Dec 20, 2024 07:52 IST
First published: December 20, 2024 at 07:52 IST
After a spirited debate in Parliament over what the Constitution means, the government and opposition have now clashed – literally – over BR Ambedkar’s name. Two BJP MPs Pratap Chandra Sarangi and Mukesh Rajput are in the hospital. The party has accused them of being beaten up by senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. The main opposition party in Parliament, in turn, alleged that BJP members blocked opposition leaders from entering Parliament and injured party chief Mallikarjuna Kharge and other Congress members. At the center of the row is Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s comments in which he referred to BR Ambedkar and suggested that Ambedkar was being paid lip service to the Congress. The criticism is par for the parliamentary course but Shah, not exactly known for his lyrical flourishes, harshly frames his criticism as unworthy of his stature in the party, which regularly invokes Babasaheb in the post-2014 jostle. It is a fashion to repeat ‘Ambedkar, Ambedkar’, if the opposition would have taken the name of God many times, they would have gone to heaven,’ he said while calling upon the Congress for not giving ‘Babasaheb his due’. For the opposition faction, torn over how to take on the ruling party after the recent Maharashtra debacle, Shah’s comments serve as immediate glue, at least for now; For the Congress, its outrage reinforces its newfound social justice agenda.
Ambedkar did not care. In more than 30 years of his public life, he fought the ideas and actions of almost every major political stream of his time, including the Congress, the Jana Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha. It is well known that he has an ideological conflict with the Congress. It is a fact that the opposition of BJP leaders to the Hindu Code Bill forced Ambedkar to resign from the Nehru Cabinet. However, it is a testament to his sanity that six decades after his death, almost every political party in the country claims to have embraced Ambedkar. The growing wave of social justice since the 1990s and the imperative of every party to reach out to the marginalized and oppressed means that today Ambedkar’s ideas are part of debates left, right and centre. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly said that he would not have been in office without Ambedkar, and the BJP regularly invokes Babasaheb in its outreach to Dalit and marginalized communities. Similarly, today the Congress has claimed that it has spoken in favor of its legacy. In recent years – especially during the Lok Sabha elections – Rahul Gandhi has often referred to “Ambedkar’s Constitution” to restore the party’s damaged relationship with the Dalit constituency. The opposition’s campaign for a caste census bears Ambedkar’s name.
Clearly, his appeal and importance exceed his original constituency. So a competitive populism, even in currency, co-exists with campaigns for constitutionalism, human rights and social justice in Ambedkar’s name. The candidate owes his legacy a testament to the vitality of the democracy he helped preserve. The spirited debates – sometimes heated debates – would certainly have done him proud but the unnecessary pushing and shoving and tone-deaf sound-bite tokenism would not have done him justice.
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