Babasaheb Ambedkar And The Farcical Greatness Pageant
By Anand Teltumbde
10 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
The media tamasha sponsored by Anil Ambani’s Reliance Mobile and conducted by CNN-IBN and the History channel, both owned by Network 18, has come to an end. As expected, Babasaheb Ambedkar has won the “greatness contest”. He is now anointed as the greatest Indian after Gandhi. The festivity that the result met with on social media shows dalits on the net in seventh heaven, oblivious of the earlier discomfort because contest organisers took for granted the greatness of Gandhi. Wise men began offering their interpretations of the result that young India has overcome the casteist prejudice of the previous generation in voting for Ambedkar. Has it really? Even as this wisdom spilled over much of the television screen, the news in the scroll at the bottom about the desecration of Ambedkar’s statues in many parts of Uttar Pradesh tended to contradict it.
Demeaning Ambedkar
One does not need much intelligence to guess that it was dalits, the net and mobile savvy generation, who have earned him this “glory”. Although they constituted only a fraction of the total population, for these dalits Ambedkar was the only icon to be voted for. Moreover, the kind of emotional bond dalits had with Ambedkar simply did not exist among non-dalit voters for any of their heroes. It is therefore a person like A P J Abdul Kalam, who was catapulted to Rashtrapati Bhavan just because he fitted the profile of the Sangh parivar’s expectations of a Muslim, who scored over all other icons. Notwithstanding the dalits’ initial disapproval of Gandhi being placed on a higher pedestal, when voting began young dalits virtually carried on a campaign to vote concertedly so as to make their hero win the contest. None of the non-dalits felt as strongly as the dalits for any of their heroes. Thus, to imagine that young Indians have overcome caste prejudices is naiveté, pure and simple. Rather, Ambedkar being declared the greatest Indian would leave a bitter taste in many mouths. The result might even strengthen prevailing anti-dalit prejudices, which in turn may be manifested in increasing caste atrocities on vulnerable dalits, what with the backlash being experienced in Uttar Pradesh.
Why should dalits then engage in such contests? What if Kalam or some cricketer or fi lmy hero had become the greatest Indian after Gandhi? Would this have lowered Ambedkar’s stature or belittled his contributions or dented his greatness? Did Ambedkar need media endorsement that he was great? Would he want a Bollywood Bachchan or a Madhuri Dixit to do a filmy salaam to him? Remember, he had disparagingly refused to take a donation from actor Dilip Kumar as he believed that cine-artists lacked in character, and earlier (1927) from the Marathi tamasha legend Patthe Bapurao because he earned money by employing Mahar women in his dancing troupe.
The initial dalit misgivings about the contest’s organi sers insinuating that Gandhi was greater than Ambedkar were rather justified. As the contest unfolded, the very placement of Ambedkar in the company of all and sundry appeared to dwarf his stature. If dalits had let go of it, it was certain that one of these worthies would have emerged as the greatest Indian. Such is the stature of Ambedkar that it would have surely embarrassed the organisers. They had spared themselves a serious embarrassment by ex cluding Gandhi from the contest because if they had put him there, he would have perhaps come in last. Dalits spared the organisers another fiasco by ensuring that Ambedkar came in first. As for themselves, it only massaged their sense of identity.
Contrary to their thinking, the result has not done any honour to Ambedkar. Rather, by implicitly accepting that he was second to Gandhi in greatness or worth being considered on par with the likes of Atal Behari Vajpayee or Sachin Tendulkar or Lata Mangeshkar, they have allowed him to be demeaned. If they had boycotted this tamasha, at least the message would have been sent across that they simply disapprove of Ambedkar being compared with anyone, including Gandhi.
Ranking Greatness
What this tamasha has clearly done is to trivialise greatness itself. Is greatness the superlative achievement of an individual as the list reflected? If so, there are scores of super achievers beyond the knowledge of ignoramuses in the media. How could they exclude the proven achievers – the Nobel Laureate C V Raman or the first Indian Olympian gold medallist
Abhinav Bindra?
Is Ambedkar great because he rose from an untouchable background to reach the summit of scholarship? Not many people would know that he was the first Indian to get a D Sc in Economics from the prestigious London School of Economics. Much could be said about his scholarship that encompassed many spheres in later years. Is he great because he drafted (as popularly presumed) the Constitution? Is he great because he reached the highest echelons of the executive, as a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and as the fi rst law minister of independent India? Is he great because he worked for the emancipation of the dalits among whom he was born? Is he great because he revived Buddhism in the land of its birth? Is he great because his statues outnumber that of any other person in the world or because he is the only person in history whose importance is increasing as he gets distanced in time or because the congregations in his commemoration attract numbers that are unrivalled? No, Ambedkar is not great because of any of these, although each of the above is an extraordinary feat by any standard. Although we loosely use the epithet “great” for such achievers, personal achievement cannot be the touchstone of greatness, because quintessentially it is just the extension of the pursuit of self. Only those who transcend the self and work with a universalist motivation maybe called great.
Ambedkar was great because he genuinely strove towards making this planet a better place to live. This is not to be equated simply with his struggle for the emancipation of dalits as his own caste people. It is the innate tendency of human beings (and perhaps all living beings) to seek the betterment of their own folk. This is a basic tribal instinct. Such collectives could be seen as extended families and truly are an extension of the self, interfaced with the environment. If
Ambedkar had taken up cudgels for dalits merely as his own people, he would not qualify for universal greatness. He took up the cause of dalits because this ideal constituted the key to the democratization of India, which was essential to extricate her from stagnation and degradation. It was an integral part of the struggle for liberation of human beings from the structures of exploitation and oppression. His vision transcended the narrow confines of nationalism and envisioned humanity imbued with the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity. His greatness lay in confronting castes in their existential form and not imagining them so as to fit into some preconceived framework as the then communists did. The caste system being antithetical to this vision had to be annihilated. His diagnosis or prescription may not have fully worked, but that is a different matter. Seen from this perspective, he would appear taller than we ever imagined. But still, to rank him as the greatest will be narrow-minded and conceptually erroneous.
Neo-liberal Agenda
This contest makes a pop-show of greatness. Why would it bother with such subtle aspects? The freedom fighters that we are conditioned to see as great were also not moved by any universalist vision. They were driven by various motives that ranged from re-establishing their caste rule to creating new structures of class rule. Many were simply intoxicated by the notion of narrow nationalism, not universalism. Only a few like Bhagat Singh rose beyond these petty considerations to envision a world sans exploitation. Fortunately, he was spared the dishonour of being included in this pop-list of greats.
Comparisons, competitions and contests are a market lexicon promoted by neo-liberalism. The premise is that everything in the world can be commoditised, graded and priced. The neo-liberals developed metrics to measure beauty and institutionalised beauty pageants by commoditising female bodies. The link between commodity culture and objectification of women’s bodies and even of love, emotions, leisure, and privacy was exploited to push them all into the market. The contest for deciding the greatest Indian is also a part of the same process. It successfully channelled people’s love, hatred and anger to create entertainment value, deflected their attention from the real issues, trivialized what was held holy to promote shallow consumerism and, in the process, also served the business strategies of the participant companies. One can see the contest stirring up unwanted debates and unwanted controversies, which are the known boosters of target rating points (TRPs) of the television channels. Millions of calls and SMSes were registered for sustaining these debates and controversies and for casting votes, directly contributing to the revenue of the telephone companies. One of the important by-products of this contest is the revelation of the size of the potential dalit market, which will be of immense importance for marketers and media planners.
Neo-liberalism cannot be comfortable with the apparent blemish of caste although it is not capable of or even interested in eradicating it. It is good enough for it to establish that caste does not exist. This puerile pageant has facilitated this conclusion. With Ambedkar winning the contest, the neo-liberal elite will have a strong argument that India no more has any caste prejudices. The big source of market imperfection in India thus no more exists. Right since the advent of neo-liberal globalisation, the neo-liberals have tried to establish how it was advantageous to dalits and have actively promoted the incipient ideas of a dalit bourgeoisie and dalit chambers of commerce. These ideas could not take hold in the face of evidence to the contrary, however. Now their proponents will have new ammunition in their armoury.
Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst, and a civil rights activist with Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.
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