Himal Interviews: Anand Teltumbde on B R Ambedkar and the limits of iconisation

Marking Dalit History Month, we revisit an episode of Himal’s Southasia Review of Books podcast from April 2025, where associate editor Shwetha Srikanthan speaks with the renowned public intellectual, scholar and activist Anand Teltumbde about his new book, Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (Penguin India October 2024).

As a towering figure of the 20th century, B R Ambedkar came to symbolise the struggle for the annihilation of caste and the emancipation of Dalits. His life is often made to stand in for that history. 

In contemporary India, his iconisation has moved beyond popular reverence, becoming a resource for political appropriation across the spectrum, folded into projects of Hindu nationalist myth-making. In his new book, Anand Teltumbde argues that it is more important than ever to return to Ambedkar on his own terms – as a self-described “iconoclast”, a breaker of icons.

Teltumbde’s reflective biography traces the radical core of Ambedkar’s thought and action across his social, political and intellectual life, while cautioning against the dangers of sanctification. Instead, it invites readers to interrogate the past and take responsibility for the present. Ambedkar’s greatness, Teltumbde suggests, lies not in deification but in his relentless challenge to the social order – in standing with the most oppressed, confronting power from within, and reshaping the course of Dalit lives.

The episode is available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Below is an edited, condensed transcript of the full interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting.

Shwetha Srikanthan: Iconoclast was written during a time in which your freedom was once again in jeopardy. You’ve mentioned how you never imagined you would write a biography of Ambedkar and that the Ambedkarite attitude deterred you from undertaking a critical biography. You were also not drawn to the conventional biography that tells the life story of a person. Your objective instead was to tell the story of Ambedkar, the iconoclast, by cautioning against his iconisation. Tell us more about this and how the book came to be in this context? 

Anand Teltumbde: Ambedkar has been iconised beyond natural limits. Everybody knows what natural limits are, because it’s very natural for a society like India to get their great people iconised to some extent, but Ambedkar’s iconisation actually transcended all these limits. The forces behind that have been the political class and the entire system – the way it is organised. It’s not just his persona that has been iconised, but all the places associated with him also are getting iconised very fast. Bhima Koregaon is one such example, it could be taken as an extension of the Ambedkar icon. Sites like the Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur where he converted to Buddhism and Chaitya Bhoomi in Mumbai where he was cremated also became a place of congregation for Dalits and became icons unto themselves. After Modi’s coming, he declared something like a Panchtirth – five places that Ambedkar had set foot were to be celebrated as such. Even abroad too, they acquired a house where he stayed as a student – 10 King Henry’s Road. A big congregation happens even there. This has actually exceeded all the limits. Now, there is nothing wrong with iconisation per se, but when Dalits get swayed by this kind trend, it becomes problematic. 

When I agreed to write a biography, as I mentioned in the preface, I had a dilemma. I would not indulge in writing biographies of people, however great they were. But then I thought – is that an opportunity for me to really deal with this trend? Then I agreed. I named it and qualified it to be something like a reflective biography, in my own way, because Ambedkar’s picture is drawn with a broad brush to present his approximate story. I contributed some new facts of his life, but this is more of an interpretation. It’s not an academic biography. My parallel profession prompted me – that parallel profession is being an activist – I’m committed to the betterment of the downtrodden, and whatever I do, every single word I write is towards that. So this biography also should be taken in that mold, and it need not be compared with any other biography. I do acknowledge the great work done by many people, but this is what it is. 

Another point that I wanted to make, and it is given by Ambedkar himself, is how does one look at great people? What is the utility of great people? In his speech, ‘Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah’, he said that great people, the way that they should relate with disciples, that they should not stifle their creative energies and the disciple also does not have any obligation to great people other than saying thank you. Great people provide their shoulders for the next generation to stand on and look further than what they could do. That is the utility of great people, so we are obligated to great people. Great people do contribute and everybody contributes in their own ways. But it does not mean that they were absolutely right. They were also people and they have also struggled, but making them out to be something like a god, packaging them into a god and hanging them on the wall actually becomes easy to do, and that is precisely what has been happening with Ambedkar. People have made him into a god and forgotten about what he said and what he did. It’s a double jeopardy. In one sense, you lose sight of the past, you refuse to learn from the past. Ambedkar also might have faltered, dealing with matters and in his strategies, so to examine what has gone wrong with that, that is totally forgotten. Second thing, you become a prey for the enemy forces to get manipulated. So both ways, Dalits are getting exploited by the political class.

With the latter, the exploitation of Dalits or iconisation of Ambedkar – it has a chronology. You know how it happened and at what point in time it happened. When India became independent, the Congress party had a monopoly on power, they did not really have a powerful contender, and they undertook certain policy measures that were in tune with the promises made during the freedom struggle like land reforms and Green Revolution; these were the policies employed during the first decade. Land reforms were direly needed in India because land was amassed by a handful of people and that needed to be redistributed. So it all appeared good on paper, but there was an hidden agenda of the Congress, that it wanted to have an extended hand to rural areas and wanted to create a network of agents from among the caste of Shudras. The way they did the land reforms was that the actual dealers, who may have been Dalits, Adivasis etc were excluded because their names did not appear in records. And the land ownership went to the traditional Shudra caste farmers, and the Green Revolution brought in huge productivity gains to these people. They became rich farmers and constituted a class unto themselves.

And that worked for some time for the Congress, because all the agricultural income is tax-free in India, and that becomes a very significant income. They diversified into very ancillary businesses and became a kind of a pseudo bourgeoisie. So the baton of Brahminism, which is to be hailed by the Brahmins or Brahminical caste earlier, went into the hands of these people. Brahmins were dislodged and were sent to the urban areas. So these kinds of monumental changes happened. In terms of politics, what happens is that for some time it worked, but the political aspirations also grew alongside this class, which could not be entirely contained by the Congress. And as a result, electoral politics became competitive. It became increasingly competitive and by the end of the 1960s, many changes were happening.

In social terms, there was a phenomenon of atrocities against Dalits, and in political terms, the emergence of vote banks, because all political parties started viewing people in terms of vote banks defined by their community and defined by their caste etc. Dalits became a very viable vote bank to be pursued because being economically marginalised people that vote bank actually worked very cheaply. So the Ambedkar icon started gaining importance because already sentimentally people are attached to Ambedkar, they revered him nostalgically that he was such a great man, he liberated us from our bondage and there isn’t anybody around now to lead us. That kind of nostalgia remained with Dalits because immediately after Ambedkar, Dalit politics was totally devastated. The Republican Party was initially a Scheduled Caste federation and despite even Ambedkar’s will, these people could not form the Republican Party because of the 1957 election. They wanted reserved seats and they did not want to forsake reserve seats, so because of that, the formation of the party was delayed and with vested interest they started disputing about what Ambedkar stood for – so-called “Ambedkarism”.

So initially Ambedkarism was projected as constitutionalism and the other part, which happened to know Ambedkar better, and wanted to actually take up some material questions like land, were castigated as something like non-Ambedkarites or playing into the hands of communists. This episode repeats again when the Dalit Panthers was formed in the 1970s as a reaction to the devastation of the Republican Party. There again the question of Ambedkarism came in and this time Ambedkarism became Buddhism. It was contended that Ambedkar gave us Buddhism and that is what Ambedkar wanted us to follow. The counter was again that the opposite camp was actually following communists, not Ambedkar, and they split. When the BJP government came to power in 2014, this trend actually has been taken to a new height. The BJP has been an antithetical party. The entire Sangh Parivar has been 180 degrees opposite to what Ambedkar stood for, but they started co-opting. 

This co-option by the Sangh Parivar began in the 1980s. Initial sarsanghchalaks like Hedgewar and Golwalkar were not very concerned with that and they always denigrated Ambedkar. They ignored Ambedkar. But then Deoras became the third sarsanghchalaks and he realised that this would not work. He had a strategic mind and realised that the RSS would not have any future unless it infiltrated the Bahujans. He then began the co-option process by including Ambedkar in their pantheons like the Pratah Smaraniya and then very forcefully started driving the Samajik Samrasta or social harmony. With that, they also began producing books about how Ambedkar was a great benefactor of the Hindu faith. Even Ambedkar’s conversion was taken as a benefaction, in a sense that he did not want to go for an Abrahamic religion and he accepted Indians and wanted to preserve Indian culture, and how Ambedkar was friendly with the RSS ideologues etc. 

Ambedkar said many things at various times and not necessarily consistently, rather when he was questioned about the consistency, Ambedkar dismissed it saying that consistency is a virtue of an ass and I am not one. So that kind of thing came handy for these people to pick up for distortion and in that distortion they blended certain absolute fabrications, absolute lies that Ambedkar visited such and such camp, that Ambedkar was very happy with the RSS, all those kinds of things they used for saffronising Ambedkar. With hindsight we can see that from the 1980s on they have almost succeeded, because India has a first-past-the-post election system wherein the winner takes it all, so there is nothing like a minimum that is set for winning representation, so these vote bank politics also stems from this kind of system. So what happens is that they have been making good inroads with Dalits. So the RSS made inroads, co-opted non-Ambedkarite Dalits and started making inroads into the Ambedkarites camps. So in this way they have succeeded quite a lot. 

In 2014 and 2019 elections, you would find that the BJP gained more reserved seats than all the parties put together. So in the 2024 election, which dented the BJP’s numbers, this number came down from 76 to 66 or something, and their vote share also dipped by 10 percent. But still they command more seats than any other party. So this is evidence enough that they have made significant inroads among Dalits. On the other hand, during this period it is significant to note that the Dalit atrocities have been rising. Today the figure stands at around 52,000 cases per year – never before had it reached that kind of high. So these are the kinds of things that ought to prompt people to worry about the trend. 

Everything revolves around Ambedkar – this unique phenomenon of an icon around which 220 million people could be drawn, it’s unprecedented in history. So it should have attracted the attention of many other people to look into this and do something about it. When this project was proposed, I perceived an opportunity because of my activism. I saw an opportunity to present Ambedkar as a real person, a person in flesh and bone, that people could see or relate with, so that he doesn’t become a god or a portrait to be hung on a wall. But people, the younger generation at least, should see that he was as good or as bad a person like themselves and he could achieve certain things in his life with the hard work that he put in – we could also do that. That is the inspiration that should be derived. Second thing, they should actually look into his life as to whether all that he has done has been right or what has been the aftermath of all that. That’s why normally biographies end with a man’s death but my biography extends, and my last chapter is about how legend lives on – somebody even said that in death Ambedkar is more powerful than alive – and Ambedkar’s influence actually extends far more than during his lifetime.

SS: In 1927 Dalits were beaten for exercising their legal civil rights at Mahad in a revolt to secure access to public drinking water, which in practice was denied to “untouchables”. When hundreds of Dalits were ready to fight back then against the rioting and bloodshed inflicted by dominant-caste Hindus, Ambedkar asked them to maintain peace. You argue that if Dalits had retaliated against the attack at Mahad, the history of the Dalit movement could have taken a different turn. Tell us more about this, and how did this experience lead Ambedkar to rethink the possibility of internal reform in Hindu society and look towards the political sphere?

AT: This was in my book on Mahad, where I shared my reflections that if the Dalits had retaliated to the attack of the Hindu goons, the history of the Dalit movement would have taken a different turn. And I stand by it. Many people were disturbed by this kind of approach, but I stand by it. 

I was always surprised that such a mass of people have been enduring humiliation and oppression every day for many hundreds of years. How could this happen? Even Ambedkar was disturbed. In 1936, he said – in the wake of his declaration that he would renounce Hinduism – that Dalits had three strengths. One is the strength in numbers, the second being the strength of finance, and third was spirituality. Because of the kind of subservience, insults and humiliation, which were all internalised so much, they lost their spirit. The caste system actually survived because of that. Everybody internalised it and believed that things needed to be like that, and there was no way out of it. They believed that people had to live like that. At that time, if anybody had questioned the process, things would not have been the same.  

Extending the same logic, I thought that Mahad could have offered an opportunity. Because never before had so many people collectively gathered together – the documentation shows that the first conference had 3000 delegates who were the veterans of World War I. So when these people mounted an attack on the Dalits, they approached the conference venue and spoiled their food while they were eating and still beat them, at that time the people were very enraged and just wanted a nod from Ambedkar to retaliate.

If these people had retaliated at that time, the future would have been different. Because for a caste Hindu, a Brahmin, the stakes are very high if a lower caste man raises his hand on him. Until that, he is something like a slave for him. The upper caste man could do anything and these people would take it, lying low. But if he retaliates, if he reacts and avenges his insult, that would be too much for them to take. It would have created a shockwave across the country. It would have symbolised that, no, these people are not going to take it anymore. A culture can only be changed with shockwaves. Unless it is jolted, a culture will not change. Culture does not change gradually. Jolts are required and this could have been that jolt. 

In terms of the numbers or the feasibility of it, it was very clear that there were only some few hundred people left in Mahad – a dozen or so upper-caste attackers. Even taking the entire population, it would have been around 3000 against a few hundred. The only reason against such a thing was that if they had retaliated, the innocent people in villages would have been beaten and it would have led to much more oppression. I do not buy that logic. Dalits were beaten up either way. It didn’t matter whether they retaliated or not. People in several villages were beaten for defying the caste code. But if people had taken an initiative to retaliate, things would have taken a different turn. Innocent people, who did not have anything to do with Mahad were also beaten. 

Around 20 to 30 years before Ambedkar, Ayyankali in Kerala did such a thing. I think among all the leaders, he stands as a real representative of Dalits – an illiterate man, a sturdy man, depending on just his bodily strength. He reacted to caste discrimination. The Pulayars in Kerala were not allowed to walk on certain roads, and Ayyankali, in a very upper-caste style, rode his bullock cart, then riots happened.  He led his community and bigger riots happened and he retaliated against them. Thereafter those roads were open to the people. This is how cultures could be breached, not through Parliament. In that sense, I still insist that such an approach would have worked much better. 

SS: In the Indian constitution, a mirror image of Scheduled Caste was created for extending the reservation to Backward Classes and Scheduled Tribes. Under the V P Singh government in 1990, this triggered the “casteization” process on a larger scale. You argue that reservation could have become an instrument to move towards the annihilation of caste. And while seemingly progressive, the policy became a political weapon to preserve caste inequality. You write that one of Ambedkar’s biggest accomplishments would turn into one of the biggest problems of Indian history. Tell us about the dysfunctionality of the reservations that Ambedkar fought for and won? 

AT: Dalits, in a very stereotyped manner, have been castigating Poona Pact, because separate electorates have gone and joint electorates have come and because of that this system has created Dalit stooges. As Kanshi Ram put it, the Bahujan Samaj Party had taken this issue in a big way and had actually built up a movement against the Poona Pact, to annul it and have a separate electorate. My contention is that even separate electorates would not have worked, because even the ruling class parties – it was not impossible for them to include Dalit constituencies through a separate electorate, create their own Dalit stooges and pitch them against the so-called genuine Dalits. It would not have worked. So both ways it would not have worked. The flaw lies in the first-past-the-post election system, which actually creates a lot of avenues for people to sort of manipulate the people’s choices. The alternative was the proportional representation system. I touch upon this in the book. The proportional representation system actually guarantees representation to each and every citizen of the country. There are models and how to enact it etc, and that is probably the merit of the proportional representation system because it is available for customisation. But there has not been a discussion in the constituent assembly on this system and by default, actually, they adopted the Westminster system. 

As a matter of fact, there has not been any change after independence when the transfer of power took place. I do not know what that independence means because there has been a seamless continuation of things. They adopted the same state structures, same processes, same people. Even the constitution, two thirds of the constitution, has been the same as the last colonial constitution, Government of India Act 1935. So what has changed? Nothing has changed.

The colonial state’s intention was to exploit India and control people, and smoothen the exploitation process. If everything had remained the same, the intention of the new ruling classes, ,by default also could be the same. In regards to political reservation, I do not think unless the election system had been changed, and a proper election system had been adopted, there was no solution either through separate electorate or joint electorate. My study at least does not support it. It was spoken out in the constituent assembly by people like Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, where she said that with this system even an institutional device of reservation would be obviated. And it is true, because automatically the manner in which people collected or organised, they would have gotten their due share either way in the proportional representation system, which is impossible in the FPTP system. 

The reservations in the educational and public employment sphere – in that, what happens is the first of the reservations were instituted during colonial times. It is tacitly done because it is not so much explicit in the act, but it was recognised that the “untouchables” or depressed classes were exceptional people. There is no dispute about there being a separate class that was totally segregated from mainstream society and downtrodden and so on and so forth. There was no question about their exceptionality. Not a single person could raise a hand. So reservation is an exceptional policy because when you declare that all are equal, then you are making some exception. So the reservation policy becomes an exceptional policy for exceptional people. And then there should be an automatically terminating clause over which that exceptionality or condition of exceptionality would vanish. So these are the vital prerequisites for any policy. When you formulate a policy, these things should be taken care of, that you should not make a reservation into a casual tool to be applied to everything, that it should be very restricted to a set of people which have objectivity about their exceptionality, and you would like that condition to vanish, because of that you are actually creating a policy. 

In colonial times, reservation only was given to “untouchables” as an exceptional people. Even tribals were also recognised as exceptional people, but they made different kinds of arrangements for them. After independence, avenues were opened to formally extend the reservation for even the tribes.

What could have been done then, would be to merge them together and create a separate schedule. The internal division could also be in operation. But what they did instead was that they changed the entire paradigm. That exceptionality vanished and they started hammering on about backwardness. Now India is a universally backward country. So in a backward country, how do you define backwardness? So they extended the reservations to the backward classes which were not defined, it was such a vague conception, and even when people spoke out in the constituent assembly, it was not considered and the reservation was extended to them. The basic intention, it appears, is that the ruling classes did not want to forego these two very potent weapons in their hands, which had proven themselves during colonial times – one is religion and the other is caste. They wanted to preserve this. Why I say so is that if they wanted even to extend reservation to the scheduled caste, it could have been very well done because the schedules were created already in 1936 and that snapped the relations with the Hindu caste. So if the intention was to extend social justice to schedule caste, which were the deserving class, so caste could have been abolished and untouchability outlawed.

If you look at history, look at all upper caste reformers – and Gandhi is the best example – they wanted to abolish untouchability, not caste. In some way, directly and indirectly, they justified caste as a good thing. Today, even the RSS is also doing the same. 

There is a historical trend which actually has been saying so and what the constituent assembly does is the same. They only abolish untouchability. How could untouchability be removed if caste remains? Nobody speaks about caste in the constituent assembly – they are all quiet on this thing because it’s the holy cow. The scheduled caste people kept quiet because they might be apprehending that if the caste is abolished their reservations would go. But that was not the case – reservation remains intact on the basis of a schedule, which was an administrative schedule, not the Hindu caste or a  scriptural caste. So in this way they preserved caste and extending the reservation to backward classes actually paved the way for the casteization of society, which is the palpable reality that we suffer today. 

The policy instrument could have been a tool for the annihilation of caste also needs to be seen. It is not the backwardness of people for which reservation is required, Dalits required reservation not because they were backward or because they were genetically deficient, but because that larger society had that deficiency – that disability that they could not treat its own people as equals. That is the disease, which needed to go. That exceptional condition actually relates to this. In order to annihilate caste, the larger entity, which is the larger society, only could undertake it, not a Dalit. So what happens in the present kind of system?

Any Dalit person getting into a reserved post or any educational institution with reservation has an inferiority complex – a stigma to carry lifelong. If the policy had been properly designed, this stigma would not have been there. Instead, the stigma would have been with society and society would have felt bad about treating people badly. 

Even Dalits would not have developed a vested interest in continuing that because restricting their quota to their share of population is their loss. The entire opportunity sphere should be available to Dalits too. 

SS Buddhism imparted a new identity to Dalits. Ambedkar said that no one can achieve emancipation in Hinduism, that it was possible only through Buddhism. But while Buddhism did not discriminate between castes, it was not caste agnostic or abolitionist. The caste system is still prevalent today in Buddhist societies in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and beyond. As an institutionalised religion, it’s also weaponised in these countries by the state and ruling classes. Why is it that Ambedkar saw religious conversion as the solution and why did he choose Buddhism?

AT: Ambedkar’s solution of conversion to Buddhism as a means to annihilate caste stemmed from his fundamental understanding of caste in a sacral mode. He viewed caste as an integral part of a unified Hindu religious order, hierarchically structured according to the Varna system.

Now, one could argue that this perspective was influenced at least in part by the colonial tendency to categorise Indian society through newly defined religious divisions, a strategy that facilitated the policy of divide and rule. The British wanted a neat division, they grouped together the Hindu and then Muslims as a counterbalance – everything else had to fit in. This was a colonial schema, and many people fell prey. So Ambedkar also visualised caste to be rooted in Hindu scriptures. In Annihilation of Caste, his magnum opus of sorts, he comes to the conclusion that the castes are rooted in Hindu Dharma Shastras, and in order to annihilate them, the Hindu Shastras would have to be dynamited and then destroyed.

Ambedkar actually problematises the Hindu Dharma Shastras being the source of caste, and states that Hindus will never be ready to destroy their Dharma Shastras. Nobody will rather. That’s why he bade goodbye, said he’s getting out and wished them very well. This is the way Annihilation of Caste ends. Now the critical question is, are castes truly sacral?

While Hinduism and its scriptures may have sanctioned caste, that does not necessarily mean caste was born from it or that it continues to derive its power from it. Caste as an operational system functions more likely in a sectarian or associational mode rather than purely as a religious construct. Social systems come into being and the ruling classes actually design or construct their scriptures around to justify it. This has been an established mechanism.  Caste operates as a collection of independent religious communities, each with its own doctrines and practices, self-contained and defining its own rights and duties independently of broader Hindu religious principles. There is something like an umbrella paradigm created by Hindus that itself is vague and underneath the way the castes operate, they have their own rules and regulations. Each caste has its own rules and regulations, the ritualistic modes. They are not uniform. They are basically different sectarian groups. The others are associational castes, where we have the non-Hindus like Muslims, Parsis, etc. Because human beings are social. Individuals are incapable of surviving alone, so they group together. Such kinds of collectivities are natural. But what the nature of that collectivity is needs to be probed. So the Hindu caste system, or the way caste survived, is basically more of sectarian groups than sacral groups. So the fundamental flaw remains in the diagnosis of it – what are castes?

This flaw then misleads one to see everything in a religious mode. So Baba Saheb also sort of got swayed and started thinking of a solution in terms of religious conversion. Now the way he looked at it, he actually looked at it from a material point of view, sometimes from a very spiritual point of view. It is very difficult to understand him. When he first declared that he would renounce Hinduism in Maharashtra in 1935, it created a big stir among Dalits. Many people were disturbed, and he had to organise a big conference in 1936 to explain himself. 

He recounted what the strengths are of religious conversion, why it’s necessary. necessary. He based this in material terms, that Dalits have three weaknesses: numbers, finance and spirituality. And the solution lies in merging with an existing religious community so as to gain strength in numbers. This was the formulation for conversion. 

When he converted to Buddhism after 20 years of study, his logic was entirely different. He then noted how Buddhism is scientific, how Buddhism is rational, and how Buddha’s legacy is legacy against caste and so on and so forth. Now, how does religion impinge upon caste? Did Buddhism have anything to do with caste? It’s a different matter that no Buddhist society is perfect. It’s different talking about Buddha’s principles. Buddhism in that sense might be a very good system of thought, a very rational, scientific system of thought, you can respect it. But when it becomes institutionalised, or when anything becomes institutionalised, it lives in a different mode. So Buddhism also as an institutionalised religion has all the negatives of any other. It is as good a religion as any other. So Buddhist societies do have caste-like divisions. 

In India, after conversion to Buddhism, what has happened to Dalits? Today we find that Indian society is more casteized than ever before. That has been one sentence I have been repeating ad infinitum, and the answer to that is rooted in the reservation. But apart from that, what has conversion to Buddhism done? I do not see any dent – except for a notional identity that we received – nothing has been done. There has been a cultural change to some extent, but that cultural change also acts in both ways because that becomes a cultural assertion of Dalits, which is actually taken as upfront by the upper class, and if something goes wrong, then it precipitates into atrocity. So it has been happening both ways. So in regards to the annihilation of caste, converting to Buddhism has not proved to be a tool.

SS: Dalits in India continue to suffer immense oppression under the force of the right-wing Hindutva project. Even the practice of untouchability shows little decline over the years, as you’ve mentioned earlier. Today, the movement Ambedkar built is in crisis. You write that under the post-2014 BJP regime, some of the most prominent Dalit leaders of the Ambedkarite movement have jumped on the BJP’s bandwagon in the face of a broader agenda of Hindu Rashtra that Ambedkar clearly warned against. At this juncture, in the face of the saffronising of Ambedkar, how do we assess and take forward his legacy and the movement towards the annihilation of caste that he led and fought for? 

AT: And that has been the key question. The main objective behind writing this book also has been that. The challenge before us is that we find ourselves nowhere. There has been an onslaught on everything, and everything is getting saffronised, autocratised and fascised. As far as the Dalit movement is concerned, most of the Dalit leaders are already in the lap of the RSS’s BJP. Hardly anyone, I could just name a couple of them, appear to be navigating independently. Otherwise everybody, directly or indirectly, has gone to the BJP. And they have taken people also along because Dalits are very gullible people, they just follow their leaders blindly. The BJP also has huge resources, man power, and money has become very vital. So their modus operandi is they help them. It never happened before with the Congress regime. They have a network of people who actually monitor which Dalit families need anything. So suppose there is a death in the family, the people would reach them and give some money to do the rituals. In this way people feel obligated and start seeing the differences between the Congress and the BJP – there is hardly any big difference. So the people who actually give you support with money, why not support them? So this is the logical answer in their minds and people have been swayed in favour of the BJP.

Having said that, how do we break this deadlock? They have been successful in saffronising Ambedkar – the way they projected Ambedkar as a congenial figure for themselves – that has also had an impact on Dalit minds. If Ambedkar has done something for them, that is a sacrosanct. So this mold needed to be broken. And that was a challenge before me.

There is no easier way than projecting Ambedkar’s real persona as a man who walked this earth in flesh and blood and projecting him as a person who struggled with a singular aim in his mind. His greatness lies in that, not in the things that he did.

We have an advantage of hindsight. In his place, we would have made more blunders. So that is not an issue. The issue is that it is my life which is ahead of me, my children’s life which is ahead of them. So how do we let ourselves be manipulated by the ruling classes in his name or see what exactly has happened in history, the way they have been projecting Ambedkar has been. So these kinds of insights needed to be gained by Dalits. Otherwise there is

no escape. 

I referred to “Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah”, Ambedkar’s speech he delivered in Pune. There he brings out all these dimensions, and that probably works as a lesson. Even in my justification, I’ve said in some interviews, I followed Ambedkar only. I have not come across any explicit terms, such a valid lesson being given by any great man. That great man is nothing, nothing but somebody offering his shoulders for the next generation to stand on and look out further. So the coming generation, they have an intrinsic benefit to see further than me. That is a profound kind of imagery, and this is the way people should take him. 

Ambedkar did contribute to the upliftment of Dalit in some ways, but how much, what has happened, how to take it, all those kinds of things remain as a question mark for us. They need to be resolved. Ultimately, the so-called followers of Ambedkar have to say thank you for lending your shoulder for me to stand on and see further. That’s it. Ambedkar said that no great man should expect more than that. That’s what it is. This is the only way to resolve even the question of the annihilation of caste. Otherwise that goal itself is lost.