This is not the first time that the Organiser has highlighted Ambedkar’s views on Muslims to underscore the political icon’s ideological affinity to the RSS as opposed to the Congress. In 2016, the magazine published an issue on Ambedkar, hailing him as the “ultimate unifier”. A piece written by Ramesh Patange in the issue said that Ambedkar believed that if the lower castes in the country had access to weapons, foreign i.e., Muslim invaders would have never been able to invade the country.

To be sure, the projection of Ambedkar as an icon for the BJP-RSS has never gone unchallenged. In response to the 2016 issue of the Organiser, for instance, historian Ramachandra Guha wrote a piece in The Indian Express stating that while he was alive, the RSS reviled both him as well as his ideas.

Yet, as an RSS leader told ThePrint, “Ambedkar’s views on Muslims were very scathing. He saw the community as one that is proud of invaders, and for whom, their motherland is not here in India. The secular parties cannot afford to show that side of Ambedkar.”

“Truth be told,” the leader added, “Ambedkar’s views do not conform to any present-day political ideology in their entirety.”

As a political storm brews over Ambedkar’s legacy once again, ThePrint analyses what makes the leader a conundrum for the RSS. While there are obvious divergences between Ambedkar and the RSS on the question of Hinduism, were there any actual ideological convergences between the two? Were his views on Muslims marked by bigotry or pragmatism or simply reflected the discourse of the time he was writing in? And as the RSS leader quoted above said, can Ambedkar be appropriated in his entirety by any ideological camp, let alone the RSS-BJP, today? 

Also read: From Parliament to the streets, how BJP & Congress are planning to continue the tussle over Ambedkar

Curious allies

In the piece published in 2016, Guha offered a case-by-case analysis of how Ambedkar was criticised by the RSS on a range of issues while he was alive. Be it the Constitution, which Ambedkar drafted as law minister, or the personal law reforms, especially the Hindu Code Bill, which he piloted, the RSS saw Ambedkar’s actual legal contributions with deep suspicion for not being “Bharatiya”.

An article published by the Organiser in November 1949, for instance, sarcastically referred to Ambedkar and Nehru as “Rishi Ambedkar and Maharishi Nehru” whose reforms “would atomise society and infect every family with scandal, suspicion and vice”.

It is not just the RSS. It was a year after Arun Shourie wrote Worshipping False Gods—in which he severely criticised Ambedkar and lamented his “deification”—that he was rewarded by the BJP in 1998 with a Rajya Sabha ticket, and made the cabinet minister in charge of the ‘Ministry of Disinvestment’ under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

However, even through this period, there were attempts by the RSS to show its closeness to Ambedkar.

“It was in the 1980s with large conversions of Dalits to Islam that we realised that we cannot let Ambedkar’s legacy be used against Hinduism,” the RSS leader quoted above said. “Since then, we have sought to highlight our ideological convergences with Ambedkar. It has been our endeavour to show that Ambedkar was just like Swami Dayananda, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Narayan Guru, etc. who tried to reform and strengthen Hinduism from within.”

An RSS pracharak from Lucknow argued that while Ambedkar’s followers today do pose an ideological threat to the RSS, since they “focus too much on the internal divisions among Hindus”, Ambedkar was “thoroughly anti-Muslim”, and that aspect needs to brought out.

Ambedkar’s unapologetic pragmatism

While it is a matter of academic debate whether Ambedkar was anti-Muslim or not, it remains beyond doubt that he was a strong votary for the Partition of India.

In his book Pakistan or the Partition of India, Ambedkar wrote, “On the assumption that the two-nation theory has come to stay, will not India as one single unit become an incoherent body without organic unity, incapable of developing into a strong united nation bound by a common faith in a common destiny and therefore likely to remain a feebler and sickly country, easy to be kept in perpetual subjection either of the British or-of any other foreign power?”

“Whether it is not better to provide for the growth of two independent and separate nations, a Muslim nation inhabiting Pakistan and a Hindu nation inhabiting Hindustan, than pursue the vain attempt to keep India as one undivided country in the false hope that Hindus and Muslims will someday be one and occupy it as the members of one nation and sons of one motherland?” he further asked.

In fact, as pointed out by Ravi Kant, a professor of Hindi at Lucknow University, Ambedkar’s view on partition was that it should be total, in that all Muslims should go to Pakistan, and all Hindus should come to India.

One way to see Ambedkar’s staunch support for Partition is his pragmatism.

As argued by Shabnam Tejani in a paper titled The Necessary Conditions for Democracy: BR Ambedkar on Nationalism, Minorities and Pakistan, homogeneity was a necessary practical condition for Ambedkar for democratic rule in a country like India.

Even on the issue of linguistic reorganisation of states, Ambedkar’s views were radical. Within India, too, he proposed population transfers in order to engineer ethnic and linguistic homogeneity.

For Ambedkar, Tejani writes, “India’s communal character meant that there would always be one group that became a dominant class and sought to subordinate those weaker in number and social position. The only way around this was to move people out of one region into another where there was a closer social congruence.”

As pointed out by political scientist Hilal Ahmed, Ambedkar’s work has to be seen in the light of him trying to practically solve the “problem of communalism” that was being confronted at the time. “He was also looking at this question from the point of view of legislative representation, and was of the view that communalism must be addressed as a political problem.”

The ‘prejudice’

However, Tejani argued in the paper that despite the strong currents of uncompromising pragmatism, Ambedkar’s views on Muslims did “reveal a deep element of prejudice embedded within the logic of his argument.”

In his book first published in 1940, and then subsequently in 1946, Ambedkar argues that before the “Islamic invasions”, not only the (pre-partition) Punjab but what is now Afghanistan was part of India and further, the people of the Punjab and Afghanistan were either Vedic or Buddhist by religion. However, the character and culture of the people of these parts, Ambedkar argued, were fundamentally altered in the course of the “762 years of incessant Muslim invasions”.

One of the central aims of these invasions, Ambedkar further said, was “striking a blow at the idolatry and polytheism of Hindus and establishing Islam in India”. He then goes on to quote from a series of historical texts from the period to show that despite internal differences and contests for power, all Muslim invaders were “united by one common objective and that was to destroy the Hindu faith.”

Even when there was peace, Ambedkar said, Hindus were “hit by excessive taxes, subject to humiliating physical beatings and sadistically denied the good things in life like fine clothing. This wasn’t the result of caprice; it was in keeping with the ruling ideas of the leaders of Islam.”

The result of the “incessant Muslim invasions” has been that “there is not only no unity between that area (the northern parts of pre-partitioned India) and the rest of India but that there is as a matter of fact a real antipathy between the two”, Ambedkar wrote. Partition, for Ambedkar, therefore, was not just inevitable, but necessary.

“The problem is nobody reads Ambedkar in his entirety,” said a political science professor, who requested anonymity. “When we deify people, we do not want to confront their limitations. If Ambedkar did display bigotry on the issue of Muslims, does it take away from the social revolution he brought about with respect to caste?” the professor asked. “This is what makes it easy for the Sangh to appropriate him because the others want to pretend like Ambedkar never wrote these things.”

The need for nuance

However, Ahmed argues that it would be simplistic to make any conclusion on Ambedkar’s views on Muslims from this writing without seeing the context in which it was written.

It has to be recognised that the politics of the time allowed an imagined homogeneity of Muslims across the country, and even Muslims were taking refuge in this imagination of Muslim homogeneity, he said.

Further, the time he was writing the only version of history available was the colonial history, which presented Indian history as one marked by invasions and loot by Muslims, Ahmed said. “That time the debates of temples and mosques were mere historical facts, not politically contested for electoral gains the way they have been post-partition. That Muslim invaders desecrated Hindu temples is a fact, and Ambedkar was not apologetic about it.”

In the politics of perception nowadays, we often place certain quotes and works of leaders out of context, making it easy to appropriate them, he said.

Further, as pointed out by Ahmed in his book Siyasi Muslims, Ambedkar was one of the only political commentators of the 1940s who ever spoke of Muslim caste, and argued that Hindu communalism is one of the major reasons behind the backwardness of the Muslim community.

In the same book, for instance, Ahmed quotes Ambedkar as saying that the reason for the “absence of the spirit of change” in Muslims in India is that they are placed in a social environment which is predominantly Hindu. This Hindu environment, he argues, is “silently but surely encroaching upon him (Muslims),” thereby making the Muslims feel that they are being “de-musalmanized”.

“As a protection against this gradual weaning away, he is led to insist on preserving everything that is Islamic without caring to examine whether it is helpful or harmful to his society,” Ambedkar further said.

Moreover, even in the absence of a nuanced reading, it is difficult for the RSS to “co-opt” Ambedkar due to his strong support for Partition, Ravi Kant said. “One of his central arguments was that Partition is inevitable and necessary. For the Sangh, on the other hand, the goal is Akhand Bharat.”

(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)

Also read: Truth is clear—Sangh Parivar is in perpetual conflict with Ambedkar’s radical modernism