Preamble #3: Ambedkar's Fingerprints

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.

 

Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.

 

Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based on imagination and hope, they had to be designed based on present day realities. Besides, in Ambedkar’s view, villages ensured the “lack of social, political and economic mobility of the untouchables”, yet another reason he was dead against them.

 

Ambedkar was also committed to labour rights, which is why he ensured that the right to form unions was embedded in the constitution. His background and (bitter) experience of life as an untouchable and the apathy of the upper castes has left its fingerprints all over the constitution.

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