By Ashutosh Bhardwaj
New Delhi: To know the Sangh Parivar’s perspective towards BR Ambedkar, one can turn to perhaps the two most celebrated events Nagpur witnesses every year. On Vijayadashmi, the day the RSS Sarsanghchalak delivers his widely televised and analysed speech, thousands of Dalits from across the country gather at Diksha Bhumi — where Amebdkar had embraced Buddhism in 1956.
When the Sangh points out that Ambedkar had an option to adopt Islam but chose an Indian religion, they deliberately overlook the fact that he chose to desert Hinduism on the day the Sangh asserts its Hindu identity, at a place that is just a few kilometres away from the RSS headquarters. And that he chose Vijayadashami not for the legend associated with the Ramayana, but because Ashoka had embraced Buddhism on the day.
Mustn’t it be read as Ambedkar’s parting reply to the ideology against which he had struggled his entire life? With what moral ground can the Sangh ever embrace a man who asserted that “Hindu society is a myth…I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mohammedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean, and meanness is worse than cruelty?”
And yet, it is also true that over the last decade the Parivar has made several attempts to embrace Ambedkar.
To understand the Sangh’s changed stance, I once interviewed former pracharak (missionary) and Panchjanya editor Devendra Swarup. He was among the senior most Sangh veterans before he died at the age of 93 in 2019. Speaking on the record, he explained the circumstances that persuaded the Sangh to embrace first MK Gandhi and later Ambedkar. Expressing the Sangh’s innate reservations about the Dalit icon, he said: “Ambedkar and every Ambedkarite is anti-Hindu… (But) the problem before us is that since the Dalit movement has adopted Ambedkar as an icon, we cannot avoid him.”
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
