How radical was Ambedkar?
Thanks to Penguin India for the footage!
Thanks to Penguin India for the footage!
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00:00I would say that there is no single individual who is significant to the African-American struggle
00:06as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was to the Dalit struggle. He was an extremely careful and rigorous thinker.
00:18Ambedkar is one of the prominent and pioneering leaders during the independence struggle who
00:25comes out as a singularly focused person who puts India constantly within the global map.
00:34Ambedkar is a foreign policy strategist. Ambedkar in his schedule caste federation
00:41had a specific column which decidedly talked about problems of Indian foreign policy. In that
00:48he charts out what are the kind of problems that Indian republic is going to face and is currently
00:53facing. He was critical of the Nehruvian doctrine which was almost focused with the idea of Asia
00:59for Asiatics. Ambedkar argued that Asia for Asiatic was good for as long as colonial role
01:05was in existence. Now that we do not have the colonial burden we have to focus on finding more
01:13pragmatic strategies. This is where Ambedkar's pragmatic best comes to the fore where he doesn't
01:21hesitate to align with America, to align with western powers because he argues that we need
01:27two things. We need one financial muscle as well as resources, the intellectual as well as
01:32scientific developments that these countries are involved in. This very much came from Ambedkar's
01:37experience wherein he was involved in building India's one of the largest dams down of the
01:43valley. In addition to that Ambedkar was also aware that Indian treasury is not enough to sustain
01:50this huge mass. So he recommended that we need to go with the countries who are willing to support
01:57us. There are unquestionably several parallels to the African-American struggle against white
02:02supremacy in the U.S. and the dollar struggle against caste-based oppression in India.
02:07African-Americans also have several outstanding individuals who have been major leaders of our
02:13struggle here including people like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington,
02:19W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. But I would say that there is no single individual who
02:26is significant to the African-American struggle as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was to the dollar struggle.
02:34As one scholar put it, for the dollar masses Dr. Ambedkar is everything together. A first-rate
02:41scholar, a Moses who led his people out of bondage, a bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition.
02:48He is like a god. Ambedkar was a very hopeful internationalist who argued and who hoped that
02:55the future of Dalit lies within the global index of human rights. Whatever globally
03:02oppressed communities are suffering, Dalit sufferings is also related. Post-independent
03:07India, the situation of Dalits becomes worse. Ambedkar is insecure about what is going to
03:15happen in future to the Dalits. Therefore, during that time he reaches out to a legendary
03:21black intellectual as well as activist who was taking the issue of race to United Nations
03:26organization. Ambedkar writes a letter to Du Bois requesting him if he could solicit his support
03:33in advancing and advocating the rights of the Dalits. In the apartheid regime, as we saw,
03:39Nehru was involved in advocating for the African as well as the third world solidarity.
03:48Ambedkar argued that the South African apartheid is existing in every villages in India. Therefore,
03:55we also need to address this question. Nehru overlooks and after Nehru, successive governments
04:02very cleverly ignored the caste question as much as they can. To understand how Ambedkar
04:08understood Dalit struggle, it was not through insular way of looking through only Brahminic
04:13text or the Hindu text or the Buddhist or the Indian geographical text. Ambedkar understood
04:21Dalit struggle through a global vision, a universalist approach that could present Dalit
04:27as a militant as well as a formative category that will emphasize its existence on its own term.
04:34All of India's political leaders at the time, I think Ambedkar had the most advanced
04:41academic training. He was an extremely careful and rigorous thinker. And this comes out very strongly
04:50in his thinking on minority rights. But he worked out a very elaborate and rigorous theory,
04:59which specified under what conditions minorities could claim a right to self-determination as a
05:05nationality, where rich and wealthy and powerful minorities did not need to be considered as
05:14minorities. And of course, the case of Dalits, many of the conditions from Ambedkar's time
05:21have changed in India. But I think Ambedkar's theory still has a great deal to tell us and
05:31teach us about the conditions that we face today.