Babasaheb didn’t only draft our Constitution, he was also involved with the nation’s safety. He was a greater Hindu than merely a Dalit
Dr BR Ambedkar was first a Hindu leader and then a lawyer, constitutionalist and finally one who did not want to die as Hindu. What the 75-year history has done to him is to convert him into a Dalit great man. The depressed classes needed an icon and snapped up the ownership of Babasaheb. Jawaharlal Nehru needed someone who could draft the Constitution quickly enough and, if possible, one who belonged to a lower caste to enable the Congress to claim affinity with the downtrodden of Hindu India.
The latter role Ambedkar performed with aplomb by getting hold of a copy of the Government of India Act, 1935, and chiselled it to make it look like a Constitution. He was aware that Nehru would insist on minority pampering and such other frills and icings. Along with the minorities, the secular Hindus swear by the national document while, at the same time, amending it one and a half times a year. By now, it has grown into a jumbo 400-article mammoth, longer than any other Constitution in the world.
What is not popularly known is that Babasaheb Ambedkar’s finest hour was in 1941 when his ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’ was published, within less than a year after Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah orated on the essentiality of Partition on March 22, 1940, which incidentally is a masterpiece on his logic of the ‘two-nation theory’. One may not agree with it, but its eloquence cannot be denied.
There happened to be an institution in 1940 called the Independence Labour Party. This ILP resolved to study Jinnah’s speech and prepare a rational reply to it. A seven-person committee was formed with Babasaheb as its chairman. They brought some remarkable answers. They assessed that 90 per cent of Muslims held sentiments favouring Pakistan and therefore the issue cannot be swept under the carpet.
The five Muslim provinces (which wrongly included Assam) Jinnah demanded did not want a Central Government because, in 1940, New Delhi’s annual budget was about `120 crore. All the provinces’ budgets totalled `74 crore. The Muslim League’s view was where was the need for the Central or the New Delhi budget? It served to only protect the land or provided law and order to the country. The League felt that the Muslims could adequately protect themselves on provincial budget account. There was no need for a Central Government which the Muslims saw as also a benefit of Partition.
Why spend so much to buy peace; they asked? Merely in order to replace the British Central Government with an Indian duplicate? While the present is driven by emotions, when the tempers have cooled for different reasons in the future, the Hindus would wake up and, for financial reasons, want to forgo the Central Government. So why not now, was a Muslim argument.
The counter-argument was that due to the theory of Martial Races, in the Punjabi Muslims, the Frontier Pathans etc were disproportionately more than men from the Hindu provinces. The taxes, however, came disproportionately more from the Hindu provinces. Therefore, the Hindus would have spent more money and got less in protection. Remember, the Islamic tradition was that a Muslim soldier could not fight a Muslim invader. The Khilafat Committee had supported the tradition and the League had endorsed it. This was discussed and decided when it was believed that, sooner or later, Afghanistan could invade the subcontinent. Babasaheb had analysed this defence syndrome with the help of data left behind by the Simon Commission. There were some areas which sent hardly any soldiers and other regions that offered most of the men. Punjab was represented by 86,000 while the Central Provinces, more or less, today’s Madhya Pradesh, only 100. Babasaheb went on to use what must sound, at the time, a devastating argument: Hindustan, once divided, would not have a natural frontier. It is therefore wise to have one’s enemies without than within one’s borders. How farsighted was the great man and how involved he was with the safety of Hindustan! He was a greater Hindu than merely a Dalit.
Dr Ambedkar advised the reader of his book to read it carefully and reflect upon it: ‘Let him take to heart the warning which Carlyle gave to Englishmen of his generation: the Genius of England no longer soars through the storms, mewing her mighty youth, much like a greedy Ostrich intent on providence and a whole skin?’ Initially, Hindus took it as a case of political measles to which people in infancy suffer but before long the illness goes away. A few Hindus took it as a permanent frame of the Muslim mind and not merely a passing phase. Those who were casual and shortsighted merely said: ‘You don’t have to cut your head to cure your headache?’ ‘You do not cut a baby into two because two women are engaged in a fight, with both claiming to be the mother.’ These were some of the warnings of the great man. One wishes that such minds were immortal.
(The writer is a well-known columnist, an author and a former member of the Rajya Sabha. The views expressed are personal.)
