Ambedkar Put Equality At The Core Of Democracy

Context: Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar’s contributions to Indian democracy should be developed as a coherent theory of radical democracy for the 21st century.

Contributions of Ambedkar to Indian democracy

• Provided an alternative theory of democracy: He offered a theory of cautious and conditional optimism, an optimism drawn from the abstract promise of democracy and a caution rooted in the Indian context. This was different from the prominent theories at that time –
  • Westminster style democracy was advocated by liberals like Jawaharlal Nehru, while the leftists believed that democracy in India would be a rule of the capitalist class cloaked in procedures of democracy.
• Offered substantive definition of democracy: as opposed to the procedural definition that dominated the 20th-century theories.
  • For him, democracy was “a form and a method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed.
• Place equality at the heart of democracy: as opposed to the western bias towards liberty.
  • He said – “The roots of democracy lie not in the form of Government, Parliamentary or otherwise…. The roots of democracy are to be searched in the social relationship, in terms of associated life between the people who form a society.”
  • He insisted that Buddhist Sanghas were the models for parliamentary democracy.
  • For him, the first and foremost condition for democracy was that there should be no glaring inequalities, which then needs to be backed up by popular acceptance of constitutional morality, widespread public conscience and the upholding of moral order in society.
  • There is no democracy without the existence of and respect for the opposition, that tyranny of the majority is antithetical to democracy.
• Critiqued Indian democracy: According to him, The ‘associated living’ that democracy presupposes simply did not exist in India; the Caste system divided Indian society into many parallels.
  • Thus, Ambedkar’s critique of the caste system was not merely that it was unjust and oppressive for the ‘depressed classes, but also that it fractured national unity.
  • According to him, “democracy is not a plant that grows everywhere”, for E.g. the cases of Italy and Germany where the absence of social and economic democracy led to the failure of nascent political democracy.
  • He understood that every institutional design has a built-in drag, that it has consequences irrespective of the intent of those who designed it, whether it is a parliamentary system or the presidential system.
• Provided an unusual approach to democracy: He did not advocate a violent or even a non-violent (was against the Satyagrah after independence) overthrow of democracy.
  • The institutional design he proposed in ‘States and Minorities’ showed a nuanced approach to using the political form of democracy for social transformation.

Conclusion: To solve the inequalities (including caste inequalities) and rising majoritarian democracy, careful reflection and imagination for turning the fragments of original thinking of Ambedkar into a coherent theory of radical democracy are essential.