Why Opposition is wrong to assume BJP is on the defensive over Amit Shah’s comments on Ambedkar

Dec 23, 2024 12:16 IST

First published on: Dec 23, 2024 at 12:16 IST

One of the greatest successes of the BJP has been to imagine Dalits as individuals with as complex a way of thinking about the world as non-Dalits. One of the greatest failures of the Opposition has been to attribute a one-dimensional world view to Dalits — for example, they are Ambedkarites and this subsumes every other worldview as far as Dalits are concerned. The BJPs cleverness lies in knowing that support for Ambedkar’s views can exist alongside multiple other beliefs and aspirations.

There has been recent concern that the home minister’s “insulting” comments towards Ambedkar may have electoral consequences for his party and that is why, in a rare move, both he and the Prime Minister have had to come out and defend the comments by attacking the Opposition’s “hypocrisy”. In the 2024 general elections, media commentators have pointed out, the Congress won 20 SC reserved seats whereas in 2019, it had won only six. This, it is further argued, is the source of the anxiety for the BJP: That SC populations will take offence at the home minister’s comments and further punish it through the ballot box.

Mono-causality makes for easy to digest news, but is rarely of much use when thinking about the connection between belief and behaviour. It is not all clear that seats are won or lost because one party was seen as more respectful of Ambedkar’s legacy. If that was the case, his broader worldview would also lead Dalits to reject many aspects of the BJP’s political strategies. That is simply not the case: There is a vast number of SC voters who do share the ruling party’s worldview. Why people vote is a very complicated matter and assuming that just one cause leads to an effect is out of touch with Indian realities. One of the most significant changes in Indian society over the past 15 years is the consolidation of the idea that the ways of thinking that were believed to be at the heart of a just and equitable post-colonial society can, just as easily, be replaced by others that were once considered beyond the pale.

India is mostly now (there were some decades of ideological consensus that ended in the 1990s), a post-ideological society and almost any belief system is capable of being promoted – and accepted – as a valid one. In some ways, this is nothing unusual: Dalits can valourise Ambedkar’s ideas at the same time that they may vote against a party – the BSP, for example – that might most conspicuously present itself as an heir to them. And, they may vote for a party – the BJP – for whom it is Hindutva that is the key guiding principle. This is not unusual because, as humans, we are not “single-minded” beings — at any point in time, our actions are dictated by multiple pulls and pushes. A party that promises a “great” and respectable Hindu identity to a Dalit who has experienced nothing, but discrimination, is likely to gain that person’s attention. The extraordinary ease with which Gandhian ideas are now openly ridiculed – something that might have been unthinkable a few decades ago – should also tell us something about the rise of the post-ideological society, one where we can no longer assume a consistency of thinking. Perhaps that has always been a luxury that could be afforded by a privileged minority. The BJP’s success lies in thinking about the nature of the population that exists beyond these confines.

The idea that the BJP’s strong reaction to the controversy raised by the Home Minister’s comments derives from the need to “defend” itself also overlooks another important aspect of contemporary Indian life. The BJP, unlike any other party before it, has mastered the idea that public presence is itself the end, rather than the means to an end. As a party of the spectacle – the multiple sartorial avatars of the prime minister, for example – the BJP is a party of the current age of multi-media technologies. The spectacle is everything – it is an ideology itself – and the home minister and the prime minister’s apparent public defence of their position has little to do with fear of losing votes. Rather it is in continuation of a strategy that recognises that now the most fundamental Indian ideology is the spectacle: The constant presence in the media is an end in itself. In the recent past, none of the BJP’s politics of spectacle, no matter their ill effect on the population – think of demonetisation and thali-banging, for example – have led to electoral reversals. It is only a particular kind of romanticisation of Indian society – that views it as one of the stable ideologies – that leads to the conclusion that the BJPs reaction is linked to a concern for what Ambedkar stood for and that it does not want the opposition to present a “distorted” idea of its position on the thinker and activist.

In the current debate over the home minister’s remarks regarding Ambedkar, there is, then, a somewhat simplistic – if not patronising – understanding of the Dalit identity. It would be considered odd, for example, if we were to say that non-Dalit lives and actions are defined by just one factor (let’s say belief in Gandhian thought). And yet, we seem quite happy to say that Dalit lives are dictated by just one aspect: Ambedkarite thought. This way of thinking of Dalit identity is not very different from colonial stereotypes of Indian identity in general which held that it was fundamentally derived from religion. Dalits, like any other section of the population, are subject to multiple social processes and inhabit multiple worlds of aspirations and strategy. It is the great failure of the opposition parties to assume that it can be taken for granted that Dalit lives and thinking is exclusively organised around reacting to comments about Ambedkar. Dalits, like everyone else, watch television, visit shopping malls, take part in leisure activities, wish to buy homes with modern amenities and take part in conversations about “threats to Hindu culture”. They are not, exclusively, Ambedkarite subjects, any more that non-Dalits are exclusively Gandhian or Nehruvian ones. It is only the BJP that has realised that ways of thinking are always anchored in conditions of contemporary life. If the Opposition is to make any headway on the electoral battlefield, it will have to stop thinking of SC populations as people fixed in history. Like the BJP, it will have to think of them in more varied ways, even as it wishes to imagine a different national future than that of the ruling party.

The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology SOAS, University of London

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