Dr. Ambedkar dismissed his contribution to the Indian Constitution as 'hack work'. He knew that India had chosen
1) to be unitary rather than Federal. Thus there was no 'dual sovereignty' and no need for the Supreme Court to act as an arbiter when the Central legislature came into conflict with a State legilslature
2) to follow the Westminster model with supremacy for the 'Crown in Parliament'. Interestingly, the Pakistani Supreme Court decided that this just meant the Governor General or President could dissolve the legislature and rule by ordinance. The situation in India was different because Nehru commanded a big majority. Still, at the time of the passing of the First Amendment, the mood of the House was captured by Frank Anthony who said 'if this country has to be ruled by a Dictator, let that Dictator be Nehru.'
3) the Judiciary relied on the Executive to enforce its judgments. It had no independent means of doing so. Soldiers did take an oath to uphold the Constitution but that Constitution could be changed, suspended or abrogated. Those calling on army officers to disobey unconstitutional orders could be arrested and jailed.
Anand Teltumbde, who doesn't know the law, is married to a descendant of Dr. Ambedkar. But he is so utterly without political importance that he was locked up for years on what many suspect to be bogus charges.
The even more useless Harsh Mander writes thus of him in Scroll.in
We requested Teltumbde to reflect on what the Constitution has meant for India’s most dispossessed peoples,
i.e. those with low productivity. Raising productivity means people can possess more. Dr. Ambedkar had two PhDs in Econ. He knew that India's problem was low productivity. Raise it by all and every means including getting rid of serfdom and bars on occupational or geographical mobility.
and how much it has contributed to helping access their rights to a life of dignity and hope.
Constitutions have no magic powers. Raising productivity is the only path forward. Sadly, the Indian legal system reduces total factor productivity because it is utterly dysfunctional. This is also true of dynastic 'Socialist' parties.
His conclusions are sobering, scathing and unsparing.
They are stupid. He is a stupid man.
Teltumbde sees an immense gap between the vision laid out in the Preamble
Talk is cheap. No 'Preamble' is going to say 'this country is a shithole. Let us make it even more shitty.'
and the realities of India’s present. “Liberty is under attack.
by Naxals and Jihadis.
Economic inequality is worse now than it was even under colonial rule.
Nonsense! There were plenty of Maharajas with sovereign immunity back then who paid no taxes. Zamindars were permitted to impose illegal cesses on their tenants. Nowadays, even a Minister can be sent to jail for rape or murder or tax evasion.
Fraternity has been shredded by rising communal hatred
That happened in 1947. Ambedkar's pal, Mandal, was foolish enough to become Jinnah's Law minister just as Ambedkar became Nehru's Law minister. But Mandal had to run away to India.
and growing caste consciousness under the revivalist Hindutva movement.
Hindutva is against caste. Nobody complained when Modi- an OBC- was the jajman at the pran prathista ceremony at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
Justice – social, economic, and political – remains elusive.
The Judiciary is utterly shit.
The very foundation of our democracy feels dangerously fragile”.
My guess is that if no party gets a clear majority in 2030, then Scheduled Castes will lose reservations. Ambedkar had stripped Muslim Dalits of affirmative action. Prakash Ambedkar argues that reservations should have been abolished long ago. Instead they keep getting renewed every ten years.
Teltumbde argues that we should not be constrained from constructively critiquing the Constitution because at this moment its very survival is gravely threatened by the Hindutva project of dismantling and rewriting the constitution to establish a Hindu Rashtra.
It was Nehru who barred Muslims who had fled across the border in panic from returning. Moreover, the Custodian of Evacuee Property could act upon some supposed intention to leave the country.
With BR Ambedkar, he is convinced that a Hindu Rashtra would be the greatest calamity for India.
if the productive become more productive, the unproductive will weep bitter tears.
Unlike the critique of the Constitution of the reactionary far-right, he affirms the emancipatory promise of the Preamble – liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice.
Cow Protection is a Directive Principle.
Yet, he sees these as values the Constitution pledged but has failed to deliver.
Because it has no magic powers.
“Yes”, he says boldly, “the Constitution is flawed…but dismantling it without first building a genuinely democratic and pro-people alternative would be to destroy the last remaining legal and moral structure within which the struggle for justice can still be waged”.
This useless tosser can't dismantle shit. A genuinely democratic India would have no truck with reservations for useless tossers.
His treatise focuses specifically on Dalits, who have for millennia been oppressed by structures of caste, and barred from education and dignified work.
He wasn't. But he is still a useless pile of shite.
But they apply more generally to all oppressed and marginalised communities who constitute the Indian republic.
They are marginalised because they have low productivity. Why not help them become more productive instead of pretending that a piece of paper can have magical powers?
Teltumbde observes that on the one hand, perhaps Dalits feel the greatest emotional connection among all Indians to the Constitution.
Mahars- maybe. But non Mahar or Jatav Dalits aren't happy that affirmative action is monopolized by a 'creamy layer' of dynasts from the higher Dalit sub-castes.
This is because its writing was led by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar who
married a Brahmin Doctor
they venerate for leading the struggles for their liberation from the centuries-old bondages of caste.
He worked for the Brits. Sadly, they fucked off and thus he and his pal Mandal declined in political importance. Jagjivan Ram, who- as Wavell discovered to his surprise- was smart and highly productive rose and rose.
Yet, he believes that the Constitution has failed resoundingly in fulfilling its emancipatory promise for Dalits,
Which is like saying 'J.K Rowling has failed resoundingly in turning me into a boy wizard no matter how often I tug my little wand.'
arguably more than for any other community. It has contributed to the rise of a small Dalit middle-class.
Kanshi Ram's dynamite idea was to organize them. But, it was Mayawati who built the caste-coalitions which got her the top job in UP. Nowadays, smart Dalits join the RSS and then switch over to the BJP.
But this small class shares with the large mass of Dalits only “a history but not a present”.
Because it has zero interest in raising the productivity of the 'large mass'. Ambedkar should have demanded support for Jatav millionaires in Kanpur so that India could take the lead in exporting leather goods. Instead he converted to Buddhism- which spread untouchability to Japan. Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables. Japan has untouchables but no Brahmins.
The overwhelming majority of Dalits continue to endure the caste stigma and oppression that has been their fate for millennia, living in “a vast, submerged reality of suffering and despair”.
While this dude was living large as a Professor of useless shite.
Dalits, he points out, form a quarter of India’s population, if we include Dalit Christians
whom the Brits had barred from affirmative action
and Dalit Muslims.
whom Dr. Ambedkar barred from affirmative action.
Their population, exceeding 320 million, would make them the third-largest “nation” in the world, larger than the combined population of 150 of the least populous countries on the planet. However, their wide dispersal across the country has meant that – like Muslims – they rarely form a numerical majority.
Amdedkar & Mandal- following Churchill's advise in his infamous 1931 speech- thought Dalits should ally with Muslims. That didn't work out too well.
Teltumbde rejects the premise of some Hindutva intellectuals that the British rule created caste. But, he avers that colonial rule fundamentally transformed caste. Before the British, caste was a dynamic, localised system.
This continued to be the case. The Brits were constantly being petitioned to recognize such and such sub-caste as 'Kshatriya'.
The British began counting and documenting caste.
They held a census.
This, quoting Arjun Appadurai, didn’t just describe caste – it produced it as a rigid, bureaucratised, institutionalised hierarchy, solidifying boundaries that were previously contextual and fluid.
Nonsense! Courts decided which caste (and therefore which customary law) applied in particular cases. This had nothing to do with the census. What was new was the 'martial race theory' which excluded Mahars from recruitment into the Army.
This colonial approach, Teltumbde states, continues to reverberate in India’s social and political life.
The 'colonial approach' involved creating legislatures and holding free and fair elections. India stuck with that approach. Myanmar didn't.
He also observes that paradoxically, colonial rule also opened some emancipatory pathways for Dalits outside the rigid caste structures of Hindu kingdoms.
Hindu Princes financed Dr. Ambedkar's education. But he was useless and thus they could not employ him.
They found non-caste employment for the first time in the military
till the Brits decided they were not 'martial'
and railways, and were able to access education and stable employment. Babasaheb himself was the son of a British military soldier.
But could not himself become such a soldier. No wonder he supported the Brits against Nehru & Gandhi.
Teltumbde importantly reminds us that until Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian National Congress – dominated as it was by English-educated elites,
Gandhi & Nehru were 'English educated'
landlords, and emerging capitalists – tended to steer clear of calling for reforms in caste, untouchability and the status of women.
It also tended to steer clear of demanding the legalization of sodomy. Sad.
It later made space for moderate reforms such as widow remarriage, child marriage, and even the abolition of untouchability, but never the annihilation of caste.
The Muslim League did achieve the annihilation of Hinduism and Buddhism in areas it came to control. Sadly, J.N Mandal and millions of Namasudras had to run away from East Pakistan.
It was Gandhi who brought fighting untouchability into the core of the Congress agenda from 1916 onward.
Gandhi's Mummy told him 'if an untouchable bumps into you, go bump into a Muslim boy' thus transferring the contagion. His politics consisted in bumping into Dalits when the Muslims were annoyed with him and bumping into Muslims when the Dalits told him to fuck the fuck off.
Particularly impactful was his movement for Dalit temple entry.
He failed. Why? He was stupid and ignorant. The pundits at Vaikom defeated him in argument. In any case, there was an easy workaround for the road entry ban- viz. convert to Christianity or Islam.
The limitation of Gandhi’s approach was that
he had shit for brains. Dalits wanted higher productivity and thus higher income. Gandhi was against productivity.
while he and the Congress looked at untouchability as a moral question and a social sin to be atoned for by caste Hindus,
i.e. yet more virtue signalling
they did not frame it as a systemic injustice that required political solutions.
Economic solutions. Politics is just hot air.
This conflicted with Ambedkar’s demands for separate electorates.
i.e. more power for himself so he could cuddle with the Muslim League under the benevolent gaze of Winston Churchill. Nehru would have called Ambedkar's bluff. Dalits were a minority everywhere. If they voted for the wrong candidate, they would be killed.
Gandhi went on a fast unto death against separate electorates because he feared this would break Hindu unity and also encourage the Muslim League to make a similar demand.
The Muslims already had separate electorates. Mander has shit for brains.
The compromise in the Poona Pact of 1932 was for reserved seats for Dalits within the general electorate rather than separate electorates. Ambedkar was dissatisfied with this because he
knew Congress 'Harijans' would get all the reserved seats
was convinced that Dalits formed a separate community from caste Hindus like the Muslims,
But Muslims were in a majority in parts of India. There can be a Pakistan. There can't be a 'Dalitistan'.
and therefore only separate electorates would protect their political and social interests.
J.N. Mandal protected his Namasudra community so well that they and he had to run away to India.
Gandhi followed this with a temple entry movement
Ambedkar started it in 1927 though there were separate pre-existing movements in some parts of India.
which incensed the conservative Hindu, but this still was not a movement for political empowerment of the Dalits.
Ambedkar's movement was nothing else. It wasn't the case that he personally liked visiting temples.
Teltumbde regards as the central flaw of the constitutional arrangements for Dalits to be that once again it stressed the abolition of untouchability rather than the annihilation of caste.
Get rid of caste by all means. That way merit alone will matter. There will be no reservations.
The Constituent Assembly was dominated by
the Congress Party. The Muslim League was excluded.
upper-caste, Western-educated elites, landlords, and capitalists, with limited participation from workers, peasants, or marginalised groups especially Dalits and Adivasis.
Also prostitutes and rent-boys were thin on the ground.
Ambedkar, a Dalit, was appointed to chair the Drafting Committee. Under his leadership, many provisions for advancing Dalit equity found their way into the Constitution, including the bans on untouchability and forced labour, and reservations in public employment and education. However, contrary to what Ambedkar had so forcefully advocated for in the 1930s, it did not outlaw caste and provide for separate Dalit electorates.
If you outlaw caste, there can't be any affirmative action. Mander has shit for brains.
In the debates in the Constituent Assembly, some members opposed caste-based reservations as incompatible with liberal democratic ideals and pointed to the risks of deepening social fragmentation. However, the alternate view prevailed, that legal equality without structural interventions like affirmative actions would be insufficient to dismantle entrenched caste hierarchies.
Reservations were a good thing because of factionalism in a 'segmentary society'. In other words, the Uncle opposed his Nephew's selection. The only way to keep both happy was to put in a Dalit so the upper-castes could say 'Politics is a dirty business. Leave it to the 'bhangis''. The odd thing was that Dalits often turned out to be smarter than upper-caste shitheads. Viceroy Wavell had a strong prejudice against the young Jagjivan Ram. Then he discovered that he was the only man in his Cabinet who understood his portfolio and could get things done. Had Ram been made PM in 1977, India would have followed the South Korean path of export-led growth. The biggest beneficiaries would be people who work with their hands. Their productivity would keep rising and thus their socio-economic situation would have improved. Even the lazy 'landlord' class would have had to change its ways and send its daughters into the factories and offices.
The Assembly unanimously voted for declaring untouchability unconstitutional and a punishable offense. Some members did question how untouchability could be eradicated without addressing the root problem – caste itself. This called to memory the fundamental disagreement between Babasaheb and Gandhi. Gandhi saw untouchability as a distortion of the caste system; Babasaheb insisted that untouchability was intrinsic to the caste system, and the caste system to the Hindu faith. Therefore untouchability could not be ended without ending caste.
i.e. ending Hinduism. But Jinnah was better at doing so. Sadly, Pakistanis don't hold Dalits in any very great esteem.
In the assembly, Pramatha Ranjan Thakur,
a barrister who had opposed the shithead J.N Mandal
great-grandson of Harichand Thakur, the founder of the Matua sect (the first Dalit reform movement) for instance, argued: “I do not understand how you can abolish untouchability without abolishing the very caste system. Untouchability is nothing but the symptom of the disease, namely, the caste system . . . Unless we can do away with the caste system altogether there is no use tinkering with the problem of untouchability superficially.”
Quit true. Get rid of caste for all and every official or legal purpose. Let there be a uniform civil code and no fucking reservations or affirmative action save on economic grounds.
A couple of other members raised similar objections. But Teltumbde points to Ambedkar’s telling silence in the Constituent Assembly on the critique that untouchability could not be abolished without dismantling caste – a position that he had so passionately espoused for most of his adult life – and describes this as a strategic compromise.
The alternative was to get rid of reserved seats. This was fine if you were smart and improved things for your voters. But Ambedkar wasn't smart. He should have been saying 'only productivity matters' rather than banging on about how Dalits were originally Buddhists.
Overruling the few dissenting voices, the Constituent Assembly unanimously passed the resolution to abolish untouchability and criminalise its practice. This resulted in Article 17 which states: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.” Hansa Mehta, one of the two women members of the drafting committee called this “the greatest thing that we have done,” a move that “posterity will be very, very proud of.”
Sadly, Hansa Mehta's hubby- who had asked her to abolish Death- died because his wife was too fucking mean to insist that the Constitution secure all Indian citizens the fundamental human right not to fucking die.
Was India’s failure to abolish untouchability a “failure foretold”?
This dude doesn't read what he himself writes. He just told us that the Constitution abolished untouchability.
Pointing to extensive evidence of the persistence of untouchability and violent caste discrimination in contemporary India, Teltumbde wonders at what he describes as a “failure foretold”. “How could the persistence of caste in independent India not have been foreseen by the galaxy of 300-odd stalwarts in the Constituent Assembly?” he asks.
How could the persistence of human beings in India be foretold by people who failed to abolish death?
Gandhi’s position that untouchability was a moral perversion, not intrinsic to Hinduism, and “his defence of the ideal of varna, albeit spiritualised and purged of birth-based inequality” is well-known. (Toward the end of his life, Gandhi had spoken more directly against caste discrimination).
Gandhi's stupidity and uselessness were well known. What mattered was whether he could get money for his crack-pot schemes.
But why did Jawaharlal Nehru, a self-avowed modernist, not challenge the caste system more vocally?
Because he was challenging lots of other stuff so fucking vocally that the hindlegs of any donkey in the vicinity fell off.
He did recognise caste to be a social evil and called instead for scientific temper and rationalism.
He had a temper. But he was shit at Science.
However, Teltumbde observes that he remained politically cautious indicating a deeper political calculus.
Hindus are the majority. Don't piss them off if you want to stay in power.
Possibly his fear was that caste was so pivotal an organising principle of Hindu life that directly attacking it might destabilise the emerging republic.
Nehru, in his auto-biography, reveals that Brahmin girls were not permitted by law to marry non-Brahmins. Thus when his youngest sister married a non-Brahmin Jain, she had to pretend to convert to Brahmoism. By contrast, when his daughter married a Parsi, the marriage was done according to Hindu rites. Parsis pointed out that this meant Indira was a concubine. Hindus laughed heartily. Feroze was a pauper of a 'ghar-jamai'. What mattered was that he wasn't Muslim. Mahatma Gandhi had broken up Vijaylaxmi's marriage to a Muslim. He even found a 'suitable' Brahmin boy for her to wed.
And Nehru was dealing with a significant section of the Congress leadership that was socially conservative and had internalised caste hierarchies.
Then he began to win general elections by a big margin. Congress needed him more than he needed Congress. Thus it had to accept his version of 'Socialism'. The sticking point was collectivization of agricultural land. Nehru realized that the soldier is the son of the kulak. He will kill you if you try to take his daddy's land away.
Teltumbde also points to the irony of the anxiety of many Dalit leaders that the abolition of caste might jeopardise their constitutional safeguards of reservations.
If no party has a majority in 2030, S.C Reservations won't be renewed. Each leader will say 'we wanted to give 150 percent reservation. That's why we refused to vote for renewal.' Muslims will be accommodated as OBC- unless that is already the case. Ambedkarites have shot themselves in the foot. They are small in number but very vocal on Social Media. This pisses off other Hindus.
Caste embedded itself further in the new republic with its intersections with class.
No. Endogamy continued but there was occupational and geographical diversification. Look at the Patels of Gujarat or Nadars of Tamil Nadu or Jats of UP.
The lower castes transformed into a rural proletariat.
No. They became landowning farmers keen to diversify into other industries or occupations.
The erstwhile Shudras became a class of rich farmers,
Some did. Most didn't unless they diversified or moved to urban areas.
which “not only accumulated economic power but also appropriated the ideological mantle of Brahmanism from the former upper-caste landlords, (whom they displaced) deploying it to dominate, discipline, and violently suppress Dalits”.
Nonsense! Pakistan has no fucking 'Brahmanism'. Upper-caste landlords can do what they like to their tenants. As for Christian Dalits in Pakistan- they can be executed for blasphemy if some villager makes a bogus allegation against them.
This, he observes, erupted from time to time in brutal atrocities.
He wants non-brutal atrocities. Why not tickle people to death rather than chop bits off them?
The constitutional order that formally guaranteed rights was
useless because rights without incentive compatible remedies are ineffective
unequal to the challenge of dismantling the caste structure within which such violence and largescale discrimination continued unabated.
Only by abolishing death can we prevent murder.
He points, likewise, to the continuance of the most abysmal forms of caste discrimination like manual scavenging
which, in Pakistan, is reserved, by law, for 'non-Muslims'. Interestingly, in 1948, Pakistan passed a law banning Hindu & Christian 'bhangis' from fleeing the country.
and bonded labour.
which has nothing to do with caste. On the other hand it is true that the Indian Constitution's failure to ban death has led to the death of over a billion bahishkrit people. This shows that Brahmins are very evil.
Teltumbde concludes that despite Article 17, untouchability remains entrenched in everyday life.
People are refusing to touch his pee-pee. Fuck you Brahmins! Fuck you very much!
The problem, he says, is that the Constitution banned untouchability but did not abolish caste itself.
It should have banned death and sexual reproduction.
In this way it allowed the social and institutional structures that sustain caste-based inequities, discrimination, violence and exclusions to persist.
What did so was following stupid policies which emphasized equity rather than the raising of productivity. Where productivity rises rapidly, caste disappears by itself.
The problem is further escalated because the state institutions created to enforce the law – the police, judiciary, and bureaucracy – are themselves deeply stained by caste prejudice and even hatred.
Why do OBCs dislike Dalits?
Their routine refusal to register cases, downgrading of offences, delays in trial, and sympathy for dominant caste perpetrators are not random failures; they become inevitable when
productivity is low. The highly productive have more money. They can use that money to get a better deal for themselves. Otherwise, they can emigrate and do even better for themselves.
caste endures and strengthens.
because productivity is low. Everybody wants a safe Government job doing useless shite.
“When the state machinery shares the worldview of those who uphold caste hierarchy, constitutional guarantees offer little relief to Dalits.
Low productivity means a 'zero-sum' worldview. The highly productive have more money. You may hate them, but you do what they tell you to do if they give you enough money.
Legal prohibitions, he explains, have inevitably failed because the underlying caste structure remains intact.
because of low productivity- especially agricultural involution. Most farmers in India today eat more food than they produce. This isn't sustainable.
This is further inflamed in the current BJP Hindutva regime.
Because the PM is OBC, the Chief Justice is Dalit and the President is ST.
“Revivalist Hindu nationalism glorifies traditional social order, providing ideological cover for caste hierarchy.
While revivalist Ambedkarism provides nothing at all.
Open display of caste markers, segregation in temples and villages, and caste-based mobilisation have become widespread.
They have always been widespread.
Social media has further amplified these assertions. The state, aligning with dominant caste interests, often protects perpetrators and grants them impunity”.
Dominance matters. But this is a function of productivity. Where it is rising, dominance increases. Where it is falling, it will disappear.
The result, as Teltumbde documents, is caste having become more visible, aggressive, and socially sanctioned than before.
Not in the RSS. They are cool with having an OBC Prime Minister.
He sticks his head out to suggest that “India today is arguably more casteised than ever”(my italics).
Why did people of his own caste not protest his incarceration? Is it because he is a useless tosser?
In these ways, constitutional ideals are routinely subverted by social reality and state complicity.
Cow protection is a constitutional ideal. Gau Rakshaks are not receiving enough support from the State.
Political representation has done little to deliver substantive empowerment
because empowerment is a function of productivity not making a nuisance of yourself.
Teltumbde is underwhelmed in his assessment of the contributions of political reservations for Dalits. This is not different from the global experience that while political reservations increase descriptive representation, they rarely deliver substantive empowerment. In the way political representation is designed in India’s electoral syatem, with Dalits rarely in a majority even in constituencies reserved for Dalits, they are forced by electoral compulsions into multi-caste alliances.
Suppose separate electorates had been granted. Then, India would be like Pakistan with 'minorities' voting for the incumbent government.
The rotation of reserved seats incentivises short-term patronage.
It also incentivizes higher caste Dalits pretending to like lower-caste Dalits.
Party affiliations further dilute accountability, shifting loyalty from community to party.
Not in India. There is no party loyalty.
The dependence of Dalit candidates on intermediaries – brokers, fixers, party workers – to access state power through those with money or influence, renders representation hollow for many Dalits. Overall, Teltumbde tells us, research shows that reservations do not systematically translate into pro-Dalit policy outcomes.
Because only productivity matters. Figure out a way to raise it and, if nothing else, you yourself get rich though you may have to emigrate to do so.
Even more gravely, he avers that political reservation has resulted in what he calls the “domestication” of Dalit leadership: instead of confronting caste power, it has been absorbed by it.
Like Kharge obeying the cretin Rahul.
His dire conclusion is that political reservations have enabled the emergence of Dalit elites without enabling Dalit emancipation.
i.e. most are trapped in low productivity employment
Also, in the first-past-the-post electoral system, reservations are less instruments of empowerment of the community and more as seeking their buy-in to those who enjoy political, social and economic power.
Under proportional representation, Dalits and Muslims and Communists would have allied to break up the country. Don't forget that the British system was more like P.R than 'first past the post'.
He believes that instead, a system of proportional representation based on vote shares alone would prevent the marginalisation of smaller or dispersed communities.
It would have led to the break-up of the country- which is what happened in any case.
It would help convert caste and community identities into political interest groups,
This happened long ago.
and with less need for identity-based reservations,
because people don't need jobs- right?
it could gradually support the project of caste annihilation.
& abolishing death
Unlike reservations which require statutory backing, proportional representation could organically enable minority inclusion.
What is more likely is Hindu vote consolidation.
Caste quotas in educational institutions and public employment
Teltumbde also examines closely the impacts of caste quotas in educational institutions and public employment.
It worsens the working of both. Nobody cares. We want degree certificates and Government jobs. We don't want Education or Productive work.
In the Constituent Assembly debates, it was Ambedkar who most forcefully argued for these as reparative justice to redress centuries of caste-based oppression and exclusion, for a people who historically “were not only not allowed to enter the public services
a Hindu prince gave him a scholarship and offered him the job of Military Secretary. He mistakenly thought Ambedkar was a patriot of the Lajpat Rai sort.
but were also prohibited from pursuing ordinary education”. He also argued that reservations were essential to allow SCs entry into administration and political life, so they could
line their pockets?
protect their rights and assert their voice in governance.
Other members supported him. In a tenor similar to Ambedkar’s, K Santhanam said that reservation for SCs was “not a privilege but an act of compensation for centuries of oppression and humiliation.”
Santhanam was a silly billy. He had compared the situation in Madras Presidency to Ulster!
KM Munshi warned the members that if constitutional safeguards are not put in place, dominant castes would continue to monopolise opportunities, thereby reproducing structural inequality.
Also if free enterprise is to prevail, the Civil Service needs to turn to shit.
Jaipal Singh, speaking for tribal communities, predicted discerningly: “Unless they get reservations, they will never catch up with the rest of India.”
But the rest of India can be pulled down to their level by a Socialist Bureaucracy.
RK Sidhva added that education was key to social mobility, and reservations were a matter of justice, not charity.
Everything was a matter of justice, not productivity with the result that India became unable to feed or defend itself.
But we also heard in the Constituent Assembly opposition to affirmative action on grounds that we continue to hear repeated decades later, of merit and efficiency being trumped by quotas. HV Kamath, for instance, said, “We should not sacrifice efficiency at the altar of social justice.” RV Dhulekar said that merit and equality before law should be paramount. But the Assembly in the end supported reservations, providing for these in Articles 15(4), 16(4), and 335 of the Constitution.
Because they were against merit or efficiency or anything which might make the country more productive. Did you know that India was once very very rich? That's why a handful of Britishers colonized it. To ensure they don't return, we must make India as poor as possible.
Evaluating the impact of these, Teltumbde observes that reservation policies in educational institutions and public employment have the merit that these at least touch directly upon the material conditions of Dalit life unlike most other provisions in the Indian Constitution.
They can get a useless degree and then sit in a Government office preventing development.
Educational and job quotas have done more to foster a more egalitarian society than political reservations.
Sadly, smart peeps run away from this egalitarian society. A Soviet diplomat once asked my mother why the grandchildren of Indian Presidents tend to be American citizens. I intervened to suggest that White Man wrongly said Columbus discovered America. Actually it was Vasco da Gama. America is actually India. Also original Americans were Communists which is why they were called Red Indians. Thus all Indian Presidents- being true Socialists- ensure their children emigrate and thus reclaim their birth-right.
For Dalits, pathways for upward economic mobility were barred for centuries.
by other Dalits and OBCs. Then the Brits decided to bar Mahars from the Army.
These pathways, Teltumbde observes, were opened potentially by affirmative action in education and public employment. These have, despite limitations, expanded Dalit presence in professions that were traditionally barred to them. They have enhanced economic security but broken through social hierarchies.
Not in Pakistan. Government has very kindly reserved manual scavenging for non-Muslim Dalits.
Yet, formulated as remedies for “backwardness” of these castes, Teltumbde believes that this framing constructs Dalits as though they were intrinsically deficient.
whereas he himself is extrinsically deficient. Why couldn't he set up an enterprise and grow rich? Were all his degrees useless? I suppose so. What is 'cybernetic modelling'? He has a PhD in it. Had he been smart, Silicon Valley would have hired him. He'd be a billionaire.
This has reinforced casteist prejudices that Dalits are an inferior people deserving possibly of sympathy but not rights, and that they are being unfairly elevated by a state driven by vote-bank politics.
Sadly, it is the truth. Meghnad Saha was the first and last Dalit scientist of note. He died in 1956. To be fair, the quality of higher education declined. This meant that if your family wasn't already well educated, you didn't get proper guidance to master your subject and to rise.
Second, Dalits are themselves often made to feel that they are undeserving or second-rate.
Unless they are Christians and don't get affirmative action.
“What was originally conceived as a measure of social justice thus becomes a marker of social deficit”.
Social justice meant lowering productivity. This created an economic deficit which in turn entailed a social deficit.
Answering the critics of education and job quotas, Teltumbde articulates a profound social truth that reservations were not necessitated by any intrinsic deficiency among Dalits.
But they may cause an intrinsic deficiency of effort on the part of the 'creamy layer'. But the same might be said of 'legacy' admissions to Ivy League. If you know you are going to get into a top school, why bother studying hard?
These were impelled by the failings of Indian society, which continues to be hostile to the ideal of equality.
Also, India is hostile to the ideal of immortality. That's why it hasn't banished death.
Reservations are not a recompense for Dalit backwardness,
smart Dalits emigrate just like other smart people. As the economy continues to grow, some may come back to set up businesses. Currently, the only Dalit billionaire is based in Germany. But he has plans to set up a cooperative food processing enterprise in India. His two sons retain Indian passports which suggests that they will be able to relocate when the right opportunity presents itself.
but a corrective measure for societal deficiencies and entrenched caste prejudices. “It is not Dalit individuals who must ‘catch up’ with society, but the social order itself that must expunge its caste biases and catch up with the ideals of a modern, egalitarian polity”.
Fuck that. India must stop trying to become shittier than it already is. Catch up growth is about raising general purpose and total factor productivity. This involves ignoring virtue signalling shitheads like Mander.
The state, through reservations, is not extending undue favours to a minority but is “disciplining a historically unjust majority”.
Sadly, Indians don't want leaders who will 'discipline' them by cutting off their bollocks.
The educational and occupational advancement of Dalits has often led to backlashes of resentment, anger and envy, and has been the trigger often for violence by dominant communities against “upstart” Dalits.
What to do? OBCs are like that only.
Teltumbde also indicates sensitively the predicament of those who benefit from these quotas. They are excluded from middle-class networks because of the continuing prejudices of caste. But at the same time, they are separated from their own caste communities, which continue to live in penury and want. This entails “profound psychological costs, including chronic anxiety, identity dissonance, and a persistent sense of inadequacy despite visible markers of success… reflecting a deep-drawn inferiority complex, inhibiting their ability to fully realise their potential”.
But they can line their pockets well enough. The trick is to get your kids Green Cards. If people want to rise by hard-work, thrift & enterprise, let them do so in America.
Also, reservations rather than annihilating caste have, Teltumbde says, in some ways reinforced it within a framework of redress. This has led to a competitive hierarchy of entitlements, reproducing and embedding caste identities and caste tensions.
In other words, non-Mahar Dalits want a fair share of the reservations cake.
The massive gap in the educational opportunities for the elite and middle classes and the poor that existed at independence has only greatly widened.
Government schools have turned to shit in many parts of India.
India failed to establish a Common School System, which ensured that, in Teltumbde’s words, “educational access continued to follow social rank rather than democratic ideals”.
But educational access is shit. Gautam Adani quit school at 15. He is the guy people want to emulate.
Public spending on education has stagnated at around 3% of GDP, far below the recommended 6% .
Because voters know that Government schools are shit.
This has systematically pushed Dalits to the bottom of the educational hierarchy.
Previously, they were on top- right?
Even in rural areas, the neo-rich dominant castes, including the now landed Shudras, opt for private schools, while poorly resourced and understaffed government schools remain the preserve of Dalit children.
I believe the 'Bhim Army' did set up coaching classes for Dalits in UP about a decade ago.
Therefore “Dalit children are trapped in a deteriorating government system that offers little mobility. The result is a harsh sorting mechanism: elites buy opportunity, while Dalits inherit deprivation, reinforcing caste hierarchy under the veneer of merit and market efficiency”.
Also, many Dalits suffer death because Brahminical elites are refusing to abolish death.
Private schools and colleges, especially those offering English-medium education, overwhelmingly serve relatively better-off upper-caste elites.
People with no money can't pay fees. Shocker!
Private colleges increasingly dominate higher education, and these have no quotas.
I suppose public colleges will just keep getting shittier and shittier.
Although public universities have reservations, the domination of private education – entirely unaffordable for most Dalits – effectively nullifies the constitutional safeguards.
I suppose he wants RTE to be extended to private Colleges.
This traps Dalit students in substandard institutions,
i.e. pubic sector institutions. But why should they be 'substandard'?
rendering their academic foundations weak and severely limiting their future employment prospects.
Because they have low 'general purpose' productivity. It is a vicious circle.
Reservations in government employment have, in Teltumbde’s assessment, delivered “meagre returns while imposing a disproportionate stigma”. After all, the public sector where reservations apply covers barely about 4% of India’s workforce, compared to 32% in China and 15%-25% in countries of the Global North. He calculates that quotas translate into benefits for only about 0.6% of SCs and an even smaller proportion of STs. For this meagre support, Dalits are stigmatised and humiliated as “pampered” and dependent on state charity.
In other words, Reservations must end in 2030. That's what Prakash Ambedkar has been demanding for many years now.
And this tiny fraction of Dalits that access reservations face a hostile and discriminatory environment at work, confining them to low-impact roles and away from management and decision-making assignments. This, he says, turns the public sector into “a graveyard of Dalit aspirations”.
Public sector turned India into a graveyard for everybody with any fucking aspiration other that of licking the arse of the Dynasty.
He speaks for instance of academic spaces – traditionally the preserve of advantaged castes – being extremely reluctant to recruit Dalits as faculty, “treating them as intellectual interlopers rather than equals”.
Was Teltumbde a good Professor? No. But he may have been a good enough manager at Bharat Petroleum which is one of the few profitable public sector enterprises.
In 2019, only 3.47% of professors and 0.7% of associate professors in forty central universities were Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes. In 2021, only 1.68% of IIT faculty and just 0.23% of IIMs were Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes.
So, there is a strong correlation between not being shit and having few SC/ST professors.
How Indian secularism “constitutionalised” caste
A particularly important and challenging section of the book is one that describes how the core foundation of “secularism” in the Indian Constitution has been interpreted and implemented in ways that have only reinforced caste hierarchies and discrimination.
Secularism only came into the Constitution in the mid Seventies. It is meaningless save in so far as it has been interpreted to mean 'RSS is very evil. So is BJP. Fuck you Vajpayeee/Advani/Modi! Why don't you fuck off back to Nazi Germany?'
Its core failure, according to Teltumbde, is that Indian secularism never confronted the religious foundations of caste.
It should have outlawed Buddhism which says caste is determined by actions in a previous life. Brahmanism, on the other hand, says anybody can become a Brahmin by paying for a costly ceremony.
Instead it “constitutionalised” it through caste-based personal laws,
These already existed as part of case-law. The Constitution recognized existing law.
failures to reform temple access and to outlaw practices linked to ritual purity.
Like bathing. Why was bathing not banned?
This meant that “the so-called secular state continued to outsource social authority to religion”.
If so, the Brits were kept in power by Hindu Pandits, Muslim Imams and Buddhist monks.
If a Dalit chooses to try to escape caste discrimination by converting to religions that in principle are more egalitarian like Christianity or Islam, they are barred by
Dr. Ambedkar
the Constitution from accessing reservations. The Constitution has effectively trapped Dalits within the Hindu fold, with “no constitutional mechanism to escape the religious identity that legitimises their oppression”.
In practice, nobody cares if you converted. Just make sure you have a Caste certificate and you are golden.
He concludes that in effect, secularism without caste annihilation only reinforced the very hierarchies it claimed to transcend.
Secularism does not claim to transcend anything. This is because only Divinity is transcendent.
The fatal flaw of impunity for state officials who violate rights
He also points to a deep, almost fatal flaw of the Constitution that while enumerating fundamental rights to secure social justice, it also institutionalises impunity for state functionaries.
Nonsense! State functionaries have to observe the law same as anybody else. Plenty get falsely accused of violating the anti-Dalit Atrocity Act.
Elected public officials, the police, security forces, judges are all protected from disciplinary and criminal action not just when they fail to protect or defend the rights of citizens but even when they violate them.
This has never been the case. The postman is not allowed to fuck you in the ass. That is not the proper way to deliver a letter. Also, if you pay him every time he does so, you are a homosexual. Mander's Mummy should have explained this to him.
This legal shield protects the state when it fails to uphold rights but also when it directly violates these, while acting with caste, communal and class bias and prejudice.
States have sovereign immunity but not with respect to their own Judiciary. However, there may be a 'doctrine of political question' or limited Executive immunity.
Incidentally, there is a legal shield against being murdered. This does not mean murders don't occur.
This impunity renders the marginalised – Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities, and dissenters – effectively unprotected by India’s constitutional order.
No. There is an anti-Dalit atrocity act. The Supreme Court tried to curb its misuse but Modi strengthened it.
This means that even custodial torture, rape and killings have no effective redress.
Was Teltumbde anally raped while in custody? I suppose so. His brains have been buggered to buggery.
For Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims, he says that this impunity translates into routine terror, incarceration, and erasure. The worst aberration is the power to detain persons without trial or bail, in the way that Teltumbde himself was held.
Most people thought Prakash Ambedkar would move heaven and earth to get his 'sambandhi' out of jail. Maybe, the idea was to give the senile coot some credibility. After all, his brother was a Naxal.
“The ideals of liberty, equality, and dignity remain distant dreams,” he concludes, and these are “betrayed not by enemies of the state but by the state itself”.
In India, the enemies of the State became the State in 1947. Sadly, they refused to raise productivity and so the country became unable to feed or defend itself.
A democratic republic, Teltumbde affirms luminously, cannot endure on the back of the doctrine of sovereign impunity.
Nonsense! The US has Federal, State and Tribal Sovereign Immunity. It has endured very well.
It must instead find its strength in the uncompromising pursuit of accountability, especially from those who wield power in its name.
In other words, it must ensure that nothing is done no matter how dire the emergency.
The way ahead is collective political assertion
rather than raising productivity. Lets all go on strike till everybody starves to death. That will make the State very sweet and nice.
He reflects that perhaps the Constitution could not have been very different from what it is.
It could have been a lot shorter.
It was after all a codification of the dominant class’s interests into law.
No. The law already existed. The Constitution merely affirmed that all such law was 'autochthonous' even if brought in by guys named Macaulay rather than Manmohan.
“A Constitution cannot stand above society”, he observes, “it embodies the political will of those who hold power”.
No. A Constitution may be 'mere puffery'. The Burmese had one before the Indians. It was useless.
For it to genuinely serve the interests of Dalits, it is incumbent upon them to shape their politics in a way that compels the ruling classes to respond.
Like J.N Mandal allying with the Muslim League? That didn't end well for his people.
“There can be no messianic solution – only the hard work of collective political assertion”.
Political assertion isn't hard work. Winning elections is. Modi is politically assertive and achieved something close to Messianic status. But that's because he works hard and does sensible things. Mander & Teltumbde are senile shitheads who have achieved nothing since quitting Public Sector employment. Obviously, this is the fault of the Indian Constitution. It should have outlawed all types of death- including brain death.
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