Iconoclast

Title: Iconoclast – A Reflective Biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Author: Anand Teltumbde
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093885
Pages: 676

Babasaheb Ambedkar is the architect of the Indian Constitution. He was also the figurehead of Dalit emancipation, rising from a low social and economic background to reach the topmost constitutional positions in the country. There have been numerous biographies of Ambedkar and precisely because of this, the author notes what is different in this book. It claims to follow Ambedkar’s approach of weighing facts on the touchstone of rationality and also to add reflections of the author to the story already told many times. The reflections are in the form of comments, questions and discussions on points deemed to be consequential to the lives of Dalits as well as others. Ambedkar defined himself as an iconoclast – a breaker of icons. It is hence ironic that he himself was elevated to the status of an idol in recent times. His writings are characterized by a direct, incisive, hard-hitting and combatant style. Anand Teltumbde is an engineering and management expert who turned to social work while employed in the highest management cadre of a central PSU. He is the husband of Ambedkar’s granddaughter. He was arrested in 2020 on the charge of instigating the Bhima-Koregaon violence and incarcerated for two years along with other urban naxals. The author is peeved at this and goes on a tirade accusing the Modi-led government of being fascist, authoritarian and totalitarian throughout the entire length of the book.

Ambedkar lived for the uplift of Dalits. His writings on Dalit causes may appear to be a one-sided narrative, declining to extend credit to others even when it is due. But his wisdom on public finance and political economy is unparalleled and out-of-the-box. His solution to the development of Indian agriculture is logical while sounding extraordinary. It was believed that the low productivity of land holdings was because of its small size. He showed that economic size of this land is not determined by the size in geographical area but by optimal provision of factors of production. A large surplus population was superficially engaged in agriculture with no capital. Ambedkar proposed India’s industrialization as a solution to its agricultural problems which would absorb surplus labour and generate savings to be ploughed back into agriculture. It is unfortunate that Jawaharlal Nehru could not see this truth even in 1951. There is no doubt that Ambedkar denounced Hindu society for casteism and the discrimination it heaped on the downtrodden people. Still, he notes in his essay ‘Castes in India’ that there is a deep cultural unity in Hindu society but this larger cultural unit is parcelled into bits by castes. However, the author challenges and negates this prudent observation. Ambedkar metaphorically compared Hindu society with a multi-storeyed tower with no stairs to connect one storey to the other. Each storey represented an individual caste. Teltumbde do modify this metaphor to a tower with five storeys, each housing innumerable castes in contention with each other.

This book covers the early work of Ambedkar in good detail, especially after completion of his education in the US and UK. A satyagraha was organized in Mahad for the use of Chowdar water tank for Dalits in 1927. This faithfully followed the Gandhian model of nonviolence and carried a portrait of Gandhi on the dais. This agitation failed. Babasaheb opposed separate electorates to Muslims in his minority report submitted to the Simon Commission in 1928. He suggested general electorates with reserved seats for Muslims and Dalits. The author narrates how the Congress mainstream ignored the wails of Dalits right from the 1920s. A committee headed by Motilal Nehru drafted a Swaraj constitution in 1928 and it did not provide representation for Dalits. Congress did not even invite any Dalit organisation to discuss on it (p.143). This was also the time that convinced Babasaheb that untouchability was practised by other religions too. During one of their journeys to Aurangabad, Ambedkar and his team visited the Daulatabad fort nearby. They washed their faces and feet on the pavement in the fort with water from a tank outside the monument. As soon as they did this, enraged Muslims confronted and abused them menacingly for daring to pollute the tank. Babasaheb noted that it could have led to a riot in the town (p.192).

The 1930s were the formative decade in Ambedkar’s career, bringing out the constitutional expert in him. He attended all three Round Table Conferences (RTC) convened to settle contentious issues before an anticipated constitution of India coming into force in 1935. He shifted his focus in the RTCs from untouchability as a socio-religious issue to a political question. He used the opportunity to internationalize the problem of untouchability. The British favoured him at that time because it justified the continued presence of their rule. Closer to the actual transfer of power, the issue ceased to be useful for their interests and they discarded the issues of caste/untouchability as well as Ambedkar himself. Gandhi attended only one RTC and Teltumbde observes that he was ill-equipped to participate in it. When grave constitutional and communal points were raised in the conference, he had only platitudes to offer, rather than views or suggestions of a constructive character. In the end, Babasaheb was victorious in getting adequate representation for Dalits in legislatures. However, he had to compromise on the issue of separate electorates while yielding to Gandhi’s fast unto death against this attempt to divide the Hindu society. In the 1937 elections, he was elected to the Bombay provincial assembly. He tried to unite Dalits and workers with communist support. He backed the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan acknowledging the validity of their claim that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and the two cannot live peacefully together.

Ambedkar reached the pinnacle of his achievements in the 1940s. He was nominated to the Viceroy’s Executive Council in the war period. However in 1945, his party AISCF was trounced by Congress in the elections which won 123 out of 151 seats reserved for SCs while the former could win only two. This convinced the British that Congress was the true representative of depressed classes and Babasaheb’s bargaining power fell. His memoranda to the Cabinet Mission of 1946 regarding safeguards for SCs were ignored. Ambedkar did not find a place in the interim cabinet and Congress’ Jagjivan Ram was included in his place. The colonial rule transformed the rebel in Ambedkar into a statesman during the war period and then he was side-lined when the British deal with the Congress was fructified. The author alleges that Gandhian strategy then embalmed his as a ‘modern Manu’ (p.338). It was with this intention that he was co-opted as the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution. Author accuses Babasaheb of then endearing himself to the Constituent Assembly as an ultra-nationalist even though he had opposed Congress’ nationalist movement till then. He who had voiced for separate electorates for SCs would oppose it later and accept joint electorates (p.333). Teltumbde then argues that all crucial decisions were taken without involving Ambedkar. Out of the various subcommittees of the Constituent Assembly, Nehru presided over three panels, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad headed two each, strategically controlling all decisions of the Assembly. Babasaheb’s task was alleged to be limited to document decisions in constitutional language.

A great contribution of this book is the inferences it provides readers regarding Ambedkar’s relations with Hinduism. It is true that he renounced it and termed it as the sole reason for oppression of the Dalits. What he fought tooth and nail in this equation was the caste system. When he opted for conversion, he chose Buddhism which some scholars say was nothing more than Hindu Protestantism in the early stages. Babasaheb was emotionally as well as culturally anchored tightly to Mother India. During Partition, he called for the division of Kashmir along Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist lines and the Muslim areas were to be given to Pakistan if they wished so and proved in a plebiscite. However, he declared that the Hindus of Jammu and Buddhists of Ladakh belonged to ‘our religion and culture’ and to protect them is not communalism (p.427). The author criticises Ambedkar for Islamophobia on his warnings in the Rajya Sabha against the possibility of Pakistan teaming up with other Islamic countries against India. He even feigns to point fingers at Babasaheb for not toeing the author’s line of thinking. Ambedkar accepted the two-nation theory but did not trace its roots in the Brahminic aspirations to recreate their hegemonic control (p.325). But Teltumbde does this with a ridiculous set of arguments that has no substance. His criticism of Babasaheb is unnecessarily sharp so as to put the great man in a bad light. He corrects Ambedkar himself even on the name of his ancestral village to Ambadava and claims that Ambedkar had wrongly spelt it as Ambawade! The author further arraigns him to be of having a ‘faulty understanding of socialism and communism’. Moreover, strategic incoherence is alleged to be a trait on his person (p.425). This is in spite of Ambedkar’s own justification for the occasional inconsistency in his words and actions with the rhetoric that consistency was the virtue of the ass. This biography is not only ‘reflective’, it is actually critical. The author goes after later followers of Ambedkarism too, because they packaged him into an icon endowed with infallibility. Any view or act that does not reflect devotion to him could be blasphemy. This is contrary to Ambedkar’s opinion of the relationship of great people to ordinary ones. This leads us to doubt whether this book is an attempt to strike hard on the blind followers.

What is evident in this book is the inveterate hostility Congress under Nehru displayed towards Ambedkar. He was defeated from a Bombay constituency to reach the Constituent Assembly. He then managed to enter the Assembly from East Bengal. Gandhi then intervened to call a truce to utilize Babasaheb’s talent in drafting the Constitution. He entered Nehru’s cabinet as law minister but had to resign soon. Again, he was defeated in the elections by Congress candidates. He was then elected to the Rajya Sabha. Probably because of being fed up with all these manoeuvres and side-linings, Ambedkar exploded in the Rajya Sabha that he was merely a hack and made the Constitution against his will. He said he was quite prepared to burn it because ‘it does not suit anybody’ (p.437). What he meant was that decisions were already taken by a clique in the Congress party and then he was forced to translate them into constitutional language by the drafting committee. It is also to be remembered that Nehru awarded himself the ‘Bharat Ratna’ in a most petty act of aggrandizement while ignoring the Babasaheb, who was awarded the highest civilian honour posthumously only in 1990 by V P Singh. The author narrates the mental conflicts Ambedkar had to undergo in converting to another religion and to choose Buddhism for it. He ascribed rationalism and scientific spirit in a religion which he deemed to be Navayana Buddhism in contrast to Mahayana and Vajrayana. Teltumbde claims that transmigration of soul from one body to another is a Buddhist belief which Ambedkar denied. This claim is doubtful because it is well known that Buddhism does not recognize the soul while karma is believed to be transmigrating. The author also confirms that Buddhism did not abolish casteism and in fact, castes are present in the societies of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal. Howsoever intensely Babasaheb detested Hinduism, his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks when he declared that he was renouncing it before the huge crowd at Deeksha Bhumi in Nagpur.

The book is divided into seven phases of his life and a posthumous phase is added to explain how the Ambedkar icon was turned into a divine avatar in the later decades while the political organisations he spawned splintered and crumbled one after the other. Ambedkar paid little heed to organisation. His parties rallied mainly on his charisma. When he was no more, his shoes proved too big for his successors who turned to fratricidal warfare that led to the collapse of all factions. In the 1960s, Congress began to woo Dalits as a vote bank. They lured its leaders with power and the masses with the Ambedkar icon as a proxy for their identity aspirations. Some of the militant organisations like the Dalit Panthers which was modelled on the Black Civil Rights movements in the US and came into being in the 1970s, denounced the Ambedkarite vision of using only constitutional methods to resolve grievances and openly allied with the far-left rebels. It is to be kept in mind that Ambedkar was a staunch opponent of communism and its class-based theories of political action.

At 676 pages, the book is a bit too large, but the reading process is hassle-free and enjoyable, despite the occasional political outbursts of the author accusing the present Indian government under Modi to be autocratic. This political bias seems to have turned him into a cynic who is unable to find anything good even in the case of the protagonist of the book – none other than Babasaheb himself. Considering the fierce criticism levelled against him on all areas of his work – social, political, constitutional and legislative – one wonders whether this book is part of a cancel culture. Ambedkar’s remarks on the desirability of women entering politics and the relationship of several women politicians with Nehru given on page 477 are indeed shocking. If you respect Ambedkar, several parts of this book would make you uncomfortable by pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions and even personal quirks in his character and life-work. The book includes more than 200 pictures covering various phases of his life. This effectively makes it a pictorial biography. However, many photographs are group photos involving many people. After completing the book, what is obvious and standing out is the personal stamp of the author, particularly his prejudices.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star