BEFORE we get on to studying B.R. Ambedkar’s thoughts on democracy and analyzing the present state of Indian democracy in the light of that thought, let us see what Indian democracy, in its leading tendencies, wishes to think of Ambedkar – in other words, what Indian democracy imagines Ambedkar to be. Let me cite two recent incidents to illustrate the work of our present-day imaginary with respect to one of, what it calls, its ‘founding fathers’.

The first – In the aftermath of the IIT Chennai authorities banning the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC), an IIT students’ group, a flurry of reactions followed. Some of these were staged in television studios, while others unfolded in newspaper columns. While factoring for the banality of these shows, one could still notice at least one interesting aspect during the television stagings, often laughably glorified as ‘debates’. For instance, in one NDTV show, a patently right wing ideologue, who also teaches in the Delhi University, accused the APSC representative of having ‘supplanted’ (the ideologue’s word) Ambedkar’s actual words when the study circle, in a pamphlet, claimed to cite the latter.

In a ‘supplanted’ form (though it has to be mentioned that the gentleman on the show did not clarify which words were supplanted) the really offending part had Ambedkar say, ‘...Hinduism is a chamber of horrors.’ The university professor, who claimed in his favour that he had been teaching Ambedkar for many years, as also the BJP spokesperson present, among others, fumed to the effect that how could anyone say such a thing of a faith of millions? Moreover, from a secular democratic perspective, which enjoins respect for all religions, this amounts to hate speech! To the APSC representative’s factual reply that these were Ambedkar’s exact words and hence it amounted to accusing the ‘founding father’ of hate speech, the reaction was apoplectically predictable: ‘Supplanters!’

 

Now there were some patent liberals on the show too. One such patent liberal, who writes regular columns in English newspapers and periodicals, and who clearly hadn’t read a word of Ambedkar, while defending the study circle’s right to free speech and circulation of ideas, and condemning the ban (which in the meantime has been revoked), expressed a hint of generic doubt whether it was at all possible that Ambedkar wrote such a thing. I term this a ‘generic’ doubt and not merely a speculative one because it was expressed, not in view of an uncertainty as to what was written on the coarse pages of a nearly eighty year old book, but irrespective of it. The APSC’s pamphlet, Ambedkar’s writings in their many editions and all such material evidence were there for everyone to see, but they appeared powerless before the intractable difficulty – how was such a thing possible?

The general observation I draw from the above example is that Indian democracy today, while sweeping up the right wing hectoring tone and the liberal tremolo, seeks a greater normative enunciation. This enunciation does not anymore take place on behalf of a people (a demos) with a real history of struggle for freedom, equality and justice or of a formal-legal spirit instituted at a particular historical moment (the republican moment in Indian history, for instance). Rather, it takes place on behalf of its own ideal image, an image so dear to the televisual media. The ideal image is really ideal because it is increasingly emptied of any historical content; tendentially speaking, the norm of democracy is absolute and self-fulfilling.

Hence, it is a matter of common incredulity for the different (otherwise adversarial) personalities on the aforementioned show that anyone – the APSC, in this case – can doubt that the question of democracy is settled. That such a doubt is expressed in the name of a ‘founding father’ of democracy makes the matter even more vexed. So the functioning, whether brutally or delicately, of the norm must ensure that the ‘founding father’ is emptied of his historical content. And if someone insists on reminding us of his real words, sticking obdurately to the coarse, dusty surfaces of the archives of history, then such reality must be ‘supplanted’.

 

The second – In his detailed exposition and criticism of Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Navayana’s annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste published in April 2015 in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Rajmohan Gandhi definitely doesn’t seem to take the question of democracy as settled. He is evidently far removed from the dull regime of the image of democracy, emptied out of the density and contradictoriness of history. In democracy, there is still something left to historically think about and reconcile; not everything is ‘patent’.

Yet, it doesn’t take long to see that Rajmohan Gandhi is conducting his granulated historical investigation of Arundhati Roy’s claims under duress. He can’t really understand why Roy has stirred up the Ambedkar-Gandhi debate in her introduction, unless it is to gratuitously demolish Gandhi. A strange ring to the query, ‘What does Arundhati Roy want?’! Rajmohan Gandhi offers an arresting image for Arundhati Roy’s ‘symptom’: she can’t give up erecting ‘verbal barricades’, she can’t bear it that a profound political and social question be settled. She is so driven that, forget Gandhi, even Ambedkar is not good enough for Roy; she finds fault with him too (Ambedkar’s attitude to tribals is subjected to her scrutiny). So the last paragraph of Rajmohan Gandhi’s depressingly lucid piece reads: ‘If Roy knew what she wants for India, she should drop hints for a path to the future while she hops and skips on what she claims is historical ground. Scattering dubious "findings" of failings in founding fathers is not good enough.’¹

 

A supple arranger of figures of thought and speech has made it possible that the protagonist and antagonist of Roy’s contrarian theatre can enter into a historical partnership and institutional camaraderie. Hence, we read ‘founding fathers’ in the above and it is as if Ambedkar and Gandhi stare down with a shared bewilderment (and possibly indulgence, since they are ‘patently’ great men) from their respective eternities at Roy’s worldly intransigence. In my view, Rajmohan Gandhi’s intellectual charm depresses in the end because of its utter conformity to the institutional norm that controls and evaluates all historical enquiry with a political pertinence.

But institutions, including the institution of those who institute, the ‘founding fathers’, are themselves results of historical appropriation, which always means expropriation in another site of history. Unless this precarious balance sheet becomes their concern, the likes of Rajmohan Gandhi will continue to provide a kind of intellectual nobility to the otherwise vulgar normativity of a modern ritual culture – a culture that mumbles-to-screams the same words and formulae again and again (and not just on television): Democracy, Citizen, the Public, Rule of Law, Sanctity of Constitution, Founding Fathers...

In what is to follow, I want to argue three positions, one building on the other. First, B.R. Ambedkar wrote, spoke and thought from within the difficult element of real historical contradictions. This he did without taking recourse to the false sovereignty and neutrality of the institutional ‘scholar’ – though he was one par excellence. But why do we need to say it with a kind of institutional, which is to say, brahmanical concupiscence? It’s like having to say, Plato, Rousseau, Einstein... were good scholars!

The second position I want to argue is that Ambedkar was able to extract from the thickness of history an absolute idea of democracy as ‘axiomatic’ egalitarian human worth. Such an absolute idea, by its ontological radicality, defies any normative grasp of its true intensity. And the third position I want to make manifest is that an all purposive search for constitution of sovereign power, for norms of exercise of power, in Ambedkar’s thinking, must be consistent with the intensity of axiomatic equality – though no sovereignty, no law or norm can be, as it were, equal to the intensity of equality. The three positions I will call, ‘contradiction’, ‘affirmation’ and ‘reservation’.

 

Contradiction: Just about two months before the first Republic Day of India, B.R. Ambedkar, on 25 November 1949, said the following words to the Constituent Assembly as part of a debate on the third reading of the Draft Constitution: ‘On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality... We must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment, or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has laboriously built up.’² Unlike the dominant tendency of our age to produce democracy as a commodity and make the Constitution its triumphal and divinized brand image, Ambedkar speaks of the Constitution as a purposive and collective act of his generation confronted from within by their historical ‘life of contradictions’.

 

In the earlier part of this address, Ambedkar had said that some of his generation had done their best to make a ‘good’ constitution. But nothing is settled with the constitution. On the contrary, everything must be re-evaluated and re-oriented in light of, indeed, the ‘norm’ of the constitution. But the norm, in Ambedkar’s assessment, is a finite historical index of an infinite axiomatic task. We will unravel the meaning of ‘axiom’ a little later. Here it is enough to point towards Ambedkar’s republican sobriety, even sombreness, since according to him, the present constitutional act of the Constituent Assembly was a living response to the exigencies of a time of ‘contradictions’, not to sovereignly master the latter, but to find a consistent way through them.

A part of the way, no doubt, has to be found within the finitude and discipline of the constitutional ‘norm’. The subjective site of this norm is something like ‘constitutional morality’, a rare subjective accomplishment of certain generations of rare social epochs (Ambedkar will quote examples from George Grote of such generations and epochs in his 4 November 1948 speech to the Constituent Assembly, ancient Greek democracy being one example). However, the point is that while some contemporary liberal-minded intellectuals highlight this part of Ambedkar’s philosophy as a constitutional-moral recipe for the ideal Indian citizen, their gaze collapses when met with Ambedkar’s prescription (to be found in an essay called ‘A Plea to the Foreigner’) that a constitution must also reflect the actually existing pre-constituted contradictions of a society.

Here Ambedkar emulates the tradition of post-revolutionary French thinkers for whom a constitution emerges from the dialectic of historical forces rather than being an immaculate document of norm and law. The mere constitutional moralist disavows both the destructive and formative potential of the ‘life of contradictions’. The consequences of this dimension of Ambedkar’s thought will be drawn out in the section called ‘Reservation’.

 

Before ending this part of the essay, I would like to bring up an equivocity within the word ‘democracy’, an etymological curiosity pointed out by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. If ‘democracy’ unpacks into demos + kratos in the original Greek (demokratia), then it means that the demos, people, are in some kind of conjunction with kratos, power. But if ‘demos + kratos’ is not the same as ‘demos + arche’, if democracy is not ‘demarche’ (as in ‘oligarchy’ or ‘anarchy’), then the people are not necessarily the principle (arche) and element of power. There is something different between the brutal, finite fact of people having power and the autochthonous, infinite idea of people giving birth to power. Of course, this heterogeneity between people and power we call ‘government’.

We accept the contingency of the governmental logic, we obsess with it; we, de facto, praise this contingency as our modern political destiny. Some of our more refined political minds – Partha Chatterjee is an example – hollow out from the terrain of government figures of social counter-conduct, improvised counter-narratives of disobedience. But these admirable exercises, while plumbing a historical depth of popular political life otherwise completely flattened out by the current dogma of democracy=administration, are still beholden to the historical realism of understanding democracy as a finite, if vertiginous, affair of power and counter-power, normativity and ab-normativity. In my view, very early on, in 1927, B.R. Ambedkar had already raised the stakes of the question of democracy by affirming it as an infinite and axiomatic truth.

 

Affirmation: In 1927, during the Mahad Satyagraha, it was imperative that Ambedkar persuade the large number of untouchable – and caste-Hindu – satyagrahis present that the age-old persecution of the lower castes by the upper castes, the ‘untouchables’ by the ‘touchables’, was a finite reality, not an immemorial one. To do this, he could adopt the critical-analytic approach of the scholar, an approach he had mastered since his early days at Columbia University when he proposed an original thesis on the genesis of caste as a system. He could, and would, unleash the polemical force of a mass event at Mahad, take the battle to the upper castes’ own territory and publicly transgress their proscription that the untouchables must not drink from the Chavadar Tank, a public waterwork of the town. However, Ambedkar also opened a third way of addressing the people at Mahad – the way of, what I call, a militant axiomatician. What do I mean by this slightly barbarous characterization?

 

Well, on 19 March 1927, during the first phase of the Mahad Satyagraha, on the brink of the mass action by the untouchables (mostly Mahars) of drinking water from the tank, a finite step towards ending the finite but long, too long history of brahmanical hierarchy, Ambedkar declared, ‘...do not let yourselves suppose that the Satyagraha Committee has invited you to Mahad merely to drink the water of the Chavadar Lake... It is not as if drinking of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal... We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality.’³

Virtually for the first time in Indian history, a decision to institute ‘the norm of equality’ is announced, by dint of which economic and social equality must be pursued and political democracy must protect and support this pursuit. But all this because, in the first place, we declare that human beings are equal, an assertion for which there can never be any definitive proof. Hence, we must find the militant courage to declare equality axiomatically. And once we, for the first time, openly declare this new axiom against the hypocrisy of the brahman, who pretends to find spurious proof and evidence of the untouchable’s inferiority but actually conceals that he too is an axiomatician, a reactionary one, the constitutional and pragmatic tasks of really existing democracy can begin.

Ambedkar’s egalitarian enthusiasm in 1927 and his republican sombreness in 1949 reach us in the present as a double articulation of the message that the Constitution is not an infinite and immortal entity; but it can provide a kind of restricted normative access to an infinite idea or truth. So it is an obvious travesty if we, as hegemons of contemporary democracy, direct popular passion towards the restricted part of our political being and not towards the courage and enthusiasm intrinsic to the infinite part. At the same time we cannot escape the concrete, nearly operational, question that exactly at what point and declension of our norms, laws and instrumentalities does the force of the infinite idea that Ambedkar called ‘equality’ pass? When and how is equality ‘enforced’ as the real kratos of our existing demos? Which part of our constitutional and normative life must be reserved for the divisive and emancipatory experience of the egalitarian axiom?

 

Reservation: First let me clarify the premise for this section: the declaration of democracy-as-equality as an infinite idea implies that the idea cannot be saturated or personified by any corporation. To this extent, neither traditional religion with its ‘spiritual’ corporations called ‘castes’ – which according to Ambedkar were nothing but organized ‘gangs’ legitimized by atrocious books like Manusmriti making Hinduism, indeed, a ‘veritable chamber of horrors’⁴ – nor modern nationhood with its latest dumbed down version of the country as a perpetual boardroom meeting of stakeholders, can meet the challenge of thinking democracy as an event. Though ‘event’ is not Ambedkar’s word, in this respect he thinks in greater proximity to the polemicists and the philosophers of the French Revolution than his illustrious American teacher, John Dewey. For the revolutionary thinkers of France – Abbe Sieyes would be a paradigmatic case – the new nation was a flickering form not reducible to any of the three ‘estates’ or corporations.

 

The whole point was that the terminology of the ‘estates’ was anachronistic because the Third Estate, alternatively dignified as the People who constituted the true Nation, was precisely not countable as one of the corporations of society. The people were affirmed as uncountable, actually infinite because the sense of the people was that it was an act of creation, an event of scrambling all the codes and calculations of pre-existent, finite corporate bodies. The ‘people’ are thus always written in unintelligible letters in a language yet to be read. And, most importantly, the demos happens rarely but decisively, such that none of the instruments of kratos can quite master this flickering event, call it People or Nation.

Yet, for the architect of the Constitution between 1948 and 1950, the event of a people was a profound political and social enigma, the consequences of which we live out up to the present without quite grasping their lineaments. Let me try to explain; one may say that B.R. Ambedkar, without getting mired in metaphysics, could either take the event of a people as a kind of leap of faith or discount it as poetic fiction. Having done one of the two, he could get on with the hard job of writing the constitution in absolutely intelligible language.

However, Ambedkar was militant enough to wager that only an ‘event’ in the sense we have indicated, could provide the true force for a new constitution; at the same time he was materialist enough to not accept any such event as outside the play of real social contradictions. Now on the latter point, how could Ambedkar, on the one hand not carry the resonance of Mahad’s revolutionary enthusiasm, and on the other, not retain the republican sombreness that refused to let the reality of a ‘life of contradictions’ be sublimated into an event (or revolution)?

 

In his 25 November 1949 speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar expressed his surprise that the assembly had elected him to the drafting committee; he had initially entered the assembly only with the intention of safeguarding the rights of the Scheduled Castes.⁵ I don’t think anyone alleges that Ambedkar ever compromised his constitutional universalism in favour of any sort of corporate representation. Some rather wonder whether in being an opponent of corporate particularism his universalist standpoint became a statism. Of course, those who today ritually repeat the epithet of ‘founding fathers’ have no difficulty in imagining that these dextrous fathers created the state as a super-corporation. India Inc. and all such mediocre fantasies.

I am, however, convinced that Ambedkar never ceased putting the Constitution he took such a large part in writing, to the test of an event of equality. No one could be sure that such an event had decisively taken place, that modern post-colonial Indian history had experienced any true revolution – but what someone like Ambedkar could do was to wager that such an event was taking place even as he and others were writing the constitution. In a kind of present continuous tense and in the mode of simultaneity, the constitution, even as it is being written, must test its normativity, its intelligibility, by the measure of the exceptional event that pushes all norm and sense to the limit and beyond it. The name of this test is ‘reservation’, a word that for a large number of Indians, spells danger, even the end of the intelligibility of democracy.

 

I think the test since its inception during the intense debates on reservation in the Constituent Assembly, has reached the heart of our present with at least three demands:

1. The first demand is that we face up to the reality that the question of democracy is not settled. The contemporary consensus that the time of the ‘primitive accumulation’ of democracy is over and now it is the time to market and capitalize ‘brand democracy’, is actually the command issued by interested parties/corporations/gangs. Confronted with either the renewal of an absolute democratic axiom of equality (opposed to the equality of stakeholders) or the possibility of new axioms and events in the future for which even the normative name ‘democracy’ might not be adequate, corporations grow dizzy and preach love and hatred of democracy in the same breath.⁶ Ambedkar’s test, at the republican moment, was how to make the Constitution reflect the exceptional intensity of the event which is happening simultaneously with the constitutional gesture. How to fix that gesture at the point of its greatest dynamism and indeterminacy? This could be called, from Ambedkar’s time to now, an intellectual demand to not give up on a collective test of thought.

2. However, at the level of democratic functioning, the position on ‘reservation’ as constitutional policy demands that along with all the logic of future social equalization through special provisions for Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes and other minorities, we are able to think reservations as a constitutional opportunity for exercising power (kratos) for those who have no power, here and now. Ambedkar was often impatient with the formal discourse of ‘capacity-correction’ through educational provisions while increasing the sphere of rights. He pointed out that even during British rule, the untouchables had some formal rights as well as some education (especially those in the British Army, like his father). But in real brahmanical society, they couldn’t exercise those rights. Which is to say, they couldn’t exercise power because the irony of formal, well intentioned rights is that in their exercise rights become power. The ‘life of contradictions’, thus, must be forced into the field of an active reversal of age-old power relations. The Ambedkarite demand, then, to our age of sanctimonious democratic formalism is to put ourselves through a test of irony against nursing the comfortable ‘myth of good intentions’.

3. It is widely known that the Constituent Assembly proposed legislative reservations to be implemented for only the first ten years of the Indian republic. Today it is common to lament the continuation of reservations as either evidence of the ineptness of apparatuses of implementation (kratos) or the errant inconsistency of the policy itself in relation to the formal equality of all citizens (demos) without exception. What is paranoically suppressed is the historical truth that reservation was a compromise forced by Gandhi on Ambedkar in 1932 when the latter successfully demanded from the British separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes and the former successfully crushed the move by threatening to literally die before letting such a thing happen. The compromise of reserved seats in the provincial legislatures that was reached was essentially the suppression of the intensity of separation; which was not just the separation of the minority from majoritarian Hindu society, but the separation of Hindu-Indian society from itself.

 

In my view, every time the question of reservation comes up, it is the suppressed intensity of Indian society’s self-separation that manifests both as enthusiasm for social justice through the exceptional measure and as rage at the absolute privilege of the exceptional minoritarian subject.

But we cannot fail to see that the majoritarian reaction also draws its intensity from the divisive courage of the minorities who once upon a time, from the end of 1920s to early 1930s, had started to say, ‘All human beings are equal. So we divide our times as a political consequence of this universal axiom.’ This axiomatic speech was cut-off in mid-sentence; but is it possible that the limited constitutional discourse reserved for the infinite axiomaticians of society remains enveloped by the infinity of the egalitarian axiom? Is it possibly that despite the corrosive consensual ‘democratic’ culture of our times, it also becomes the untimely hour when we subject ourselves to a test of courage and draw new divisive and emancipatory consequences from a speech which we were not allowed to fully hear once upon a time?

 

Footnotes:

1. See Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘Independence and Social Justice: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate’, Economic Political Weekly 1(15), 11 April 2015, p. 44.

2. See Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2009, p. 415.

3. See G. Aloysius, Ambedkar: Nation and Nationalism. Critical Quest, New Delhi, 2009, p. 64. It is noteworthy that Ambedkar asserted the direct axiomatic worth of human beings against the indirect, circuitous and speculative path of the saint-poets who sang of the equality of the brahmin and the shudra in the ‘eyes of God’. Only in an axiomatic, self-evident egalitarian basis can we divide the unequal constitution of the real world into its unjust reality and its aspiration to justice. ‘The value of man is axiomatic, self-evident; it does not come to him as the result of the gilding of Bhakti.’ See Dhananjay Keer’s citation from Ambedkar, op. cit., p. 109.

4. See B.R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. Thacker Publishers, Bombay, 1945, p. 307.

5. See Dhananjay Keer, op. cit., p. 413.

6. See Jacques Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy (trans. Steve Corcoran). Verso, London, 2006.