Preamble #7: Dignity

Dignity. There is that (in)famous incident of Gandhi being thrown out from the first-class carriage of a train in South Africa. It led Gandhi to write that Indians had “become the untouchables of South Africa”, says Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble.

 

It took a “real” untouchable, Ambedkar, to point out that the discrimination Indians faced abroad, while routine and condemnable, was a false analogy to what the untouchables faced in India. After all, pointed out Ambedkar, in South Africa, Gandhi was the boss of several white employees. He had whites as house guests, he dined with white South Africans, he owned property and handled significant amounts of money. Contrast that with what untouchables experienced and suffered back home, pointed out Ambedkar. Hence the charge of the false analogy. As Rathore says:

“Only a visa got Dr Ambedkar out of this hostile land that was his homeland, so he could travel abroad, far from the dominion of Brahmanism, and only then enjoy the liberation of not being an untouchable.”

No wonder Ambedkar’s autobiographical writing is called Waiting for a Visa.

 

The villages were the worst on this front, urban life slightly better for an untouchable. Yet Gandhi romanticized the village to the chagrin of Ambedkar.

“Gandhism does not mind these consequences in the least.”

It was all this that drove Ambedkar to add “dignity” side by side with “fraternity” in the Preamble (requoting that line from the earlier blog on fraternity):

“Fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the Nation.”

Without dignity, there could be no unity of the nation.

 

The Irish preamble was also considered as source material. While features like fraternity, dignity and unity of the nation were parts of the Irish one, other aspects like invocations to Jesus and the Divine Lord were huge turnoffs for the members of India’s constituent assembly – the Irish preamble sounded “more like a liturgical prayer than a legal document”!

 

Ambedkar led temple entry movements from as far back as the 1930’s. Why? Here is his answer (as always articulate):

“Entry into the Ram Temple… will not bring about any radical change to our life. But this is a test to judge… whether the Hindu mind is willing the accept the elevated aspirations of the new era that man must be treated as man… human dignity should be established.”

 

It is evident that lots of clauses and features of the Indian Constitution are rooted in the deep and core values as well as the experiences of Ambedkar.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nazis and the Physics Connection

When the Nazi government seized power, they started removing Jews from more and more positions, including the civil services, and the science departments of Germany. Those physicists who saw the writing on the wall fled to either UK (like Schrodinger) or the US (like Einstein), writes Adam Becker in What is Real?   The great physicist, Enrico Fermi, wasn’t a Jew. But when Mussolini aligned with Hitler, Fermi came under suspicion since his wife was a Jew. To make matters problematic, Mussolini’s new laws had made it illegal to take “more than pocket change” out of Italy. Neils Bohr broke an unwritten rule of the Nobel and told Fermi that he (Fermi) was in the running for the Nobel that year. Perhaps Fermi, should he win, could consider escaping from Stockholm with the prize money to start a new life? Fermi agreed, but it was touch and go – his wife’s passport had been confiscated, which meant she couldn’t come to Stockholm. Fermi managed to pull a few strings to get her passport...
Read more

Need for an Informed Aadhar Debate

As Aadhar increases in scope, supporters consider it necessary, says L.Viswanath : “We have Aadhaar getting linked to ration cards, NREGA payments, PAN cards, bank accounts, mobile SIMs, mid-day meals in schools, school admissions, university admissions…the list is endless. In a country plagued by corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, the hope is that Aadhaar will help eliminate fraudulent identities, thereby saving the direct and indirect losses to the nation.” Conversely, opponents don’t cite concrete use-cases of how it might be abused apart from throwing phrases (“Orwellian state”) that sound scary. Until its opponents provide such details, supporters will win the argument by simply asking why Aadhar should be restricted only to subsidy schemes, as Subhashis Banerjee points out : “Admittedly there are substantial leakages in these schemes, but surely the need for de-duplication and strict record keeping and audits are as much, if not more, in the domains of tax co...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more