Ambedkar's in Everyone's Thought

‘Everyone is Arguing About Ambedkar.’ An American-Dutch company is reportedly making a feature film based on what is happening in contemporary India: everyone is arguing about Ambedkar. The beauty of the whole process is that B R Ambedkar has been long gone, but as a proper noun, he is still very much a topic of controversy in the usual ping-pong matches that take place between GoI and not-GoI. The truth is that there is no single real reason why Ambedkar has been brought up as a topic of discussion – except for the fact that bringing him up always, without exception, gets everyone’s attention.

But apparently the home minister said something, as home ministers are wont to do, which involved Babasaheb. ‘Ambedkar’ being a trigger word, it got folks up. For a few days…. Lots of people chipped in, including Ambedkar’s grandson. But it doesn’t matter. Once you decide it’s Nehru’s fault – and rope in Babasaheb – it’s a caste-related merry-go-round. While Ambedkar was hoping for the ‘annihilation of caste’, we have other plans – in 2024, moving to 2025. Parliament is debating on ‘Ambedkar’, something that MPs believe is relevant to the future. The innocence – or otherwise – of that thought is genuinely breathtaking. Our parliamentarians are quite cute – in the fact that they forgo the future to think of what Ambedkar would have thought. Cute.