IN What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables? (1945) Ambedkar warned,

“… this Congress fight for liberty, if it succeeds, will mean liberty to the strong and the powerful to suppress the weak and the downtrodden …” and added that “democracy and selfgovernment in India cannot be real unless freedom has become the assured possession of all …”


For Ambedkar, the ‘nation’ was no ready-made thing to celebrate. Rather, it must be painstakingly built by recognizing and destroying the foundations of inequality and oppression. Contrast this attitude with that of the RSS and BJP, which brands any critique of existing Indian society, especially any critique of caste, gender and communal discrimination, as ‘anti-national’ and ‘divisive’!

“We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality … in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty. On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?”

(BR Ambedkar, Speech in the Constituent Assembly on adoption of the Constitution, November 25, 1949; henceforth Speech, emphasis added)

When Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet, upset with the Nehru Government’s dilution of the Hindu Code Bill, he said:

“To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu Society, untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”


Castes Are Anti-National

Would the RSS brand Ambedkar as ‘anti-national’ for his bold words:

“I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion.How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us. For then only we shall realize the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realising the goal. The realization of this goal is going to be very difficult ….

The castes are anti-national. In the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are anti-national also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste. But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality.” (Speech)