Articles
UN Observes Dr Bheemrao Ramji Ambedkar’s Jayanthi
Dt: 3/4/18
UN Observes Dr Bheemrao Ramji Ambedkar’s Jayanthi
Dr T.H.Chowdary*
Dr Bheemrao Ramji Ambedkar was a great scholar an economist, a statesman, and a leader of vast masses of people consigned since centuries to a miserable life. There had been few people of his stature in the world history - Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Martin Luther King of the USA could be thought to be the likes of Dr Ambedkar to a certain extent. Dr Ambedkar’s influence in India could be likened to that of only Swami Vivekananda who not for a section of the people but for the whole country and the nation, got global recognition. On this occasion of the 127th Jayanti, Dr Ambedkar’s bold and inimitable analysis of two issues and prescription of solutions may be recalled.
2. The first and foremost was his bold view about Jammu &Kashmir. While writing the Constitution he was critical of Jawaharlal Nehru’s wrong and soft attitude to Shaikh Abdullah and J&K . The Maharaja of J&K acceded his state to the Indian Union through the same instrument of accession like several hundred Maharajas, Princes and Nawabs . Nehru wanted a special provision what has come to be known as Article-370 for J&K . There was widespread opposition for such article for J&K. On advice from Nehru, Shaikh Abdullah met with Dr Ambedkar giving all the specious reasons for special status to J&K. Dr Ambedkar heard all of Shaikh Abdullah’s arguments very patiently and for long and finally said, “You want India to defend Kashmir, feed its people, undertake its all-round development and give Kashmiris equal rights all over the country; but you do not want the rest of India and Indians equal rights in Kashmir. I am the Law Minister of India. I cannot betray my country*." With these words, he refused to draft the article Abdullah desired. Shaikh Abdullah went away disappointed but Nehru prevailed upon the docile
Congress -men in almost a dictatorial fashion by telling them that Article -370 was only a temporary provision and that over a period of time it would totally disappear. This has not happened; on the other hand the Article- 370 gives protection and encouragement for those who are wanting J&K to secede from India.
3. Nehru’s irrational and the exuberant concern for Kashmir was one of the reasons that led to Dr Ambedkar’s resignation from the Nehru’s’ cabinet in Sept 1951. True to his conviction and very boldly he spoke out against Nehru’s obsessive concern with Kashmir to the exclusion of the plight of Hindus in Pakistan. In the statement giving reasons for his resignation he said ,”our quarrel with Pakistan is a part of our foreign policy about which I feel deeply dissatisfied . There are two grounds which have disturbed our relations with Pakistan – one for Kashmir and other is the condition of our people in East Bengal. I felt that we should be more deeply concerned with East Bengal where the condition of our people seems ….intolerable than with Kashmir. Notwithstanding this, we have been staking our all on the Kashmir issue. Even then I feel that we have been fighting on a unreal issue. The issue on which we are fighting most of the time is who is in the right and who is in the wrong. The real issue to my mind is not who is in the right but what is right. Taking that to be the main question, my view has always been that the right solution is to partition Kashmir. Give the Hindu and Buddhist part to India and the Muslim part to Pakistan as we did in the case of India. We are really not concerned with Muslim part of Kashmir . It is a matter between Muslims of Kashmir and Pakistan . They may decide the issue as they like or if you like, divide it into three parts - the ceasefire zone, the valley and the Jammu-Laddakh region and have plebiscite only in the valley. In the proposed plebiscite which is to be an overall plebiscite, the Hindus and Buddhists of Kashmir are likely to be dragged into Pakistan against their wishes and we may have to face the same problem as we are facing today in East Bengal.” We have not heeded to his sage solution: Art-370 is 70 years temporary and the civil strife has been undying.
4. The disaffection of Muslims of the Kashmir valley under our government is too very well known. Not only have there been and are periodic intihfadas, uprisings costing us trillions of rupees by way of packages of money spent and tens of thousands of lives of our citizens and soldiers lost to retain a part of J&K within in India, but also to our utter shame, we are putting up with the expulsion of 400,000 Hindus and Sikhs from the Muslim majority Kashmir valley. For the last three decades those Hindus and Sikhs are living in tents within their own country as refugees in Jammu & elsewhere. While doing nothing for them, we are shamelessly and even piously calling upon Israel that it should allow the Palestinian Arab Muslims who had fled from Israel in consequence of the 1948 and 1967 and 1973 . Arab-Palestine and Israeli wars to return. Is it not a matter of surprise that even the loudly nationalist BJP -led NDA governments have not rehabilitated the Hindu Sikh victims of the Islamists intolerance in the Kashmir Valley?
5. The plight of farmers in India is one of continuous deprivation, marked by tens of thousands of farmers committing suicide because of indebtedness. Despite eloquent and frequent promises that the government is commitment to the welfare of farmers, the misery of the farmers continues . Long ago, in the manifesto of the Sheduled Castes Federation of India, for the 1952 general elections Dr Ambedkar boldly and clearly addressed the problem of agriculture in India. He said, that the old pattern of agriculture should not be allowed to continue . Fragmentation and dispersion of the holdings detract from the viability of agriculture itself . Most importantly, as the population is growing the land available per person in India is continually declining. It used to be 0.88 acre in 1911, 0.71 in 1948 and now it is 0.25 acre . Dr.Ambedkar proposed that land should be taken over by the state and parcelled out into viable units . The owners may be compensated by bonds with perpetual validity with interest linked to inflation. Agriculture should be mechanised. The parcels of land should be given to the poor interested in agriculture as occupation mostly Dalits . Even this would not put agriculture on a sound economic footing. Dr. Ambedkar proposed that there should be family planning and that the SC Federation would take appropriate measures to contain the population growth. It was so bold of the leader of scheduled castes now called dalits, to advocate population control in his political manifesto. That if the population is not controlled, India’s Five Year Plans would be ineffective for the economic development of the poor people was emphatically put forward by the late JRD Tata to Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru dismissed JRD’s idea and totally ignored Dr Ambedkar well-reasoned proposition for population control. It is in consequence of this, we are now having the per capita cultivable land at a fraction of what it was in 1951 .
6. We are now talking of doubling the income of farmers. It is impossible to realise unless at least the Swaminathan Committee recommendation that the procurement price for agricultural commodities, especially rice and wheat should be 50% more than the cost of production.
7. Dr Ambedkar was convinced that universal education was the most effective means of getting out of poverty and making a decent living by one’s own efforts, without depending upon loans and welfare and gifts from governments. As in no constitution anywhere in the world Dr Ambedkar put Art-45 in our Constitution which directs the State that every child in India should be given free and compulsory education for eight years between age 6 to 14. 68 years after the Constitution, we still have to attain that goal. On the contrary , even the poor are having to send their children at great economic deprivation of themselves to private schools, paying heavily from their meagre earnings . In 2002, Art-21A made education a fundamental right.
8. All political parties are singing paeans to Dr Ambedkar without ever sincerely striving to implement the measures he advocated for the wellbeing of people and integrity of this country. The various unions, societies and associations with the word Ambedkarite as prefix are doing great disservice by reducing this great son of India as leader of a section of the lowly people and not giving him the status that the great in India like Vivekananda and Shankara are given; like Bismarck and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther in their countries. That the UN has started celebrating his Jayanthi is global recognition of the greatness of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. (1,532 words)
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