Ambedkar on Parliamentary Democracy

Ramakrishnan

Parliamentary Democracy is in reality a governmentment of a hereditary subject class by a hereditary ruling class.

That is part of a prepared speech of Ambedkar at All India Trade Union Workers Study Camp held in Delhi, Sep 1943, under the auspices of the Indian Federation of Labour. It is the least cited, even by the severe critics of parliamentary democracy.

Ambedkar’s political views and experiments varied over time: He established the Independent Labour Party in August 1936, obviously not limited to SCs. That was replaced on 19th July, 1942, with the AISCF which he dissolved on 14th October 1956 at Nagpur and announced the formation of RPI, for which he drafted a constitution before he died. RPI came into existence on 3 October 1957.

In his opening remarks of this 1943 speech, Ambedkar said: “as the autocracy of Despotic Sovereigns was replaced after a long and bloody struggle by a system known as Parliamentary Democracy (PD in short), it was felt that this was the last word in the frame of Govt. It was believed to bring about the millennium in which every human being will have the right to liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. It is therefore a matter of surprise that there has been a revolt against PD, although not even a century has elapsed since its universal acceptance and inauguration”.

“I do not doubt that what has ruined PD is the idea of Freedom of Contract. PD took no notice of economic inequalities and did not care to examine the result of freedom of contract on the parties to the contract, should they happen to be unequal. It did not matter if the freedom of contract allowed the strong to defraud the weak. The result is that PD in standing out as the protagonist of liberty has continuously added to the economic wrongs of the poor, the downtrodden, and the disinherited classes”.

And adds: “Democracy is another name for equality. PD developed a passion for liberty. It never made even a nodding acquaintance with equality. It failed to realise the significance of equality, and did not even endeavour to strike a balance between liberty and equality, with the result that liberty swallowed equality and has left a progeny of inequities”.

(In reality, in post-1947 India, even liberty remains a mirage; it disappears the moment rights are sought to be exercised by toiling classes and their supporters.)

Ambedkar further said: “All political societies get divided into two classes – the rulers and the ruled…If the evil stopped here, it would not matter much. But the unfortunate part of it is that the division becomes stereotyped and stratified so much so that the Rulers are always drawn from the ruling class and the class of the ruled never becomes the Ruling Class. People do not govern themselves; they establish a government and leave it to govern them, forgetting that it is not their government. That being the situation, PD has never been a government of the people or by the people, and that is why it has never been a government for the people. Notwithstanding the paraphernalia of a popular government, PD is in reality a government of a hereditary subject class by a hereditary ruling class.”

Ambedkar further advises the oppressed classes:

“In the first place, they have shown most appalling indifference to the effect of the economic factor in the making of men’s life. The labouring class, far from being fat like pigs are starving, and one wishes that they thought of bread first and everything else afterwards …The labouring classes failed to acquaint themselves with literature dealing with the government of mankind. Everyone from the labouring classes should be acquainted with Rousseau’s Social Contract, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical on the conditions of labour and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, to mention only four of the basic programmatic documents on social and governmental organisation of modern times. But the labouring classes will not give them the attention they deserve. Instead, labour has taken delight in reading false and fabulous stories of ancient Kings and Queens and has become addicted to it”.

“There is another and bigger crime which they have committed against themselves. They have developed no ambition to capture govt, and are not even convinced of the necessity of controlling govt as a necessary means of safeguarding their interests. Indeed they are not even interested in govt”. “It would be a great mistake to suppose that Trade Unions are a panacea for all the ills of labour”. Compare this statement with the Communist Manifesto: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy”.

Perhaps, he had thought the UK’s PD was an exotic plant for a feudal India that would lead to a hereditary ruling class. Now India has a semi-feudal, semi-colonial hybrid democracy, funded by a big business that is a junior partner of imperialism, so that it better serves the latter.

The above views of Ambedkar are rooted in the UK’s Fabian Socialism and Labour politics of the day, one phase in his political life, even as Ambedkar the politician evolved and changed.

Quota to the minorities is now hot in the polity. “Does it mean that you would steal from the rights (quota) of Dalits, STs, and OBCs?” Thus, Modi invoked Ambedkar to woo them all and to pit them up against Muslims. This does not mean, Sanghpariwar will always oppose reservation for Muslims. Electoral considerations decide: In BJP-ruled MP, reservation for more than a dozen OBC Muslim castes has been in operation; so also in Rajasthan. Karnataka’s former BJP CM Yeddyurappa assured he would not abolish reservation for dozens of Muslim castes that had existed for decades. The Union government allows it for Muslim OBCs. So also NDA-ruled states like AP, Maharashtra. Modi argued: “Is it not an insult to the Constitution, and Ambedkar?” There was religion-based communal representation, the BJP needs to be reminded, in the Constituent Assembly itself: There were representatives, besides Hindus, of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, of SCs. Thus it had no people’s mandate and no sovereignty. See how ingeniously RSS Chief quoted, not wrongly, Ambedkar. Mohan Bhagwat, in his 2018 Vijayadashami speech said: Ambedkar had stressed there can be no justification for unconstitutional methods, which were 'nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy”.

Ambedkar indeed said: “Hold fast to constitutional methods. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution; we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha… But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”(in Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949).

Now one can see better why Sanghpariwar opted to celebrate the Constitution Day. Indira Gandhi had invoked Ambedkar’s Constitution for her Emergency (1975-76), and the Supreme Court upheld it. Thus, there is need to re-study and recalibrate Ambedkar.

Ambedkar was not allowed to be elected as a member of the Constituent Assembly (in 1946) by the ruling classes of the day. He could enter the House only from the Eastern Bengal thanks to the support of GS Mondal, of Bengal’s SC Federation, supplemented by Muslim League. And with 1947 partition, he lost his seat. Then he was co-opted, also into Nehru’s Cabinet, along with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.

Ambedkar did not like being co-opted and was keen that he should get elected to the Lok Sabha in 1952. But the ‘architect’ was defeated by a margin of 14000 votes by a Congress candidate, in a reserved seat. Upset and shocked, his wife and colleagues lobbied for him and he was in the Rajya Sabha. There came a by-election to the Lok Sabha in May 1954; he contested and was defeated again. That humiliation he swallowed; He continued in the Cabinet until he resigned later. Unless one surrenders or compromises with the ruling classes as well as principles, no sincere candidate can win elections in today’s India. This is one takeaway from Ambedkar’s electoral experience.

The Constituent Assembly was ‘conceived’ and ‘elected’ in 1946, under the much-despised, Government of India Act 1935: There was no universal, adult franchise; less than 10 % of the population were voters: a certain level of tax-payers, those highly educated, those deputed by the princes. ‘We the people of India’ was an empty claim. Even those elite were not sovereign; they were subjects, many of them henchmen, of a colonial regime.

Many eulogise the “Indian” Constitution and Ambedkar as its great “architect’. Both are falsehoods, the ruling classes present to the gullible. The “Chief draftsman” was SN Mukherjee, and the drafting committee had a British-nominated Advisor sitting on its head, BN Rao, ICS, expert in (British) Constitutional Law. He acknowledged their original drafts and other contributors in his 1949 Nov speech. He was only a Drafting Committee Member and the Chairman of a 7-member Drafting Committee, that worked from 1947 August 29 to 1950 January 24, which would do the necessary word-smithing as decided by the Constituent Assembly that was NOT founded on a democratic basis. The draft itself was overwhelmingly borrowed – often copied almost verbatim (at least 250 Articles were thus taken from 1935) from the Act of 1935, described by Nehru as a “charter of bondage”. The 1935 Act, in turn, had been borrowed from that of 1919. Cooperation with 1935 Act would amount to a “betrayal”, the AICC had said in a Resolution. Then there were clauses borrowed from France (ideas of liberty), from Ireland (Directive Principles), from Japan (Acts related to the Supreme Court), from Russia (planning-related), from the US, and then May’s Parliamentary practices of the UK. One renowned expert had said: The Constitution was prepared after 'ransacking all the known constitutions of the world”. The end product was a “beautiful patchwork”, said one Member in the House (Durgadas vol-2, p. 613-616). It was a “slavish imitation of the west,” said another. CWC Member Sarat Chandra Bose had said: The very Preamble was conceived in 'fraud”. A popular cinema song of the Nehru era (Mera Jootahai Japani… phirbhi Dilhai Hindustani, or something like that) perhaps was a reflection of this admixture.

He revealed his mind and the reality in bitter words in the parliament itself, in RajyaSabha Sep 2, 1953. Ambedkar said: “People always keep saying to me: ‘Oh, you are the maker of the Constitution’. “My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do, I did much against my will.” (Oxford Dictionary says ‘hack’ is ‘a person hired to do dull routine work.’)

Then a Member said: “But you defended it.” Ambedkar shot back: “We lawyers defend many things.” The then Home Minister Katju said Ambedkar was responsible for drafting the Constitution. “You want to accuse me of your blemishes?” Ambedkar later added: “Sir, my friends tell me that I have made the Constitution. But I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody.” ((Biography by DhanajayKeer, seen by Ambedkar before publication, mentions this).

Ambedkar, by 1955 was indeed highly disappointed and demoralised, no doubt by the electoral defeats, but that was only one factor. He was physically ailing and emotionally wailing for more than a year before his death. He poured out his anguish in one of his last major political speeches (18th March, 1956) at Agra. “So far this speech was available in Hindi only. I have translated it into English,” wrote SR Darapuri, a retired IGP, an IPS officer, a Dalit activist from UP. In a brief but telling intro to the speech, he wrote: “Today Dalit society has moved away from Dr Ambedkar’s agenda of annihilation of caste and is infected with caste divisions. It appears that the caravan of Babasaheb is moving backward.” We can recall a few lines from that translation to size up the reality, more relevant today than ever:

“To Government Servants: Some persons have reached high posts after getting education. But these educated persons have betrayed me. I expected that they would do social service after getting higher education. But what I see is a crowd of small and big clerks who are busy in filling their own bellies….”

Despite reservations for decades, AnandTeltumbde writes: “If one looks at the profile of Dalits as the predominantly (81 percent) rural people, linked with land as landless labourers and marginal farmers with a small (19 percent) section living in urban areas, a large part of which lives in slums and works in informal sectors, one surely finds that the historical Dalit discourse revolving around reservation has always been unrelated with the majority of people, because upwardly mobile urbanite Dalits articulated it… More recently, after a deeper study for his latest book, Republic of Caste (Navayana 2018) Teltumbde went deeper into the question, in the Book Release function, reported as Reservations are not a measure of justice: Anand Teltumbde.

Ambedkar had himself called for the abolition of reservations for elections to Legislatures both in states and at the Centre. Very few mention this fact. This he did in a speech he made at the All India Conference of SC Federation on December 27, 1955. In fact, the Conference passed a resolution to that effect.

(This is an abridged and modified version of an article published in countercurents.org. All emphases added. Thanks to Dr K S Sharma, for his research.)

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Vol 57, No. 43, Apr 20 - 26, 2025