Caravan has an interview with Aishwary Kumar- about whom I've blogged previously.
"Ambedkar is a constitutionalist only because he is a revolutionary": Professor Aishwary Kumar
Ambedkar wasn't a revolutionary because his side would have been slaughtered in a violent conflict. But he wasn't a constitutionalist either. He dismissed his contribution as 'hack work'. What, in fact, was he? The answer is, he was a 'Law & Econ' maven avant la lettre who, for readily understandable reasons, lost political salience and had to retreat into Religion.
What happens when an academic pretends otherwise? He babbles nonsense.
In the recently published Indian edition of his 2015 book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and The Risk of Democracy, the academic Aishwary Kumar—a professor of political philosophy and intellectual history at the University of California-Santa Cruz—argues that it is time we move beyond examining Indian political life merely in terms of its difference from western counterparts,
India has no western counterparts. It is as poor as shit.
as postcolonial theory sometimes tends to do. Instead, by revisiting the intellectual legacies of BR Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi, and their thinking on equality, Kumar proposes we use India as an exemplary model for analysing global politics.
Coz a very poor country is an 'exemplary model'. Biden got elected because he promised to help the American economy catch up with India. He even chose a woman of Indian heritage as his Veep.
In September, Appu Ajith, an editorial assistant at The Caravan, spoke to Kumar about the premise of his book. Kumar said that one of its central concerns is “to speak to the problem of inequality in a way that is both fundamentally Indian, and tragically global or tragically universal.”
But such speech would be nonsense unless everything is fundamentally Indian.
Appu Ajith: The question of equality is central to the book. How did you stumble upon this particular topic and decide on to taking it forward?
After the financial crash everybody started raving about inequality because of the manner in which Obama & Co revived the economy- i.e. the fact that they sent big checks to rich dudes like Trump while lots of ordinary people lost their homes.
Aishwary Kumar: I did not start out as a scholar or as an intellectual biographer of these two thinkers. My intention was to write an account of a philosophical history of the political, in the anti-colonial world.
His intention was to write nonsense and, to his credit, that is exactly what he achieved. It is easy enough to write yet another philosophical history of anti-Colonial politics. Existing scholarship clearly indicates where the gaps are and what sort of deeply boring research is needed to plug those gaps.
What is it that allows a certain kind of politics around the question of freedom and self-determination to emerge,
Money. Once a class which could benefit by getting leverage vis a vis the Colonial power has a bit of spare cash, they start using some of it for political work. However, even if they started of doing 'social reform' they have to get into political work to keep the money coming in.
and once it emerges, what is it that is lacking in this politics
the fact that the richer donors want to hog the benefits of 'countervailing power' acquired in the name of the native
that allows for something like a critique to also emerge from within that tradition?
Thus, first the landlords and chiefs and so forth get a better deal for themselves by 'loyalist' politics which always has a degree of menace behind it. Then the nouveau riche industrialists and speculators get organized and make a bid for the loyalty of the Civil Service and traditional village power brokers. But there are also peasant and Trade Union leaders anxious to secure and exercise their own 'countervailing power' so as to get a seat at the table and a share of the rents. Each grouping will have its own propagandists and pedants as well as wide-eyed visionaries with ontologically dysphoric agendas which, nevertheless, could turn into Crusades.
The moment you start thinking about critique you think about Ambedkar,
who was the classic barrister/politician who could plausibly represent both 'Depressed Classes' as well as 'Labor'.
because it is in him that the most glaring silences of this entire tradition of thinking about politics acquires its most formidable and radical form.
This is nonsense. Ambedkar was loquacious. Everybody was back then. Talking the hindlegs of donkeys was how they coped with not having TV
I stumbled upon a question which was simply about the nature of inequality—that is both specific to Indian traditions, but also in their violence, universal.
What was that question? Rather meanly, Kumar won't tell us.
By the time I started reading Ambedkar, it had become clear to me that histories of modern India that are otherwise rich and fascinating in detail have settled down with a consensus: that post-colonial politics was anchored in a fundamental difference with other forms of political thought and thinking; that there was something very different and that it needed another language and another vocabulary to be understood.
This makes sense. Obviously, the politics of ruling a country will be couched in a discourse with little resemblance to that of anti-colonial protest.
It seemed to me, when I started working on the book in 2005-06, that, while that question was an important one, it had outlived its importance and that it had reached its own impasse. …
Why? Back in 2005 it was obvious that Indian political discourse was evolving rapidly. Old shibboleths had lost salience. Mayawati had greatly raised the prestige of Dr. Ambedkar. Modi, in Gujarat, was building up Sardar Patel as an alternative role-model to Nehru. The Left appeared newly resurgent. Would it copy China or lapse back into senile dementia? What seemed certain was that Indian political discourse would become increasingly technocratic now an economist held the top job. It should be remembered, Ambedkar had two Doctorates in Econ. Manmohan had only one. We would have expected the rise of a technocratic Ambedkarism.
So, what became different for me was not that post-colonial, colonial or anti-colonial traditions were different, but that they were exemplary in the way they could silence their own internal contradictions.
Writing bollocks based on stupid lies is the exemplary way of 'silencing internal contradictions' because nobody will bother reading you.
Equally, saying x was human but x was actually a God is a way of explaining away any 'internal contradictions' associated with x. After all, God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
When Ambedkar introduces the Constitution of India, he says that this is not a moment for triumphalism, and that they were entering an age of contradictions—social and political. There will be political equality and there will be social inequality. What does Ambedkar mean by this? Why is the architect of this constitution so skeptical of its own ability to right these contradictions?
The answer is simple. The Indian Constitution was not Communistic. It asserted a fundamental right to property and had Privy Purses for Princes and so on. Everyone got just one vote, but there was no provision for equalizing income or wealth.
AA: I think you also mention in the book that Ambedkar can be thought of as a posthumous thinker.
Not by an Ambedkarite, or any one with any respect for that great man. If he was a posthumous thinker then, in life, he was a fool.
AK: Kalyan [Kumar Das, an assistant professor at Presidency University] does that in the foreword. You know, because of how Ambedkar reads a lot of these philosophers themselves often at the margin. Nietzsche is not marginal now,
Nietzsche was huge then.
but because of the searing critique he had of European morality and so on, he figures in Ambedkar’s thinking very, very importantly and very significantly.
No. He figures in Iqbal. He does not figure in Ambedkar except as a figure to be execrated and equated to Manuvadi Hinduism.
I think Ambedkar says it more than once, that in order to be a thinker, the first thing you have to do is to give up the fear of being judged by history, because the truest, most rigorous thinkers are often read only after they are gone.
Ambedkar was in poor health- he'd even married a Brahmin doctor!- and was aware that he might die before completing a work of rigorous scholarship in a field where many philologists and professional philosophers had made their mark. This is perfectly understandable. We are not to take the blueprint for the completed masterpiece.
AA: How important is this project to revisit Ambedkar and Gandhi in our times, when they are being appropriated by right-wing Hindu nationalist outfits?
Not important at all unless you are doing it in a popular idiom in an Indian language.
AK: With Ambedkar, this much can be most safely, and without any risk said that he is inappropriable.
No. Ambedkar's Economics is based on Oikeiosis. Ambedkarites can wholly appropriate him if they follow his path or belong to his community. The fact that this appropriation is non-rival, does not mean it isn't complete.
I mean, a thinker who gives a theory of an inappropriable politics cannot himself be appropriated.
An inappropriable politics is one to which one can't, in good faith, claim to represent or practice. Ambedkar worked hard to ensure that his politics could be appropriated by his own people.
Not because there is no dogma that he is aware of; not because he is unaware of ideological manipulations; nor because he does not know that democracy is always at a risk or rather at the mercy of demagoguery. But precisely because he knows that these risks of democracy are real, and that, therefore, answers to the impasses of democratic life must be addressed to specific historical questions and moments.
Ambedkar was an economist. He knew that where risks are real, the solution is 'risk pooling', not addressing 'historical questions'. If your house might burn down, you get fire insurance. You don't address questions relating to the Great Fire of London. Actuarial Science, not Historiography, is what is needful here.
And because he can develop a theory of politics grounded in an absolute specificity of the question, it makes him inappropriable to any ideological mainstream.
This is nonsense. Any theory of Political Economy espoused by an actual politician is 'grounded in the absolute specificity of the question' to which he claims to have a solution.
Part of the magic of reading Ambedkar is to realise how miraculously recalcitrant he is to any stream of thought that wants the whole or part of him.
Is Ambedkar opposed to Rationalism? No. He would be pleased if smart people said 'everything you have written is perfectly rational'.
He is a thinker whose whole you can’t have because he is unbearably different or resistant. …
You can give yourself wholly to his program. Hundreds of thousands of very smart Indian people- barristers, doctors, senior administrators, scientists etc- have done so.
So you have a thinker who nationalists today want to appropriate in the name of a strong state, but they don’t realise that Ambedkar was, first and foremost, the champion of plebiscite—direct democracy—
Nonsense! He wanted reservations in the Legislature so the 'communal majority' would not be a 'political majority'. Plebiscites aren't 'direct democracy'. Napoleon III and Hitler and so forth liked plebiscites.
and his readings on ancient Greek and the classical traditions are full of those elements, in which he says, if you have to wipe out an entire state off the map of the Union of India—which can happen, we now know—the way to do it would be through a plebiscite.
So he was against plebiscites. Kumar has silenced his own sense for 'internal contradictions' so as to talk bollocks.
AA: Where does the idea of force in your book—which is stressed upon—come into play?
AK: If you read Ambedkar, the motif, the concept, the notion, the idea, the word “force,” haunts his writing, because clearly he is not for the exercise of force.
Ambedkar was an economist. Economic models seek to emulate those of Physics. Force is a 'term of art'. But Kumar is ignorant of this.
He sees enough of it—our world is saturated by force, whether we call it coercion,
or Gravity
whether we call it violence, domination, interference, intervention, lynching—all forms of force. … That entire tradition of thinking about force—force in relation to everything and nothing
Force exists only where there is an interaction. If nothing exists, or no interactions occur, there is no force.
—that marks Ambedkar's philosophical trajectory between Annihilation of Caste and exactly twenty years later in The Buddha and His Dhamma.
Ambedkar had studied a bit of Science at School and, as an Economist, was familiar with current literature including work by ex-engineers like Pareto or math mavens like Marshall.
That twenty-year period we are looking at, add to that another decade—1926-56—when he prepares for the Mahar Satyagraha [Mahad Satyagraha was a satyagraha led by Ambedkar to allow untouchables to use water in a public tank in Mahad, Maharashtra], when he burns a copy of the Manusmriti publicly. We often wondered, should books be burnt? Should any book be burnt? And Ambedkar would say yes.
Why? The reason is obvious. Either God would strike him down then and there or Manusmriti was just a book like any other.
So the notion of force is for him a conceptual intrigue
No. It is what determines the outcome of an interaction. This is an empirical, not a conceptual, matter.
into thinking about those who have nothing and yet are capable of everything,
in which case they can get anything they want by themselves.
and the greatest example, the most exemplary act of that force is conversion.
Nonsense! Anybody could convert. Gandhi's eldest son did and then the Arya Samajis had to come to shuddify him.
[He said] “I was born a Hindu but I will not die a Hindu,”
because he didn't like Hinduism. But he did like Buddhism- at least his own version of it in which worship of Ganesa & Hanuman is banned.
“I am not a part of a whole, I am a part apart,”
this was a perfectly sensible thing to say in response to some other member of the legislative council saying he should 'think as part of a whole'- i.e. keep quiet till the Brits departed.
or when he says the “secret of freedom is courage.”
Again, this is perfectly sensible. Freedom is no good to you if you are a coward and will slave away for any bloke you are afraid of.
A major theoretical claim I make in the book is that in order to read Ambedkar as a thinker is to go with him on a journey of force, is to understand what really force is.
Force arises where there is interaction. To really understand it you'd have to understand not just Yoneda lemma but stuff like anyons and so forth. This History Prof. doesn't have the brainpower for it.
Not what power is, not what violence is, not what non-violence is, not what inequality is, not what equality is, but rather what force is and this ability to comprehend equality in terms of force is radical equality.
No it isn't. Equality in terms of force means Newton's third Law operating between identical particles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Radical equality is not a liberal measure, it’s not a measure of redemption, not a matter of proceduralism, of deliberation…. It’s a measure of understanding the nature of force, how force saturates our world, and therefore to exit that world and think of another force.
So, just die and after you are dead imagine another force- one that turns you into God or Captain Marvel or something super-cool.
That would be radical equality—that everyone would have that force, that irreducible, insoluble force.
Mahesh Yogi made billions teaching people to levitate. Kumar could make trillions by giving everybody God-like powers.
The example of that if you will, would be conversion.
Oh dear! First you'd have to convert to Kumarism. My bet is it would involve some particularly degrading sex act.
AA: You discuss the idea that Ambedkar wants to destroy religion, specifically to create anew.
No. Ambedkar didn't want to destroy Buddhism.
Because religion is not something dispensable for Ambedkar. This finds an articulation in The Buddha and his Dhamma. So how is his relationship with religion different from that of Gandhi’s?
He was a Boddhisattva whereas Gandhi was merely a Mahatma. Kumar, however, could turn us all into super-cool Gods.
AK: What Ambedkar means when he uses the word religion—and he uses it in a very salutary fashion—for him, religion is the name of a responsibility.
Because subscribing to a Religion entails certain pious obligations or responsibilities.
Political religion, of which he is a great expert, and, in fact, Gandhi was too. What I try and say in the book is that they are both great exponents of a political religion—religion given a political form.
So what? It was Jinnah who created a theocracy.
But for Gandhi, religion has a political form insofar as it allows us to live a life of truthfulness.
Though he accepted Atheists could live the same type of life.
For Ambedkar, religion is a political form insofar as it allows us or gives us the moral capacity to judgement.
But we already have that.
One is truthfulness, the other is judgement, and they are two very distinct things.
No they aren't.
Truthfulness assumes a universalism or posits one.
Nope. Read a little Kripke you cretin.
Judgement posits distinction, specificity, anarchy—that is to say, the ability to break free of the rules that categorise or confine the ways in which we reach a conclusion.
No. Both truth and judgment, are the same thing- i.e. the product of a protocol bound, buck stopped, ratiocinative process- if this is not the case, anything which obtains, unless it is divine revelation, is merely a hypothesis or a prejudice.
Ambedkar’s religion is this relationship between this responsibility and judgement. In Annihilation of Caste, he says, “We need to destroy any religion that is irresponsible.” …
Who wants a religion which is drunk off its head and constantly gambling away the rent money?
The question I really ask today … is that in the major political, philosophical and religious traditions worldwide, especially of Europe, within Christianity or Judaism or Islam, have [there been] thinkers who have freely denounced Christianity, for example, in order to imagine a modern politics?
Sure.
You cannot think of republicanism or the French Revolution and so on without thinking of [the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and [the English philosopher Thomas] Hobbes, or [the Dutch philosopher Baruch] Spinoza within the Jewish tradition, who are at once Jewish and critics of that tradition.
Nonsense! Republicanism existed in Geneva two centuries before Rousseau was born there. Dutch republicanism, like the English sort, had to do with anti-Catholicism not Hobbes or Harrington. Spinoza was wholly irrelevant.
Why is it that the so-called Indian tradition, or the post-Vedic tradition, or the classical Indian tradition, which has so many critics of that tradition even in its own time: it’s not that there is no source of critique, [the question is] why is it not politicisable? That’s the question that Ambedkar asks, why is it that critique is not political in India?
This is crazy. Lots of princes were descended from guys whose religion was 'politicized' on the basis of some critique or the other. India wasn't different from any where else. Ambedkar was acutely aware of the sort of the historical origins of conflicts of the sort found in Kohlapur. He was writing for an informed audience who knew about other Vedokta type controversies. Don't forget some Brahmins had a grievance against the Chitpavan Peshwas and thus were possible allies.
Why is it that pacifism, agreement, low-intensity conformism is the defining framework of political life in India?
Because we are as poor as shit. Politics is about money.
Why is it that despite a great tradition of critique of religion, we have not had a modern religious critique of religion,
we've had plenty. We are sick of the stuff. Any nutter can say- as Pratap Bhanu Mehta does say- things like 'you belittle God by worshipping him in temples. Say your prayers while you shit- God is everywhere and likes watching you do potty.'
a religious responsibility that addresses religion in all its toxicity and violence? [We have not had] a political judgment aware of its own fundamental relationship to the theologico-political; a political thought that does not look at religion apologetically, and this is the great limit of Indian liberalism and Indian Marxism, in the last seventy years.
Clearly the guy hasn't heard of the D.M.K in Tamil Nadu.
Part of why today Ambedkar is important in the face of a resurgent conservative or reactionary Hindu nationalist politics is because through Ambedkar we understand one grave deficit in our political thinking or thinking about democracy. For the best part of the last sixty [or] seventy years, liberals and social democrats, or Marxists, even, have thought that they can disavow the sheer paradoxical, violent and yet enriching permanence of the theologico-political.
No. For the past sixty or seventy years we have had shit politicians who actively shat on the Hindu majority. Now that majority wants to be richer and more secure. This means getting rid of politicians who think they have done their job just by shitting on the Majority's religion.
AA: In his book Ambedkar and Other Immortals, Soumyabrata Chaudhury
a cretin who thought Shaheen Bagh would break the mould of Indian politics
speaks about how India’s university spaces and their Brahminical disposition
No! It is their refusal to see Ambedkar as what he was- a Law & Econ maven avant la lettre which has turned Ambedkar studies into a pile of shit.
have sort of factionalised Ambedkar, and moved him to the margins, where only Dalits scholars—or Dalit studies as a discipline—are the ones to actually read him as a critical political thinker. Do you think this has played an important role in delaying Ambedkar’s recognition as a serious political philosopher?
Hilarious! Who in India thinks a Masters in Political Science isn't either a stepping stone to sarkari naukri or else a proof of imbecility?
A serious political thinker is considered less important than a frivolous guy who can fart a tune on YouTube.
AK: Soumyabrata Chaudhury makes a very important claim about the Ambedkarite strand of politics,
No he doesn't. Basically he says that you can call anything Ambedkarite or Shaheen Bagh or your neighbor's cat. It is an immortal because anyone anywhere could claim it is. This is mere magical thinking.
Consider the following extract from an interview he gave to the Wire-
When one speaks of Shaheen Bagh, one speaks of it very concretely as being an assembly of those subjectified by the laws which they were protesting. But those subjectified by the law were also refusing that subjectivity, so that refusal has to be already an opening up of the situation. So Shaheen Bagh is not simply the purity of the spatial emblem but it is already, within that space, a temporal opening up. And hence spatially also Shaheen Bagh can close off today but it can move into some other space. Because spaces are always contingent if you want mortal signs. But immortality is a construction, a kind of truth, a gamble that something will be thinkable at the very level of what is going on. What is going on will pass but what is thinkable will always be henceforth a new threshold, a new truth as a resource not for the ones who are part of this protest or this struggle, but for anyone. For anyone. So this idea of anyone which I owe to Alain Badiou and his theatre director friend Antoine Vitez is something which I like very much. To anyone. So yes, this is the movement that I was trying to bring out.
You could substitute 'Yellow Vests' or 'Capitol Hill rioters' for 'Shaheen Bagh' in the above to justify petrol subsidies or racist policies.
embracing with unflinching brilliance the purported factionalism of Ambedkar's posthumous political life by giving it a counter-intuitive theoretical heft. For nothing is more important to our ability to understand Ambedkar outside of the nationalist framework than our willingness to bear witness to how fearlessly, in his time and ours, Ambedkar splinters the nationalist consensus (which is also his critique of the pedagogical and linguistic consensus). …
Okay, granted, the guy had promise and did well while the Brits were around. But he failed as an electable politician and his heirs were factionalist shitheads. Why rub it in?
Let us note the logic underpinning the accusations of factionalism that are often leveled against progressive and radical student groups committed to articulating an Ambedkarite politics in the universities.
The logic is that if you claim to represent a 'subaltern' minority but keep splitting into factions then nobody gives a shit about you. They think you are stupid.
Such accusations stem not only—not even necessarily—from reservations about Ambedkar as a symbolic figure of revolutionary political thought. The liberal left, let alone the Hindu nationalist formations, are now only too happy to appropriate Ambedkar for those symbolic purposes. Instead, accusations of factionalism stem from another, profounder epistemological worry: that Ambedkarite politics, which takes his moral and political thought seriously and to its extreme, pushes the nationalist consensus itself to its breaking point.
But nobody cares because you are a bunch of shitheads teaching shite in shit University Departments.
This consensus, which has always been a tacit, unspoken compact between disparate political formations built around a low-intensity stasis, a running war on the Dalit body, scaffolds the gravest, most enduring, most formidable epistemic exclusions of the Indian university.
Fuck off! The gravest 'epistemic exclusion' of the Indian university is in excluding the sort of remedial instruction which would make disadvantaged kids employable.
It has been eight decades since Ambedkar composed Annihilation of Caste. And yet, caste remains the juridical scaffold or “mechanism” within which Indian forms of cruelty continue to thrive, acquiring their mature, civil and civic life, insinuating themselves into newer spaces and technologies every day.
So, the guy was useless. Sad. He should simply have concentrated on making money and then using that money to fund scholarships or something of that sort.
It follows that caste is at once a machine specific to a mode of sacrifice and a name for generalised cruelty shrouded in ordinary vices and virtues: a cruelty that makes civility in India incurably violent and violence in India unimpeachably civil.
So, Kumar reckons that if he gets raped by some thugs, they will be 'unimpeachably civil'. Perhaps he is right. It may be that they will say 'kindly spread your ass cheeks, Sirji! Please and thank you for use of your rectum. Have a nice day!'
We cannot understand the structure of our urbane civility without understanding the structure of caste privilege, it is often glibly argued.
What these guys don't understand is what fills their books.
Not merely privilege, a word Ambedkar never uses, but instead “caste domination” or what he calls India’s “armed neutrality,” its unspoken civil war, is the foundation of this new civility.
Please and thank you Sirji! Don't ask for reach-around as refusal often offends. Have a nice day.
Now, one might point out, not inaccurately, that we are at war with ourselves in a manner that makes any resolution of conflict impossible. Caste is the obdurate capital—or heading—of this war. And yet, the fundamental question for Ambedkar is not only caste. Instead, the question for him is of human freedom, caste being that instrument which thwarts human freedom, afflicting its victim no less than it deforms the perpetrator (and thus, democracy itself).
Ambedkar's own freedom and agency increased because of his caste. His pal, Mandal, & Mandal's Namasudras lost freedom and agency and had to flee Pakistan not because of their caste but their religion. Ambedkar, like other politicians of the period, made some terrible mistakes.
Ambedkar’s archaeologies, as he calls them, are not simply archaeologies of caste violence, but of this epochal unfreedom, that gives stability to India's conformist, voluntary servitude.
Archaeology does not destabilize anything. Ambedkar said that his Institutionalist account of the origin of Untouchability was analogous to archaeology or paleontology. He was wrong. The materials uncovered by archaeologists or the bone fragments used by paleontologists can be used by smarter people or those with better tech so as to overturn previous notions. The German historical school of Econ, which Ambedkar knew about, turned out to be utterly useless. Had Ambedkar lived long enough to meet Akerlof, who credits his experience of the Indian caste system with providing the insights underlying his Nobel Prize winning theory of efficiency wages, Ambedkar would have had sufficient nous to collaborate with the American on producing something better.
His archaeologies are not intended to amplify the insurmountable difference that marks out Indian forms of violence from other forms and modalities in the post-colony (or what we today call the Global South).
Ambedkar has no archaeologies. He said he was doing something analogous to a particular type of archaeologist- i.e. one who attempts to reconstruct lost cities from the broken bricks that remain on site- but he was wrong.
Instead, his archaeologies are anchored in the idea that the Indian forms of violence are at once singular and exemplary.
No. Ambedkar knew about untouchability in Japan, Hawaii, the suffering of Dalit Indian origin Gypsies in Europe, etc., etc. There was plenty of that type of anthropology around at that time.
So exemplary that they provide a lens into the global forms that antidemocratic violence in the future—violence of the future—itself will take; that in the end all violence will have learned something from India.
So, Kumar's Ambedkar is a paranoid thinker whom all may appropriate. Consider the plight of elderly billionaires like Trump. It seems, now having ignominiously exited the White House, some treat him or members of his family as virtual pariahs! This is systemic violence! The UN must take action! Trump's family should receive reservations in the Senate and the Supreme Court and the Cabinet!
AA: You point out two dimensions to Ambedkar—one as a constitutional thinker and one as a revolutionary. How do these exist in conjunction with each other?
Revolutionaries create constitutions to their taste after they win. A true revolutionary won't do 'hackwork' on a Constitution created by his enemies. This was Ambedkar's final tragedy. Having been used by the Brits when it was convenient for them to do so, he was used by the High Caste Hindus when it was convenient for them to do so. Then he was abandoned to the wilderness of his own rage where he soon died after converting to a Religion which exported untouchability to Japan. Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables. Japan has no Brahmins but does have untouchables.
And what does it do for Ambedkar’s revolutionary status, the fact that he mobilised the constitution to fight for his ends, to achieve his ends?
Using the constitution to fight for your interests is 'constitutionalism'. On the other hand, Ambedkar did endorse amendments to the Constitution which made it easier to crack down on dissent.
AK: Some will argue that there are two Ambedkars—one revolutionary and a constitutionalist. I see Ambedkar within a constellation of thinkers like [the German-American philosopher] Hannah Arendt.
Who was completely useless.
Because the revolutionary tradition is unthinkable without the constitutional tradition.
Nonsense! Revolutions appear in history 2500 years ago. Some gave rise to what we might call constitutional law. Most did not.
In fact, the primary or fundamental principle of all revolution is the writing of the constitution.
No. The fundamental principle is killing or chasing away the guys who currently have power. Whether or not a Constitution is promulgated is wholly irrelevant. Who cared about the 1924 or 1936 or 1977 Soviet Constitution? It was merely the window dressing of a tyranny.
Arendt calls it the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.
She was a fool. Did the Israelis ask her for advise? No. Don't be silly. It still hasn't got round to agreeing a written constitution. Lebanon has had a Constitution since 1926. That is why it is such a mess.
So, the revolutionary and even the anarchist moments of Ambedkar’s political thought—when he says the rule breaks you and you break the rule; or infact he says a principle gives you the freedom to act, a rule does not—that [is an] anarchist moment.
No it isn't. It is commonsense.
And I am not saying Ambedkar is an anarchist, I am saying that Ambedkar cannot be understood without understanding this anarchist formulation that runs through his political thought.
No. Ambedkar can be understood simply as an economist who talked and wrote worthless bollocks similar to the bollocks talked and written by others with time on their hands back then.
Kumar hasn't understood Ambedkar because he keeps trying to link him to Hannah's Aunt or other such silly people.
Is that revolutionary anarchist articulation of politics in contradiction with his constitutional fidelity or faith? No. Remember in the 1950s he says that I can burn this constitution if it doesn’t work. … That will be the core idea behind Ambedkar's constitutionalism. It won’t be law that will save us. The Constitution will not save us. … And those who take the route of celebrating Ambedkar by simply saying, “But he is a constitutionalist,” forget that he is an insurrectionary first and a constitutionalist only because—I mean, let's be very precise—he is a constitutionalist only because he is a revolutionary.
He would have been killed quickly enough had he been a revolutionary. What happened to the Dalit panthers? Come to think of it, what happened to the Republican Party of India? B.P Maurya, whom many considered Ambedkar's successor, is still remembered for his 'Jatav-Muslim bhai bhai' slogan. But he was coopted by Congress for the Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim combine which stood no chance against the rising AJGAR forces.
Ambedkar has retained importance for two reasons
1) he was a proper economist- not a Gandhian or Sarvodaya or Marxist nutjob
2) he wore a suit and tie.
Go thou and do likewise.
No comments:
Post a Comment