When Dr Ambedkar Said Democracy Won’t Work in India, Transcript of Dr Ambedkar’s 1953 Interview with BBC

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Infowarrior

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Recently BBC released a part of the video of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s interview with BBC. You can find that video at the end of this post. Here I present the transcript of the interview of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar with BBC that took place in 1953. In the interview, Dr. Ambedkar discusses the issues of democracy and it’s future in India. [Voice of the video is not very clear so please excuse me if I have made any mistake while transcribing it and would love to improve it so if you find any mistake or have some suggestion please let me know in the comments section. Thank you!]

BBC – Dr. Ambedkar do you think that democracy is going to work in India?

Dr. Ambedkar – No, I would say in a formal sense if you want.

BBC – What do you mean?

Dr. Ambedkar – [inaudible]… some periodic elections, Prime Minister and so on and so on.

BBC – Are elections very important?

Dr. Ambedkar – No, elections are important if they produce really good men [? or did he say ‘means’ ?]

BBC – But elections are important because they give chance to change the government.

Dr. Ambedkar – Yes, but who has an idea that voting means the change of the government? Nobody has. People have no consciousness and our electoral system never allows to choose the candidate. Now, for example, Congress says vote for the Bullock, the question never comes who represents the Bullock. Nobody cares who is the candidate behind the Bullock election symbol. People will vote only for election symbol. People don’t know whether the election symbol Bullock is being represented by a Donkey or an educated person.

BBC – What do you mean by formal sense, in the fundamental sense that democracy wouldn’t work?

Dr. Ambedkar – We have a social structure which is totally incompatible with the parliamentary system.

BBC – Do you mean it is based on inequality?

Dr. Ambedkar – Yes, it is based on the inequality. Unless you get rid of the caste system, you can’t fix. It is a question of social structure and it should be outcaste (or did he say ‘outlawed’). I am quite prepared to say that it would take some time to fix the social structure if you want to fix in a peaceful way. But then somebody must be making the efforts to change the social structure.

BBC – But Prime Minister is giving many statements against the caste system in his speeches.

Dr. Ambedkar – These are endless speeches. [Inaudiable but sounds like he said here – When Carlyle was presented with volumes by Spencer, he said oh these English speaking are acting like Christians now.] We are fed up with the speeches now some concrete actions should be taken, such as some programs and schemes should be started so that some real work is done [to eradicate caste system].

BBC – Suppose if all this didn’t work, what alternative do you think?

Dr. Ambedkar – As an alternative, anything is possible, for example, communism.

BBC – Why do you think that democracy would not work for the nation? Wouldn’t living standard of people improve?

Dr. Ambedkar – Who really cares about the elections business? People want food, people want their materialistic needs to be satisfied. In America, there is a democracy and it works and I don’t think there would ever be communism in America. I have just arrived from that country. They had invited me to award me a degree. In America, every citizen’s voice is heard.

BBC – But this can start in India also.

Dr. Ambedkar – How? We don’t have much land, rainfall rate is much lower, our forests are is less. What can we do?

BBC – How do you think these problems can be tackled?

Dr. Ambedkar – I don’t think the present government will be able to tackle these problems. [inaudible]

BBC – So you mean the whole system will collapse?

Dr. Ambedkar – Yes, indeed, pretty soon probably. If the foundation of the building begins to collapse, it’s the lower strata that would be more damaged, that means my own people, untouchables.

BBC – Do you think communists would have any impact?

Dr. Ambedkar – No, they are not working. They have trust in me and I haven’t said anything till now. If they will ask then one day I will give the answer.

Transcribed by Pardeep
http://velivada.com/2017/12/08/tran...c-dr-ambedkar-said-democracy-wont-work-india/
 
Mahatma Gandhi's marksheets

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

Gandhiji was a mediocre student, yet rose to become one of the most influential men of the 20th Century. Beginning a column that profiles unusual characters and recalls curious incidents drawn from history, politics, literature and not least, cricket. At best, Gandhi was a mediocre student in school. Yet he was one of the most influential men of the 20th Century. Beginning a new column that explores how the past has a bearing on the present.

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Mohandas Gandhi with his friend Sheikh Mehtab, Rajkot, 1883. YEARS ago, I picked up the autobiography of a man who, at various points in his career, had served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi, Governor of the Reserve Bank, and Finance Minister of the Government of India. Curiously, his memoirs had as many pages on his achievements in school and college as on his experiences running central banks and devising Union Budgets. He first reproduced his Matriculation results: the marks listed by subject, never less than 96 per cent. We then learnt of how, in his Intermediate Examination, he set a record that stood for years in the Bombay Presidency. As if this was not enough, a statistical proof of his Gold Medals in the B.A. and M.A. followed.

Later, as I read more such works, I came to regard this as characteristic rather than curious. When they came to write their memoirs, famous Professors of Sociology and high officials of the Indian Civil Service alike seemed to single out, above all other high watermarks, success in school examinations. Then I came across an exception: the autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The Mahatma claimed that "I was not regarded as a dunce in high school", before — in the spirit of truth with which the work was conceived — speaking of the difficulty he once had with Sanskrit and, for a time, with Euclidean geometry.

Gandhi spoke in general terms, but his somewhat vague recollections of life at school were to be given a devastating specificity in a book published in 1965. It is called Mahatma Gandhi as a Student, and its author, J.M. Upadhyaya, had been Principal at the High School in Rajkot where the Mahatma had spent seven years.

Upadhyaya's book packs in a great deal in its 74 pages. The boy Gandhi, we learn, changed several schools before he reached the age of 10. At times his attendance was noticeably lax: a mere 110 days out of 238 in Standard III, for example. His marks at the annual examinations normally averaged between 45 per cent and 55 per cent. In junior school, he was always comfortably beaten by one Tribhuvan Bhatt, who in the manner of "toppers" of the time, ended as a Babu, albeit an elevated one. (His last job was as Chief Minister of Rajkot State.) The one early sign of the young Mohandas's superiority to his fellows was that his elder brother Karsandas was a less distinguished student still. Karsan lost two years, and ended up in the same class, where he usually logged lower marks.

Things turned worse in middle school. Mohandas's attendance slipped again, as he attended on a sick father and newly-wedded wife. Asked to repeat a year, he bucked up, and for once "grew quite serious in studies". He achieved eighth rank in class, with a (for him) remarkably high overall score of 66.5 per cent. The momentum carried over into high school. Outside the classroom, his life was rich in incident — he played the "lustful husband", experimented with meat, and tried unsuccessfully to sell some of the family gold to pay off a debt incurred by brother Karsan. Yet, despite this, his attendance at school was 125 days out of 125, and he came fourth in class, with an average in excess of 60 per cent. In Upadhyaya's words, "he could no longer be described as a mediocre student".

This judgment was put sternly to the test in the third week of November 1987, when Gandhi travelled by train to Ahmedabad to take the Matriculation Examination of the Bombay University. This was his first visit to a city he was to later make his own. In a lovely detail, Upadhyaya notes that Gandhi's examination number was 2275. There were 3,067 candidates in all. Of these 799 were successful. Gandhi's own rank was 404th, and his marksheet was as follows:

English 89/200
Gujarati 45.5/100
Mathematics/59/175
General Knowledge 54/150


The total, 247.5 marks out of 625, comes to an average of about 40 per cent Mohandas K. Gandhi could once again be described as a mediocre student.
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Mahatma Gandhi as a Student is a work that bears testimony both to the author's industry and to the Gujarati respect for old records. And it contains much more than marksheets. We learn here that despite his rather ordinary performance in examinations, Gandhi's middle school teacher marked his conduct as "very good", whereas the best any other student achieved was "good". Upadhyaya's reproduction of the English paper that Gandhi answered in his Matric exam seems to give certain clues to his later development. For 45 marks, he was asked to "write an essay of about 40 lines on the advantages of a cheerful disposition". Could not this answer have helped encourage him to become that rare politician, who was never known to have lost his temper? For 25 marks, he was asked to paraphrase a poem which described how Jesus would reveal himself only to the poor peasant, not to the rich men whose chariots went contemptuously "whirling past". Might not this exercise have stroked an early awareness of exploitation and injustice?

We must also consider the significance of the sociological snippets that Upadhyaya so casually throws our way. Consider this:Mohandas's best friend in high school was a Muslim, while their headmaster was a Parsi. The school building was constructed with a gift of Rs. 63,000 from the Nawab of Junagadh. In his last years in school, as Mohandas's marks percentage climbed into the upper fifties, he was given a scholarship of Rs. 10 per month, this award being in the names of two Kathiawari nobles, one Hindu, one Muslim. Should we not consider this as part of an early training in multi-culturalism, as essential preparation for the making of the inter-culturalism, as essential preparation for the making of the inter-religious Mahatma?

But, the cynic will say, we can't finally get away from the marksheets. By way of apology and, indeed, justification, let me then remind the reader of the early career of one Albert Einstein. Nothing, writes one biographer, "nothing in Einstein's early history suggests dormant genius". The boy was able to speak fluently only at the age of nine. When Albert's father asked the headmaster of his elementary school what profession he thought his son should prepare himself for, he got the answer: "It doesn't matter; he'll never make a success of anything." Later, at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, Einstein was "still slightly backward," and failed to complete his diploma. Later still, after he had moved to Zurich, Einstein failed the entrance examination to University. "The accepted reason for his failure is that although his knowledge of mathematics was exceptional he did not reach the necessary standard in modern languages or in zoology and botany."

Such, in summary, were the academic records of the two men commonly regarded as the best, the wisest, and the most influential individuals of the 20th Century. Long ago, in the 1930s, the Bombay journalist D.F. Karaka wrote a biography of Gandhi entitled Out of Dust, He Made Us Into Men. The reference was to the countless nationalists whose heroism and self-sacrifice was a direct consequence of the Mahatma's influence. Without him, these Indians would have been content to have been ordinary lawyers, teachers, brokers, and clerks or, perhaps, even black-marketers. One knows what Karaka meant. So did J.M. Upadhyaya, except that he added a meaningful caveat: "Gandhiji, it has been well said, could fashion heroes out of common clay. His first, and, undoubtedly, his most successful experiment was with himself."

Ramachandra Guha is a full-time writer based in Bangalore.
The Hindu : The Mahatma's marksheets
 
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