Hereditary principle in Congress today would have been repugnant to Ambedkar: Ramachandra Guha

“Dr. B.R. Ambedkar would have been opposed to political parties being family firms and to a single family claiming the hereditary principle,” said historian Ramachandra Guha, who delivered the first Justice Ahmadi Distinguished Lecture on ‘What would Dr. Ambedkar have made of the Republic of India today’, in the city on Saturday. The lecture was organised by the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, in collaboration with the Ahmadi Foundation.

Quoting Ambedkar, who had said, “Parliamentary government means negation of hereditary rule. No person can claim to be a hereditary ruler”, Mr. Guha said: “Let me be blunt, the hereditary principle in the Congress party of today would have been absolutely repugnant to Ambedkar.” Many other parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Samajwadi Party, and Shiv Sena had also become family parties, he said.

Mr. Guha began his lecture recalling how Kannada writer Devanur Mahadeva’s speech in Manipal in 1994 inspired him to study Ambedkar.

“It is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution without changing its form by merely changing the form of the administration and to make the administration inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution,” Ambedkar had said while presenting the draft of the Constitution to the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948, Mr. Guha recalled, and said, “A quarter of a century later, in the early 1970s, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did precisely that”. He said, “Arguably, these ideas have been taken further by the government now in power, which has sought to rig the civil services, the police, the investigative agencies, the regulatory bodies, and the judiciary and make them subject to its political agenda.”

Mr. Guha then drew attention to two warnings Ambedkar gave in his speech on November 25, 1949: personality cult and equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life. “Bhakti in religion may be a route to the salvation of the soul. Bhakti, or hero worship, in politics is a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship,” Mr. Guha quoted Ambedkar.