The political slugfest that is on nationally and which led to a day in the Winter Session becoming its worst in India’s parliamentary history may be owed to the facetious comments the home minister Amit Shah made on the floor. It is moot whether he should have come forward at the earliest with a straightforward apology to douse the fires. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that off-the-cuff remarks have triggered a war that is really a fight for the votes of the dalits rather than a battle of high principles.
The Opposition, sensing an opportunity to further its claim to be a champion of the dalits, has opened the battle on many fronts in the wake of the home minister’s slip. Ambedkar is no less than a god to his followers who constitute about 17 per cent of India’s 968 million voters and hence even an allusion to ‘God’ in the debate on the Constitution, of which he was the principal architect, became the tinder that set the issue on fire whose repercussions are hard to gauge now. Truth to tell, Ambedkar’s political and social influence on Indian society has far outgrown the social justice movement he propounded to empower the suppressed and the backward who, being on the lowest rung of India’s reprehensible caste system, suffered the worst of the discrimination.
Only slavery in the West could have matched the caste system’s dehumanising effect on society. And yet the man who opposed M.K.
Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru when it came to matters of principle.