Dr John Mohan Razu
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, affectionately known as Babasaheb Ambedkar continues and will continue to illumine and inspire the world at large in general and the Indians in particular on very many facets – be it social, economic, political, cultural, constitutional, religious and host of others in his writing spanning all facets of human life. In my view there are a few seminal, original and organic thinkers and B. R. Ambedkar figures as one among them. In India he is indeed par excellence. His scholarship is amazingly versatile and inter-disciplinary. Over and above, B.R. Ambedkar is a visionary and a prophet, not only for the Dalits, but to all the oppressed and alienated people and communities.
Further, Babasaheb Ambedkar, was the main architect of our Constitution. The task of framing free India’s Constitution was formidable. The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly for this purpose was held on December 6, 1946. Ambedkar was elected on August 29, 1947 as the chairman of the drafting committee. He was insistent that the guarantees of fundamental rights be expressly incorporated in the Constitution and that remedies for their enforcement be easily accessible and expeditious. With that in view, draft Article 25, corresponding to the current Article 32 was incorporated.
According to Ambedkar, “If I was asked to name any particular article in this Constitution as the most important — an article without which this Constitution would be a nullity — I could not refer to any other article except this one. It is the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it”. Ambedkar’s prescription for the successful working of the Constitution was that there must be no glaring inequalities and that there must be neither an oppressed class nor a suppressed class. He believed that unless the moral values of a constitution are upheld, grandiloquent words will not protect the freedom and democratic values of people.
BR Ambedkar attached great importance to constitutional morality in the working of the Constitution which he meant “a paramount reverence for the forms of the Constitution, enforcing obedience to authority acting under and within these forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts”. According to Ambedkar, constitutional morality is “not a natural sentiment. It had to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it”. For Ambedkar, morality and constitutionality go hand in hand.
On the concluding day of the Constituent Assembly, November 26, 1949, Ambedkar expressed his misgivings about the successful functioning of democracy in our country in these memorable words: “A thought comes to my mind: What would happen to her democratic constitution? Will she be able to maintain it or will she lose it again? When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.”
By employing constitutional provision as means, the ruling dispensation of the day keep enacting and repealing laws that would suit their policies and ideological compulsions. Having brute majority in the Lok Sabha and substantial number (100)in Raja Sabha, the passage for passing any bills and amendments become much easier. In view of the numbers, the ruling party without any debate and deliberations keep introducing new laws and if need be,tends to amend the laws that suits them by voice vote. Debates on important bills seldom takes place and when questioned the treasury bench retort that people are the centre of democracy and so they voted for us and we go back to the electorates.
Lotus flag has spread right across the country. BJP claims that it is the largest party in the world in terms of its membership.Diverse methods that come into play and employed in different settings manifests the grammar of anarchy. Hate speeches, communal clashes, twisted narratives that incite violence are spreading like wild fire. Given the context though many want the polarisation agenda to end and be abandoned, so that it would be better for the Indian society hardly has hardly resonated and are is on the rise. The grammar of anarchy was present even at the time of Ambedkar. He had hoped that it would be abandoned. On the contrary, in the given context, it is going to be a mammoth task to be eased-out because of hero worship which is endemic in our country. Now we see a boon and boom in personality cult.
Nowadays in India especially in the areas of polity and religion ‘hero-worship’ flourishes. However, there is nothing wrong in admiring leaders as heroes, but the risk is that in the process, the tendency is to entrust such persons with unlimited enormous powers leading to uncritically accept the exercise of these powers, without insisting on accountability, which is a sine qua non of any genuine democracy.Ambedkar was aware of these lurking dangers. In recent times we have been witnessing there are people who tends to worship PM Modi as a hero. He is called by many names such as “saviour”, “prophet”, “avatar” and “demigod” and so on.
B.R. Ambedkar had foreseen long ago that in a democracy “hero worship” is bound to happen and thus offered a note of caution. He underlined the importance of observing caution which John Stuart Mill had uttered to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions”. There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long service to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness.Ambedkar emphasised that this caution is far more necessary in the case of India. For in India, bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in politics, unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country.
Bhakti, in religion, may be a road to the salvation of the soul. In religion Bhakti connotes different thing – a higher level of spirituality leading to salvation. But in politics, Bhakti or hero/heroine-worship, is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.If we observe and analyse the sequence of events and the levels of attributes extended to PM Modi equals to something ‘super-human’ or ‘super-natural’ and be he is eulogized and thus elevated to ‘demi-god’. As a consequence, PM Modi is galvanizing absolute power that triggers him to do whatever he wants and, in the process, could lead to a dictator. B.R. Ambedkar unequivocally denounced ‘hero or heroine worship’ in a democratic setting like India warning if it is not totally annihilated it would eventually lead to the emergence of dictators.
