First step towards the democracy

The idea of the citizenship is an attempt to create a sense of belonging to a community, which is, as Benedict Anderson would say, essentially imagined. It is inherently an inclusive attempt, however, it might not get realized on the ground due to the class, gender, social and other inequalities, differences and injustices. But essentially it requires a sense of inclusion and equality. But in India it has been always a sphere of contention. What we call an India society, is basically a structure of exclusions, which Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the radical democrat and chief architect of Indian constitution, used to call a society of ‘compulsory segregation’. Here one starts with the exclusion, punitive norms and identities and this saturates the notions of citizenship in India.

This is the background, against which Dr. Ambedkar started his political work of reforming the society, and after his first few experiments, he understood that while remaining within the caste fold, there cannot be real reform and this failure of the reform will bury the aspirations of any real democratic revolution in the society. He emphasized that Hinduism is incompatible with the democracy. Thus he concluded that first the ‘Untouchable’ (now known as Dalits, the depressed which is the lower social strata of Indian society) need to denounce the Hinduism, and get converted into another religion to usher a social reform which would become base for the political revolution.

This, as a method, remarkably resembles with the V-effect which German dramaturge Bertolt Brecht formulated for his own theatre. Through my research project, I am trying to see models of V-effect in both Ambedkar and Brecht.

Here is the speech where Ambedkar denounces the Hinduism.

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