10 highlights
-
In an age where both politics and religion have suffered such an enormous decline, Babasaheb Ambedkar offers us an example to learn from.
-
Ambedkar’s spirituality did not allow for a crude separation of the personal and the political. Ambedkar’s insistence on a spiritualisation of human life constitutes the truly notable radicalism of his political struggle. This is his most significant contribution but also his most forgotten legacy.
-
Meaningful politics in an unjust society comprises endeavours to alter the balance of power in favour of the deprived and oppressed.
-
It is this striving that drew Ambedkar to various religious traditions and finally, to Buddhism. This was not for him an end-of-life realisation, as some believe. As early as 1936, in his classic work Annihilation of Caste, in a passage generally ignored, Ambedkar said: “I believe true religion is the foundation of society, the basis on which all true civil government rests, and both their sanction.”
-
Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me hasten to clarify that Ambedkar is not making a case for a theocratic state. His emphasis is on the fostering of values that would engender a humane society, based on loving kindness, an impeccable Buddhist virtue.
-
He was drawn to the religious traditions because the change they seek is more fundamental than those limited to transforming specific structures of power, whether based on gender, class, caste, race, region or community. This is what makes his spirituality so powerfully radical in political terms.
-
But for Ambedkar it was of the greatest significance how this fraternity was to be built, and he rejected both Gandhi and Marx in this respect. He wrote: “One has to choose between government by force and government by moral disposition. The Buddha’s way was not to force people to do what they did not like to do although it was good for them. His way was to alter the disposition of people so that they would do voluntarily what they would not otherwise want to do.”
-
Thus, without an inner transformation of the individual, social revolutions remain incomplete and unsustainable. Force and compulsion, even if moral (as with Gandhi), do not carry change for very long.
-
It may be best to view Ambedkar’s legacy within a pantheon of activists who brought reconstructed spiritual resources to address the key challenges of their own time and context. These include Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire and their theology of liberation in Latin America.
-
Working for the annihilation of caste, Ambedkar would have wanted us to affirm the oneness of all existence, in recognition of our interconnectedness, way beyond the separate self. Only on that basis can we live a life animated by the Buddha’s exhortation often cited by Ambedkar: “Just as the earth does not feel hurt and does not resent, so also you Bhikkus must continue to bear Maitritowards your offenders … Let the ambit of your Maitri be as boundless as the world”