Foreign Policy

Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar, and the Facts Which Have Been Erased

by Arun Shourie

Reviewed by Sunil Khilnani

When people burn a book, it is essential to take notice of it. During a summer in which India marked its 50th year of freedom from British rule, Worshipping False Gods, written by Arun Shourie, one of India's most eminent journalists, was set alight in various parts of the country. Understanding why it has provoked such a violent reaction reveals much about the current mood of Indian politics and about the nation's historical memory in a year when such memory has been assiduously massaged and manipulated by current pieties.

Shourie's book has one very simple purpose. It is an extended--indeed, overextended--bitter polemic against those who, driven by current political ambitions, wish to rewrite the history of Indian nationalism and the early years of the foundation of the Indian republic. More specifically, Shourie takes to task those who downgrade the prominent role of Indian leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, while elevating lesser figures like B.R. Ambedkar. Undoubtedly a remarkable figure, Ambedkar was born in 1891 to parents of the "untouchable" Mahar caste. He lifted himself from the near total illiteracy of his caste to study law and earn degrees from Columbia and London universities. On his return to India, he became the leader of the untouchables (or "Scheduled Castes," as they were termed in the jargon of the British Raj) and dedicated himself to freeing them from the oppressive, inhumane hierarchies held in place by the Brahminic order. Always a critic of Gandhi's Congress, which he saw as a party of the upper castes, Ambedkar was nevertheless inducted by the Congress leadership at the time of independence, and he became closely involved in the debates that produced the Indian constitution. He was an architect of the policy of reserving quotas in education and employment for members of the Scheduled Castes--a policy adopted with the 1950 constitution to redress historical wrongs, making India the first country to commit itself to the wide-ranging policies known today in the United States as "affirmative action."

Ambedkar was always regarded with respect across the spectrum of Indian politics, but in recent years he has been transformed from a notable historical figure into something approaching a saint, venerated by growing lower-caste movements and the parties of the Dalits and Bahajuns (as members of the Scheduled Castes now call themselves). These lower-caste parties comprise one of the two new political formations that have emerged in the wake of the Congress Party's historic decline since the late 1980s--the other being the Hindu nationalists, represented in parliament by the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp). Inevitably, each has embarked on rewriting Indian history in order to legitimize its own current aspirations. Nowhere have these developments been more strikingly apparent than in India's most populous region, the 140 million-strong state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, the lower-caste parties, led by the Bahujan Samaj Party (bsp), and the Hindu nationalists are locked in a struggle for power that produced a bizarre shotgun marriage (the two parties recently fell out over a deeply uncomuncomfortable arrangement where each took a turn governing the state for a six-month period). The bsp's leader, the feisty Mayawati, takes her inspiration from Ambedkar and during her six months in office engaged in a frenzy of naming parks, buildings, and development projects after her hero, while also commissioning thousands of his statues (thus producing a severe shortage of skilled statue makers) and ordering the publication of new school and university textbooks that "properly" reflect Ambedkar's contribution to India's history.

Into this atmosphere of uncritical veneration, Shourie has tossed a politically incorrect hand grenade. He sets out to demolish two myths that in recent years have calcified into truths: that Ambedkar was at the forefront of the national struggle for independence from the British and that he played a decisive role in drafting the constitution. Shourie amasses a catalog of Ambedkar's doings during the 1930s and 1940s that establishes that he often sided with the British against the Congress Party in return for British support for the claims of India's untouchables. Shourie also provides plenty of evidence that shows the constitution to be the product of extended, collective deliberation, rather than the outcome of one man's vision--as Ambedkar's supporters are wont to claim. Most of this is well known, as Shourie himself acknowledges, and in his rather heavy hands it makes for tedious and often one-sided reading. But most of it has also been conveniently forgotten. Worshipping False Gods serves the important purpose of reminding Indians of the need to explore fully the complexities and ambiguities of their recent past, rather than merely to succumb to a caricatural history in which heroes and villains enact mythic struggles. If Indians continue to burn books like Shourie's, they will remain prisoners of the very past whose legacies they wish to escape.

Sunil Khilnani teaches politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France  (Yale University Press, 1993) and The Idea of India , forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.