BR Ambedkar name controversy: Playing to the RSS gallery

It is common practice in Maharashtra to use your father’s first name as your middle name (replaced by a husband’s first name if you are a married woman). Hence Smriti Irani borrows the practice from her moorings in Bombay to call herself Smriti Zubin Irani. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s middle name was thus Ramji and his grandson is Prakash Yashwant Ambedkar whose father was Yashwant Bhimrao Ambedkar.

There is no way that Dr Ambedkar could have dropped his middle name but men of valour in Maharashtra are often referred to as Raos – like Bajirao Vishwanath Ballal, the Peshwa general of the Chhatrapati kings of Maharashtra. Raos are usually associated with the Maratha community but on occasions, the name could be used by others. Thus, Dr BR Ambedkar was Bhimrao and neither he nor any of his contemporaries in those troubled times of his birth and evolution in terms of transcending caste had any trouble with his given and his preferred name. So, Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik, also from Maharashtra, was playing purely to the RSS gallery by suggesting that Dr Ambedkar’s name was being wrongly used as Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Dr Ambedkar’s signature in Marathi on many constituent assembly documents appears as Bhi. Ra. Ambedkar, which is how all Maharashtrians of every caste sign their initials in their own language with the Devnagri script.

So, there is great mischief afoot when the UP government of Yogi Adityanath attempts to change his name on all government documents to include the word ‘Ramji’. According to his grandson, now the president of the Bharip-Bahujan Mahasangh, an offshoot of the Republican Party of India founded by Dr Ambedkar, the BJP government is simply misappropriating the name to help their temple agenda in Ayodhya. Prakash Ambedkar is of the view that not many of their original Hindu supporters are interested in building anything. Ambedkar says it is easier to unite Indians against something (hence the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya) than for anything which is why the temple issue has been languishing for so many years.

While he thinks their game plan to give Hindu colour to a leader who had consciously eschewed Hinduism as a very unequal religion which was never designed for liberty, fraternity and equality – values which he deliberately wrote into the Indian Constitution – will simply not work, there is more to the controversy over Dr Ambedkar’s name and much else too. Soon after the 2016 attacks on Dalits in Una in Gujarat by cow vigilantes, large sections of the community began to switch over to Buddhism.

If they were being lynched for skinning dead cows, which was their traditionally apportioned profession within the religious fold, many Dalits believed they were safer outside the religion and could meet the upper castes on their own terms as Buddhists, far removed from the duties and places imposed upon them by Hindu society. The exodus was a dribble to begin with but what also alarmed the Sangh Parivar was that those Dalits who continued to remain in the Hindu fold nevertheless began to donate their personal images or idols of the weapon-carrying gods in the Hindu pantheon, like Durga, Krishna and, of course, Lord Ram to temples and decided to direct their worship towards those who had no legends of bloody wars attached to their heroism.

Elsewhere in the country, particularly Bihar and Jharkhand, Asura tribals, too, in unrelated moves, began to raise their voices against the portrayal of their ancestors as demons and the glorification of Goddess Durga and others for slaying the mythological asuras (Mahishasur, Narkasur, Bakasur et al). Not surprisingly, the RSS women wing is named Durga Vahini. The RSS is thus alarmed by all the isolated incidents of self-assertion by Dalits and tribals, which aggregated itself in violence in many states during their Bharat Bandh on April 2 in protest against the dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Sceduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by the Supreme Court on March 20 wherein the BJP-led government intervened for a review only after they saw evidence of angst among even Dalits within their fold.

The insertion of ‘Ramji’ into Dr Ambedkar’s name also has to be seen in light of the violence by upper castes against Dalits celebrating 200 years of their victory over the Peshwa army in 1818 at Bhima Koregaon on new year’s day this year. The main provocateur of the incident was the octogenarian Sambhaji Bhide. But Sambhaji is not his real name. His is quite an unexceptional name like Manohar Bhide.

However, appropriation of the name of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s son, Chhatrapati Sambhaji, who fought valiantly against Aurangzeb’s Moghul army and was dismembered on capture before being put to death, gives it quite another resonance and colour to Bhide’s mischief. He has recently called to rid Hindu society of ‘mlechchas’ and by that he means both Muslims and Dalits. Despite much evidence against his shenanigans, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, a hard-core RSS ideologue, has given him a clean chit and steadfastly refuses to sanction his arrest that is angering Dalits no end. But Dr Ambedkar’s followers in Maharashtra can still protest for his arrest on equal terms as Bhide’s supporters who warned against targeting their guru. That would not be possible by Dalits who might be downtrodden within the Hindu fold and that is why it is so important for the Sangh Parivar to shift their moorings back to Hinduism by giving their icon, a virtual god in their eyes, a Hindu orientation by inserting Ramji into his name. The irony of their misplaced shenanigans is doubly apparent when we realise that they just defeated his namesake Bhimrao Ambedkar, a candidate of the Bahujan Samaj Party, at the Rajya Sabha elections in UP. And who was their own party MP from Uttar Pradesh who raised her voice against growing atrocities against her fellow Dalits? Savitribai Phule, an iconic name in India, not just as the wife of the earliest Dalit reformist Jyotiba Phule but India’s first woman teacher in her own right who broke the shackles of Hinduism to rise above her place in traditional society and make a difference. So, yes, the name Ramji matters to the RSS. Dalits, however, are unlikely to respond to their ‘jai Shri Ram’ with anything other than their own ‘Jai Bhim!”

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