Ambedkar’s vision: Imagination versus reality

Fractions, factions, unity undermined tragically from within and farcically from without — another Ambedkar Jayanti has passed on April 14, with India’s 200 million Dalits utterly divided. The benefits of coming together are unambiguous: Dalit unity could mean no less than achieving real, material social, economic and political power. The coveted aspirations of equality, liberty and justice would inevitably follow.

So, what is standing in the way? Perhaps, following John Lennon, such failures are due to the defects of our collective imagination. As he entices us to believe in his 1971 piano ballad, Imagine:

Imagine there’s no countries/

It isn’t hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for/

And no religion, too

It is indeed charming, if naive, to think that pure human spirit, the imagination and the will, could overcome all the powerful centrifugal forces constantly pulling us asunder: religious differences (not only amongst neo-Buddhist versus the unconverted, but also Dalit Sikh, Dalit Muslim, and Dalit Christian communities); regionalism (what, after all, positively binds together Dalits of northern, western and southern India?) and linguistic differences; traditional class (labourers versus salaried, urban versus agricultural) and gender differences (patriarchy dividing the interests of Dalit males and females, and undermining solidarity with transgender Dalits and Dalit queers); and of course, profound divisions, competition, and historical rivalries between numerous Dalit castes and subcastes (Chambhar versus Mahar, Mala versus Madiga, and so on ad infinitum).

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And let’s not forget to mention conscious savarna conspiracies, designed to assimilate and dominate Dalits, to enervate and control them, to divide and conquer. These tactics have distinctively characterised the fate of Dalit political parties within India’s wider electoral politics since Independence.

At this point in history, nearly 130 years from Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth, Dalit disunity appears not merely to be inevitable, it actually appears to be the perennial, natural course of things. Belief in unity, on the contrary, seems at best a hippie dream.

You may say I’m a dreamer/

But I’m not the only one.

I hope someday you’ll join us/

And the world will live as one.

A new book just published by Penguin on this Ambedkar Jayanti is seeking to challenge this assumption, however. Its editor, K Raju (the All-India Congress Committee’s national coordinator for the SC, ST, OBC and minorities departments) is no hippie, but rather a hard-nosed political operative. And yet, in The Dalit Truth: The Battles for Realizing Ambedkar’s Vision, Raju and his diverse group of contributors have made a pitch for pan-Indian Dalit unity along Ambedkarian lines.

The authors may want us to imagine, but they are not dreamers. They are politicians (Jignesh Mevani, Priyank Kharge), technocrats (Sukhdeo Thorat, R S Praveen Kumar), bureaucrats (Raja Sekhar Vundru, Budithi Rajsekhar), Supreme Court advocates (Kiruba Munusamy), academics (Suraj Yengde, Badri Narayan), activists (Bhanwar Meghwanshi) and even a filmmaker (Pa. Ranjith). Uniquely, they are all realists — yes, even the filmmaker. This is why they speak more of battles and less of dreams.

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Raju’s The Dalit Truth is the eighth book in a series of recent volumes, a series of battles really, that have sought to rethink our collective vision for India along progressive lines. The series, Rethinking India, running since 2020, has published books on the Shudras (by firebrand Kancha Ilaiah Shephard), on being Adivasi (by the late, great Abhay Xaxa), on women’s equality and rights, on the conundrums of being Muslim in India, and various other probing volumes going back to the first series book, my own Vision For A Nation (edited along with Ashis Nandy), which sought to sketch precisely that: a rethought-out vision for India. A more just, more equitable, more prosperous, more united India. A realistic vision, though, and not a utopian fantasy. This, even though most of us are in the process of losing faith that such a thing is even possible, if we haven’t lost it already.

And so, as I said, another Ambedkar Jayanti has passed. These have, of course, always been a day of celebration. Lately, I see them more and more as a day to quietly reflect — to rethink, given the current state of things, what futures may actually be possible, and to be reminded of possible futures. I guess that basically means to imagine.

Realising Ambedkar’s vision. Maybe much of it depends on the will and imagination, after all?

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