Amit Shah’s statement is against the basic ethos of our freedom struggle and negates the sacrifices

ambedkar1

Perplexed with Amit Shah’s statement on Dr Ambedkar in the Parliament, the drama created by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the entrance gate of the Parliament and later registering an FIR against Rahul Gandhi is a very low level and reprehensible act only to divert the attention of the people. While there are CCTV cameras at every nook and corner in the premises of the Parliament, no CCTV footage of the incident has been shown that the BJP is clamoring for. This proves falsehood in the claim of the BJP against Rahul Gandhi. 

Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar was the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of our Constituent Assembly.  The basis of the constituent assembly in which the constitution was framed was laid during the struggle for independence. India’s freedom struggle was fought by the entire country, in which women and men of different ideas, religions, castes, classes, workers and farmers, intellectuals, even children contributed. This struggle gave a message of harmony, brotherhood and sisterhood. Many freedom-loving youth, among whom the names of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Ashfaq Ullah Khan etc. are prominent along with many unknown people sacrificed in the struggle against the British imperialism. Hundreds of freedom fighters suffered extreme torture in Andaman and Nicobar jails. All of them had a single slogan and one aim, a self-governing nation based on the principles of justice & equality, without any discrimination based on caste, religion, ethnicity, gender and for a secular democratic and socialist India after independence. Therefore, in the Constituent Assembly representatives of all the parties and many other intellectuals were taken as its members. Even Shyama Prasad Mukherjee from the RSS was taken in it, although everyone knows that RSS not only did not take any part in the freedom struggle, on the contrary it supported the British in the same way as some fanatical Muslims.

Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s greatness lies in the fact that he tried to incorporate the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, revolutionaries and leftists in the constitution while completely rejecting the idea of creating a religion-based country – the Hindu Rashtra.

Discrimination on the basis of caste since ages is a very sad truth of our society. The constituent assembly had a daunting task to remove this inhuman aspect of our society. The assembly therefore adopted the policy of reservation for the Dalits – the SCs & STs and other backward sections who had been marginalised both socially and economically for centuries. This step was taken because otherwise the Dalits would never get a chance to rise. Ambedkar himself came from the Dalit community, so he not only understood the problems of Dalits but also faced this discrimination many times in his life. Being a talented student, he excelled in studies and reached this position.

The manner in which Amit Shah sarcastically called Ambedkar Ambedkar six times actually reflects the anti-Dalit mentality of the RSS which unknowingly came out from Amit Shah’s mouth.


It is a truth of our country that caste and class come together in many places. For example, the majority of the oppressed poor classes come from the SCs and STs. According to statistics, even today the average income of the scheduled caste is 7.5 thousand rupees per family per month which is about 1500 rupees per person per month. This is a nasty joke. But this is the truth. Because of this, India’s number comes to 105 out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index. Without any facilities, the children of these classes remain deprived of education, the youth have no other option than doing manual labor. According to the study, the manual workers who mostly hail from Dalits, have a lower life expectancy than the national average.  It is now crystal clear that the RSS is against the toiling masses from the very beginning as its ideology and wants to keep the poor people as such. No wonder the BJP government unashamedly sides with the corporate and is following anti-people, anti-worker and anti-farmer economic policies. However, sometimes they offer some doles to them. Ambedkar, therefore, emphasized the need for education among the Dalits and described education as the way to their emancipation.

The opposition to Amit Shah’s statement is not only based on his casteist outlook but also on the class position of siding with the corporate.

Dr Arun Mitra is a Practicing ENT Surgeon in Ludhiana, Punjab. He is also the President of Indian Doctors for Peace and Development (IDPD) www.idpd.org 

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