Anticipating the Threat of Democratic Majoritarianism: Ambedkar on Constitutional Design and Ideology Critique,1941–1948

Religion, Nation and Community in the Crucible of Mass-Representative Politics

In British India, demands for self-government that had expressed themselves in the decades before the 1940s were caught between unresolved differences on the precise constitutional form that such a (self)government would take. The issue of whether more than one State was to emerge was the final and finalizing expression of this irresolution, which ranged from province–Centre relations to provisions such as separate electorates and reserved seats. There was a consensus among mainstream political parties on the fact that British India of the early decades of the century consisted of distinct ‘political’ communities in legal, social and cultural ways. This consensus was reflected in the acceptance of the differentiated everyday experience of law in ‘societal’ matters such as ‘personal’ law as well as more formal political matters such as those pertaining to representation. From within this consensus, the disagreements between the Congress and the Muslim League lay in deciding on the precise constitutional instruments that were needed to express, articulate and negotiate such differences, whether it took the form of separate electorates, reservations or Centre–province relations. ⁸

As Ambedkar forcefully reminds us, the Congress party too was in a sense ‘communal’ in acknowledging and recognizing the distinctive and separate political interests of the Muslims, and it changed position on the question of choosing the right constitutional instrument, moving from an acceptance of separate electorates (from the Lucknow pact of 1916 to the Delhi proposals of 1928) to the repudiation of separate electorates in favour of specific reservations (in the Nehru Report of 1928) to then remaining ‘neutral’ in relation to the Communal Award when it came to a resolution condemning it in the Central Assembly (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 24)—even while being critical of it—and finally ending in acknowledging special representation for religious minorities as late as the initial report of the Advisory Committees Report on Minority Rights in 1947 (Bajpai, 2011). In the same vein, the Congress acknowledged the constitutional provision that any interference in religion would need the majority assent of the community concerned and never wished to interfere into religious ‘personal law’ that regulated the everyday life of communities in the Nehru Report and the Constitutional Settlement at the Second Round Table Conference (1931)—an issue that remained to a certain extent unresolved even in the Constituent Assembly and thereafter (Bajpai, 2011). Notwithstanding this acceptance of communal–political identity, the Congress maintained its stand against what it saw as ‘communal’ politics, and it is this that Ambedkar in a critique calls a ‘game of diplomacy, if not duplicity’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 132). Moreover, the resort to ‘mass’ politics, such as the Quit India movement, rather than persist in constitutional negotiations, at crucial junctures, is interpreted by Ambedkar as doing little more than exacerbating existing divisions.

By the 1940s, whatever the differences over the interpretation of the ‘Pakistan resolution’, the possibility of the emergence of more than one state appeared undeniable. If not Partition or distinct states, the intractable problem of the relationship between centre and provinces, or the question of the location of ‘residuary’ powers, indicated that even a unitary state in conception might have to include within it the right to secession. Earlier, Ambedkar had discerned in the Centre–province question communalism in its ‘greater intent’, since he saw in the demand for more Muslim majority provinces and residuary powers in the provinces nothing less than a strategy to combat what was seen as the Hindu-dominated Congress. The Centre–province question in these contexts could not, therefore, be treated outside the ‘communal paradigm’ since residuary powers to provinces enabled them to secede from a unitary state. As Ambedkar well recognized, the question was not simply about whether a communal settlement could be arrived at but rather whether the state that would result would be as such viable (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 95–99, 246–261). ⁹ In the aftermath of the Pakistan demand, the point, therefore, was not its ‘impracticability’ or ‘ambiguity’ but its significance as a sign of the fact that no ‘natural evolution’ of a unitary Indian nation-state could any longer be simply assumed. This sign reflected both the actually existing lived conditions in the country with its distinct ‘exclusive’ and ‘self-enclosed’ communities and the nature of mass rioting and constitutional wrangling as it had evolved over the past few decades (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 259).

If the constitution of a unitary nation-state was hardly the most natural evolution, this was because the norm of the nation-state was to consist in the exercise of democratic franchise as a form of self-government undertaken by a specified body of people living in a specific locus who consented to constitute themselves into a ‘nation’. Ambedkar cited several passages from Renan amongst others to show the constitution of a nation to be a ‘spiritual’ act; it could not be the material result of mere historical circumstances (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 16–17). He notes a historical break late in the 1930s in the form of the transformation of the Muslim League’s demands. From demands for constitutional safeguards as a minority community within a unitary constitution, the League had come to demand Partition and a separate state, based on its argument that Muslims constituted a distinct nation (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 307).

Ambedkar does not see anything unnatural in this alteration of demands—in this shift from a people representing itself as community to now representing itself as a nation, notwithstanding limited franchise. It is essential to his argument that these categories were historical and not organic or natural. The principle of self-determination had to be understood in two different and distinct senses. ‘In the one case it meant the right to establish a form of government in accordance with the wishes of the people’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 369). In another sense, it meant ‘the right to obtain national independence from an alien race irrespective of the form of government’ (Ambedkar, 2017a). After making this distinction, Ambedkar insists that the relationship between the government and the governed needed to be examined more closely, even in cases where the wishes of ‘the people’ were ostensibly fulfilled by democratic majority rule. Such a political situation of universal franchise did not obviate the need to account for and scrutinize the category of the governed. His concern, therefore, was not merely for ensuring democracy in the sense of universal franchise, which he assumed would be the case, but for analysing the possibilities of democratic majoritarianism where the majority community rules over a minority community.

In the attempt to specifically explain the changing demands of the Muslim League, Ambedkar draws on H. Sidwick’s distinction between ‘community’ and ‘nation’ within the category of the governed—a distinction that gives rise to the correlative distinction between the ‘right of insurrection’ and ‘the right of disruption’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 320). While the right to insurrection involved a right to a change in the mode and form of the government, the right to disruption extended this right to seceding from the existing country-state by a people along with a portion of territory. Ambedkar, thereby, not merely recognizes the historicity of the nation-state but also diagnoses the conditions of its morbidity. In doing so, he provides his own criteria of ‘ultimate destiny’ where, unlike a nation’s existence within a unitary state, a community is construed to be that body of people that sees its ‘ultimate destiny’ as lying with the larger whole. Notwithstanding this distinction, (territorial) separation was not necessary (even) in the context of a community having a distinct national consciousness within a unitary state since self-determination could mean preserving a distinct nationality as ‘cultural autonomy’ rather than politico-territorial secession (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 371). In this sense, a community had as much of a right as a nation to demand political safeguards for itself within the constitutional design of a single unitary state. Considering the historicity of nations and states, no a priori distinction could be made between a minority wishing to secede from a state and a community wishing to combat and remove an alien conquering race (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. xviii).

It is in this theoretical acknowledgement of such contingencies of nation and community and their documentation in the historical facts of several places from Ireland to Eastern Europe and Turkey that Ambedkar studies the politics leading to the 1940s (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 197–212). In the case of India, Ambedkar’s analysis involves the thesis that the religiously lived life as much as its distinctive expressions in politics prevented not merely the emergence of a national or common consciousness but, on the contrary, succeeded in entrenching social divisions and discrimination within as much as across religious communities—the two were conjoined and part of the same process. That religion formed the ground of community formation is attributed as much to the Congress, which had already acknowledged the distinctiveness of Muslims as a political community by accepting separate electorates (and later reservations) and personal law—even while differences persisted on questions of the relationship between the provinces and the Centre. As will be demonstrated in the next section, it was only because of Ambedkar’s intervention, drawing on the demand of his community, that Gandhi and the Congress acknowledged the ‘untouchables’ to be a ‘minority’ requiring constitutional safeguards analogous to religiously defined communities (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 44–115).

Ambedkar’s interpretation of the crisis of the 1940s and the emerging possibilities of Partition and Pakistan was rooted in this critique of the inability of both Congress and Muslim League to see beyond religion as a marker of community, thereby obviating internal ‘social’ critique or reform. The next sections consider in greater detail the ways in which religion and mass politics prevented both an inter-religious common will and internal social critique.

Mass Politics: Community, Religion and Nation in the Emerging Politics of Self-Government

Ambedkar’s critique of the Congress was based on a close reading of its history and politics, in particular, of its abandoning of the ‘social’ question in favour of becoming ‘mad after politics’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 227–229; 2022b, pp. 8–17). This shift is traced to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the early twentieth century, even as the Gandhian Khilafat/Non-Cooperation movement, is given a special place in the broader analysis (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 8–10; 2022, p. 22). Ambedkar argues that in conventional histories of the Congress, it is forgotten that the Non-Cooperation movement had its origins in the Khilafat movement (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 137–138). The latter was explicitly grounded in a particular religious idiom and objective that in fact initiated the demand for complete independence from the British, something Gandhi and the Congress built upon in their demand for Swaraj in the Non-Cooperation movement (Ambedkar, 2017a). There is no doubt something deeply paradoxical about the idea of non-territorial loyalty to a religious principle and institution as initiating the first ‘national’ mass-movement for self-government and against foreign rule. Therefore, it is not surprising that merely the shared premise of ending foreign-British rule, with no agreement on the nature of the form of government to take its place, led to differences between the Khilafat committees and the Congress—differences that cast a long shadow into the partition demands of the 1940s.

Gandhi’s framing of this country-wide mass movement as a matter of ‘Hindu–Muslim’ friendship reflected and accentuated the essentially religious–communal contours that subsequent anti-colonial politics would take. ¹⁰ Political consciousness in the form of the political demand for self-government was ab initio religious both in the form of its demand for self-government and in the fact that it was articulated as the self-government of religiously distinct and demarcated communities. ¹¹ By ‘political’, one refers here to the demand for self-government and independence from the British based on representation and franchise, howsoever restricted, even while the precise form of the relationship between the two religious communities who were meant to self-govern remained unresolved. In the case of Hindus, Ambedkar diagnoses this hardening of religion as one that worked in the negative sense of moving away from social questions, such as that of caste discrimination and untouchability, in the attempt at a consolidation of a Hindu identity, while for Muslims it was a direct overt affirmation of their religious identity being tied to the importance of the Ottoman empire and therefore paradoxically in fact and form pan-Islamicist.

It is to this religious shape of mass politics that Ambedkar then traces the series of conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in the 1920s that cemented the notion that Hindus and Muslims were politically distinct communities. The paradox unsparingly unveiled by Ambedkar was that the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat valourization of religion in the form of mass politics ultimately, if unknowingly, unleashed a vicious cycle of ‘riots’ between Hindus and Muslims in its aftermath (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 151–153). The lack of resolution regarding the precise constitutional framing of Hindu–Muslim relations—notwithstanding the acceptance of the two religious communities as politically distinct—is expressed in the lack of mass Muslim participation in subsequent anti-colonial mass movements such as the Civil Disobedience movement and Quit India. The successive failures to arrive at mutually acceptable constitutional provisions regarding the relationship between the two major communities, and their framing in terms of essentially distinctive religious community-identities, ensured that the demand for community-minority safeguards would turn into demands for national independence.

Political identity and religious distinction drew attention away from the social. According to Ambedkar, the argument that Hindus and Muslims shared much in their everyday life offered little evidence of the fact that they shared their ‘social’ life, matters pertaining to family and intermarriage, and therefore they did not in fact see themselves as politically one. ‘Neither Islam nor Hinduism permit intermarriage. With these social laws there can be no social assimilation and consequently no socialization of ways, modes and outlooks, no blunting of the edges and no modulation of age old angularities’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 325). Religiously informed ‘personal’ laws were taken for granted, and little effort was spent to carve out a common social, that is, national life—an attitude that would be replicated in matters such as caste and untouchability.

It was in this context that Ambedkar read Gandhi’s unwillingness to accept ‘untouchables’ as a distinct community requiring constitutional safeguards of their own in the second Round Table Conference. Since religion was a key marker of political community, no divisions within a religion could be tolerated. Gandhi’s attitude was based on the anxiety around the identification of ‘untouchables’ with the large Hindu fold—an anxiety that had a much deeper history going back to the initial constitutional provisions made by the British government in the first steps towards local government. The Muslim League’s 1906 delegation to the British that demanded that Muslims be given special representation as a minority also claimed in 1909 that the ‘untouchables’ not be counted as Hindus (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 235–236, 239–244). The matter of counting was critical in the context of grants of representation in local governance to communities and classes that involved factors such as numeral strength (Ambedkar, 2017a). However, the League demanded special representation also because of their ‘special status’ as a community representing the erstwhile rulers of the country. The status of minority, thus, always encrusted something in addition to mere numbers representing the special and distinctive nature of the community in relationship to the country at large (Ambedkar, 2017a).

Ambedkar points out that the Congress was established to ensure ‘good governance’ and not ‘self-governance’, and that its initial years were marked by a difference of opinion regarding the inclusion of ‘social’ issues such as discrimination on the basis of caste and gender (Ambedkar, 2017a). The very possibility of discussing social reform, howsoever indirectly, abruptly stopped in 1895 beginning with the leadership of Tilak, and the Congress henceforth concentrated exclusively on ‘political’ demands. The antagonism towards the public discussion of social matters was such that Tilak’s followers threatened to burn the Congress pandal if social matters were brought up there (Ambedkar, 2017a). This implicit antipathy to social issues came to an abrupt halt in the December session of 1917 under the Presidentship Annie Besant of the Congress where a resolution was passed that called upon Indians to remove the disabilities imposed on the Depressed Classes by ‘custom’. Why did this happen, particularly under Besant, who Ambedkar shows to be no real friend of the ‘Untouchables’ (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 4–8)?

This fundamental change is attributed by Ambedkar to the resolutions passed by two meetings in 1917 which had raised a series of demands, included the right for ‘untouchables’ to elect their own representatives in proportion to their numbers in any scheme of representation, in addition to free and compulsory education for all (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 16–21). The first meeting also specifically demanded that the Congress pass a resolution on the need to remove all religious and custom sanctioned disabilities imposed on the ‘untouchables’ that had prohibited them from access to ‘public schools, hospitals, courts of justice and public offices and the use of public wells, etc.’ (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 17–18) It also stated that ‘these disabilities social in origin amount in law and practice to political disabilities and as such fall legitimately within the political mission and propaganda of the Indian National Congress’ (Ambedkar, 2022b). The ‘social’ is thereby revealed as a systematic granular form of economic domination and discrimination.

Ambedkar argues that it was in response to these two meetings in the city of Bombay that the Congress after decades of indifference—if not antipathy—towards such matters included in its agenda a programme for social reform that would include the betterment of the condition of the ‘untouchables’. The 1917 December resolution of the Congress took more concrete shape in the 1922 Bardoli programme of Social Construction, but within these five years, Gandhi’s intervention had fundamentally altered the Congress party. As a mass organization with a more radically political orientation in terms of both the stated objectives and the mobilization, Ambedkar detects a deeper concealment and deflection of the ‘social question’. He points to the utter disinterest in these issues by appending the letters of Swami Shradhanand that bemoaned not merely the lack of funds but also the fact that the schools being built under the Bardoli programme often catered to caste prejudice by building separate schools (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 27). Ambedkar amplifies his critique through a close reading of the budgetary allocation given to the ‘depressed classes’, most striking of which was that from the 13 million collected from the Tilak Swaraj Fund, 200,000 (later amended to 500,000) was awarded for the upliftment of the Depressed Classes, indicating at once both the priorities of the Congress and its constituency. ¹²

In fact, as Ambedkar shows, when the Congress had become a mass organization in the 1920s, Gandhi, far from undertaking mass campaigns against rampant caste atrocities and everyday caste discrimination, wrote prolifically on the virtues of the Hinduism and varnasharama scheme (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 301–27). This refusal on questions of the ‘social’ were also reflected in Gandhi’s remarkable half-heartedness in issues that challenged Hindu dogma or upset Hindu sentiment, whether in the case of the Vaikom Satyagraha (where Sikhs who had joined agitations for opening the public road were told that this was an ‘internal matter’ for Hindus alone), the Mahad Satyagraha (where Gandhi merely suggested that Satyagraha as a political form could only be used against the British and not fellow Hindus) or Guruvayur (where after initially promising to fast in support of the opening of temple to untouchables, Gandhi simply backtracked); (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 119–139, 290–291)

The introduction of a religiously mediated politics in the form of Khilafat and Swaraj could not be extricated completely from the ‘riots’ that almost took the form of a protracted ‘civil war’ in the decade of the 20s, beginning with the ‘Moplah movement’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 135–155). While Gandhi encouraged the use of the religious idiom in the Khilafat movement including the recruitment of the ulema for political mobilization, other Congress leaders were more circumspect. Having signed the Lucknow Pact with the Muslim League, Congress leaders from Balgangadhar Tilak to Motilal Nehru saw this to be an opportunity for involving the Muslim community in their political demands; but soon enough, the increasing use of religious rhetoric around the Khilafat gave cause for concern. By framing the question as one of Hindu–Muslim unity, Gandhi appeared to agree with the proposal of some Khilafatis to invite the Amir of Afghanistan to conquer British India. Such proposals alarmed Congress leaders (Ambedkar, 2017a. p. 145), and Ambedkar asked incredulously whether ‘any sane man could go so far’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 145). Clearly ‘Hindu–Muslim’ in this sense did not refer to theological dogma, but a political partnership that all the same preserved religious identity as political–communal identity. It was in such a context as some historians too have argued—and not merely the violence at Chauri Chaura—that this first mass political movement was abruptly called off by Gandhi; leaving Khilafat leaders unhappy and unconvinced. ¹³

The Mutually Escalating Dynamic of Communal Politics: The Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League

If the Gandhian Congress was critiqued for deflecting questions of social reform in the infusion of a religiously informed mass politics, such a critique was equally applicable to Muslim League politics. In fact, Ambedkar provides a critique of Islam as a religion as well as the specific shape of the politics of the Muslim League in the subcontinent. According to him, Indian Muslims seemed to be much slower in matters of social and secular reform, not merely in comparison to Hindus (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 223) but also in comparison to Muslims from other countries, including Turkey. This contention was attributed to a sentiment particular to Muslims in India who, Ambedkar argues, were characterized by a fear that Hinduism was ‘silently but slowly encroaching’ and under which Indian Muslims might well be ‘submerged’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 223–225). Taking as an example the organized opposition to the Marriage Bill, Muslim politics is interpreted to have in its agenda merely its religious-community identity, taking little cognizance of other ‘secular’ differences such as that between the rich and the poor, capital and labour, landlord and tenant (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 226).

Notwithstanding the distinctive aspects pertaining to the Indian subcontinent, Ambedkar also attributed such forms of ‘Muslim politics’ to the religion of Islam in which two central features were discerned: the fundamental distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Muslim imagination and the fact that there was an inherent incompatibility between Islam and a local-territorial allegiance. ¹⁴ This, as much as Hindu religious strictures, was held to have impeded the creation of both a common political–secular as much as a genuinely social space of interaction and intimacy between Hindus and Muslims. In turn, this meant no possibility of a social–internal critique. ‘They had no common and continuous cycle of participation’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 339). In their mutual antagonism, they had ‘suspended the cause of removing the social evils with which they [are] infested’, drawing a ‘conspiracy of silence over social evils’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 237). Their interactions with each other were ‘mechanical’ and not born of the common will required of a nation, and ‘the past [was] imbedded in religion and for each to give up the past [was] to give up religion’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 19).

It is in the context of this social and political analysis that Ambedkar interprets Savarkar’s arguments and those of the Hindu Mahasabha. The occlusion of genuine social reform by Gandhian-Congress mass politics in the interstices of an emerging representative-governmental schema had also seen the birth of a more explicitly political–militant form of Hinduism in the works of Savarkar, the RSS and the Mahasabha. Ambedkar argued that the Mahasabha was a more ‘deeply’ political organization in its resistance to social critique and social change, since such attempts could be seen as undermining its political unity based on the affirmation of the culture and history of the Hindus, perceived as a distinct entity (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 26). This Hindu ideology mirrored and replicated the position of certain strands of Muslim organizations by speaking not merely of the existence of two distinct Hindu and Muslim nations within India but also compounded religious identity with a historical consciousness that was marked by Hindu–Muslim conflict.

Ambedkar notes the paradox that the late demand for Pakistan and its ideology that India consisted of two distinct nations was in fact but the reiteration of Savarkar’s earlier arguments of the 1920s. Savarkar’s Hindutva argument on the definition of nationalism that had posited the territory-country as holy, rather than any Hindu religious scripture such as the Vedas, was, according to Ambedkar, carefully designed to exclude Christians and Muslims and simultaneously include Buddhists and Sikhs amongst the Hindus (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 130). And yet, notwithstanding this thesis of distinct nations and historical antagonism, Savarkar was unwilling to accept the very idea of Partition. The only way that Ambedkar sees a way to reconcile these ‘illogical if not queer’ contradictions—insisting on distinct nations with conflictual relations but refusing partition—is by commenting that ‘suffice it to say that the scheme of Swaraj formulated by Mr Savarkar will give the Hindus an empire over the Muslims and thereby satisfy their vanity and their pride in being an imperial race’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 134). Ambedkar saw such visions of a ‘Hindu Raj’—if realized—as the ‘greatest calamity’ that could fall on the country (Ambedkar, pp. 354–355).

These different conceptions of nationhood as they emerged in the decades of late colonial India were nonetheless reflected in the formal recognition of the political distinctiveness of religious communities; as Ambedkar notes Savarkar was not opposed to separate electorates for Muslims (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 132). Ambedkar traces both the change in Jinnah’s position and the shift from ‘community’ to ‘nation’ in the complex and changing ways in which religious community identity was articulated politically, whether in terms of reservation, electorates or centre–province relations. As he makes clear, Jinnah was not someone who always took separate electorates as axiomatic even as the shift towards the Pakistan demand had to be rooted in the impasses over the specific form that constitutional safeguards to minorities would take as much as the divisions in actual social existence. And while there was no reason to believe that Pakistan would be a solution to the ‘communal problem’, for Ambedkar, it certainly represented ‘a new vision symbolized by a new name’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, pp. 338–339). There could be no doubt about Jinnah’s increasing influence over the Muslim community at large as well as leaders across the spectrum of Muslim provincial politics into the early 1940s—a contention confirmed by contemporary historiography (Hasan, 1993, p. 42; Jalal, 1994). But rather than persevere in an attempt at a constitutional settlement, the Congress initiated a mass movement with meagre Muslim participation, that is, Quit India (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 407). The electoral success of the Muslim League in Muslim constituencies in the elections of 1945 to 1946, and the cycle of riots, only appeared to confirm Ambedkar’s overall thesis about the lack of national will amongst political parties as much as communities on the ground.

The Minority Question: Caste and Religion

If Ambedkar’s reading of the Pakistan demand is rooted in historical circumstances where religion was politicized so as to avoid questions of social reform, this is linked to his more specific critique of the Gandhian Congress’s treatment of the ‘communal problem’. That is to say, the importance of religious politics is reiterated in the willingness to recognize Muslims as a distinct political community and, thereby, entitled to constitutional safeguards of a kind that was not to be made available to ‘untouchables’—the latter being a question ‘internal’ to Hindus and therefore not ‘political’. After establishing that the ‘shudras’ and ‘untouchables’ suffer from the undemocratic nature of Hindus society, Ambedkar asks, ‘Has not the governing class of the Hindus, which controls Hindu politics shown more regard for safeguarding the rights and interests of the Musalmans than they have for safeguarding the rights and interests of the “shudras” and the untouchables?’ (Ambedkar, 2017a, p. 352) It is this critique that is traced and substantiated in this section.

In the Round Table Conference, Gandhi, as representing the Congress, was firmly against giving the ‘untouchables’ a minority status—and therein entitled to safeguards whether reservations or separate electorates—until the history that led from the announcement of the Communal Award to the Poona Pact. This attitude in acknowledging the distinctive political interest of religious minorities and the fast against the separate electorate for ‘untouchables’ was entirely consistent with his religiously en-framed politics—religion not in terms merely of theological dogma but as a form of community’s perception of itself as a political–legal entity with distinctive interests. Notwithstanding this, in the face of demands by a range of ‘untouchable’ groups, he was forced to recognize the problem of ‘untouchables’ as one requiring political safeguards and hence the Poona Pact and the Congress acceptance of ‘reservations’ in representative bodies (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 44–115). The decade of the 1930s saw a renewed Congress rhetoric on the caste question even while Ambedkar contends that such rhetoric was devoid of any real substance. In the first Round Table Conference, Ambedkar had already put forward the demands for the ‘untouchables’ being on par with other minorities with regard to adequate representation and separate electorates (Ambedkar, 2022b). Though cognizant of the problems with separate electorates, reservations were deemed insufficient because of the fear that in cases such as that of special reservations (in joint electorates), it was always possible that the individual ‘untouchable’ elected on such a platform would be in fact a proxy for a non-untouchable ‘Hindu’ party—there was no guarantee that he even got the majority of the ‘untouchable’ vote (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 57). Apart from constitutional provisions in the legislative domain, considering the pervasive forms of discrimination from open violence to social boycott that cut off access to essentials and public amenities, special statutory provisions on boycott too were demanded (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 45–56).

After the Poona Pact, Gandhi and the Congress appeared to immediately take up the cause of untouchability through temple-entry—something Gandhi was earlier much more reticent about—as well as the opening of schools and wells. However, Ambedkar shows Gandhi’s vacillations in the case of temple-entry in the early 1930s as shown in the cases of Vaikom, Mahad and Guruvayur. (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 128–138, 271). Equally damningly, Ambedkar narrates the story of the ill-fated temple entry bill of Mr. Ranga Iyer in the Madras Council to which support was finally withdrawn for fear of the electorate by the Congress under Rajagopalachari, and with Gandhi’s tacit support—once again a distinction was made between the political and those religious and customary issues in which intervention was not warranted. Through the narration of such episodes, Ambedkar underlines his point that the Congress’s political mobilization only meant a further entrenchment of Hindu religious consciousness, and no real mass campaign was undertaken on ‘religious-social’ issues that violently impinged on the everyday lives of those discriminated against (Ambedkar, 2022b). ¹⁵

Much like temple entry, the formation of the anti-Untouchability League in 1932 was also considered by Ambedkar as being little more than an eye wash. That Ambedkar initially had hopes from the League is clear from his letter to A. V. Thakkar where he clearly puts forth his views on the methods to be pursued for the genuine betterment of the condition of the ‘untouchables’. In the letter, Ambedkar pointed out that untouchability was to be understood not as a problem of individual private morality but rather as a case of the systematic oppression of one class over another. It was in such a context that he proposed that the League take up the question of civil rights, including the right to take water from village wells, village schools and public conveyance, even if such actions resulted in ‘bloodshed’ and ‘social disturbance’ as had happened in the past. Moreover, he argued for the need to open up concrete economic opportunities such as the entry of ‘untouchables’ into the weaving department (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 152, 150–156). And finally, he insisted that the League encourage social fraternizing between the various castes. The religious-social is once more seen as the basis for systematic orders of oppression and discrimination.

This letter was not acknowledged but the Anti-Untouchability League made it clear that ‘social reforms like the abolition of the caste system and inter-dining are kept outside the scope of the League’ (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 157). This broader ‘reticence’ in relation to the ‘social’ is best illustrated by Ambedkar through an episode which took place Kavitha village, Ahmedabad District (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 291–293). The mere demand there by the ‘untouchables’ that their children be allowed access to the village schools along with (upper caste) Hindus led to the latter announcing a complete boycott—a boycott that took the form of denying untouchables access to the common pastoral lands and labour. In such a situation, the ‘untouchables’ agreed to a ‘settlement’ by withdrawing their demand, but not before they were punished by the upper castes who poured kerosene into their well (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 292). Hearing of this, Gandhi mourned the condition of the untouchables but merely suggested that they vacate such inhospitable environs rather than resist or prosecute their oppressors. This, according to Ambedkar, was symptomatic of the Gandhian Congress valourization of the politicization of religion at the cost of the ‘social’.

Thus, even while Gandhi’s position of matters of caste such as inter-marriage changed, as has been well documented, the fundamental point raised by Ambedkar is that the refusal to recognize the systematic nature of caste oppression resulted in the absence of any mass campaign in this regard. Analogously, while the colonial political–economy and law no doubt enabled forms of social oppression including caste, that the latter did not emerge as fundamental to the agenda of the Congress indicated the priorities of the Congress and its constituency. Ambedkar’s documentation of practices like gobarana show that nothing could have been considered more urgent. As he explains it:

In the month of March or April when the crop is fully grown, reaped and dried, it is spread on the threshing floor. Bullocks are made to tread over the corn in order to take the corn out of husk by the pressure of their hooves. While treading over the corn, the bullocks swallow up the corn as well as the straw. As their intake is excessive they find it difficult to digest the corn. Next day, the same corn comes out of their stomach along with their dung: The dung is strained and the corn is separated and given to the Untouchable workmen as their wages which they convert into flour and make into bread. (Ambedkar, 1935)

Notwithstanding Ambedkar’s broader critique of the specifically religious politicization of the decades from the 1920s onward, he was all too aware that religion could not be conflated with either theology or theological dogma. Rather it was a sign of the strong modes of communal living in India on several registers, and the various forms of distance and discrimination that characterized such forms of life. In such a situation, several kinds of communities would see the simple democratic arrangement in terms of franchise as a threat, and hence the complex history of the constitutional safeguards, something in which the Congress actively participates. The demand for ‘minority’ safeguards was simply the reflection and expression of the fact that certain communities did not fully participate in the ‘national’ life of the country, or rather were actively and punitively prevented from doing so, and hence a simple democracy might well lead to the tyranny of a communal majority.

Since this was a context where a community perceived democratic majoritarianism to be a threat to itself, Ambedkar argues that the demand by Muslims for minority status—and concomitant constitutional provisions—was not because of their ‘religious’ identity as such. It was rather because of their ‘social separation’ from national life that they demanded safeguards—something for which they were no less responsible (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 206). Religious consciousness was not the most important factor since one could see religious differences not mattering socially (such as in the case of Hindus and Sikhs) just as one could see social separation among adherents of the same religion (such as the ‘Blacks’ and the ‘Whites’ in America) (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 206). Religious difference in the form of social difference need not—but could—transform into national difference, given specific historical conditions. This transformation could be tracked in the figure of Jinnah who had initially refused to participate in the Khilafat movement due to its religious agenda and wished to safeguard minority interests of all kinds but finally took to adopting a religious–political rhetoric in his advocacy of the national distinctiveness of Muslims and Partition. While the threat of Hindu majoritarianism was indeed a real one, the Muslim League was equally driven by forces inherent to it which Ambedkar diagnoses and critiques, as discussed earlier.

Constitutional Safeguards and the Threat of Democratic Majoritarianism

If religious difference was the manifestation and source of social differentiation, becoming a justification for a constitutional safe-guard such as minority status, Ambedkar argued that ‘untouchables’ whose social segregation was punitively enforced and exploited historically through religious sanction could certainly in justice demand such a status. He emphasizes the fact that caste was not merely Hindu theological dogma but was seen as a necessary part of every Hindu’s practice (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 207). ¹⁶ It is insisted that the problem of untouchability was not a question of private morality like drinking but concerned the instituted and enforced relationship between classes of people. A long history of the legal and political codification of this institutionalization of segregated discrimination created the requirement of special constitutional safeguards or ‘minority’ status. To those who argued that the Hindus would reform themselves, Ambedkar firmly declared that the ‘possibility of a better future was no guard against the tyranny of the present’ (Ambedkar, 2022b, p. 209). Religiously sanctioned, caste discrimination took form in the ‘secular’ world through outright violence and the violence of social boycott as well as the denial of basic civic and public amenities such as access to public wells, schools and transport.

While concerned with constitutional safe-guards Ambedkar changed his position on the precise constitutional instrument to achieve such a safeguard moving from proposing joint electorates to separate electorates, then conceding reservations in the Poona Pact, to then demanding separate electorates in States and Minorities, then conceding to special reservations in the Constitution and to finally argue for the doing away of such reservations in the legislative domain (Zelliot, 2013, p. 198). The acutely historical grasp of India as consisting of the socially, legally and politically instituted relations between communities and not an organic democratic nation is what informs his constitutional–political demands—even though nothing stopped one from working towards the ideals of a nation free of discrimination. This led to his endeavour to secure the protection of the ‘untouchables’, which unified his different strategies from separate electorates to special reservations to finally doing away with the latter, even as he very early realized that the disadvantage in special reservations lay in the fact that such a provision could be co-opted by the majority community. This was the basis of his advocacy of ‘cumulative voting’ as well as his analysis of the 1937 elections—an analysis that explains his turn to separate electorates in 1945. Undertaking a study of the 1937 elections Ambedkar contends that the Congress could not claim to have the complete support of the ‘untouchables’ by arguing that despite their greater finances and organizational power, and the reservation within a general electorate, the Congress won but 777 seats out of 1758, that is, less than half, getting only around 18% of the actual votes from the Depressed Classes (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 164–173)

It was this inability to grasp the historical and institutional conditions of India in favour of an abstract theory of democratic government that Ambedkar sees as the inability of ‘Western scholars’ in distinguishing between the ‘freedom of a country’ and the ‘freedom of the people of the country’. It was not enough to assume that the mere existence of constitutional morality and universal adult franchise signified ‘self-government’. Such a position failed to recognize the function of a ‘governing class’, which in specific historical circumstances was able to continue to rule despite universal adult franchise because they are often taken to be ‘natural leaders’ (Ambedkar, 2022b, pp. 223–226). States and minorities had definitively clarified that a constitutional framework was required for the specific protection of minorities against the ‘tyranny of the majority’, a minority being defined in terms of ‘social discrimination’—this being the basis for constitutional safeguards of even religious minorities such as Muslims and Christians. The very idea of justiciable fundamental rights was therefore formulated so as to protect against majoritarian legislation that might undermine the rights of minorities. In a critique of legislation, one again sees a critique of democratic majoritarianism, and hence the requirement for constitutionally guaranteed rights and provisions.

The requirement of a constitutional framework was thus seen as a bulwark against majoritarianism. Precisely because religion translated into social and economic discrimination and violence in the form of boycott, Ambedkar clearly advocates for state socialism in States and minorities. In this sense, he was prophetic in arguing that tenancy legislation would not be of any help to the depressed classes, who were largely landless labourers (Ambedkar, 2017b, p. 31)—a contention confirmed by several subsequent economic studies (Frankel, 2005). This too cannot but be seen as his explicit critique of Gandhian trusteeship. Certainly, pressure from the Communists, Socialists and those so inclined within its ranks ensured that the Congress party had moved a long way from Gandhi’s reticence in matters of land reform towards demands such as that of zamindari abolition, but fundamental divisions within the Congress, often phrased as a leftward and rightward wing affecting questions of political–economy as much as constitutional policy, remained, and have been well documented. ¹⁷ Ambedkar had already made it clear that adult franchise was insufficient to accomplish self-government or self-determination, and it was crucial to therefore articulate a two-fold praxis: establish (constitutional–institutional) safeguards and critique the ‘social outlook’ and ‘social philosophy’ of the governing classes (ideology critique). It is in such a context, where ideology and self-perception became a key ingredient in electoral and political mobilization, that one can understand his historical studies Who were the Shudras (1946) and The Untouchables (1948), in the wake of Pakistan or the Partition of India and What Congress and Gandhi has done to the Untouchables, which have been discussed earlier.

While Ambedkar scrupulously documented the horrific discrimination faced by ‘untouchables’, the task was equally to show that such forms of discrimination had a historical logic—a logic that formed the basis of his historical studies. It is striking that Ambedkar uses the word ‘communalism’ often in his description of Brahmanic-Hindu law and that his historical studies establish that Hindu society was communal because the terms of ‘associated life’ were dictated by the norm of ‘graded inequality’. Caste was an inherent form of graded communalism, and such a divisive social form could only be combatted by specific constitutional–institutional safeguards and ideological critique. Caste was not merely an idea or notion but in fact had the sanction of law, and was therefore the ‘realization of an ideal’. It is in this context that Ambedkar distinguishes the Hindu conception from the Greek conception since, unlike the latter, the former sought to enforce its norm through law (Ambedkar, 2022a, pp. 24–26).

Not only was caste discrimination legally enforced, but such enforcement had divine sanction, as most forcefully articulated in the Purusha Sukta hymn. On the Rig Veda, Ambedkar comments that there is a consciousness of a nation in the unity of the five tribes, and yet through the Purusha Sukta hymn, there was ‘communalism’. As he asks, ‘Why did it [the hymn] recognize the communal division within the tribes?’ ¹⁸ (Ambedkar, 2022a, p. 31). Writing on the inherent ‘communalism’ in Hindu society with its caste divisions in the late 1940s, Ambedkar makes it clear that his interest is not so much in the ‘shudras’ as a people but rather in the normative–legal structure of caste and its historical enforcement across time forming the social through discrimination. It is this ‘norm’ that unifies the history of the subcontinent, even though no racial identity could be postulated between the ‘shudras of today’ and the ‘original sudras’ (Govind, 2018).

Both criminal and civil law was once again dictated by community membership in terms of ‘graded equality’. It is in this enforcement of exclusion that Ambedkar sees both in the historical life of Shivaji as well as colonial law (Ambedkar, 2022a, pp. 162–166, 175–184). While it was true that colonial criminal law did not recognize caste as a status, such status was recognized in matters of marriage and inheritance, and therefore the Courts did tacitly recognize it as legal. Towards these ‘communal’ divisions, no anti-colonial party—from the League to the Congress—seemed to have any reservations and the general grammar of difference was therefore only affirmed. The argument about the essentially ‘communal’ nature of Hindu history is cemented in his work on The Untouchables, tracing their origins to the defeated tribes as well as the conflict between Buddhists and Brahmins (Ambedkar, 2017c). Once again, Ambedkar shows ‘communalism’ to be something not confined to the Hindu–Muslim question but a central motor of Indian history. His insistence on calling caste discrimination as communal is a reminder of the need for constitutional safeguards as well as ideological critique in an environment where political mobilization and resultant politics had as its essential ingredient identity and history. His historical and sociological work could therefore be seen as a detailed defence of the need for constitutional provisions for safeguarding the minority status of the victims of caste discrimination as much as a response to the emergent politics of electoral democracy.

As a member of the Constituent Assembly on the sufferance of the Congress, Ambedkar once again withdrew his demand for separate electorates. But even his argument that electoral victory in the case of reserved constituencies ought to have the support of the majority of the ‘untouchable’ population was not acceded to in the discussions pertaining to Constitution-making (Jaffrelot, 2005, pp. 106–114). Yet, notwithstanding this, the Constitution indelibly carried the imprint of Ambedkar’s thoughts and definitively rejected the Gandhian thinking on the village, law and trusteeship (Jaffrelot, 2005) ¹⁹ by enshrining certain constitutional values on the justiciability of fundamental rights, parliamentary democracy and the state’s role in the economy. The enshrinement of the constitutional values pertaining to achieving economic equality therefore have to be attributed not so much to Gandhi, or what some consider the ‘right’ wing of the Congress, as much as Nehru, the Socialists and Communists, given the history of peasant mobilization and militancy, as well as Ambedkar.

Conclusion

It is not accidental that Ambedkar continued his struggles on the Hindu Code Bill in Independent India—an arena that the politics of anti-colonialism had left intact. He also became disenchanted with the constitutional provision of special reservation (Zelliot, 2013, p. 198) in the legislatures, and this can be rooted in his arguments of a much earlier time when he warned of the possibilities of ‘proxies’ being set up by the majority community and party. His dual aim may be located in such a context. On the one hand, to form the Republican Party India (RPI), like the earlier Independent Labour Party, in order to represent the larger discriminated classes so as to engage with the nature of democratic politics and mass mobilization, rather than ‘untouchables’ alone, and on the other hand, to engage in an effective ideological critique of contemporary Hindu society as much as its past through a (re)interpretation of Buddhism (Jaffrelot, 2005, pp. 110–143; Rodrigues, 1993; Zelliot, 2013, pp. 143–175). Such endeavours can be traced to his historical arguments regarding the ‘shudras’, the ‘untouchables’ and the conflict between the Buddhists and Brahmins, and his unfinished works Revolution and counter revolution and Buddha and his Dhamma. Buddhism provided a religion for a society ‘awakened to science’, with the ‘religion’ reinterpreted to encapsulate a missionary ‘Bhiku’ zeal for social service and material welfare; in this one finds a re-articulation of ‘religion’ to be distinguished from his critique of the politics of the colonial period. ²⁰ In this sense, the more explicit turn towards Buddhism as well as the formation of the RPI is consistent with writings of the 1940s.

The unsentimental study of the ‘national movement’ accounts for what many are loathe to accept, that partition was emblematic of a failure and cannot be merely seen as a tragedy—a failure that is not solely to be attributed to external imperial machinations since neither lived experience nor legal provisions accepted across the anti-colonial political spectrum exhibited the ideals of a ‘national life’ as envisioned by Ambedkar, notwithstanding the ideals of several popular and peasant movements that found ultimate expression in the Constitution. Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi and the national movement might appear unfair in the face of the undeniable and inspiring personal courage and compassion that Gandhi as well as several Congress and non-Congress freedom fighters’ no doubt exhibited in their struggle against an oppressive imperial state. Gandhi’s absence from the Constituent Assembly—in which Ambedkar played so central a role—while attending to the mass killings that had begun across the country demonstrated these very individual qualities to a rare degree. But if Partition signalled the undeniable lack of a unitary national will, towards the new challenge of constituting a state in the face of societal inequalities and differences, Gandhi had little to offer in terms of an ideological critique embodied in an institutional paradigm—a paradigm provided by the Constitution that has guided several peoples’ movements in independent India. The fact that concrete and militant struggles of peasants and workers, many organized by sections within the Congress, Communist and Socialist organizations, left their imprint on the values enshrined by the Constitution is undeniable. ²¹ Ambedkar’s own endeavours in this regard, including his argument for state socialism in 1945, may be understood in such a context, leading to his actual interventions in Constitution-making. On the other hand, the Congress, with its divisions within, could not provide an effective ideological critique of the nature of Hindu society and practices, in colonial and Independent India, and it is little surprise that Ambedkar had to struggle so hard, even after independence, in relation to the Hindu Code Bill.

The writings in the 1940s analysed here are nothing less than a prolegomena towards understanding some of the failures of anti-colonial politics as well as the importance of the values ultimately enshrined in the Constitution. In forcefully demanding for justice in institutional modes and critiquing the certitudes of ideological representation, Ambedkar articulates, in a unique way, the specifically modern dangers of a democratic populist majoritarianism—majoritarianism as articulated not merely in terms of numerical superiority but also in the institutionalization of a dominant ideology in the social–political complex. ²² He remains acutely modern and contemporary, and one of the most important and insightful of anti-fascist thinkers in his recognition of the dangers of popular mobilization through the stigmatization of communities in the name of tradition, culture and religion. As is more than evident today, if democracy is not merely a matter of majoritarian force, such as took place in Khairlanji, or the ceaseless attempt to capture power through the stigmatization and scapegoating of religious minorities by drawing on false histories, as detailed studies of so-called communal riots have established, it can only be said to find its real measure in the vigilance of ideology critique (‘educate, agitate, organize’) as much as an institutional design (constitutional values such as fundamental rights).