Ambedkar: Double struggle against outside and inside

Abstract

Ambedkar was involved in two struggles simultaneously: the struggle against British colonialism and Indian caste oppression. In other words, on the one hand, he fought against British colonialism to liberate Indians from British colonial hegemony; on the other hand, he fought against the oppressing caste structure in India to liberate untouchables from Hindu caste hegemony. Therefore, he had to struggle against the leadership of the Indian independence struggle to realize the objectives of the second struggle. His idea was that to emancipate the people of oppressed castes, there should be a double struggle by breaking both the colonial regime and the Congress Party as well. As Arundhati Roy insists in The Doctor and the Saint: Cast, Race, and Annihilation of Cast, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi, there is no single sentence for the annihilation of caste in the Collected Works of Gandhi. As a part of the struggle for the annihilation of caste oppression, he struggled to remove the expressions in Vedic texts that defended caste discrimination. After the failure of that struggle, he himself converted to Buddhism and proceeded to convert some 500,000 of his supporters to Buddhism, and he wrote Buddha and his Dhamma. However, he was unable to trace the caste elements in the practice of Buddhism. The objective of this study is to understand, firstly, the contradictions between Gandhi and Ambedkar in their struggles against British colonialism and caste oppression, and secondly, Ambedkar’s own contradictions in giving prominence to Buddhism over Marxism as the solution to the Dalit question. The ideas and arguments in Ambedkar’s books, biographies, and critiques formulated by scholars like Trevor Ling, Arundhathi Roy, and Ranjith Guha have been used to explore the dialectical development of contradictions between Gandhi and Ambedkar and between Buddhism and Marxism that Ambedkar addressed.