How might one engage with the here and now of politics, without getting instrumental and cynical? How might one be productive in the present, without surrendering entirely to what it offers by way of power and self-achievement? The time of politics for India’s Dalits has been one that straddles the present as well as the future; pragmatic concerns, as well as a near-mythic yearning for a new world, and a new life, as Dr Ambedkar put it.
At present these questions have come alive for at least one Dalit leader and party – Thol Thirumavalavan and the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK). They took their time to extend support to Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), which had emerged as the single largest party in the elections, but did not have the required majority. The left parties, VCK, and the Indian Union Muslim League decided to support the TVK’s claim to form the government.
Meanwhile, speculation was rife as to Thirumavalavan’s intentions: was he demanding to be made deputy chief minister? Is it true that he was offered the Urban Affairs Ministry? How can Thiruma do this? All along he was with the DMK and supported them at every turn, in spite of their dubious record with respect to Dalit rights. So, how could he now endorse Vijay’s candidature? Is this, or is this not betrayal? Apart from such asides, there has been no dearth of advice thrown at him. As a Dalit leader, he was expected to continually affirm his moral credibility and agree to be baptised by the fire of other people’s righteousness.
In extending their support to the TVK and Vijay, Thirumavalavan and VCK made it clear that they were doing this in the interests of democracy and in ensuring that a party elected by a majority of the people can take office. Predictably, this earned both leader and party snide asides from a small section of TVK fans who asked him to move on and let their leader take charge, and so on.
At the same time, for Thirumavalavan’s constituency, the prospect of him being part of the government must have appeared enticing, considering that both the Dravidian majors have ensured that he remained a ‘junior’ partner within their respective alliances and failed to sufficiently acknowledge his political and intellectual stature.
In this context, it is important to understand a dilemma that Dalit parties are forced to reckon with again and again: to respond to the present moment, to explore what it might hold for Dalits, and judge its potential for opening up options to do with rights, and due share in resources, including political power. If this requires a tactical compromise, how might one work with that? Or if it requires political co-option, is that worth risking?
In the past too, Thirumavalavan has had to deal with such questions. He (and the VCK) have been responsive to a range of concerns, from the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka to questions to do with the environment; with the subplan for Scheduled castes to the Hindu right’s affirmation of the Manusmriti and much more. In all this, he has foregrounded a point of view that is anchored in a broad vision of democracy.
The challenge has been this: that even when he speaks for the greater common good, he is viewed as a Dalit leader, which he is, but he is seldom seen as one who is capable of and possesses the conceptual clarity and moral credibility to speak for all of us.
Veering between being mindful of Dalit concerns and grounding his politics in a democratic vision, Thirumavalavan has found himself caught in uneasy political situations. While he and his party have remained valuable partners within any alliance, he was expected to stay within limits set by the dominant party. Thus, he has not always found it easy to voice his opinion on, say, party policy to do with Dalits, or the working of the criminal justice system when it comes to violence against them.
To further understand and interrogate the social and political contexts that hedge Dalit political choices, it is useful to review the ways in which Babasaheb Dr Ambedkar engaged with the promises of the present, without losing sight of his ultimate objective – the annihilation of caste and untouchability and the making of a new social order.
The architect of Dalit autonomy
Throughout his political life, Ambedkar had to avail of the possibilities presaged by particular moments in time, in the full realisation that these were likely meagre. Yet he did so, responding to the historical hour in order to state and claim a denied right, or to make a case for new rights for Dalits. At the same time, whatever the demand, and however modest, he utilised the occasion to renew and re-state his transformative and imaginative vision for a just, free, fraternal and equal world.
The Mahad Satyagraha was a protest against a specific expression of injustice among many others that Dalits endured. As we know, the second phase of the satyagraha did not proceed as planned because the caste Hindus had obtained a court injunction against the Dalits accessing the tank on the argument that it was a private tank. While Ambedkar was initially inclined to go against the injunction, a discussion with the Collector convinced him that to do so would pit them against the local government that was supportive of Dalit claims.
This disappointed the satyagrahis, but yet they accepted his argument. On the one hand, this might appear a cautious move, but it is evident that he had made a choice: it was not possible for the Dalits to take on both the government and the caste Hindus. It was important to step back and re-arm oneself.
Thus, he utilised the moment to bid goodbye to a time and text that signified slavery and subordination – the burning of the Manusmriti was just that. He also turned the moment into a historically significant one: by lecturing to his audience on the French revolution and why the claims made by Dalits were world-historical in nature and nothing short of a declaration of rights for all people.
In 1928-29, given the casteism in sections of the working class, he refused to take the part of striking workers in the Bombay mills – and he ended up speaking in ways that served the interests of the management, though that was not his intention. Mill owners used his words to convey to the strikers that it was they, and not the management, who had objected to employing Dalit workers in the weaving section and that their cause therefore was not universal.
Ambedkar chose to place himself on the other side of the barricades, because he was firm in his conviction that the working class ought to fight caste-based discrimination in its ranks. This did not endear him to the communists and neither did it translate into gains for the Dalit workers. But the moment enabled him to raise fundamental questions about the nature of the proletariat, such as it was, in caste-ridden India.
The strike in fact acquired paradigmatic value in Ambedkar’s writings – and was recalled many times to point to working class disunity, based on caste differences. His latter day statement that the working class ought to fight both Brahmanism and Capitalism owed to his experience and understanding as a resident of a working class chawl and his astute analysis of how caste plagued working class lives, apart from the conditions of labour and the everyday.
In 1930, Ambedkar was forthright in his critique of British rule, yet he had to gain the ear of the colonial government to ensure that Dalits were represented and could represent themselves in such schemes of political reform that the British Indian government was likely to undertake. While the reform scheme did not offer much to the Dalits, he used the occasion to underscore Dalit political claims and rights.
His endeavour was nothing short of epic, in that he assembled an entire vocabulary of suffering and injustice that pointed to the British and his fellow Indians, how the so-called untouchables viewed and sought to challenge their marginality by demanding that they be part of political worlds. This moment which saw Ambedkar make a case for Dalit self-representation in politics was important in that it brought to the fore a radical vision of democracy in the Indian context.
As we know his understanding was not quite heeded and he had to go with what Gandhi and the Congress proposed by way of electoral rights for the Dalits. He worked hard to strike what appeared a hard bargain at the time, and the outcome, the Poona Pact, appeared a hopeful beginning to Dalit political life. This was also because of the earnest promise made by Gandhi that henceforth he would work hard to ensure caste Hindus endorsed Dalit rights and humanity.
However, this promise did not quite realise itself, and this had to do with workings of the Anti-Untouchability League that Gandhians founded. Ambedkar had suggested that the League function as a civil rights watchdog and aid the Dalits in their struggles, and he wanted it to be led by them.
However, Gandhi viewed it as an organisation that would push caste Hindus to turn penitential and undertake ‘seva’ for the Dalit cause – build schools and hostels, dig wells, and so on. While these efforts were significant in themselves, they rendered the Dalits the recipients of caste Hindu moral largesse, at a time when they were emerging into a distinctive political community.
There were other problems as well. In the wake of the excitement generated by the Poona Pact, some caste Hindus sought to create legal measures to enable Dalits to enter Hindu temples. These efforts gained attention, were debated, but nothing came of them.
Ambedkar was exasperated by the visibility granted this issue, when attention in fact ought to have been on Dalit political rights and historical agency. Also, the proposed legislation appeared to him a half-measure and he argued that it could be termed significant only if it opened up the Hindu social order and religion to consistent critical scrutiny. If such a critique was not countenanced or taken ahead, he famously noted, this would mean that one “temporised with evil” and was ready to “barter away the sacredness of human personality”.
So, within two years of the signing of the Poona Pact, Ambedkar was disillusioned. It did not help that elections held under the pact – in 1937 – returned Dalit representatives who owed their success in many places to caste Hindu votes, and so remained politically indebted to them.
At the same time, he attempted another sort of initiative at reconciliation and fraternity: the Independent Labour Party (1936), which he imagined could bring workers, peasants, and the Dalit laborers together. While this opened some doors – as during the anti-Khot struggle, which had caste Hindu and Dalit peasants and tenants fighting profligate caste Hindu rent receivers – it did not expand the realm of social relations, as such. Beyond the barricades, Dalits continued to be viewed as untouchable and were expected to carry on with such demeaning labour that was imposed on them.
By this time, Ambedkar had decided that a different approach to the problems posed by caste and untouchability was needed. One could say that in this period – from 1935 to 1937 – he broke with historical time and the political present, to an extent, and gestured towards a deep time, stretching back to antiquity, and future time that would beckon in emancipation.
In 1935, therefore we have his Yeola speech, which announced his decision to exit Hinduism. In 1936, the undelivered address – which later was published as Annihilation of Caste – made it clear that the Hindu creed and social order were incapable of reform, and had to be remade. The same year, he addressed a Mahar conference and noted that the way to emancipation for Dalits was to convert to another religion. In the course of these two years, he thus broke with whatever faith he had that one could reason with the Hindus or reform Hindu beliefs and practices.
This was also when his scholarly labour acquired momentum and he researched on a range of issues, whose outcome today is available to us in the collected works – particularly his unfinished Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India (Volume 3) and the Essays on Untouchability (Volume 5).
The early 1940s had him arguing with the British over such statutory political rights that the Dalits required. This was in the context of various moves undertaken by the war-time British government to edge India towards self-rule.
The demands Ambedkar put forth were modest, yet they were consistently ignored, since both the British and the Indian National Congress were convinced that the important question to be addressed in this context was the Muslim question, given the Pakistan resolution of 1940 at a Muslim League Conference. Ambedkar continued to invest his claims with normative worth, but we also find him tired and impatient.
But once again, we see him exploring other options: he had been called into the Viceroy’s Cabinet as Labour member, a move that the British made to allay whatever apprehensions they had with regard to Ambedkar’s anger – he had threatened to undertake a country-wide agitation should Dalit political claims not be addressed. Ambedkar utilised the opportunity to explore with his characteristic thoroughness what one might undertake in the cause of labour.
War-time rule needed workers to prosecute the war, and so both the British government as well as the British-Indian government were not averse to considering such legislation as would advance labour’s concerns.
Ambedkar worked this moment to advantage, and outlined a slew of measures which took forward labour rights. He also advanced the rights of Dalit students and workers, and more generally, young undercaste workers, by involving them in wartime industrial training and employment.
On the other hand, he had to carefully navigate other problems – the famine in Bengal and the measures undertaken or not undertaken by government to end the misery of hungry people, many of whom were workers; the impossible hours demanded of workers who slaved in the mines and elsewhere to meet wartime demand for steel and iron; and the general pushback on liberties, which affected workers as well.
In this sense, Ambedkar was made aware of how historically opportune moments that would enable him to push the Dalit – and workers’ – cause would likely also limit what might be done, in a substantive sense.
By the late 1940s, as the second World War appeared to be ending, it became clear that Britain was ready to transfer power to the Indians. Once again, Ambedkar sought to raise the question of Dalit political rights. He visited Britain, and spoke to both Churchill as well as Labour political leaders. He threatened as well to take the question to the emerging UN.
It was in this context that he was invited into the Constitution making process, and made the Law Minister in the Congress interim ministry. He had been dismissive of the Constituent Assembly on the argument that it was unrepresentative and his book on what Gandhi and Congress did to the untouchables had been published only recently.
Yet when the historical hour beckoned to him, he decided to avail of this opportunity. He was, perhaps, aware of what this meant: that he would have to work within the boundaries set by the Congress, but on the other hand, he was being given a central role in drafting the Constitution, and this was an opportunity that ought not to be missed.
This is also the spirit in which he engaged with the Hindu Code Bill, working with a draft that was already in place, but determined to frame it in ways that would secure women’s inheritance rights in a constitutional sense.
Ambedkar’s labour in the Constituent Assembly and on the Hindu Code Bill, was unrelenting. At times, he had to step back from his own expansive vision and work with competing visions of the greater common good.
Working with politically diverse men and women, and legal luminaries, with whom he both agreed and disagreed, he realised the limits to what he might be able to achieve. This is why when he presented the draft constitution he remarked with gravity and worry that India needs to build social and economic democracy and not be content with political democracy alone.
This is also why he noted constitutional morality was yet to be built in India, since custom, religion and beliefs determined behavior. In 1951, he resigned as Law Minister, over the non-passage of the Hindu Code Bill and on account of other differences he had with Premier Jawaharlal Nehru.
And once again we have him breaking away from a situation that he had consented to, but which now appeared to be restrictive. This is what he did in the mid-1930s as well, when he could not see a future in the Poona Pact-directed electoral prospects for Dalits.
On both occasions, without giving up on his claims, he sought to embed them within wider concerns. In the late 1930s and after, he had worked hard to bring together his lifelong ethical, philosophical and historical concerns to do with the philosophy of Hinduism, the Hindu social order, and the time of tensions between Brahmanism and Buddhism.
These texts announced his indictment of the Hindu social order and the faith that sustained it. In the 1950s, he undertook another sort of journey – he sought to make the previous (Buddhism) possible in the present through his commitment to conversion and his steady writing and speeches on the dhamma and democracy, which he understood to be related.
First among unequals
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Ambedkar had to work with the limits set by colonial political reform, even though he was well aware and critical of the perfidies of colonial economics and of the essential disregard for Indian political rights. Seen from the Dalit point of view, no opportunity was to be viewed as meagre or unimportant.
As he noted famously in the document he presented the Southborough Commission in 1919, the Dalit’s interest in politics, and securing representation in his own person was a paramount interest, besides which the interests of almost all others, including men of property and learning paled into insignificance, for the Dalit had his very person confiscated.
The Dalit condition was the embodiment of injustice and had to be understood as such. He thus produced a pedagogy of injustice and inequality which was then used to break faith with the Hindus.
It is instructive to consider some of his definitions of the Dalit condition in this context: a political minority, denied the right of self-determination; an oppressed minority that required statutory protection and rights; a working class, midway between villein and serf; a people who were a part apart, being tied to the Hindu social order, yet stationed beyond its social realm; a group of “nobodies” whose existence was to be sustained as such, so that the rest of the Hindus could be “somebodies”; a broken people, who once had perhaps been Buddhists.
In and through these definitions he sought to mark the contours of an expansive democratic revolution that had to be carried out, and which could only be done, if the Dalits were granted their political rights and if these rights were safeguarded by law and constitutional fiat. The actual rights demanded were modest, at all times, given the limits of colonial reform, but they were demanded in and through a complex social and ontological critique.
The mid-1930s afforded him an excursus into more fundamental questions: were Dalits Hindus, should they remain within Hinduism? While breaking away from the Hindus appeared important to assert Dalit claims to being an oppressed minority, it was not only that.
What was at stake was the character of an entire civilisation, only the Hindus were determined not to see it as such. But he desired that Dalit sought to develop a critical vision of the culture and social order that they found themselves in. Thus he charged them with a task that had no immediate end in mind, but which nevertheless had to be undertaken.
The 1940s brought him back, as noted, to the demands of the present. His time in the Constituent Assembly had to be accounted for, in terms of specific outcomes, equally, these had to be explained and justified in normative terms.
His constitutional labour turned out to be an exercise in emotional, ethical and intellectual forbearance – neither romantic, nor instrumental, but viewed as a historic responsibility, Ambedkar’s law making efforts were unlike any other. To him, the Constitution was a secular guarantee, a necessary, though, not a sufficient instrument to further democracy. In line with his earlier battles, when he had to respond to the contingent moment and the historical conjuncture and settle for such minimal gains that accrued to the Dalits, this one too was taken on, with full awareness as to its modest objectives. Yet the effort was viewed against a vast landscape of thought, going back to the Buddha on the one hand, and the French revolution on the other.
With respect to the Hindu Code Bill as well, this was the case: as Ambedkar repeatedly argued, neither he nor other supporters of the bill were proclaiming revolutionary legislation, actually, they were making law, as secular citizens, and the significance of this ought not to be lost. Rather than follow custom and shastras, believed to be given by a supernatural source, whose credentials ought not to be questioned, men and women were engaged in a dialogue to make laws for themselves. This was a profound act, he implied, and cannot be taken lightly.
A part apart
Ambedkar worked hard at such incremental change that could be brought about, but kept his senses trained onto that line of possibility that appeared to exist beyond the horizons of the present. It is likely that this movement between the here and now of the present and the long duree of history proved exhausting and unsurprisingly, it took a toll on his health. At the same time, his life has come to exist as legacy, not in an iconic sense alone, but as embodying a new politics.
In our own time, this politics has acquired other dimensions, with Dalits being present in the polity, but not always able to work political decisions to the advantage of marginal populations. Neither are they in a position to always influence policies. Ambedkar had warned of such a likelihood and had suggested only a union of minorities might save the polity from the tyranny of a perpetual Hindu majority.
Thol Thirumavalavan has been well aware of the perils of a communal as opposed to a political majority, in the sense Ambedkar used these terms. By communal, he meant a perpetual caste Hindu majority and he wished for that to be transformed into a political majority held together by shared ideals or principles, rather than birth-based affiliations and mentalities.
Thirumavalavan has sought to work at creating just such a political majority – by inducting non-Dalits into his party, and by addressing a range of concerns to do with our democratic life. It has not been easy, clearly, given that caste Hindus continue to view him as a partisan leader. Besides, within his own ranks, there are people who foreground the interests of a particular Dalit community, rather than the subaltern Dalits as a whole. There has also been an alienation of other communities from the VCK, particularly the vulnerable though feisty Arundathiyars.
Yet, with all these limitations, he has kept his vision trained on the larger social revolution that all of us desire. Meanwhile, the pull of the present, of moments that hold out slender opportunities for Dalit progress and rights continue to exert their pressure. Given the very many constraints Dalits labour under, such opportunities cannot be let go, either.
We are familiar with political narratives to do with the long duree of revolution, ever impending, and never entirely realisable. We know as well, a more generalised longing for a future that helps transcend the limitations of the past.
But the time that shapes the political imagination of those who are viewed as ‘a part apart’ is different. The present moment appears productive yet it could be a trap. But can it be avoided, therefore? Put away? The future appears indistinct, yet it might lead to Begumpura, the utopia of Sant Raidas’ imagination. But while this can be evocative and inspiring, what is that future and what will get us there?
Dalit time is therefore distinctive, and poses challenges that we are yet to unravel entirely.
V Geetha is a Chennai-based feminist historian, translator, and publisher. She writes on caste, gender, labour, and education.