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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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Hannah Arendt who thought a lot about the Vida Aktiva,
distinguished between thinking, conducted in solitude,
and thinking as a dialogue of thought with others.
Here on entitled opinions we engage in the latter.
We submit things to consideration,
like is thinking a form of action.
That's a vexed one to be sure.
Heidegger, in his letter on humanism, declared
that the essence of action is accomplishment,
and that thinking accomplishes the relation of being
to the essence of man.
I can live with that as long as we don't spend all our time
thinking about what being means, and what the essence of man is,
and what on earth their relation might consist in.
Heidegger did a lot of that in his later years,
none too cool, stating thinking does not produce practical wisdom.
Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe.
Thinking does not endow us with the power to act.
We live because we are living beings, and think
because we are thinking beings.
All that might be true from one point of view,
but thank goodness for entitled opinions
where we can think these issues through,
and submit them to the dialogue of thought with others
between us and them, between me and you.
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It's bizarre that Heidegger would claim that thinking does not
produce practical wisdom.
Documents like the American Constitution and Declaration
of Independence do not come into being thoughtlessly.
The practical wisdom informing them
contains a greater quotient of lucid thinking
than transcendental meditation or unwworldly contemplation
in my impatient opinion.
And in the final analysis, modern nations
are based on ideas which are crystallizations of thought.
Today, we're especially concerned with the role
that thought plays in the founding of one modern nation
in particular, the Republic of India.
We're going to discuss some of the most critical ideas
that led to the creation of that republic,
which came into being in 1950, some three years
after India achieved independence from Britain.
How much thinking went into the establishment of modern India?
A great deal, it turns out, and it took the form precisely
of that dialogue of thought with others as Hannah Arendt called it.
There were a great many participants in that dialogue,
the prodigious plurality of voices.
But today, we're devoting our show to two of the main ones--
BR, and Bedcar, and Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi was the leader of India's independence movement,
and Bedcar, one of India's great jurists,
economists, and political activists, was charged
with drafting India's constitution, adopted in 1950.
The guest who joins me today has just
published a book about these two founding fathers
of the Indian Republic.
Ashwadi Kumar is an assistant professor of history
here at Stanford.
His fascinating book is called Radical Equality,
Bedcar, Gandhi, and the risk of democracy,
published in 2015 by Stanford University Press.
He is here to share his thoughts about two thinkers
who had a great deal of practical wisdom,
and who, although frequently at odds,
were engaged in a tense and intense dialogue of thought
with one another.
Ashwadi, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Robert Sonan, for being here.
In the first sentence of your book, you write,
quote, "Modern India, apart from naming a time and place
has come to stand in for an interminable struggle
with history, the struggle to formulate
an ethics of justice for the present,
and to affirm a belief in democracy that is still to come."
And then you go on to write, and this is a rather long quote,
but I think it bears getting through to the end.
This book examines the intellectual and political history
of the encounter between B.R. and Bedcar and Mohandas
Gandhi, two of the most formidable non-Western thinkers
of the 20th century whose visions of moral and political life
have left the deepest imprints on that struggle
and the paradox that sustains it.
One was a prodigious untouchable who
lifting himself against the exclusion and violence
that surrounded him became a revolutionary constitutionalist,
a thinker whose laborious draftmanship and exegetical rigor
produced a new constitution for the free republic in 1950.
The other born in a community of Hindu,
Vashnava merchants was an inept lawyer who galvanized
through the sheer force of his convictions and prose,
and as yet unformed people against the most powerful empire
of his time.
Never had the colonial world's right to justice
been formulated in such proximity by two thinkers who
had otherwise struggled so ceaselessly with such
scruple and hostility against each other.
But perhaps more crucially, never had this right to justice
been sought in the shadows of a religion
known to be so persistently oppressive and violent
towards those it claimed as its very own.
So you pack a lot into those opening sentences of your book.
So why don't we take up these issues maybe one at a time,
starting with a bedcar who was less well known in the West
than his counterpart Gandhi, who was a bedcar, what role did he
or more precisely what role did his thinking
play in the founding of India?
And why were on bedcar and Gandhi so frequently
a loggerheads with one another?
To most people who know about the iron bedcar
and there is now thankfully a very large number of them,
B. Ironbaitker is known to be the architect
of the world's longest written national constitution.
He was a master jurist draftsman of the first order,
but also someone very aware of legal and constitutional
nuances.
In that sense, the idea that a bedker
was first and foremost a constitutional terrorist is not inaccurate.
Although I believe that he is also in the same vein,
one of the greatest thinkers of constitutional principles
and constituent power in modern times.
B. Ironbaitker is also known as a social reformer,
as a person committed to the eradication of caste inequality
and especially untouchability.
In all its forms, legal, political, and social,
as it existed and tragically still exists,
despite him in India.
But one of the great occlusions in this narrative
about B. Ironbaitker is the unwillingness to approach
a baker as a thinker of politics.
And it is there that I think B. Ironbaitker stands out
as perhaps the tallest among those who were responsible
for the foundation of the modern Indian Republic.
Apart from that, he was also, in my view,
one of the greatest non-Western thinkers of the relationship
between violence and politics in modern times.
A terrorist of politics, a thinker of democracy
in the truest sense of those terms and categories.
Baitker's biography is fascinating in that, as I say,
in the opening lines of the book already.
He is not someone who is born into privilege.
He is not someone who has already access
to the institutions of education and higher learning,
like many of those who will become his fellow travelers
over the following five decades.
He is born into a caste called the Mahars of Western India
in Bombay presidency to a family of a colonial soldier
who used to teach in a military school.
A Mahars of the Baitker had experiences
of being thrown out of school, students, and friends
refusing to share food or eat with him,
having to travel alone, changing homes
between cantoanment towns in colonial military,
along colonial military postings, and so on.
But from there, it is the sheer force of his thought.
And I do not use force casually.
It is the sheer force of his thought.
His ability to craft sentences and give them,
lend them a certain philosophical density that broke through
all the social prejudices of his type,
that takes him to first to New York on the scholarship,
and then eventually to London before he returns to India
in the early 20s with two doctorates.
A Mahars studies with John Dewey,
the Doyne of American pragmatism at Columbia.
And that fact is widely known.
One of the important things to remember about Dhambaitker
is that he is one thinker who is never
a sum total of his influences.
The freedom and the sheer autonomy of his thought
is what places him among the greatest
of political thinkers of the last century.
But when you insist on this role of thinking
in his place, in his stature, this is not that on the one hand,
he was a constitutionalist and a social reformer
and someone engaged in thinking about violence and politics.
And on the other hand, he was also a great thinker.
No, that his thinking took the form of thinking
about constitution, drafting a constitution,
and a sustained critique of the caste system in India
and so forth.
These were not just two independent aspects of his mental life.
Absolutely not.
I mean, I think you're right in connecting these two.
In fact, these are inseparable.
And if we translate these into some of the paradigmatic
questions or tensions within the modern political tradition,
one might even argue that Dhambaitker
is one of those great intervenres in the tension
between freedom and equality.
Equality as it is disrupted by caste injustice,
caste oppression, by racism and slavery,
freedom as that which structures the very possibility
of modern political life of modern republics at large.
The essential question that connects,
I think, on Baitker's biography,
and Baitker's thought, and they are, again, inseparable,
is simply his concern with violence
not in their visible manifest forms,
but an entire constellation of practices and experiences,
what we might call the phenomenology of violence
as it structures modern life.
At what point-- and this is a question that brings him
into the most direct conflict with Gandhi, who, again,
in a rather simplified manner, I would argue,
is known to be a theorist of nonviolence.
All in all, it seems like nonviolence
over determines Gandhi in the same way
that cast over determines on Baitker.
And they're both more than these two things.
But what brings them together and then tears them apart
is precisely the question that on Baitker
asks relentlessly, especially when he encounters Gandhi
and his commitment to nonviolent passive resistance,
namely, at what point, what vanishing line or limit
does an abstract commitment, no matter how truthful,
but an absolute discommitment to nonviolence,
itself become a form of violence.
So when you talked about his thinking
about the manifold forms that violence takes,
you don't mean violence there as something which
occurs when a whole polity breaks down
or that there's moments of disorder.
Are you talking about institutionalized violence,
for example, as something like the caste system,
or other forms of repression that have been now
incorporated into the social order as such?
Yes, when we speak of those constellation of practices
that constitute violence, we are speaking
generally of social exclusion, of systemic marginalization
and prejudice, we are speaking also of epistemic biases
that structure our very commitment to justice.
With Baitker, this is why he marks such a decisive rupture
within any tradition that you place him in,
any tradition of thinking about justice.
Because with him, it is not simply a question
of reorganizing, reconstituting, perhaps even
refounding the social order.
It is the question of how one cannot think
even of social justice without calling into question
some of the founding principles of modern republicanism
itself.
That is to say, on the one hand, when we say of violence
as a breakdown of law.
And on the other, when we speak of violence as prejudice,
we often separate them as we just did.
With Baitker, they become inseparable.
You cannot have a republic grounded in visions
of security, of collective life, of collective solidarity
without actually, and highlighting
the founding prejudices of the cast order.
So in that sense, for him, justice and sovereignty
are related.
So one of his main concerns, as a thinker,
was to abolish the caste system in India.
Am I correct on that?
So he writes this very important treatise
that you would spend a lot of time dealing with in your book
called the Annihilation of Cast, which
you find important enough to give it, at least,
intense focus at the opening of your book,
because through that analysis of the Annihilation of Cast,
if you go on then to follow his career in general.
So what is it about the Annihilation of Cast
that lecture, which then became a kind of treatise?
What is it that's so important about that piece of reasoning
or that kind of thinking that goes into that piece?
There are two dimensions of that text
that I find absolutely fascinating.
The first is methodological.
Approaching and high-lation of cast
as a particular event in the history of Indian thought
allows us to approach the very narrative of freedom
on which anti-colonial movements were grounded or founded
in a new way.
We know, for example, that one of the classic texts
in this long tradition of thinking about freedom
or what Gandhi calls Swaraj,
is Gandhi's own 1909 work, Henswaraj, or Indian homeroom.
And to many thinkers of anti-colonialism
and to many scholars of these histories of movement
for self-determination, Henswaraj is a beginning point
of something decisive, something shifts
with Henswaraj.
One of the arguments I make is that if you approach
on high-lation of cast as that text
where something shifts, something decisive occurs,
then it allows you to think of another freedom itself.
It allows you to approach and understand
the moral, the political, the conceptual density of freedom
in a way that has been itself freed from the tyranny of nationalism.
But you said earlier that he did not
subscribe to the traditional forms of republicanism,
that he was quite original when it came to the thing
about republicanism.
So you're not-- I take it that you're not
suggesting that his rethinking now,
after through the annihilation of cast,
would take the form of Western notions of the equality
of citizens before the law, of the equality of women
and people of all stations in life,
that how do you see his thinking about the republic
as different from the mainstream Western republican
thought in this regard?
That is a question that on May it curve perhaps never
resolved himself.
Let us put that on the table.
It is a question he did not resolve,
not because he wasn't sure what he was asking for
or what his vision of politics was.
It was because there were certain things
about the Western tradition, including the republican
tradition, without which no modern democracy he believed
could thrive.
In that sense, he remains a very important, very astute,
interlocutor receptor modifier of some
of these founding principles of modern republicanism.
Equality is something that he takes from there.
So does Gandhi, but he also spends it or refracts it
through a whole series of readings and engagements
with the Indian tradition.
So when we say equality of women,
a microb was perhaps one of the most militant egalitarian
when it came to the rights of women.
So much so that he was forced to resign
from the government in the early fifties,
because of his, because of women's equality,
because of this very lengthy piece of legislation called
the Hindu Code Bill he was working on.
And what was that bill essentially?
It was essentially about women's rights to property
and other such, it was a host of procedural mechanisms
that would have ensured what we today call gender equality.
- Right, and it's very progressive, I have to say,
from what a little I've seen of the provisions
and his commitment to it.
- Yeah.
- And you were telling me in conversation that Gandhi
had written in various places that you can judge a society
by the way it treats its animals.
- Right.
- And that bet-cars revision of that is that you judge a
society by the way it treats its women.
- Yes, absolutely.
- Which is right, and I'm with him entirely on that basis.
- Right, and the tragedy of B.R.M. Baker is that,
not only is he forced to resign because,
because the Indian Republic and the parliament in particular
would not pass some of these provisions,
but also because he is so in his ideas,
so in so many powerful and fundamental ways,
always out of time, out of joint with time, so to speak.
He's someone who is often arguing against nationalism.
He is often arguing against consensus and unanimity.
He is someone who often believes that it is precisely in disagreement.
It is precisely in resistance and even insurrection
that authentic citizenship might find it very Arrentian,
in that sense.
- Right, you have a plurality.
- Yes.
- That's freedom.
Freedom, disagreement is one of the dominant modes
of expression of freedom as such.
And of course he's doing all this in the great fervor
of nationalism in India,
and where there is a strong drive towards consensus
and conformism by ideas.
- Yes, and that is what I think in many ways,
almost condemns him to being what he himself called a part,
he was routinely questioned by nationalism,
thinkers of nationalism and Indian nationalist themselves
about his loyalty to the nation.
And in one brilliant formulation,
which I reconstruct in the book,
he calls himself a part apart.
And I think this ability to be outnumbered
without giving up on your fundamental political principles.
- I wonder if you ever read that,
because Dante after his exile and his disillusionment
with the trying to get back to the Florence
with these different factions,
he said he made a party of himself.
It's a part of a part.
- Right.
- A part apart.
- I will not be surprised if I made her head
actually read Dante because you can see
these great literary figures,
these great philosophical figures
all over his writings.
His use of Shakespeare while he was still a master's
student at Columbia is for example,
one of the most brilliant pieces of student writing
in the annals of Indian thought,
exile of course becomes a very fundamental motive
in the way unbeker understands politics.
You have to critique,
you have to relinquish your love for place
in order to find that place that is just.
He reconstructs for example the long episode
that leads to the exile of the Buddha
in his final work, the Buddha and his Dhamma.
And we know that within the Buddhist tradition,
Parivraja or wandering,
the state of wandering is absolutely essential
to an ethical life.
This is what I meant when I said that he receives
and perhaps even more derates
some of the fundamental principles
of modern civic republicanism,
refracting them through the prism
of his own engagement with the classical Indian tradition.
- So the annihilation of caste,
what is the reasoning process
that he advances in that work?
- The first I think,
and the fundamental idea there,
is has this great stream of nationalists,
this great anti-colonial tradition really actually
thought about what authentic freedom might mean.
The structuring sentence comes
towards a slightly later half of the text
where he says, is a Hindu actually free to use his reason?
And this is why you suddenly see
how the text is so, so placeless and at once
so placeless and timeless because this is a question
that will haunt shall we say,
the Indian political life.
- The question of reason.
- The question of the relationship between freedom
and reasoning that can be asked freely.
Can I, am I today free to ask
perhaps even question what my freedom really means?
And this is the question he poses
to the cast reformers.
The book is not actually written
to the vast mass and multitude of the so-called untouchables
and lower cast alone.
The book was actually written as a lecture
to be delivered to a body of reformers
called the Jatpat Torak Mandel based in Lahore.
So he's actually asking the cast reformers
whether they have understood
what freedom really means.
And around this axial question,
I'm a curator of a series of smaller sections
close to two dozen of them
where he talks about the question of place and space
in caste, where he talks about the question
and the problem of sovereignty within caste system
where he talks about the heuridical
and the punitive laws that enforce and entrench
this kind of prejudice,
often in very mystical and invisible forms.
There is a powerful moment in annihilation of caste
where
and scholars of apartheid and racism
will perhaps relate to it when a white cross says,
caste is so different,
precisely because you are not fighting barbed wire fences,
right?
Caste is not simply physical barrier,
caste is a form of cognitive enslavement.
And without this ability to think freely
about what freedom is,
without the ethics of sharing freedom
when it might come for India,
that ethics of sharing freedom equally
is what alone might annihilate caste.
Would it require also the annihilation of Hinduism
in which the caste system has its roots?
I think on Bitcoin is very certain
that
the moment you take,
the caste out, the evil and the cruelty,
the lawlessness as he calls it, of caste out,
there would be no Hinduism left.
And this is where I think his disagreements
with Gandhi
become absolutely reconcilable.
- Yeah, can you talk a little bit now about that disagreement?
- Especially on the caste question,
to start with a caste question,
then,
- Right, follow.
- In so many ways,
the disagreement is often
seen to be about the modality of caste reform.
And I think it begins there
in a very powerful sort of a way.
If we go back a few years,
this is Ambedkar and Gandhi's first meeting.
- What year are we talking about?
- We're talking about 1931,
just on the eve of the aroundable conferences in London,
that the British government has about independence.
About both the transfer of power,
but eventual transfer of power,
but also about the question of franchise,
about how is it that the franchise has to be configured
in India?
Partly because the great war has already shown
how big in the future and already at that time,
the question of minorities will be.
Ambedkar visits Gandhi,
they talk legend has is
that Gandhi almost doesn't even look at Ambedkar,
but they have a polite conversation.
Ambedkar fiercely uncompromising
and absolutely articulate in his sheer logical force.
Gandhi no less so,
but it seems like Gandhi was trying to evade
the much deeper kind of demand,
moral demand and make us making
on the nationalist cause at that time.
At any rate,
once Ambedkar leaves and they fail to come to an agreement,
an agreement on the cast,
on the franchise, on the question of separate electorates.
Gandhi asks his one of his aides sitting in the room,
but I don't understand why Dr. Ambedkar is so aggressive
or anxious about the lower cast.
And his eight-dell's Gandhi because he's one.
And Gandhi's taken aback because his entire approach
to casting equality, his entire approach to who've
where these untouchables was such that he was unable to ever,
even imagine that it was likely that Ambedkar,
the master theoretician, the argumentative force
that he was was actually one of them.
- Because he was too well educated and too knowledgeable.
- Yes, so that is one might argue that that is
by and large Gandhi's own casteism,
rearing its ugly head,
not for the first nor for the last time.
- Because Gandhi belonging to the Brahmin class.
- No, Gandhi himself belonged to a non-Brahin
of our caste, a caste of merchants.
In the classical idiom, one might say,
he belonged to the veshears,
but the ancient or the classical notion of whirna,
which quite interestingly can be translated as color.
It does not map on as cleanly onto the modern notion of caste,
but Gandhi, either way, was not from a lower caste,
but it is, and therefore it is his prejudice.
Things are also complicated because Ambedkar's own surname
was a gift from his Brahmin teacher when he was a student.
Ambedkar is a surname he had been gifted rather than inherited.
Now, we know that the disagreements were simmering for a while.
They come to a head around the Pune-A-Pak negotiations
as it's famously or infamously known,
when Gandhi goes on to fast until death,
until Ambedkar withdraws.
- With draws what?
- His demand for separate electorates for the lower caste.
- Separative electorates for the lower class.
- Right.
- The lower caste depressed classes,
there are many ways in which these groups and communities
are described now known as assertively known as Dalits.
- So Ambedkar's reasoning for why there should be special elections
for the lower caste is that they could not participate
in the larger polity.
- Take, take.
- Fairly.
- Yes, at the most fundamental level,
it's the systemic prejudice itself.
Gandhi was willing to concede reserved seats for these candidates,
for representatives of lower caste and Dalits and depressed classes,
as they were known.
Ambedkar wanted the entire electorate to be separate.
Only the depressed classes would vote for elections of representatives
who would represent only the depressed classes.
- For Gandhi, that was an internal partition.
For Ambedkar, that partition had already been there, always.
- And Gandhi wins this.
- Gandhi wins it.
Gandhi wins it because of his brilliant, remarkably well-cultivated
ability to die for a cause.
He is willing to sacrifice himself,
pressure, mount sonam baker,
as his health deteriorates.
And then he, he, he, he, and following that,
the British government, which was the provision.
- Well, forgive by,
ignorance about this matter in terms of speculation now,
but and it seems to me, or let me ask you the question,
the name of the show is entitled opinions.
In your opinion, right?
Do you think Gandhi was right on this issue?
And I'll tell you why I just have a suspicion
that he might have been on the right side,
that if you instituted a system that had, you know,
a special elections for a special class,
that it would perpetuate their difference
and their depression.
And that the insistence that the nation be,
be really institutionally as one,
it seems to be a rather enlightened view.
- Right.
- But there are any number of opinions on this issue,
I'm sure. - Sure.
- Yes, there are, there are a host of opinions
and a host of disagreements around what,
what might have been.
I think what is interesting here is not whether
Edgar was right or wrong,
whether Gandhi was actually in the long run proven right.
I think what,
what is interesting at this moment is
how on May it correspond to a mental point
about the tyrannical structure
of the anti-colonial movement is revealed
in its brightest, most unequal vocal form.
Gandhi may have been right about separate electorates.
It's difficult to say, even in hindsight.
And I do not think he was entirely right
or entirely wrong.
What I do believe is that the manner in which
this argument was one and lost
actually proved,
that there is a debate on betkers much deeper problem
with the tradition of democratic thinking
that was taken ground in India.
- Do you mean the fasting? - The fasting until death.
Subsequently, in the constitution,
he calls it the grammar of anarchy.
- Gandhi does not. - No, I'm very concerned.
- I'm very concerned. - Ambedkar,
relates to this entire tradition of thinking about politics
the language or compresses them within the expression grammar
of anarchy.
And there we are on to another register altogether
that we might not want to go straight away.
But the much fundamental issue here,
apart from the correctness of their opinions,
was the method and the form of struggle that was deployed.
And I think the disagreement,
even Ambedkar's disagreement with Gandhi,
eventually is not always about Gandhi's opposition
to separate electors.
I mean, this is one fact that is often ignored
by scholars of political thought.
Partly because this disagreement and this event itself
is seen to be,
seen to be the framing device
around which their disagreement is constructed.
- Is it the main disagreement between them?
- It is, in my view, not the main disagreement.
- What is the main disagreement?
- The main disagreement between them is the question
or the relationship between freedom and equality.
That to me is the fundamental,
and within that sure, it is absolutely right.
And I agree with the generations of scholars who argue
that they had a certain difference
over the question of cash reform.
But I think Ambedkar was committed to
and geared towards a much more fundamental thinking
about political life, about politics as such.
- So you would say that even politics as such,
even though, well, if you take that,
again, a rent-to-end distinction,
I keep going back to my own canon here,
the distinction between the political and the social
that Ana had it makes,
where it would seem that much of Ambedkar's life work
as a jurist, constitutionalist,
was in the realm of social reform,
rather than, let's say, political foundation as such.
Now, this distinction might not apply in this case
that maybe the context is so different
that you can't make this distinction,
but one could say that politics is one thing,
founding the nation, what its laws are,
and the other is all the series of social reform.
- About casting equality, about destitution,
and poverty, about injustice, and so on.
To him, these questions are inseparable,
from the founding, perhaps, as you might say,
the public realm, and the founding laws of the republic.
It is in this sense that he finds it
very difficult to separate questions of freedom
and sovereignty from questions of equality and justice.
He's both in that sense, if, again,
I go back to your canon.
He's also somewhere adjacent to her anti-and-conceptions
of politics, but this politics has to be understood
slightly differently in the way he understands it.
Ambedkar has this remarkable, and often,
scandal-red, a set of meditations
on what majority means in a democracy.
And one of the things that fascinates me about him
is taking over his whole question sort of a way.
He's also a terrorist majority in the most political sense
of the term.
Does the sovereignty, the mass-read domination
that defines a political majority in a political space
within a political nation?
And India is a very politicized, political republic.
And he makes a very interesting distinction there
that complicates some of the other normative ways
of understanding the relationship, the numerical relationship
between majority and minority.
Where he says in India, there are two major words.
There's a political majority, which is who we vote for,
reducible to or identified with the numbers it has
in the parliament or the councils and so on.
And then there is the communal majority.
And this communal majority has nothing to do with the political
majority, although it runs away.
That's the expression he uses.
He runs away with the mandate that actually
the political majority has.
What is this communal majority?
It is that which is invisible.
It is that which is pernicious.
It is that which structures not simply the laws
of the republic, but it's everyday life.
- Are these the embedded prejudices of the,
of the people as such?
- It is the embedded prejudice of the people as such.
Yes, I think that's absolutely accurate.
It is also that, and this is where I'm made
and Gandhi perhaps have some striking resemblance.
It is also that which can never be transformed or converted.
It has to be destroyed.
Which means that no law will be adequate to the task of undermining
or resisting this communal majority.
It already punches way above its monstrous weight
because in numerical terms it doesn't show itself on paper.
But the entire sword of including people on the left
and among liberals are part of this communal majority.
- So how does one destroy it?
- That is where annihilation of caste,
especially in the way
on which it deploys the term annihilation becomes operative.
It is only through an unconditional commitment
to giving up on all sorts of privileged cast springs.
And the question is whether India is capable of that.
And one might feel disillusioned
by the way contemporary political life
in India is structured because America has been proven right.
It has been very difficult to dislodge
through some sort of legal intervention,
through some sort of rest-intuitive
or even constitutional intervention.
This kind of caste prejudice that structures Indian life.
And it doesn't simply structure Indian social life
when we say political life,
I mean it in the strongest sense of the political.
That it undermines the very foundations
of a possible republic.
- I've always believed that democracy is not very well
understood by certain other countries
that presume to have a democratic system.
So for example,
just take Turkey out of the one.
He wins a majority of votes
and he says the majority has spoken.
And now it's got blanche for anything that he wants to do
regardless of the rights of the minority.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding
of what a democratic republic is where it's based primarily
on the protection of the rights of minorities
against the tyranny of the majority.
- Right.
- And it's not enough to have a numerical majority
voting for you that the minorities
can be disregarded.
I think the Muslim Brotherhood made the same mistake
in Egypt where you have a numerical majority
and they think that now it's any concerns of the minority
opposition or have been neutralized.
Well, no, it doesn't work that way.
Even in Italy, Bad Luzconi, when he was in the prime minister,
he thought that as long as he was,
his party was winning a majority of the votes
among the other parties he could do as he pleased.
But that's, I think, is a misunderstanding of how the,
at least the American version that it takes about
the rights of minorities is fundamental,
even foundational for a certain kind of democracy.
So in the title of your book, Radical Equality,
that I'm taking it that you believe that there's something
about radical equality, which is very difficult
to conjugate with freedom in the political spheres.
Is that correct?
That's one of the tensions or even what you call an "antinomy"
in your book.
Yes, in the most schematic sense one might argue
that radical equality is equality taken
outside of the limits of the social question.
To the extremities of the very limits of thinking
where it becomes inseparable from questions
of freedom and sovereignty.
The way equality is thought through,
especially in these two thinkers,
is not simply transformative in the social sense,
but it transforms the very nature
of how we understand equality.
If we understand equality fundamentally as commensibility,
as an abstract sameness,
as a certain principle of quantity,
then these are things that are very difficult to find
in these two thinkers.
They are absolutely committed to difference.
They have a respect for plurality,
but that plurality is not reducible to mere respect
or reverence.
And perhaps most importantly, this equality
cannot be understood without political freedom.
And it is in this sense that they radicalize the question
of equality but also of democracy.
And this is the risk, as I say often,
it is a democracy is a risk in many senses of the word.
But in these two figures,
what you often see is a disenchantment
with the representative form of government too.
And Beethoven, in fact, is very categorical
when he says that in India,
one of the things we might perhaps lack
is constitutional morality.
Simply having a representative form of democracy,
simply having representative institutions
will not ensure.
- That's the risk of democracy.
The risk of democracy is that you might have communal
material in a society.
And the second risk, which is perhaps a global risk.
And we see it nowhere more than in the United States.
And this is what I'm very curious about in the '40s,
is he's, again, to pick up a thread
that we had begun with.
In a very classical Republican manner,
a baker sees the greatest threat to democracy
from the alliance between politics and money,
between privilege and franchise.
It is from that insurrectionary angle he is coming,
because nothing contaminates the possibility
and the promise of democracy more than its absolute compromise
with money interest.
And yet he never seems to have been tempted
or seduced by Marxism, no?
- No, he was never.
In fact, with the Ghanaian and Middle-Kewia,
we are as we often are in the vicinity of two thinkers
who are irreconcilable and yet inseparable,
as I think they are.
Partly because for a Baker class doesn't actually capture,
or the rhetoric of class doesn't really capture
the fundamental truth about prejudice and privilege.
It is no more, classes no more abstract
and no less given to these forms of privileges.
- The caste is different from class in that regard.
One can look at various socioeconomic indicators
and find some parallels there beyond doubt.
But if we are thinking in terms of how a baker thinks
of these things, I think he's,
the theoretical category,
the classes in epistemic category is different from class.
- Right, so when you write,
and I quoted that earlier, but perhaps more crucially,
never had this right to justice been sought
in the shadows of a religion known to be so persistently
oppressive and violent towards those
it claimed as its own.
There are the references to Hinduism
and that this religion, it's oppression and violence
is because it serves as the foundation for the caste system
and for a great many other kind of social ills
that are very difficult to overcome,
even if you come up with a constitution
of a Republican form of government
and you put in the kind of equality of citizens to vote
and so forth, but still there is some other
force at work, which neither Gandhi nor I'm better
than what I understand wanted to have a complete separation
of, so on the one hand there's a commitment
to a secular Republican, a bit car,
but there is not this kind of repudiation
of traditional religion and the past.
This is not like Adhat Turk who when he becomes
the drivers of Turkey, he abolishes the imams
and the veil and says we're gonna Westernize,
changes the alphabet and all this past of ours
is going to turn our backs on it, this is not
the kind of secular republicanism that I'm bettar
is embracing, right?
Yes, one of the great paradoxes as I say,
that sustains Indian democratic life is precisely
its ambiguities towards secularism as such.
In principle, the constitution will eventually define
their public as a secular one, but in practice,
neither on Bitcoin nor Gandhi either believe
or are committed to the question of an absolute
relinquishment of religion.
Because it's not because they believe
that there has to be a necessary moral, spiritual force
that has to be preserved and in that sense
that it's more than merely political
in the reductive sense of the term political, no?
Yes, it is more than, this is the point
where it becomes very difficult to separate their politics
from their ethics and their understanding of the religious.
In fact, an annihilation of caste has this brilliant sentence
where a baker is giving a call for the destruction
of Hinduism and he says, how can the destruction
of such an oppressive religion be irreligious?
Isn't the duty of religion as such first and foremost
to destroy a tradition that mas creates itself as a religion?
And he calls it a religion of rules or religion,
Hinduism as a religion that has become a law unto itself.
Now, the two very interesting and strained threads running
through and made presentations on religion.
One is clearly his firmly secular idea
that religion can destroy the integrity of political life.
And here he's very close to Hobbs,
or Rousseau whom he reads and often cites.
In fact, the expression religion as law is from Hobbs
and Ambedkar read Hobbs at other moments for other purposes.
The other tradition here is the Marxian one.
For example, the expression essence of religion,
which appears in annihilation of caste,
is taken from Ambedkar's reading of Marx's
on the Jewish question.
Now, that said, he has something rather original
in the second half of their sentence,
towards the more defining and closing sentences
of that paragraph, that series of mutations,
where he says,
"There is nothing irreligious in the destruction
of such a religion."
Because Hinduism is a religion that prevents us from
understanding our responsibility.
Hinduism and highlights not just faith or belief.
Hinduism makes impossible the very idea of responsibility.
In order to understand obligation,
one has to first religiously destroy religion religiously.
And I say this often because it's somehow taken as granted
that here is a thinker who is a complete
unequal, secularist in 1936.
And then after a series of defeats and disillusionment
turns to religion in 1956 before he dies,
that is not actually what happens.
What happens is a struggle between Ambedkar and Gandhi
to think about religion as such.
And that religion alone,
this is not a civil religion clearly.
It's not a religion that insinuates itself
in municipal functions.
It is a religion that will lead to a fundamental realignment
of what political truth is.
It's a religion that will restructure
the very relationship between politics and truth.
And that strand, that strain, that tension,
is already powerful in Ambedkar in the 20s and 30s.
It's a running strain which eventually leads him
to produce his masterwork, the Buddha and his summer in 1956.
But again, as I was saying,
one has to re-align
the way we understand the anti-colonial tradition
in order to reconstruct, recreate this richness
of the debate around questions of freedom.
- Right.
Well, Ashvadi, we've come getting beyond our allotted hour.
And let me just say that we have not dealt very much
with Gandhi in this hour.
So maybe we can come to an agreement
that you will come back on the show very shortly
and that we'll have a part two where we will focus more on Gandhi
and the relation between the two.
It would be an honor to do so.
And one last question for you as we wrap it up
for someone who is as critical of Hinduism
as Ambedkar was.
How do you explain the fact that he is still regarded
very widely in India as a national hero?
And in many ways venerated for someone who has attacked the heart
of the Hindu religion, it seems unlikely
that he could retain this enormous stature
that he still has today.
- I am so glad we have come to this question to us
at the end because one of the great paradoxes of
Ambedkar's political and philosophical legacy
is that he was not considered to be a mainstream
thinker for a very long time.
As late as until a decade ago,
when I started working on this book,
the broad question was,
well, what is there to say about Ambedkar's political thought
but more importantly, of Ambedkar as a thinker
that might be worthy of reconstruction
of yielding and lending moral and political density.
So for a very long time,
the consecration, not simply the hegographic construction,
but the consecration of Indian nationalism,
the great tradition of anti-colonial struggle
has ensured a certain marginality for Ambedkar.
He might have been very happy about it to say the least.
As we know, he says, I'm not part of the whole,
I'm a part apart, there is a way in which
Ambedkar's insurrectionary political thought,
especially insurrectionary when it is thinking of citizenship
and civic virtue.
In fact, he's thinking of citizenship as insurrection,
has been very, very problematic for a very vast
what of
of nationalists, of liberals in India,
of Marxists who have not paid any attention
for a very long time and are now doing so to Ambedkar.
So he's a very, very powerful, very tragic,
very enigmatic and very in-electable thinker right now.
And his legacy comes out of very, very powerfully
emancipatory social movements, the Dalit movements,
the Dalit-Astrad movements in literature,
in sometimes in cinema, in certainly in art forms,
in theater and so on.
Ambedkar is a revolutionary who has been for the best part
of the last century, difficult to reconcile
with some of the aggressive violence
certitudes of Indian nationalism.
And one of the problems of his resurgence,
I do want to end with a caution
that one of the problems with the resurgence of Ambedkar,
is that he will be now sought out,
if not completely or who created,
by groups, including the Indian National Congress,
that had resisted him for the longest time
and the Hindu right,
who want to use his legacy as a way for electoral advantage,
there is a very real danger of that eclecticism
that is so fundamental to anti-colonial thought,
that eclecticism can take extremely monstrous forms.
And it is that eclecticism of thought
that Ambedkar warns first and foremost against the greatest
risk of democracy comes from the nation state.
- Well, I have to say that his mark as a true thinker
is most credibly confirmed for me
by the fact that he doesn't fit in any pre-established category
as such, either the revolutionary or the nationalist
or the Marxist or so.
And therefore, he's a part of part is what the thinker is.
And we've been doing some of that thinking here
on this show with Professor Ashwadi Kumar
from the Department of History here at Stanford.
So we have a deal, we're gonna come back
and we're gonna talk about Gandhi next time
and we're gonna talk about Gandhi primarily
like we did today with Ambedkar as a thinker, you know?
So thanks again for coming on.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions
and tune in next week.
- Thank you, Robert for having me.
- Bye-bye. - Bye.
(upbeat music)