As the campaign for the first general elections in 1951-1952 played out, the Congress led by Nehru fiercely targeted two leaders. For the fledgling Jana Sangh and Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Nehru came out in open abuse, vowing to ‘crush Jana Sangh.’ For Dr Ambedkar and the Scheduled Caste Federation, the Congress adopted a ruse.

Nehru deputed his trusted communist friends to ensure Babasaheb’s defeat. Jawaharlal Nehru was extremely unrelenting and ungracious when it came to his political and intellectual opponents. It did not matter to him that they were his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly till the other day and had contributed equally to erecting the constitutional edifice of free India.

He wanted both Ambedkar and Syama Prasad defeated. He was allergic to their parliamentary skills and to their vocal advocacy of a new polity for India. He wanted a new Parliament shorn of opponents, except communists, who, in any case, were his ideological co-travellers. Nehru did not put up a candidate against the CPI’s A K Gopalan in Kannur. This camaraderie overflowed especially after Sardar Patel’s death. Despite Nehru’s flame-throwing blitzkrieg, Dr Mookerjee won his Calcutta south seat, with his Jana Sangh just about managing to stay afloat as a national party by bagging little over three percent of the vote share.

Babasaheb lost from Bombay North seat, primarily because of the machinations of the communists who were outsourced by Nehru to carry out the hit-job against him. It did not matter to Nehru that Dr Ambedkar’s health was failing restricting his mobility. It did not matter to him that Dr Ambedkar had completely exhausted himself in the gargantuan task of putting together the Constitution and was therefore worthy of a noble gesture of support. Speaking of his defeat, Dr Ambedkar, one of his most authentic biographers Dhananjay Keer tells us, felt that it ‘was due to the machinations of S.A.Dange’[1], then general secretary of the CPI.

During the campaign Dange had given out a vicious slogan, he said, ‘Spoil your votes but don’t vote Dr Ambedkar.’[2] To Dr Ambedkar, Communism was ‘like a forest fire; it goes on burning and consuming anything and everything that comes in its way.’

Dr Ambedkar had deeply studied communism and had closely followed and critiqued the communist movements and politics in India. He had seen through a number of their machinations. It always bothered to see that communists used the marginalised to serve their political ends, as fodder to fuel a false revolution. He had clearly stated that communists ‘exploit labourers for their political ends.’[3]

Dr Ambedkar’s masterly intervention in Rajya Sabha while it discussed the international situation on 26 August 1954, is a best example of how deeply he had read and studied the immediate post-war international situation and the ‘expansion of communism in the world’ which posed a major challenge to the free world. It was a problem ‘between that part of the world which believes in parliamentary and free democracy’, and ‘the expansion of communism in the world’[4], he said. Speaking of the worldwide threat of communism, Dr Ambedkar, explained

‘…if we take stock of the situation from May 1945, and find out what has happened, this is the situation. Russia has consumed, as I said, ten European States: one is Finland; two, Estonia: three, Latvia; four, Lithuania; five Poland; six, Czechoslovakia, seven, Hungary; eight, Rumania; nine. Bulgaria; and ten Albania. In addition, Russia has taken possession of parts of Germany, Austria, Norway and the Danish Island of Bornholm. Of these ten European States, three have been straightaway annexed by Russia and made part of her country. The rest seven are kept under Russian influence. This European conquest of Russia amounts to an absorption of a total of 85,000 square miles and 23 millions of people subjugated…’[5]

Babasaheb made observations that would prove prescient in 1962. He argued, thus:

‘…Here you have a vast country endlessly occupied in destroying other people, absorbing them within its fold on the theory that it is liberating them. The Russian liberation, so far as I can understand, is liberation followed by servitude; it is not liberation followed by freedom. But the point is this—and it worries me considerably. You are, by this kind of a peace, doing nothing more but feeding the giant every time the giant opens his jaw and wants something to eat. When you are feeding the giant regularly and constantly, the question that I should ask myself is this. Is it not conceivable that this giant may one day turn to us and say: “I have now consumed everything that there was to be consumed; you are the only person that remains and I want to consume you.’[6]

There could be no co-existence in such a system, Babasaheb argued:

‘…The question is: Can communism and free democracy work together? Can they live together? Is it possible to hope that there will not be a conflict between them? The theory, at any rate, seems to me utterly absurd, for communism is like a forest; it goes on burning and consuming anything and everything that comes in its way. It is quite possible that countries which are far distant from the centre of communism may feel safe that the forest fire may be extinguished before it reaches them or it may be that the fire may never reach them. But what about the countries which are living in the vicinity of this forest fire? Can you expect that human habitation and this forest fire can long live together?’[7]

That forest fire from India’s neighbourhood would make an attempt to consume parts of India in 1962. It had already consumed Aksai Chin in 1950s while Nehru kept silent and looked the other way.

The communist members in the Upper House, led by its leader Bhupesh Gupta could offer no counter point and analysis. Incensed with Dr Ambedkar’s riveting analysis of their expansionist ideology communists indulged in catcalls and theatrical obstructionism while he spoke. Dr Ambedkar remained unperturbed and in the best of parliamentary tradition and etiquette continued articulating his masterly critique of Nehru’s foreign policy. It was but natural that communists considered him, his devastating logic and profuse documentation in support of it, anathema to their propaganda and slogans. Ambedkar, for them, needed to be kept out of parliament or isolated at any cost.

Dr Savita Ambedkar, in her reminiscences of her life with Dr Ambedkar, recalling this first election writes how Nehru was ‘keeping a sharp eye on the constituency’ and of how ‘S K Patil (Mumbai chief of the Congress) and S A Dange of the Communist Party had agreed’’[8] to collaborate to defeat Dr Ambedkar.

It emerged, writes Savita Ambedkar, that ‘Nehru, S K Patil and Dange had decided that they would do all that was required, use whatever strategy suited the occasion, but they were determined not to let Dr Ambedkar win.’[9] The Congress-Communist conspiracy, Savita Ambedkar observed, left ‘the Constitution-making Doctor Saheb defeated.’ It was a terrible psychological blow for Saheb…’[10]

It was Congress’s manipulation that caused the defeat of the maker of the Indian Constitution. This first defeat deliberately inflicted on Dr Ambedkar, deeply disappointed him since he was looking forward to returning to Parliament. Parliament, he felt, was his natural arena of work, a forum standing on which he could give his best to his country’s regeneration in his remaining years. ‘This horrendous defeat in the elections,’ writes Savita Ambedkar, ‘had an extremely harmful impact on his already debilitated health, melancholy, disappointment, depression and disability returned.’[11]

Nehru and Congress engineered a second electoral defeat when Babasaheb lost the by-elections to Lok Sabha from the Bhandara seat. For this election, Babasaheb chose a young RSS pracharak Dattopant Thengadi as his election convener after receiving the approval of the RSS Sarsanghchalak M.S. Golwalkar.[12]

Thengadi would closely work as Babasaheb’s understudy for the next two years and would go on to found the world’s largest trade union movement Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh. The Bhandara by-elections were a chance for the Congress to make amends and to give up its pettiness, but Nehru stuck to his blind opposition to Babasaheb.

Dr Savita Ambedkar, ruefully writes that the Congress ‘should have displayed the largeness of heart to re-invite [to Parliament] the sculptor of the Constitution with due honour. For the sake of the welfare of the nation, if not for anything else, Nehru should have left the way open for Saheb to be elected to the Lok Sabha. But quite to the contrary, the Congress shook hands with a person like Dange and applied all its strength and got into all kinds of machinations to defeat Saheb, which proves that Congress cared more for the party than for the welfare of the country.’[13]

During the Bhandara elections, Dr Ambedkar writes Keer, was scathing of Nehru and Congress. He was fighting the elections, he said, ‘so that he might give the people the other point of view from the Opposition. It would not have been difficult, he said, for him to be in Parliament if he was prepared to make a compromise with the Congress.’[14] Babasaheb firmly chose not to compromise or succumb before Congress and thus faced political humiliation and insult in his last years.

Was Nehru’s intransigence due to Babasaheb’s outspokenness? What is because Babasaheb was cogently, convincingly and forcefully reaching out to the people and was succeeding in creating and shaping an alternate vision and narrative which free India could accept? Why is it that the Parliament debates have no record of Dr Ambedkar’s resignation statement? Why does one find it only in the volumes of Dr Ambedkar’s writings and speeches? Why was the animosity against him so intense?

A reading of Dr Ambedkar’s resignation statement reveals how he faced marginalization and discrimination at the hands of Pandit Nehru. ‘I have never been a party to the game of power politics inside the cabinet or the game of snatching portfolios,’ Dr Ambedkar told the House, ‘I believe in service…’[15] Yet his sense of service, of constitutional and of cabinet propriety was repeatedly ignored and played down by Nehru. Dr Ambedkar exposed Nehru’s way of working. The cabinet, he argued, ‘has become merely a recording and registration office of decisions already arrived at by Committees.’[16]

The cabinet, Dr Ambedkar lamented, worked by Committees, ‘there is a Defence Committee. There is a Foreign Committee. All important matters relating to Defence are disposed of by the Defence Committee. The same members of the cabinet are appointed by them.’ Dr Ambedkar was not a member of any Committee. ‘They work behind an iron curtain’, he lamented, and those who ‘are not members have only to take joint responsibility without any opportunity of taking part in the shaping of policy.’ This, for him, was an ‘impossible situation.’[17]

He was promised the ‘Planning Department’ because of his previous experience, and when the Planning Department did eventually come into existence he was left out of it. Other ministers were given more than one portfolio but not Dr Ambedkar. He was always overlooked. ‘Others like me,’ he told the House, ‘have been wanting more work. I have not been considered for holding a portfolio temporarily when a Minister in charge has gone abroad for a few days. It is difficult to understand what is the principle underlying the distribution of Government work among Ministers which the Prime Minister follows. Is it capacity? Is it trust? Is it friendship? Is it pliability?’[18]

Dr Ambedkar was repeatedly overlooked for appointment in various committees of the cabinet. The manner in which he was first included, then excluded and then re-included in the Economic Affairs Committee is disconcerting. It clearly demonstrates the insult and indecent treatment that he was subjected to by Nehru. His own words divulge the pain he had to endure during those early years when he yearned to actively participate in the shaping of free India’s polity. When the Economic Affairs Committee was formed, writes, Babasaheb:

‘…I expected, in view of the fact that I was primarily a student of Economics and Finance, to be appointed to this Committee. But I was left out. I was appointed to it by the Cabinet, when the Prime Minister had gone to England. But when he returned, in one of his many essays in the reconstruction of the cabinet, he left me out. In a subsequent reconstruction my name was added to the Committee, but was as a result of my protest.’[19]

He bore the insults stoically never venting his growing frustration at his inability to actively contribute, through his field of expertise, to the shaping of free India’s governance and policy structure. He was increasingly saddened on this count in his last years.

Having had a recorded history of heaping insult and ignominy on Dr Ambedkar, the Congress and the communist parties and their leaders can hardly claim to speak for him or to being the upholders or claimants of his legacy. Any such claim must be dismissed as hypocritical posturing and a display of rank opportunism.

[1] Dhananjay Keer, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Life and Mission, 1954

[2] Anirban Ganguly, Naveen Kalingan edited, Dattopant Thengadi: Activist Parliamentarian, 2020

[3] Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol.17, Part-3, 2020

[4] ‘Motion Regarding the International Situation’, Discussion in the Rajya Sabha, 26 August, 1954

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Savita Ambedkar, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar, 2022

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Dattopant Thengadi: Activist Parliamentarian, op.cit.

[13] Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar, op.cit

[14] Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Life and Mission, op.cit.

[15]Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings & Speeches, Vol.14, Part -2, 2020.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.