Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born Bhiva Ramji Sakpal was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the interim government of India from 1947-1952.
India’s interim government was run by Nehru as Prime Minister and 15 cabinet ministers who were from the Constituent assembly which was elected in the provincial assembly election of 1946.
Free India’s first elections happened in 1952. And you may be amazed to know that BR Ambedkar, one of the architects of our Constitution and one of the more brilliant minds to ever walk the earth, lost his seat and hence did not find a place in India’s first elected government in 1952. In an ideal world, he should have been in the cabinet and continued in his role as Law & Justice Minister, which he had already been doing in India’s first government from 1947-1951.
But he was not.
Here’s the story of how that came to be…
So, for starters, Nehru having total sway over the Congress (even more so after the death of Gandhi and Patel), and for reasons best known to him, did not give Ambedkar a ticket on the Congress’ party platform. This meant that Ambedkar had to break away from the Congress, form his own Scheduled Caste Federation (which later became the Republican Party of India), and stand on its ticket from the Bombay North Central constituency.
General consensus was that Ambedkar was sure to win the seat, as not only would the Dalit vote gone entirely to him, but also most of the non-dalits since he had done stellar work from 1946 till 1952, both with the constitution and as India’s Law & Justice Minister.
To nix his win, Nehru fielded Narayan Kajrolkar against Ambedkar. Narayan, a Dalit himself, had been Ambedkar’s executive assistant for years. Nehru lured him away from Ambedkar by offering him a Congress ticket, provided he contested against Ambedkar. Not only that, but Nehru also got Jagjivan Ram to create a separate party called the All India Depressed Classes League to split the Dalit vote and they put up a candidate opposite Ambedkar as well. The trifecta of Dalit candidates ended up splitting the Dalit vote heavily. Further, Both Nehru and SA Dange (of the CPI) campaigned aggressively against Ambedkar.
And Ambedkar lost the only Lok Sabha election he contested, to Congress’ candidate Narayan Kajrolkar.
While Nehru & the Congress treated him with utter disrespect & disdain, it was Jan Sangh’s Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who got Ambedkar to the Rajya Sabha as an independent by supporting his RS election. In the Rajya Sabha records, he is listed as an ‘Independent’.
Ambedkar was keen to be in the Lok Sabha, so much so that when a seat opened up in Bhandara in 1954, and a bye-election was conducted for it, he stood for election again. In this occasion too, Nehru campaigned aggressively & bitterly against him, ensuring his loss.
Why Nehru would go to such lengths to keep Ambedkar out of India’s first free elected Lok Sabha is beyond me. In an ideal world, Ambedkar should have continued as India’s 1st elected Law Minister and continued working on tweaking our constitution to make it even better.
Perhaps if he had not faced this double/triple betrayal, had been in the Cabinet and had something to look forward to, he would not have died so soon, in 1956 (at the relatively young age of 65)…
P.S. If you ask me, Nehru did all this because he was terrified that Ambedkar, if he got into the parliament, would have raised a stink against Article 370, which Ambedkar was vehemently against. Ambedkar would have also renewed his demand for our Constitution to include a Uniform Civil Code and a clause which would have sought to enshrine gender equality in the laws of inheritance and marriage in the constitution. All these ideas had popular support but would have gone against the then-prevalent ‘minority practices’. Nehru’s minority appeasement politics cost the country a few more years of being served by Ambedkar’s brilliant mind.