Looking for Dr B. R. Ambedkar in The Times of India,December 1956–April 1990

Abstract

This article searches for Dr B. R. Ambedkar (India’s first Law Minister) in the pages of The Times of India (TOI; India’s largest-selling English-language newspaper) from December 1956 to April 1990, that is, from Ambedkar’s death to his receiving the Bharat Ratna. A lone soldier for his social and political causes, during his life and after his death, Ambedkar’s afterlife has recently seen a total transformation in contemporary India. This article looks for Ambedkar before this turn by going through the pages of TOI over a period of thirty-four years, to trace both his representation in and resistance to it, before the current appropriation, on four key themes of religion (neo-Buddhism), region (Bombay/Maharashtra), caste (scheduled/backward) and class (lower-middle/political). Drawing upon 200+ items, the article presents the newspaper’s expanding coverage of Ambedkar in Indian politics in a framework of continuum that reconciles its changes, by focussing on the regularity of these reports and analysing their periodicity. Taken together, these details allow us to see the slow switch in the status quo on Ambedkar’s iconography, long before the present idolisation, and fill a political vacuum before his present veneration.

Introduction

On the 127th birth anniversary of Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), in a newspaper column titled ‘The Discovery of Ambedkar’, journalist Ravish Tiwari wrote in The Indian Express that

In his over 30 years of active public life, Ambedkar contested the ideas and actions of almost every major political stream of those times—the nationalists (Congress), cultural nationalists (Hindu Mahasabha, Jan Sangh), Communists and Socialists. In return, Ambedkar remained a contested figure. Yet, in the five to six decades since his death, Ambedkar has risen again, this time as a figure that none dare contest. In fact, there is a clamour among the descendants of the same four political streams to firmly embrace him. ¹

It is this political discovery of Ambedkar that is at the heart of this article, which traces its pre-history in the years between his death in 1956 and his being given the Bharat Ratna in 1990. Ambedkar’s clashes with the Indian National Congress on untouchability, separate electorates for depressed classes, ² and the Hindu Code Bill, ³ with the Hindu Mahasabha on religious conversion, ⁴ with the Communist Party of India (CPI) on violence and democracy, ⁵ and the different Socialist Parties on peasantry, ⁶ meant that by the time he died, Ambedkar personified Wordsworth’s solitary reaper, confined to his province of Bombay/Maharashtra. As Tiwari noted, for years from his demise, Ambedkar remained a political untouchable for political mainstream(s), and it was only in the early-1980s that the major Dalit (scheduled castes) faces of north Indian electoral politics, namely Kanshiram, ⁷ and Ram Vilas Paswan, ⁸ started mobilising around Ambedkar. Until then, Jagjivan Ram of the Congress held sway as the Gandhian ‘Harijan’ icon, ⁹ while the Communist and Socialist parties’ leadership remained either upper caste, ¹⁰ or from the Other Backward Castes. ¹¹ As for the Bharatiya Jana Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), they had little to commend about someone who proudly ‘did not die [as] a Hindu’, after his public conversion to Buddhism in October 1956, ¹² and whose veneration was a case of Worshipping False Gods. ¹³

This was a far cry from the recent spectacle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi participating in 10 events organised on Ambedkar from April 2015 for his 125th birth anniversary celebrations, at the end of which, in April 2016, the RSS magazine Organiser brought out a special issue on Ambedkar, presenting him on the cover as ‘The Unifier’. As Tiwari put it, this embrace from the top of Ambedkar represents but the tip of the iceberg of the latter’s appropriation by one and all and is a consolidation of the churn that started over thirty years after Ambedkar died. Taking its cue from these words, this article looks for Ambedkar before this churn. What was heard of/on him in the public sphere from 1956 to 1984–1986 (when Kanshiram formed his Bahujan Samaj Party and Jagjivan Ram died)? How did mass mobilisation happen in his name and around his message before he gained pan-India social traction and became electorally relevant? As political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote during those 125th birth anniversary celebrations:

The response to Ambedkar has been, first, resistance: with the grand exception of his participation in the drafting of the Constitution, there was a systematic attempt to marginalise him. Then it was defensiveness: the appalling lengths to which we will go to deny the violence inflicted on Dalit bodies, or the continual denial of opportunities for empowerment. When defensiveness is no longer a political option, there is appropriation. ¹⁴

This problematique of afterlives in contemporary India has also been noted vis-à-vis the revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–31), who is ‘similarly invoked across contradictory ideological projects from the Hindu right to the Maoist left [and] Sikh separatists to secular nationalists…’. ¹⁵ But Ambedkar’s changing portrayals—from a ‘caste leader’ and the ‘antithesis to Gandhi’ to a ‘thinker of mid-20th c. law’ and an anchor of Buddhism—are sui generis when it comes to historical resurrection. ¹⁶ His selective appropriation ‘by the right, the left, progressive, liberal[s] …the socialists’, ¹⁷ has evolved into something of a celebration. This article tracks the multiple folds before this rush by utilising the pages of The Times of India (TOI, est. 1838), which has been India’s largest-circulating English-language daily and, as catering to the English-knowing bilingual middle/upper-class/caste (the language in which Ambedkar wrote and the class/castes that he crossed swords with), has been called ‘the premier representative of the Indian press’. ¹⁸ Historically, a status quo newspaper, the TOI has also been chosen because of its defining presence in the Indian print landscape as a ‘newspaper [of] profit…’. ¹⁹ The article locates Ambedkar in the TOI and attempts to derive meaning from these mentions about, first, his presentation and second, both resistance to and then appropriation of it. This latter shift is traced through the increasing appearance of Ambedkar, and with a heightened intensity, in the newspaper’s reportage of the relevant social struggles. In this early-independent India, Ambedkar stood between many contesting collectives of religion, region, caste and class, and the article is both chronologically and thematically organised to reflect these.

It is within this context of then-and-now that the article explores the coverage of Ambedkar among the TOI’s preferences and projections, finds the emergence of new identity positions and their responses, and surveys their liminal space of uneasy cohabitation. The newspaper’s reach and its self-avowed apolitical stance are of some importance in this exercise, which is about delineating the slow-and-staggered emerging political utility of Ambedkar across a historical time. Unlike the ‘enduring Brahmin domination’ of The Hindu (est. 1878), ²⁰ or the business ‘paternalism’ of The Indian Express (est. 1932), ²¹ or even the shifting ‘nationalism’ of The Hindustan Times (est. 1924), ²² the TOI has been a pioneer in the ‘marketing-to-the-exclusion-of-editorial’ approach. ²³ This meant that by the new millennium, it was outselling its nearest rival by two-to-one while, by 2011–2013, its circulation figure was double that of its next competitor. ²⁴

The TOI is then used here as statistically the largest prism to see this change in the political fortunes of Ambedkar as reflected in the newspaper and thereby in a social reality in which old markers have been overlain by new. This newspaper is but one vantage of the multivocal print media landscape of those years, and, to that extent, this article is but an indicative attempt to capture first the denotation and then the connotation of Ambedkar in its pages, before the construction of new political identities in India since 1990. ²⁵ However, for all their diversity, the four newspapers mentioned above—accounting for nearly two-thirds of the readership of English-language newspapers—have not sought to destabilise national politics, while it was not until 1979 that ‘Hindi newspapers surpassed English ones in circulation’. ²⁶ In any case, two years before Ambedkar died, it was well-observed that India’s English language press is the ‘only national press’, while four years after he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, it was still being asserted that since only English is spoken throughout the country, hence ‘only English language publications can claim a “national” status’. ²⁷

The primary material presented in this article comes from the period December 1956 to April 1990, amounting to a total of 200+ items, which have been read looking for Ambedkar. Through this historical time, the TOI’s expanding coverage of Ambedkar in Indian politics is presented in a framework of continuum that reconciles its changes, ²⁸ by threading through the shifting representations of Ambedkar in the newspaper. If time ‘is essential to what periodical print media is’, ²⁹ then it is also ‘peculiarly susceptible to cultural construction’, ³⁰ including what has been referred to as the ‘sudden acceleration of a distantly perceived future’. ³¹ The article’s search for Ambedkar, by focussing on the regularity (or not) of the TOI’s reports and by following the newspapers’ periodic intensity (or otherwise) in organising their presentation of the Ambedkarite cause by different parties, affords us the four key discursive domains—religion, region, caste and class—around Ambedkar, and enables us to see the slow switch in the status quo, long before his present appropriation and idolisation.

1956–1967: Resistance

Dr B. R. Ambedkar died in New Delhi on 6 December 1956. He was sixty-three years old and had been suffering from diabetes. While his political career had stagnated and he had discharged no governmental duties for five years, the scholar in him was alive and he had been working on his book, The Buddha and His Dhamma. The next day, the TOI carried fulsome tributes for him, spread across many pages, terming him variously as the champion of Scheduled Castes and as among the chief architects of India’s constitution. Before the dead body was flown to Bombay by his wife, Dr Savita Ambedkar, and the noted Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant, and their cabinet colleague, Jagjivan Ram, called at Ambedkar’s residence. Afterwards, paying homage in the parliament, Nehru described Ambedkar as ‘the symbol of revolt against all the oppressing features of Hindu society’, who had played ‘a most important part in the making of constitution’, but was also a ‘highly controversial figure [and] not a person of soft speech’. ³²

Following the Prime Minister, similar speeches were reported from across a wide spectrum, bringing out different sides of the deceased. Congress’s N.V. Gadgil struck telling notes in pointing out that Ambedkar was ‘ten times dearer to Maharashtrians’ than to the rest of India, and if he was ‘bitter in tongue, his heart was sweet’. Gadgil also claimed that Ambedkar had told him that there should be ‘no more privileges to the scheduled castes. They … should fight the remaining injustices along with the rest’. ³³ For the TOI, it was this sentiment that served as Ambedkar’s political testament. Across the parliamentary aisle, N.C. Chatterjee of the Hindu Mahasabha, and P. N. Rajbhoj, from among ‘Harijan’ parliamentarians, paid tributes to this champion of downtrodden. Outside the parliament, organisations like the All-India Harijan League, and the Indian National Trade Union Congress recalled Ambedkar’s services. Outside the national capital, the Bombay Municipal Corporation, Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF, est. 1942), the Bombay High Court and Bar and the University of Poona moved resolutions on Ambedkar’s death. ³⁴

There was a ‘mammoth’ funeral procession in Bombay on 7 December 1956 of ‘over half million’ people, who gathered to have a ‘last glimpse’ of their leader, ³⁵ and it took five hours to cover the five-mile route to the cremation ground. Curiously, the recently installed state government of the Congress’s Y.B. Chavan was represented rather thinly on the occasion, during which hundreds of Ambedkar’s followers took the pledge to embrace Buddhism, ³⁶ by its ministers for public works and local self-government, the speaker of the assembly and the chief secretary. Ten days later, thousands turned up for a mass Buddhist prayer in the city of Nagpur, at the ‘very spot’, where on 14 October, Ambedkar, ‘along with more than 100, 000 of his followers [had] embraced Buddhism’. ³⁷ Simultaneously, ‘more than 50, 000 followers’ assembled at Ambedkar Nagar, Nasik to pay homage to the last remains of their leader, as a procession carrying an urn of his ashes was taken out, marked the occasion by embracing Buddhism. ³⁸

Buoyed by these turnouts in Nagpur and Nasik, the SCF announced that it would try to put up candidates for the general seats in the upcoming second general election. And though arguably he was not a public icon yet, beyond these provincial parishes, Ambedkar’s former sparring partners in the Congress too, while drafting their election manifesto in January 1957, adopted two resolutions ‘condoling the death of Pandit [R. S.] Shukla, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, Mr G. V. Mavalankar, Mr Manilal Gandhi…and 20 others’. ³⁹ Sandwiched in this list between his arch-adversaries on the Hindu Code Bill, Ambedkar’s content in the newspaper comprised—for now—those of his followers who had embraced Buddhism, ⁴⁰ and participated in the 2501st anniversary of the death of the Buddha in Bombay in May 1957. ⁴¹ Privately, the aftermath of his death saw the usual squabble for his property between son Yashwant and wife Savita, with petitions filed by them in Delhi and Bombay High Courts, respectively. ⁴² Eventually, they came to an understanding and an administrator was appointed, bringing curtains down on a saga that was well covered by the TOI. ⁴³

As Ambedkar’s first death anniversary approached, thoughts turned towards commemorating him and the lead was aptly taken by the Mayor and the Sheriff of Bombay, who at a citizens’ meeting in November, appointed a committee to collect funds for a ‘memorial’. ⁴⁴ In the meantime, Ambedkar cropped up, once in a while, in ministerial remarks, such as when the Home Minister Pandit Pant inaugurated the 15th annual session of the Bharatiya Depressed Classes League in Gwalior in March 1958. ⁴⁵ Or, when the Bombay Chief Minister Chavan unveiled his portrait at the Buddha Bhavan of the city. Chavan was more forthcoming than most on this occasion in extending the canvas of Ambedkar’s work when he said that ‘history would record its clear verdict that Ambedkar had served … not only his own people but the country as a whole’. ⁴⁶

This praise was, however, not followed by patronage, and, in January 1959, Yashwant Ambedkar’s Republican Party of India (RPI) was struggling to stake claim to the consecration ground in Nagpur. When a deputation of the party met Chavan, the Chief Minister reportedly told them that ‘the site had been reserved for a new engineering college, but a plot of land might be found elsewhere for the memorial’. ⁴⁷ Soon another way to memorialise Ambedkar presented itself when P. T. Borale, one of the founders of the RPI, was elected Mayor of Bombay defeating V. N. Desai of Congress. ⁴⁸ Borale, the first Scheduled Caste Mayor of the city, succeeded S. S. Mirajkar, the first Communist to hold the office, and recalled Ambedkar, though his victory had more to do with the then-ongoing anti-Congress agitation for a Marathi-speaking state. ⁴⁹ Still, Bombay city saw more of Ambedkar in death than in life, and in September 1959, his portrait was unveiled in the premises of the legislative council hall, alongside those of Shivaji, Naoroji, Tilak, Patel and Nehru. ⁵⁰

Simultaneously, efforts continued to cement Ambedkar’s memory in the state’s calendar by petitions to declare his birthday as a ‘public holiday’. ⁵¹ Not all the hurdles in this quest were external. In mid-August 1961, when the twelve-acre consecration ground in Nagpur was formally handed over to the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Smarak Samiti by the state government on a ‘tax-free lease for educational purposes … open to students of all castes, communities, and creeds’, ⁵² it was only possible after the Samiti overcame differences in the by-now divided RPI, both wings of which had sought possession. But, in October 1961, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Ambedkar’s and his followers’ mass acceptance of Buddhism, the Maharashtra State Buddha Mahasabha opposed the abovementioned transfer, as it ‘militated against the mutually agreed principles by Buddhist organisations and the government, belittled the sanctity of the holy ground and amounted to interference with religious rights’, ⁵³ for the Ambedkar Samiti was ‘not a religious organisation’ and therefore was an ‘undeserving’ body.

This broadside—rich fodder for the press—recalled parliamentarian P. N. Rajbhoj’s calling Ambedkar no-more a ‘Harijan Leader’ as a ‘consequence of [his] conversion’ in October 1956, and adding that those who had followed Ambedkar ‘could no-more claim the rights and privileges [of] the Scheduled Castes’. ⁵⁴ Ten years later, the same Rajbhoj would go on a fast to demand six seats in the national parliament and sixteen in the Maharashtra state assembly for the neo-Buddhists. ⁵⁵ Caught thus between the old Scheduled Castes, the new Buddhists, and splits in his own party, Ambedkar’s son Yashwant lost to the Congress candidate in the Maharashtra assembly election of March 1962 by a considerable margin of 66,530 votes in the city of Kolhapur. ⁵⁶ The two-part RPI would remain a party of demonstrations and charters, organised typically on the birth/death anniversaries of Ambedkar, with their demands usually starting with a portrait of Ambedkar being raised in the parliament. ⁵⁷ The press too would take their notice in a similar vein, or when a book like Dhananjay Keer’s Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1963) would be published. ⁵⁸

His political movement may be stymied thus, but his pedagogical initiatives were thriving and when Ambedkar’s People’s Education Society (Bombay, est. 1945) organised exhibitions on his 74th birth anniversary in 1965, a companion volume to D. R. Jatava’s Political Philosophy of B.R. Ambedkar, containing his writings and speeches was released. ⁵⁹ The TOI, in its interpretation of this text, termed Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism rather than any other faith a ‘realistic’ act because, while it meant a ‘not-too-drastic’ break with the ‘Hindu majority’, it did signal a ‘clear-cut rejection of certain social practices’ without ‘the Marxist way of built-in violence’. ⁶⁰ But before any conflict could come, commemoration was needed, and an estimated 75,000 people gathered on 14 April 1966 in Bombay for Ambedkar’s seventy-fifth birth anniversary, when Maharashtra Chief Minister V.P. Naik released a commemorative stamp on Dr B.R. Ambedkar, providing the first such state imprimatur that was approvingly reported by the TOI to its reading public. ⁶¹

1967–1978: Marginalisation

On 2 April 1967, almost ten years from when a committee was created in Bombay to commemorate him, a thirteen-foot-high statue of Dr Ambedkar was unveiled in New Delhi, in the parliament compound by the President Dr S. Radhakrishnan, who described it as a ‘permanent reminder to practice the principles of social equality in our everyday life’. ⁶² On this occasion, Y.B. Chavan, now Union Home Minister, reiterated his earlier remark that Ambedkar was not merely the leader of his community but verily of the whole country. This well-attended and well-covered occasion marked a turning point in the state memorialisation of Ambedkar and, a year later, the Maharashtra Chief Minister V.P. Naik, laid the foundation stone of a Buddhist stupa at Nagpur, to commemorate Ambedkar’s embracing of Buddhism. ⁶³ In terms of electoral politics though, the worm was far from turning. The RPI, whose factional splits were by now four-fold, was threatened with disintegration because of their ‘fraternisation with the Congress’. ⁶⁴ Consequently, in September 1970, the state police would seize Ambedkar Bhavan in Nagpur following ‘rival claims …’. ⁶⁵

It was in this volatile political climate between the general elections of 1967 and 1971 that the agitation for Ambedkar first started and made it prominently into the newspaper’s pages. Y. B. Chavan, the Maratha satrap in Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s shaky union government, ⁶⁶ declared in Bombay in mid-April 1969 that ‘those who supported the caste system were enemies of the nation … [They] did not understand the forces at work in society today’. ⁶⁷ In October that year, as the Indian state organised functions marking the Gandhi centenary, the RPI called for a half-day hartal and mobilised 5,000 student marchers from colleges and schools started by Ambedkar to protest the disfiguring of a Buddha statue at Aurangabad. ⁶⁸ In December 1970, Chavan inaugurated the second conference of Buddhists of India and recalled Ambedkar’s significant role in ‘resurrecting Buddhism in the country’. ⁶⁹ And in between, from the right-wing Jana Sangh, its president Atal Bihari Vajpayee called on the youth to emulate Ambedkar and ‘eradicate social inequalities’. ⁷⁰

1971, Indira Gandhi’s annus mirabilis, was also Ambedkar’s eightieth year of birth and I. A. Ezekiel remembered him in the TOI in curiously Gandhian terms, as ‘the social revolutionary [who] championed the cause of Harijans through non-violence…’. ⁷¹ On the one hand, Ambedkar’s memory was reflected that year in the appointment of Dr T. K. Tope, principal of Government Law College, Bombay, as the Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University, for Tope had published a tract called Why Hindu Code? in 1950 to support it, at Ambedkar’s instance. ⁷² On the other hand, the American Black Panther Party-inspired Dalit Panthers were founded in May 1972. ⁷³ And, on the occasion of the silver jubilee of India’s independence, the portrait of Ambedkar was finally added to the picture gallery of Parliament’s central hall that had served as the Constituent Assembly (1946–49), which had been an arena of his major work. ⁷⁴ This memorialising spell was broken in Nagpur in October 1972, when ‘the police burst tear-gas shells and lathi-charged a neo-Buddhist mob that tried to enter Deeksha Bhoomi … the result of a dispute between followers of Anand Kausalyayan and the Ambedkar Smarak Samiti’. ⁷⁵ Their ongoing fratricide was joined by outrage in April 1973, when an early incident of damaging an Ambedkar statue in Bayana, Bharatpur was reported. ⁷⁶

From 1973 to 1974, as Indira Gandhi’s annus horribilis began, Ambedkar started cropping up in the TOI as a subject of either eulogy—such as when her government accepted a demand for All-India Radio broadcasts on Ambedkar’s birth and death anniversaries—or estrangement. ⁷⁷ The latter took many forms like, when an 8,000-strong Dalit Panthers procession to protest against police atrocities in Worli was dispersed forcibly, causing one person’s death. ⁷⁸ In April 1974, ‘4 people were killed and 16 wounded’, ⁷⁹ when the police opened fire at Worli during a clash between neo-Buddhists and caste Hindus on Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. Later that year came another incident of defilement of Ambedkar’s statue—from Malegaon, Nasik—leading to an opposition walk-out from the Maharashtra assembly, ⁸⁰ while January 1975 saw UP’s Chief Minister, H. N. Bahuguna, deny press reports that his government had prohibited Ambedkar’s photograph from being displayed in government offices. ⁸¹

With the imposition of the emergency in June 1975 and the suspension of constitution, ⁸² its drafter-in-chief understandably came under greater focus, as the Prime Minister began a series of public nods to him with her attendance in February 1976 at the silver jubilee celebrations of Milind College (Aurangabad), founded by Ambedkar. ⁸³ A resolution moved by the latter in Bombay assembly back in November 1938 was pulled out by a Maharashtra Congress legislator to highlight Ambedkar’s advocacy of birth control vis-à-vis the government’s forced sterilisation programme. ⁸⁴ As the emergency passed the one-year mark and murmurs gathered around the Prime Minister’s desire to rewrite the constitution, she recalled that Ambedkar had said that the constituent assembly had been elected on a ‘limited franchise’, and a parliament elected on universal adult franchise in 1971 ‘cannot be said to have lesser power’. ⁸⁵

The general election that Indira Gandhi called in March 1977 showed where greater power lay, that is, with the people, who ushered in India’s first non-Congress union government. ⁸⁶ Two months later, in May, came the fiftieth anniversary of the famous chawadar tale Mahad Satyagraha launched by Ambedkar in 1927, and the newly installed Janata Party government in Maharashtra embraced the occasion. As thousands of neo-Buddhists, RPI members and Dalit Panthers gathered at the Buddhawada ground in Mahad, where Ambedkar had burnt a copy of the Manusmriti having earlier ‘drunk water from Mahad lake in defiance of orthodox opinion’, ⁸⁷ Chief Minister Vasantrao Patil arrived by helicopter, announced an institute in the name of Ambedkar, donated ₹50,000, unveiled his statue, and felicitated eleven veterans from 1927. Ambedkar’s son was on hand to welcome the gathering that relaunched Ambedkar in the public sphere of Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, the Dalit Panthers began to register their growing public presence in the pages of the TOI. In August 1977, they gathered in the Oval Maidan in Bombay and courted mass arrest, when Chief Minister Patil refused to meet their deputation. The demands on this occasion were facilities for neo-Buddhists, increase in Extremely Backward Classes scholarships and the naming of Marathwada University in Aurangabad (est. 1958) after Ambedkar. ⁸⁸ This latter demand was the first appearance of an issue that was to become a cause celebre in Maharashtra politics for the next few years. In November, the Panthers disrupted the All-India Marathi literary conference at Poona, after some people in the audience passed ‘adverse’ remarks about Ambedkar, ⁸⁹ and in April 1978, a group in Ahmednagar district sought to collect contributions for Ambedkar Jayanti with the consequent clash seeing the police promulgating prohibitory orders for seven days. ⁹⁰ That same month as the Delhi unit of the Dalit Panthers was established, ⁹¹ the TOI reported a ‘noisy Harijans’ dharna’ outside the Parliament, where a function was going on to commemorate the eighty-fifth birth anniversary of Ambedkar ⁹² ; giving a sign of the street battles that were to come shortly. These would be comprehensively covered by the newspaper in a stance that detailed growing support for Ambedkar, albeit not without implicit and explicit resistance to his political emergence at this historical time.

1978–1980: Defensiveness

It all began when, in July 1978, the Sharad Pawar-led government in Maharashtra decided to rename Marathwada University after Ambedkar. The thirty-eight-years-old Pawar had split from Chief Minister Vasantrao Patil’s Congress (Indira), and joined hands with the Janata Party, forming a coalition government, which would last till February 1980. During this time, this issue would be arguably his biggest political challenge, portending one of the fault lines of the next decade of Indian politics. Within days, there was a bandh organised by the university’s students’ action committee to protest the decision, which turned violent and spread from the city of Aurangabad to the rest of the region of Marathwada, as the radio announced that ‘the state legislature had unanimously resolved to rename the institution as Babasaheb Ambedkar University’. ⁹³ The following first description of a related incident in the TOI set the tone for its almost daily coverage of such episodes for some years: ‘an agitated mob moved through the streets attacking the residences of local Janata Party leaders. Vehicles were stoned, streetlights were damaged, and barricades were set up on roads to block the movement of traffic’. ⁹⁴

Pawar, who can be called as one of the earliest backers of Ambedkar in Indian politics, was taken aback at this backlash and declared that he would consider ‘all views before taking any decision’, while, simultaneously, assuring ‘full protection to Dalits’, ⁹⁵ towards whom the violence was starting to turn. On 4 August 1978, the Chief Minister was ‘gherao-ed by 50 Dalit Panthers for 2 hours…’ ⁹⁶ in Bombay, while in Nanded, a ‘Harijan basti’ was attacked and one person was killed. ⁹⁷ Pawar hastened to announce that the legislative resolution was ‘only recommendatory’, as Dalit Panther leaders and RPI groups warned him that this issue had all the makings of a ‘fight between caste Hindus and Dalits’. ⁹⁸ As the numbers of Dalit deaths and injuries started to mount in Nagpur, ⁹⁹ and army units were alerted, there were demands made that ‘the entire Marathwada region be named after Ambedkar’. ¹⁰⁰

After Nagpur limped back to normalcy following a spell of violence that saw five deaths, rumours started that the Pawar government had withdrawn its decision and ‘different groups converged on the Deeksha Bhoomi’. ¹⁰¹ Meanwhile, Aurangabad saw the no-changers momentarily suspend their agitation, a decision that however gave no relief from the ‘intense caste antagonism’ in the region, ¹⁰² which saw, ‘hundreds of Dalits rendered homeless’, given the ‘exodus of Harijans from villages’. ¹⁰³ The TOI held—multi-metaphorically—‘Pawar and co. caught napping … government in haste’. ¹⁰⁴ Soon, attempts began to spin the narrative away from caste and towards region, and claims were made that the no-changers’ opposition was because they loved Marathwada more. It was the ‘aggressive and abusive’ Dalits ‘from outside’ (the neighbouring Vidarbha) who had ‘crowded the university’, while the ‘Dalits from Marathwada never demanded a change’. ¹⁰⁵

On its part, the union government tried to take the sting out of the issue with gestures like naming the central railway’s hospital complex at Byculla (South Bombay) after Ambedkar, ¹⁰⁶ even as a demand was made for a Babasaheb Ambedkar Buddhist university on the lines of Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University. ¹⁰⁷ In Bombay, the state government was firmly on the backfoot, with over 1,400 people taken into custody, but Pawar was still undecided whether to go for ‘a judicial inquiry or to impose collective fines …’. ¹⁰⁸ With a parliamentarian panel arriving to tour Marathwada, after a three-hour discussion in the Lok Sabha, ¹⁰⁹ Pawar’s government reimposed curfew in sensitive cities like Solapur, following renewed stone-throwing. ¹¹⁰

The Chief Minister himself came to visit in the first days of September 1978. In Nagpur, he declared that the government would take no further step until peace was restored. Speaking to a delegation of the Boudha hakka sourakshan samiti, Pawar admitted his greater concern for ‘the safety of the Dalits and the neo-Buddhists than the renaming’. ¹¹¹ With the government on defensive, in mid-October 1978, the RPI factions announced a nationwide agitation. ¹¹² However, they were beaten to it by an Aurangabad bandh in March 1979, called by the Marathwada University students’ action committee ‘opposed to the renaming’, which turned violent, when ‘68 people were hurt’, and about 200 were arrested. ¹¹³

Around this time, Prime Minister Morarji Desai was visiting Bombay and a delegation of Dalit Panthers called on him, with a charter of five demands namely setting up of ‘a commission for the backward class’, extension of Scheduled Caste concessions to neo-Buddhists, renaming of Marathwada University, setting up of separate courts for caste-related crimes, and ‘giving arms to Dalits to defend themselves’. ¹¹⁴ What they received instead was an announcement that the government had decided ‘to beautify the area around the “Chawadar Tale” lake in Mahad’, to embellish the memory of Ambedkar’s 1927 Satyagraha. ¹¹⁵ This snub served to propel the promised agitation for renaming the university into a ‘long march’ that was to begin on Ambedkar’s death anniversary, ¹¹⁶ overriding Chief Minister Pawar’s appeal that it was ‘not advisable’ on the eve of the general elections (January 1980). ¹¹⁷

The TOI reported on 24 November that ‘about 4000 people in Bombay will participate in [it]’, ¹¹⁸ a figure that two days later, grew to 100,000. ¹¹⁹ Terming this ‘greatly embarrassing’ for the political parties, ‘at a time when they have to woo the majority caste Hindus for votes’, the newspaper noted that the state shivered with ‘Dalit insecurity [and] caste Hindus’ palpable hostility’. ¹²⁰ The government responded by the preventive detention of the leaders of the ‘long march’. ¹²¹ Soon these pre-emptive arrests grew, as the Dalit Panthers ‘gheraoed the revenue minister in Bombay’, ¹²² to over 7,000 along with ₹15,000 collected in fines, ¹²³ while 1,500 arrests were made in neighbouring Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. ¹²⁴

On the appointed day, two people lost their lives amidst a 50,000-strong procession in Nagpur, 3,500 were arrested out of 12,000 in Aurangabad, there was lathi-charge on a crowd of 4,000 in Poona, trains were held up at Manmad and cities like Akola-Wardha, Chandrapur-Amaravati and Thane-Kolhapur saw thousands, including women, arrested in court. March leaders claimed that ‘over 30,000’ were imprisoned including Ambedkar’s wife. ¹²⁵ The agitation and police firing on it continued the next day and brought ‘the total number of killed to four in two days’ in Nagpur. ¹²⁶ That day, the RPI’s campaign was suspended, to be resumed after the general elections, ¹²⁷ even as restive reports came in from places like Dharwad, Indore, and night curfew continued in Nagpur. ¹²⁸

Since everyone from Prime Minister Charan Singh to Chief Minister Sharad Pawar was framing the issue in terms of the upcoming polls, many Dalit youths, who had participated in the ‘long march’, suggested that all Dalits and caste Hindus supporting them should ‘boycott the coming election’ ¹²⁹ ; instead, the Dalit Panthers announced that they would be backing Congress (Indira). ¹³⁰ Before the year ended, the anti-changers threatened a demand for a separate Marathwada state if the decision to rename the university was forced upon the people by outsiders, as neo-Buddhists formed but a fifth of the population of the region. Their alternatives were either setting up a technical institute in Ambedkar’s name or holding a referendum, as ‘renaming would [not] promote [any] social transformation’. ¹³¹

The pro-changers were back on the streets after 15 January 1980, as was Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister. Noting that the agitation for renaming was ‘hotting up again’, the TOI reported ‘both sides poised for a showdown’ since the ‘long march’, when ‘for the first time a very large number of caste Hindus joined the agitation of the Dalits’. ¹³² Arguing somewhat like the anti-changers, the newspaper brought up the real issues of backwardness, unemployment, under-development of the Marathwada region; the former Nizamat (princely state) areas that had not seen any government initiative since the setting up of a Development Corporation in 1967. In April 1980, the agitation was revived by the student pro-changers. ¹³³ By July, with a new state government, that of Congress (Indira)’s A. R. Antulay, the Dalit Panthers were out on the streets ‘in Akola [and] Nasik’. ¹³⁴ By November, the RPI factions had re-joined the bandwagon, ¹³⁵ and together, all these followers of Ambedkar geared up for a ‘decisive struggle’. ¹³⁶ In response, Antulay held an unscheduled cabinet meeting at Aurangabad and announced a breathless bonanza for Marathwada: ‘a ₹500 crores 34-point time bound development programme’. ¹³⁷ Missing here was the renaming of the university and Dalit Panthers demonstrated outside the venue of the cabinet meeting.

Meanwhile, the wheel of time was ticking along too. In April 1981, on Ambedkar’s ninetieth birth anniversary, for the first time, another state government—in Andhra Pradesh—declared the day as ‘a public holiday’. ¹³⁸ In Karnataka, the two-way lane between the state secretariat-cum-legislature complex and the High Court, ¹³⁹ was named Ambedkar Road. That year, 1981, was also the twentieth anniversary of Ambedkar embracing Buddhism and several functions were planned in Nagpur on 8 October, when thousands were expected to follow suit. The TOI did some counting from the 1951 census, when in Maharashtra, the number of Buddhists was a mere 2,487 to 1971, when it had increased to thirty-two lakhs, and claimed drily: ‘While 75% of Buddha’s followers in his lifetime were Brahmins, not a single Brahmin in known to have embraced Buddhism in the last 25 years …’. ¹⁴⁰

On the appointed day, ‘nearly 300,000 people embraced Buddhism [at] the silver jubilee of the Dhamma Chakra Parivartan Din’, ¹⁴¹ organised by RPI groups. Buoyed by this, the Dalit Liberation Army announced a ‘final fight … to coincide with Maharashtra legislature’s budget session to press for renaming’. ¹⁴² This was the context in which Indira Gandhi’s union government notified on 13 April 1982 that Ambedkar’s birthday ‘be declared as a restricted holiday’. ¹⁴³ Babasaheb was climbing up the official calendar, and his name was starting to adorn more places. Fifteen days later, the Maharashtra government named the proposed technological university in Raigad after Ambedkar—he hailed from there and his Mahad Satyagraha too came under that district—but the new Chief Minister Babasaheb Bhosale’s decision did not ‘pacify those demanding the renaming’, ¹⁴⁴ and on 15 August, there were protests outside Podar College, Matunga. ¹⁴⁵

By early-September 1982, the newspaper was again reporting rising tension in Marathwada as ‘some 20,000 people set off for Bombay to [protest] on the opening day of the state assembly’. ¹⁴⁶ Dalit Panthers and members of other social organisations from the state courted arrest in large numbers in Bombay, Solapur and Poona. This time the protests also included participation from the newly formed BJP (est. 1980). ¹⁴⁷ As the agitation continued, over 2,400 Dalit Panthers including 150+ women ‘courted arrest near Bombay university’. ¹⁴⁸ These arrests went on for twelve days, ¹⁴⁹ even as the agitation was contested by a one-day Marathwada bandh in the six districts of the region. ¹⁵⁰ On 17 September 1982, the Maharashtra council ‘rejected by 36 votes to 12 a non-official bill seeking to amend the Marathwada University Act for renaming the university’, thereby putting the legislative lid firmly back on its predecessor’s decision from July 1978, as Chief Minister Bhosale declared that ‘Ambedkar and Marathwada were two distinct matters …’. ¹⁵¹

It would not be until 1994 that the Marathwada University could be renamed by the Maharashtra government, which was headed—once again—by Sharad Pawar. For now, even as the narrative in New Delhi around Ambedkar was firmly focussed on homage, on his ninety-second birth anniversary, Health Minister B. Shankaranand announced the formation of an ‘Ambedkar Memorial Trust’, ¹⁵² on the ground, there was curfew in Nasik after police firing that had left three dead and seven injured following an outbreak of violence caused by the removal of a newly-installed statue of Ambedkar. ¹⁵³ By the end of June 1983, ‘2 people were killed and 3 injured in Malegaon’ as disturbances continued and broadened into a ‘conflict between Neo-Buddhists and certain middle castes’. ¹⁵⁴ Taking a closer look at these riots, the TOI concluded that ‘the militant Dalit Panthers want to keep up pressure to rename Marathwada university … They feel frustrated that the caste Hindus have succeeded in stalling this’. ¹⁵⁵

1985–1990: Appropriation

On 14 April 1985, during Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s ninety-fourth birth anniversary function in the parliament, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ‘reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the reservation policy’, ¹⁵⁶ while President Giani Zail Singh released a souvenir brought out by the Ambedkar Trust. The President would also call for an ‘extension’ of facilities enjoyed by the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to the Other Backward Castes in August 1985, while inaugurating a twelve-feet high bronze statue of Ambedkar at Calcutta. ¹⁵⁷ Meanwhile, back in Marathwada, Dr Shivajirao Patil-Nilangekar, another Congress chief minister of Maharashtra, announced another, this time 42-point, programme for the development of the region in Aurangabad, as the city saw another procession demanding the renaming of the university. ¹⁵⁸

Simultaneously, the TOI was discovering ‘a new pattern’ of caste conflict, between ‘relatively advanced’ Scheduled Castes and neo-Buddhists, ‘benefitting from government concessions, [having] improved their life’. ¹⁵⁹ Indeed, because of their ‘ambiguous constitutional status’, the neo-Buddhists seemed to the newspaper to have become ‘more isolated from Untouchable communities’. ¹⁶⁰ Both these frames were to dominate the conversations around affirmative action subsequently (on the so-called ‘creamy layer’ plane), ¹⁶¹ but for the moment, the dominant binary remained ‘disfiguring’ of an Ambedkar statue at Ulhasnagar, Thane, followed by a road block by members of the RPI and the Dalit Panthers and police firing, ¹⁶² and his birth anniversary celebrations becoming bigger and more official, such as when B. Shankaranand, Union Minister for Water Resources in New Delhi, veteran socialist S.M. Joshi in Poona, and the I&B Minister V.N. Gadgil in Nagpur, joined in paying tributes in April 1986. ¹⁶³

In 1987, a controversy erupted around a critical chapter on Lord Ram and Krishna in Ambedkar’s book Riddles in Hinduism, which was published in volume four in the series being run by successive Maharashtra ministries. With rising social tension, remaining volumes (out of a planned total of eleven) were delayed by the then-government of Chief Minister S.B. Chavan. ¹⁶⁴ In response, a protest was announced in Bombay, ¹⁶⁵ and the lead-up to Ambedkar’s thirty-first death anniversary was again violent, as ‘one person was killed and 12 injured when the police opened fire [at] a clash over the “riddles” issue in Chandrapur’. Chief Minister Chavan tried to find the middle ground by removing the critical portions from the text of the book but including them as an annexure to it, to no one’s satisfaction and saw protest in Jalgaon, Dhule and other places. Simultaneously, the TOI reported that Dr Savita Ambedkar had confirmed that ‘she had seen the handwritten manuscript of the “riddles” and there was no ground for doubting the authorship’, after some people had aired their ‘reservations about authenticity’. ¹⁶⁶

On 6 December 1987, the Ambedkar Samiti warned a nationwide agitation if the chapter was deleted, and it was followed by a Dalit march in Bombay, with the crowd estimated to be ‘1.25 lakhs by the police and over 2.5 lakhs by the organisers…’. ¹⁶⁷ From the other end, the Marathi regionalist party Shiv Sena’s supremo Bal Thackeray threatened ‘dire consequences’ if the annexure was published. ¹⁶⁸ Chavan managed to cut through the mounting tension by hosting the leader of opposition in the state assembly, Prakash Ambedkar, Thackeray and the BJP’s Manohar Joshi, and persuading them to sign a joint statement ‘for retaining the annexure with a footnote added making it clear that the “government does not agree with the views expressed in the annexure”’. ¹⁶⁹ This restored some calm after a turbulent two months, which had seen shutdowns in Amravati, Nagpur and Bombay, deaths in Mulund and the drama of the Shiv Sena performing ‘purification’ ceremony after a Dalit morcha at Martyr’s Memorial, Bombay. ¹⁷⁰

The year 1989 saw the Janata Dal government in New Delhi, headed by Prime Minister V. P. Singh. ¹⁷¹ Supported (and smothered) by both the CPI/M and the BJP, he would take several steps that would anoint his year of premiership as that of ‘social justice’; most famous among these being the implementation of the B. P. Mandal Commission’s report on reservation for other backward castes in late-1990. ¹⁷² But before that, in the month of January, his government decided ‘to extend to neo-Buddhists all the facilities and reservations … available to Scheduled Castes’, as V. P. Singh considered it as an electoral tactic. ¹⁷³ It paid off within a fortnight as the RPI split again, with one section supporting the Congress, while the other deciding to go with the Janata Dal. ¹⁷⁴ And then came the twin announcements on 31 March 1990, which complete this cycle of the coverage of Ambedkar in print-politics, as V. P. Singh announced the conferment of the Bharat Ratna, on Ambedkar. A portrait was to be unveiled on 12 April, in the central hall of parliament, and the newspaper quoted the prime minister as saying that ‘we honour ourselves while honouring him’. ¹⁷⁵ His government also removed any restrictions from the observance of the birth anniversary of Ambedkar, April 14, as a ‘public holiday’. ¹⁷⁶ On the appointed day, the TOI described the ceremony thus:

The nation honoured Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar with the highest civilian honour of Bharat Ratna on his birth centenary today… His 84-year-old widow, Dr Savita Ambedkar, received [it] from the President, [wondering] why this was delayed … V. P. Singh said that 1990–91, the centenary year of Ambedkar, will be observed as ‘social justice year’. ¹⁷⁷

Conclusion

‘So, what explains this embrace of Ambedkar?’, asked Ravish Tiwari in his 2018 column in The Indian Express on ‘The Discovery of Ambedkar’, with which this article began. His answer suggested ‘a consolidation of the churn that started from the late-1980s’ along the electoral axis of Other Backward and Scheduled Castes votes, its accompanying social assertion, economic rise of a new middle class, ¹⁷⁸ and—above all—a pan-national political consciousness. Since then, the burgeoning scholarship ‘on Ambedkar’ continues to marvel at his soaring stock in the marketplace of Indian politics. ¹⁷⁹ But the question remains if this embrace of Ambedkar evinces ‘expediency’ or displays ‘pragmatism’ or represents ‘progress’? And how can contemporary history—as glimpsed through the pages of a newspaper like the TOI—be mustered to contextualise this rather recent change, its cacophonic articulations, and the accompanying idolatry of a kind that Ambedkar himself was contemptuous of.

What has been attempted here is but a slice of a narrative arc, drawing upon primary material from an arguably representative TOI over a period of three or more decades, to present the mentions and depictions of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, to show the slow emergence of a new image around his politics, to reflect on the struggles and the resistances in this process along the way, and to record the negotiations and navigations engaged in by the state positioned between social thought and local practice. The underlying hope is that an exercise like this can offer a glimpse into the recent past and present political expressions of cultural appropriations around his persona and identity. As successive moments and phases foreshadowed the said churn, they were followed by a marked shift in the intensity and frequency of the newspaper’s coverage of Indian politics’ future.

Finally, the TOI’s coverage of Ambedkar also helps give a sense of the historical time in Indian politics between 1956 and 1990. ¹⁸⁰ The present phase of Ambedkar’s discovery and appropriation, beyond Maharashtra, which began in 1991 and continues apace, were prefaced by increasingly explicit albeit often adversarial articulations around him. It is these ‘differentiations between past and future, experience and expectation, which make it possible … to study historical time’. ¹⁸¹ This trajectory of a gathering bandwagon is amply reflected in the periodicity attempted in this article of the TOI’s reportage, which also served to feed this stream. The growing scale of the newspaper’s coverage on Ambedkar was a product of the events on the ground and their effects on politicians; in turn, it played an instrumental role in the promotion of this constitutional icon. Looking for Ambedkar in the TOI is then also a case study of how the press covers, constructs and congeals illustrations of an iconography around a historical figure, whose political time was coming.