rewrite this content and keep HTML tags
It is interesting to speculate what Ambedkar might have felt given the growing concern about electoral malpractices across the country, which has been ignored by a careless Election Commission, even as the principle of one person one vote was a A vote cannot ensure a value. He would have been astonished to find that India today is one of the most unequal countries in the world as far as economic quality is concerned, even worse than when the Constitution was drafted, in the top 10. % of the population owns 77% of the total national wealth. According to an article in The Hindu earlier this year, the richest one percent of the Indian population owns 53% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half holds barely four percent of the national wealth.
“I am of the opinion that we are under a great illusion in believing that we are one nation. How can people divided into thousands of castes be one nation? The sooner we realize that we are still not a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better off we will be. Only then will we realize the need to become one nation and think seriously about ways and means to realize the goal.
Ambedkar’s second dire prediction, which has great contemporary relevance, was about the danger of hero-worshipping political leaders. He quoted John Stuart Mill as saying that he “did not lay down his liberty at the feet of even a great man, or trust in him such a power as would enable him to destroy his institutions”. Babasaheb further said, “This caution is more necessary in the case of India than in any other country. In India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of bhakti or hero-worship has no equal in its politics to the role it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Devotion in religion can be the path to salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure path to degradation and ultimately dictatorship.
Today, all kinds of party leaders may be pretending that Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar and the Constitution are sacrosanct, but this is nothing more than a pretense to extract petty political gains from their eminent position among the vast socially and economically oppressed masses. Is. In fact, it is a great irony of history that those who daily trample on the idea of what India should be, are made gods and goddesses and are forced to worship at their feet.
(The author is a senior Delhi-based journalist and author of ‘Behanji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion article. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint Neither endorses nor is responsible for it.)
