Christophe Jaffrelot's book could not have come at a better time – inasmuch as one wishes that such an account of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar's life had come much earlier. This mismatch between the reality of an arrival and the retrospective fantasy concerning its timing corresponds to the mismatch between the surrealism of contemporary India and the progressivism of Ambedkar's ideas that this book highlights. As such, Ambedkar, known as the first Dalit leader of national significance in independent India, comes off equally, and by the same token, as the one political figure whose ideas make the most sense for the best-possible India of the 21st century.
The Indian surrealism comprises the following twin realities: on one hand [is] the government's and national media's daily drumbeat of the knowledge economy, information technology and superpower dreams; on the other are incessant reports of extreme organized violence against the Dalits (or erstwhile Untouchables), increasingly belligerent bourgeois intolerance of the rural poor, glaring sexual assaults on women, and unofficial discrimination against religious minorities and the non-religious. That this Hindu-majority country has a Sikh Prime Minister, a Muslim President, and an Italian-born lady as the head of its strongest political party only adds to the surrealism. For more than a decade, the country has also had in place, via its education and job reservation quotas, one of the strictest frameworks in the world for the uplift of the oppressed castes (of which the Dalits are a part).
On a different level of observation, the only clear ideology that Indian political elites appear to retain for India's future is that of economic liberalisation. That choice rejects Gandhian traditionalism as much as Nehruvian socialism, and – given whatever the BJP did in its tenure under Atal Bihari Vajpayee – even some key orthodox strands within Hindu nationalism (such as advocacy of national economic autonomy and opposition of consumerism). Indian politics, in short, has consigned much to amnesia or political ritual in the past 15 years – without preserving or recouping from the history the little that it should have. Ambedkar's views belong to this latter category of the forgotten, and it is as such that they point to the modernity to which India should have aspired.
Division of labourers