On December 6 this year I was in Mumbai, having attended the swearing-in ceremony of the new Mahayuti government at Azad Maidan the previous day. It was the death anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar, and a journalist friend suggested I see the way Dalits from all over the state pour into the city year after year on this day to pay homage to the man who had crafted India’s Constitution – and worked to transform their lives.
As I drove from Haji Ali to Shivaji Park, I could see the double file of people inching forward to get to Chaityabhoomi, which houses Babasaheb’s samadhi. Five lakh people showed up in Mumbai that day. They were allowed to travel free by the Railways across the state, and most would go back the same night, after paying obeisance to their icon and having a look around Mumbai for a few hours.
I was aware of Babasaheb’s standing among the Dalits, but I had not realised the reverence with which they – particularly the young – viewed him now. Said a college student, who had come with her ailing grandfather from Aurangabad: “I am doing law, because I too want to be like Babasaheb.”
A schoolgirl who hopes to “work in an MNC” said: “It’s because of him that I can have education today. I pay Rs 515. But for him, I would be paying Rs 1 lakh for my studies.”
An emotional 30-year-old, a farmer from Yavatmal district, said: “Bababsaheb is our ideal, maa-baap se bhi zyada hain. Hamein jeene ka tareeka sikhaya hai, unse aashirwad lene mein sukoon milta hai, energy aati hai (He is more than a parent to us. He taught us how to live, it gives us comfort to take his blessing, it gives us energy).”
Many had arrived at the crack of dawn – from Beed, Nashik, Pune, Kolhapur, Satara, Nanded, etc. Some had been eight-nine hours on the road. Chaityabhoomi at Shivaji Park seemed to be the site of an Ambedkar festival with photos, festoons, food stalls, theatre programmes, books and pamphlets featuring the leader. The food was free (arranged by NGOs and government agencies).
A young woman, selling a magazine on Dalit issues, said: “Babasaheb saw inequality and casteism as the basis of Hinduism. That is why he said, ‘I may have been born a Hindu, but I am not going to die a Hindu’.”
Most of those at Chaityabhoomi were also neo-Buddhists, like Ambedkar, who converted to Buddhism before he died in 1956.
Mumbai was plastered with more posters of Ambedkar those two days than of newly sworn in Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy CMs Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar – or, for that matter, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It felt as if an aspirational upsurge was taking place in the community.
The previous week I had visited the Ambedkar museum in Pune – and saw people prostrating at the entrance.
Despite Ambedkar’s differences with Mahatma Gandhi over separate electorate for the “depressed classes”, which resulted in the Poona Pact of 1931, and with Jawaharlal Nehru, whose Cabinet he finally quit as Law Minister in 1951, he was picked by the two to head the drafting committee of the Constitution. But then, those were different times.
“Let’s face it,” said a Mumbai entrepreneur, who is not a Dalit, “Babasaheb has become a part of the country’s trinity today, along with Gandhi and Nehru. No party can ignore him, each party wants to appropriate him.”
The contention in Parliament last week over the Dalit leader was therefore not surprising. Neither side wanted to be seen on the wrong side of Ambedkar. Amit Shah in his address in the Rajya Sabha quoted chapter and verse to claim that, over the years, the Congress had not recognised his contributions but only denigrated him. And the Congress seized on Shah’s remarks, that it had become a fashion now to keep saying “Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar…”, to say the Union Home Minister had made a “mockery” of the Dalit leader.
The standoff led to Parliament witnessing ugly scuffles, the hospitalization of two BJP MPs, and the extraordinary move of an FIR being filed against the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi.
The BJP which lost the support of Dalits in this year’s Lok Sabha elections, thus falling short of a majority, is believed to have regained some of this support in the Maharashtra and Haryana elections. With the BJP, which is no longer a “Brahmin Bania” party, wary of risking Dalit support, Shah even gave a press conference to say that his remarks about Ambedkar were being distorted. PM Modi, who remains aloof in such instances, jumped in to defend his No. 2.
The Congress has vowed to create a “movement” on the issue across the country, seeing an opportunity to intensify its push for Dalit support. Divided down the middle till only days earlier, on the Adani issue and on the question of who should lead the alliance, the INDIA bloc united over Babasaheb Ambedkar.
The trouble, however, is the timing. There are no big elections around the corner – except in little Delhi, and in Bihar later in 2025.
Even so, the DMK has passed a resolution criticising Amit Shah’s “mocking” words. The poll-bound Arvind Kejriwal has held out an offer promising to fund Dalit students who manage to get admission in prestigious foreign universities.
On the BJP side, Maharashtra CM Fadnavis did not waste time announcing a judicial probe into the death of a Dalit law student, “who aspired to be just 1% of Babasaheb”, in police custody, after he was picked up in Parbhani district for allegedly protesting against the desecration of the Constitution. NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar moved to highlight the incident, and Fadnavis rushed his Deputy CM Ajit Pawar to damage control.
Political parties now know how quickly Dalit youth can galvanise – as they did in the Lok Sabha elections after the Opposition claimed that “400 paar (400-plus)” seats for BJP could entail end of reservations, enabled by Babasaheb.
Today, with the BSP, the preeminent Dalit party, on the wane, there is a growing vacuum in Dalit leadership. Now it seems the young, educated, aspirational Dalits are in the lead. Ambedkar’s importance in their lives has grown exponentially. Political parties sense this change – and can ignore it no longer.
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