is no land, there is no house, there is no job, you don't even own your own self there because you are enslaved yourself to the feudal lord who is controlling your labor. In that sense, Ambedkar is profound to say, we are stateless people. I always say that as I met Mr. Gandhi in the capacity of an opponent, I have a feeling that I know him better than most other people because he had opened his real fangs to me, you see, and I could see the inside of the man. The two would confront each other in 1932.

Ambedkar wanted separate political representation for Dulles. Gandhi called for a unified Hindu electorate. When the British sided with Ahmedkar, Gandhi responded with a proclamation to fast unto death. Ambedkar relented. I saw him in his human capacity, the bare man in him. And so I say that I understand him better, you see, than most of the people who have associated himself, themselves with him. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on RN, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.

You can also stream us or get our podcast on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayyed. It's easy to know you want to make a change in your life, but it is hard to actually do it. How to Be a Better Human from TED is a podcast for when self-revehirt. help feels too daunting or just not for you. I'm Chris Duffy, the host of How to Be a Better Human, and trust me, I do not have it all figured out. But join me as I talk to experts about actually attainable ways we can try to improve our lives, whether it's facing fears, setting boundaries, cleaning your house, or all sorts of other topics. Find how to be a better human wherever

you get your podcasts. B.R. Embedkar devoted his life to one cause to create a space for the Dalit cast, the so-called untouchables, in a free India, an India that was built on the ideas of equality, freedom, and fraternity. As time passed and he saw that the issues of emancipation and equality for Dalits were being ignored, Ambidkar became increasingly disillusioned with Hinduism altogether. In 1935, he declared he would not die a Hindu. In his book entitled Annihilation of Cast, Ambitcar saw Hindu scriptures as the bedrock of the caste system, and so called for Hindus to rid themselves of them. It was a shocking gesture

that still reverberates today. Contributor Piaoli Roy brings us the second of a two-part series we're calling the idea of India. I will not die as a Hindu is not just mean to say I'm converting to religion or I'm just opposing religion, but also it means I'm going to correct the history. I'm going to now rewrite the new history for coming generations and I will make sure that I will try to reform the society and I think those are the broader messages he gives by that by just disowning the Hindu and of course it's a big critique of the Brahmanism

that he's very much centralizing his thesis upon. Hindu is a rotten house. These people are not going to give us rights. We try to agitate. We try to do first Satyagra by the way 1927. He led a Satyagraha for the basic right of water. Can you imagine? Like people fighting for access to water.

Even today we are agitating. Dalits are agitating to access to water. Basic survival. Even that is controlled by people who don't want to give water. So Ambedkar when he observed these people, he tried to convince, he tried to make peace. He was pissed with the Congress who was not doing enough. He was frustrated by the Hindus who just were offering a mouth, a lip service. and in all of that, Amritker was just not sure

even if he's fighting for entry into temples his people are not given rights to temples and he goes like, well, why the hell then we need to go into this temples if they're beating us up? Let's not just go. And why do we need to be Hindu? There can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu, there cannot be.

This is so not because there is anything wrong with his personal character. In fact, what is wrong is the entire basis of his relationship to his fellows. The best of men cannot be moral if the basis of relationship between them and their fellows is fundamentally a wrong relationship. To a slave, his master may be better or worse, but there cannot be a good master. A good man cannot be a master and a master cannot be a good man. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Cast, 1930. What Ambaitker is fundamentally pressing for is a form of sociality, of social exchange, which to him is absolutely lacking in caste society.

And you'll remember that in the annihilation of caste, the denouement, if you will, of that text, is to make an argument that Hinduism does not exist, has to be no legibility, if you will, without caste. So the annihilation of caste is talking about the relationship between caste and Hinduism as inextricable. Hinduism cannot exist without caste. That's another great innovation in the annihilation of caste. Hinduism is not about religion. It's not about spirituality. He calls it a religion

that is fundamentally lacking morality and ethics. And it's from there, it seems to me, that Ambedkar makes that kind of argument that without breaking caste, which then means abolishing, annihilating Hinduism, we will not actually have social democracy. We will not actually have people who can practice or engage in practices of self-regard.

who can actually, in some sense, very simply put, become all that they can be, right? This goes against almost every other thinker of the time, who wants to suggest that Hinduism can be reformed, Pache Gandhi, and that Hinduism can continue to exist as a structure of guiding ethics, of spirituality, of a kind of religious life, you know, remade for modern times and so forth, And Ambaitkir says, absolutely not. Hinduism is not just religious. It structures social political power.

It is a structure of dominance. That beautiful phrase in the annihilation of caste, right? That caste is a graded, it's a form of graded inequality. An ascending scale of reverence, a descending scale of contempt. So what caste does, and the reason why caste has to be broken is because every cast in the caste system becomes implicated in the maintenance of caste. And I think by this point in time, Ambedkar is willing to push the envelope in precisely those ways. And here he is saying, I see no way out. I've criticized the Hindus. I've questioned the authority of the Mahatma

whom they revere. They hate me. To them, I am a snake in their garden. When Ambidkar is thinking through the question of conversion and so on, Gandhi makes an argument about, you know, religion as not being something that can be brokered. Can you really play with religion? What Ambikr is doing is throwing a challenge. But what's the challenge that Ambitekir also puts forward? He says, is there Hinduism without the untouchable? But he asks that question in two ways, right? It's the conceptual question.

Can Hinduism exist without untouchability? but there's also the political question. If you don't have Hindus together with a Hindu majority, if you don't have the numbers, then what right do upper caste Hindu elites have to lay claim that they constitute or that they speak for a majority? And this is what he does with a separate electorate. Muslims have got a separate electorate.

We've got other communities that have separate electorates. And he says if we've got the fracturing of something that we think is unified, and if I refuse to play, if I would draw consent, is there a Hindu majority in terms of numbers, right? It's like saying, you know, if you believe that Hindus constitute a majority of different casts, 20%, 18% of that community withdraws, refuses to identify as Hindu. then what happens? Then the play space becomes very different. Now, yes, it's a deeply philosophical question for you, right, of inclusion. But if you're also trying to make an argument to the colonial state that as the Indian National Congress, you represent the majority,

and you've got somebody saying, you don't, uh-uh, you don't represent me. It poses an absolutely critical problem of political representation. This is Ambedkar's genius, it seems to me, constantly. And it's a genius because it is not merely tactical. It's not utilitarian. It comes, it seems to me, from the place of such a deep understanding of the exclusion that the Untouchable has historically faced in Indian society. It comes from such a deep place of understanding the mind

of the upper caste Hindu. Therein lies the bullets. In 1936, the same year annihilation of caste was published and Bedkar started his first political party. He continued speaking at rallies and conferences, became a minister of labor

in the Viceroy's Executive Council, and even wrote about the future constitution. So when he ignored yet another Gandhi-led civil disobedience campaign, it was more than a snub. he said, quote, I do not want to escape subjugation by the British, only to fall victim to complete domination

by the Hindus. Yet his relationship to Gandhi was complex. His involvement in constitutional affairs occurred only because of Gandhi. It was Gandhi who helped recruit Ahmedkar, who was then elected to the constituent assembly

that would write the country's constitution. Ambedkar was appointed chairman of the drafting committee. That meant Ambedkar, the Dalit, whose people throughout history had no right to education, would be a key architect of the country's future.

So, I mean, if your question is, you know, what is Ambedkar's imprimatur on the Indian constitution? I mean, in a sense, all of it is the way it is thanks to him. But in a sense, perhaps, you know, his signature in some sense is indiscernible, because there are so much.

many others who also are playing a role in its making. Um, Bidker is both using a structure and pushing it to its limits. He does this with the Constitution. Third draft of the Constitution discussion, he says, if this cannot be a document that actually produces social democracy, I'm happy to burn it. How do you have a figure, right, who is actually tasked in some sense with, you? You know, he is the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution. How do you have that very same person arguing that if this document cannot do justice to this social question,

if it cannot actually produce substantive equality, how do you have that same person saying, I'm happy to burn down this document? So that betwixt and between, inside, outside, space that a big replacement, That is the particular position of the radical Dalit imagination, the radical Dalit political imagination that I think he puts in place throughout his life. The Constitution would later outlaw all forms of discrimination, abolish untouchability, and guarantee the right to freedom of religion. It also included a system of affirmative action for Dalits and India's indigenous peoples, the Adavasi's.

But even though Ambedkar believed in the constitutional process, he was also skeptical of it. He knew that even the most brilliantly constructed document wasn't a magic bullet, and that injustice against Dalits would continue. In politics, we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic strife, 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 equality 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 are the who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously built up. B.R. M. Mbedkar, speech to the constituent assembly, November 25th, 1949. The new India was initially not kind to Mbedkar. As the Minister of Law and Justice in the country's first cabinet, he tried to pass a Hindu code bill that would have guaranteed women's right to divorce and property, but it failed. He felt sidelined by India's first Prime Minister, Jawarlal Nairu. Ambedkar's expertise in economics, planning, and federalism were ignored.

Disillusioned, he resigned from government only to lose in the country's first general elections. In 1952, he was appointed to Parliament's upper house, but by then was seriously ill with diabetes. fighting time itself, he returned to his earlier pledge to not die a Hindu. His conversion to Buddhism, along with hundreds of thousands of his followers, was his final radical act. You need to satisfy spiritual hunger. Let's think for a good alternative, a better alternative. And that's when he explores, of course, when he said that,

he really spent 20 years thinking about it, closely reading, observing, and almost every other religion approach to him to get converted and, you know, of course we know that he went to Buddha and he said he's doing a big favor by going to Buddha on India because he said if I become Christian, then he's totally going to change the equation because, you know, he has 19% of India's population with him. If they convert Christian, then it's going to problem. Same with if he turns to Muslim Islam and he says these two religions are not native to India, although he finds great values in them and he resonates with their universal message of brotherhood and equality that it promises.

But then he just says, I'm going back to the Indian roots, which is the Buddha. And of course, Buddha, that's just he said as a political statement, but Buddha was someone who remained with him early on in his life, I mean, since he was, since he matriculated. So that are the kind of, you know, long engagement of low. looking at his own existential self while reflecting on the mirrors of Hindu society. He wants one of the big faiths. He doesn't want one of the smaller faiths. He wants a religion that has prestige and history, the kind of weight of one of the great religious

and philosophical traditions of the world. He writes the history of the Untouchables in 48. That's where he makes the argument that the Dalits were broken men. He uses the term broken men, which is the term for Dalit, right? Broken, ground down, crushed and so forth. And he says that these were ones first while Buddhists. They refused to give up on their Buddhism. They became these remainder subjects, if you will.

They were pushed to the edges of village orders. They suffered various practices of spatial and suburb. segregation. And they ended up being these subjects who remind us of the possibilities of Buddhism on the subcontinent. So Ambitka really goes big, if you will. He goes large. He expands the, he expands historical time, right, to include Buddhism and says that we actually see a religious conflict. We see a grand conflict between what he calls Buddhism and and Brahmanism, Brahmanism won. Buddhism was defeated.

The Dalit is the defeated Buddhist. She stands to us as a kind of reminder of what was possible with an ethical, egalitarian Buddhist order. Thieves, mendiccans, women, they were all part of the Sangha. And that for him is the model of fraternity.

The great force that Ambedkar places on that term fraternity, remaking social life. Buddhism was the original form of fraternity, the Buddhist Sangha. And incidentally, he, you know, at that conversion ceremony, I mean, in Nagpur, in October 1956, he, you know, there's this kind of mass conversion, which is something that has never been seen in the history of world Buddhism. But he also made people take these vows, and at least half the vows are about how they are

to reject Hindu practices. And only half the vows are about the new Buddhist practices that they will embrace. So it's an equal kind of exercise of saying no to that and yes to this. And he spells it out in this kind of litany that he creates. So it's a massive intellectual, political, spiritual exercise that he has undertaken.

that he has undertaken. I mean, its ambition is kind of astounding, if you really think about it. And it's amazing that he manages to achieve it, in a sense, just before he dies. Dr. B.R. M. Bedkar died on December 6, 1956. He was 65 years old. Today, India is a country cracking along all kinds of race. religious, class, caste, and ethnic fault lines. Narendra Modi and his government embrace Hindu nationalism

and a conception of India as a Hindu state, the Hindu Rastra. Ambedkar's fears for minorities in a Hindu Raj now seem prophetic. What would Ambedkar say about today's India? I think he would be disappointed. On the other hand, compared to 1947, the Dalits, as the untouchables are now called, The Dalits articulate, organized, they speak for themselves. They don't need upper caste reformers like Gandhi to speak for them. They speak for themselves.

They are prominent in politics, in public life, in entrepreneurship. So here to be pleased with some of the progress they made through their own struggles. But you regard their journey is unfinished and with a long way to go. I cannot imagine how somebody as committed to justice, to the idea of representation, to the idea of democracy, to the idea of equality, to the idea of rights, to affirmative action, you know, how somebody like that would accept a majoritarian definition,

a religious nationalist definition, an attempt to overthrow the Constitution, all of these things which are now sought to be pushed as the New India. I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, he would find this acceptable. Because in this India, Muslims and Dalits will be worse off than ever. They don't have a prayer in the Hindu Raj. He would be deeply disappointed.

He would be restless. He would be like, you know, let's take India to the United Nations and let's hold it accountable for what it has done to its own people. it would have paid a lot of attention to the poor people in this country, the Dalits, the adivasis, backward classes, the Muslims, the other religious minorities. He would have offered a certain leadership, but looking at this, he would be really disappointed. And first of all, he would scold all of us. Like, how did this happen?

How did you let right-wing brahmanical government come in? to power. What went wrong? He would have said that I've worked all my life against such things and you let this happen. Is this how you want to remember me? Despite a life of massive challenge, Ambedkar never lost hope. At a 1942 conference for Dalits, he spoke the following words. My final words of advice to you is educate, agitate, organize. Have faith in yourself. With justice on our side, I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual.

There is nothing material or social in it. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for reclamation of the human personality. On ideas, you've been listening to Part 2 of The Idea of India from contributor Piali Roy. Thanks to Remachandra Guha of Korea University. Anupama Rao of Bernard College at Columbia University.

Ananya Vajpayi at New Delhi Center for the Study of Developing Societies. And to Sura Gengdi, author of Cast Matters, and co-editor of The Radical in Embedkar, Critical Reflections. For links to their work, visit our website at cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas. Readings by Matthew Lazen Rider. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Nikola Lukshic is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.