Genesis of the “Untouchable Question”, In Ambedkar's Ideological Discourse

The ‘Untouchable question’ was presented as a subset of minority question that the ideologues of Indian National Movement had to deal with. Ambedkar's idea of the ‘emancipation of Untouchables'was intrinsically linked to his political ideology of “Untouchables” being a separate minority distinct from the Caste Hindus. The standard approach of the Nationalist leaders was to deny the separate ‘political identity’ of different communities, but, to treat the differences of social/cultural identities of communities to be limited to social and cultural sphere. The Nationalist approach failed in some of the cases because of the unequal power relations among the different communities; whereby the Colonial State created the space and opportunity for contestation for power and hegemony.

By extending the Marxist concepts of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’, we have re-configured the history of the idea of the ‘untouchable emancipation’ and ‘untouchable question’, through dissecting the speeches and writings of one of the greatest protagonist of Untouchable cause, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar; and unearth his ideology's historical scope as well as inherent limitation. The construction of a political ideology of a group/community is embryonically linked to the emotional, epistemological and ontological effect of unequal power relations in the society, and these inequities need not only be economical in nature. Identity politics faces a conflict between the “transformative” aim of fundamentally changing the power relations and “affirmative”aim of asserting group identity, for political mobilization, as is heuristically conceptualized by Nancy Fraser. Practically, the overall contestatory framework of power relations is left unchanged, through the ‘identity-politics’; this conundrum to oplagued the Ambedkarite predicament; and continues to be the case with the ‘identity-politics’ in independent India, which has an import for politics of creating a social base for Indian Nation-State.