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CHAPTER FOUR
B.R. Ambedkar on Market Domination and Popular Sovereignty
Tejas Parasher
PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science
University of Chicago
I. Ambedkar and Rights
In the emerging literature in political theory and intellectual history on Asian anti-imperialism
and the founding of the Indian state, the jurist and economist Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-
1956) occupies an exceptional and slightly anomalous position. Ambedkar’s contributions to
Indian independence from the British Empire were profound. As early as 1919, he became one of
the first leaders anywhere in the empire to demand universal adult franchise and the introduction
of representative government within non-white colonies. As Member for Labor in Viceroy
Linlithglow’s Executive Council between 1942 and 1946, Ambedkar began to outline the general
architecture for an independent welfare state. Most importantly, more than perhaps any other figure
in the 1940s he was responsible for drafting India’s postcolonial constitution (1950), with its
characteristic modernist vision of state centralization and social transformation. But at the same
time, Ambedkar throughout maintained a skeptical distance from the mainstream of Indian
anticolonialism. He joined neither the Indian National Congress (INC) nor any regional
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Communist parties, the main pro-independence organizations after the 1920s. Only at the very end
of his life did he begin to consider possible electoral alliances with the socialist wings of the INC.
Ambedkar’s relationship with both nationalist and Communist leadership was vexed leading up to
and after independence. He famously disagreed with M.K. Gandhi’s model of village-based
democracy and also rejected the kind of centralized, regulatory planning state proposed by both
Jawaharlal Nehru and more leftist parties.
Ambedkar thus seems uncannily disconnected from his context—anticolonial but not in any of
the ways dominant in South Asia in the 1940s. To account for his simultaneous commitment to
national self-determination and his distance from nationalist mobilization, intellectual historians
have recently taken Ambedkar’s politics to be an idiosyncratic version of liberalism. According to
this now common interpretation, Ambedkar’s complicated relationship with anti-colonialism was
driven by his view of the postcolonial state as a means to a very specific end: the protection of
individual rights and civil liberties. More than any of his contemporaries, Ambedkar was attentive
to the threats that social norms and practices posed to individual flourishing. He strategically used
state institutions to overcome and regulate destructive or tyrannical forms of socio-religious
discipline and was willing to reject any politics that did not take the natural rights-bearing
individual as its foundational unit. The Ambedkar scholar Gail Omvedt articulated an influential
version of this interpretation in the early 1990s, arguing that Ambedkar’s politics were motivated
by an uncompromising liberal faith in individual freedom and self-determination and a staunch
opposition to any forms of social or religious life marked by exclusion or discrimination.1 Over
1 Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in
Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993).
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the past two decades, the reading of Ambedkar in terms of individual freedom has greatly expanded
across scholarship in political theory and South Asian history. For C.A. Bayly, Ambedkar
represented a deepening and radicalization of the “high liberalism” of early colonial India, a
philosophy seeking to protect individuals against social control.2 Rochana Bajpai similarly
identifies Ambedkar as a “radical liberal” extending older nineteenth-century ideas about inherent
rights to self-rule amongst colonial subjects.3 In new works by Bidyut Chakrabarty and Martha
Nussbaum, Ambedkar’s core commitment is seen to be the creation of an inclusive civic culture
with equal opportunities and freedom from discrimination for individual citizens, regardless of
caste, religion, or birth.4
2 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 297-307.
3 Rochana Bajpai, “Liberalisms in India: A Sketch,” in Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honor
of Michael Freeden, eds. Ben Jackson and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
53-76.
4 Bidyut Chakrabarty, "B.R. Ambedkar and the History of Constitutionalizing
India," Contemporary South Asia, 24.2 (2016): 133-148 and Martha Nussbaum, “Ambedkar’s
Constitution: Promoting Inclusion, Opposing Majority Tyranny,” in Assessing Constitutional
Performance, eds. Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016), 295-336. For further interpretations of Ambedkar in terms of political liberalism and
individual rights (and, increasingly, ‘human rights’), see K.S. Bharathi, The Political Thought of
Ambedkar (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1998); Upendra Baxi, “Emancipation as Justice:
Legacy and Vision of Dr. Ambedkar,” in From Periphery to Center Stage: Ambedkar,
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This recent scholarship finds in Ambedkar’s liberalism the key to deciphering his position vis
a vis anticolonial nationalism. While Ambedkar’s strategic reliance on political institutions
departed from classical liberal orthodoxy, it also led him to be involved with projects of state-
building and social transformation through the 1940s.5 Conversely, an underlying view of
individual freedom and flourishing as the real goal of all political society, taken from late
nineteenth-century Millian liberalism, led him to oppose the communal visions of Gandhi’s
village-based republicanism on one hand and Communist collectivization on the other. The
dominant liberal interpretation of B.R. Ambedkar therefore takes his idea of the state to be
grounded in civil liberties and the rights of the individual. It is the peculiarity of such liberalism in
the milieu of 1940s South Asia—an intellectual climate dominated by placing the national
community and prerogatives of state intervention above the rights of the individual citizen—
which, for many commentators, explains Ambedkar’s unique position during the Indian founding.
In this paper, I challenge the image of Ambedkar as a liberal constitutionalist. I suggest that
this image overlooks Ambedkar’s rejections of liberal understandings of individualist market
freedom. Reappraising Ambedkar’s views on the origins and purposes of political society by
turning to his writings as a labor leader between 1936 and 1946 and his constitutional proposals in
1947-48, I argue that, in an inversion of one of the core precepts of liberal philosophy, Ambedkar
Ambedkarism, and Dalit Future (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000), 49-74 and the edited
volumes Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Emancipator of the Oppressed: A Centenary Commemoration
Volume, ed. K.N. Kadam (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1993) and Socio-Economic and Political
Vision of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, ed. S.N. Mishra (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2010).
5 See, for instance, Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 302-306.
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viewed economic individualism as the groundwork for acts of domination and arbitrary violence
by the powerful. Consequently, his concern was not so much the freedom and autonomy of
individuals participating in the economy as the empowerment of dominated workers over market
dynamics. Taken together, Ambedkar’s writings on labor and his legal proposals for a postcolonial
constitution illustrate that he saw the transformation of market structures along participatory lines
as the key task of government. Far from a whole-hearted advocate of liberal individualism (and
the sort of regime which would defend liberal individualism), Ambedkar was thus preoccupied
with group-based economic restructuring.
At stake is not just a revisionist reading of Ambedkar as an important figure in South Asian
intellectual history, but the larger relationship between his political project—the transition from
empire to a self-governing community—and key elements of modern European political
philosophy. Part of the interpretive strategy of this paper is to suggest that Ambedkar illustrates
how twentieth-century decolonization was an important moment for the modification and rewriting
of European notions of popular sovereignty and the nature and purpose of representative,
participatory government. The interventions that thinkers of decolonization like B.R. Ambedkar
made into existing accounts of democracy in the 1940s and 1950s are obscured if we assimilate
their constitutional proposals into universal liberal frameworks of rights. Here, I trace Ambedkar’s
unique visions of transformative representative government from his early scholarship on caste
and kinship in 1917-18 to his final political writings for the Republican Party of India (RPI) in
1955-56. In the first section of the paper, I reconstruct Ambedkar’s analysis of Indian society,
focusing on his arguments about its internal economic hierarchies. In the second section, I show
how the state for Ambedkar emerged as a response to domination within commercial society, and
how this central idea informed the structure of a participatory democratic regime. I conclude with
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a discussion of how re-evaluating Ambedkar as a critic of liberalism invites historians of twentieth-
century political thought to be more attentive to decolonization as a site for the re-invention of
democratic thought.
II. The Sociology of India
The core of much of Ambedkar’s thinking was his diagnosis of the specific problems of Indian
society. This was the topic of his first intellectual forays into sociology and economics as a
graduate student at Columbia University between 1913 and 1916. An early research paper he
prepared for Alexander Goldenweizer’s anthropology seminar in May 1916 provides an
illuminating window into the development of Ambedkar’s thought. Entitled “Castes in India: Their
Mechanism, Genesis, and Development,” the paper was published as an article in the Orientalist
journal Indian Antiquary the following year (May 1917). It exhaustively mined British and French
colonial ethnography and early twentieth-century scholarship by Indian sociologists to try and
define caste as a social scientific concept. Ambedkar’s first argument in the paper was that castes
represented endogamous kinship groups. A caste was an associational group whose interactions
with all other groups was strictly policed through socio-religious customs. The genesis of caste lay
in the imposition of group-based endogamy onto Indian society. This entailed the strict
enforcement of laws which dictated and controlled inter-group interaction, especially around
sexual and gender relations. Such laws included prohibitions on widow remarriage and ostracism
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for marrying outside clearly defined communities. Caste was “an artificial chopping off of the
population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another.”6
As a result, a caste-based society could never form a unified whole. Members of different
castes were never co-participants in anything. They always existed separately from each other as
“self-enclosed units,” and their interactions never amounted to a “fusion” of different lineages.7
Unlike other forms of “social sub-division” like occupation, caste foreclosed the possibility of
combining, moving between, or existing at the intersections of groups. Caste society was
constantly on guard against the threat of miscegenation: “there is a tendency in all groups lying in
close contact with one another to assimilate and amalgamate, and thus consolidate into a
homogeneous society. If this tendency is to be strongly counteracted in the interest of Caste
formation, it is absolutely necessary to circumscribe a circle outside which people should not
contract marriages.”8 By policing “cross-breeding,” as a source of degeneration and pollution,
caste institutions compelled kinship groups living side by side to see themselves as fundamentally
different from one another.9 The “obdurate” logic of inherent difference was so deeply internalized
that those who were excommunicated from their particular groups went on to form new castes with
6 B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development,” in Dr.
Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (BAWS), ed. Vasant Moon., Vol. 1 (New Delhi:
Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Govt. of India, 2014), 9. All subsequent ctiations
from Ambedkar refer to the official Government of India edition of his works.
7 Ibid., 18.
8 Ibid., 10.
9 Ibid., 17.
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similar disciplinary codes: “castes have no mercy for a sinner who has the courage to violate the
code. The penalty is excommunication and the result is a new caste.”10
This early ethnographic study led Ambedkar to three main conclusions about Indian society:
(1) caste was its core organizing principle, (2) caste served to keep individuals locked within
groups separated from and hostile to one another, and (3) caste was anti-democratic. The anti-
democratic nature of caste emerged because fragmentation into self-segregating groups challenged
any possibility of “associated life”—experiences which citizens could share in common as
democratic equals. Ambedkar drew the term from John Dewey, one of his most important teachers
at Columbia; he repeatedly underlined the differences between the segregation of caste society and
the participatory, fraternal ideals of Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916).11 What evolved
over the course of Ambedkar’s maturation as a thinker was a subtler analysis of this third point,
that there was a fundamental conflict between caste and democracy. Beginning with his return to
India and his engagement with popular journalism in Bombay in 1920 (as editor of the journal
Mooknayak), Ambedkar began to see caste society as based not just on difference but on hierarchy.
Under the rules of the caste system, groups perceived each other as units separated by relations of
rank. The unwillingness of one caste to mix with another was rooted in its contempt for a social
inferior. Ambedkar characterized caste as a system of “graded inequality.”12 “Graded inequality”
described how each caste, from priests and warriors down to farmers and manual laborers, sought
10 Ibid., 21.
11 See Arun P. Mukherjee, "B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy," New
Literary History 40.2 (2009): 345-70.
12 Ambedkar, “Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto,” BAWS, Vol. 5, 101.
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to avoid being polluted through mixing with a “lower” group, and opposed the latter’s attempts to
rise in status:
In a system of graded inequality the possibility of a general common attack by the aggrieved
parties is nonexistent. In a system of graded inequality, the aggrieved parties are not on a
common level…. All have a grievance against the highest and would like to bring about their
down fall. But they will not combine. The higher is anxious to get rid of the highest but does
not wish to combine with the high, the low, and the lower lest they should reach his level and
be his equal. The high wants to over-throw the higher who is above him but does not want to
join hands with the low and the lower, lest they should rise to his status and become equal to
him in rank. The low is anxious to pull down the highest, the higher, and the high but he would
not make a common cause with the lower for fear of the lower gaining a higher status and
becoming his equal.13
The theory of “graded inequality” allowed Ambedkar to reframe caste from a system of social
fracturing and sectarianism to a mechanism for the reproduction of hierarchy. Those who were
excluded and oppressed on grounds of inferiority in rank themselves went on to exclude and
oppress others. The key to the pyramid-like structure of Hindu society was thus its reinforcement
at every tier of the system, and not simply the imposition of caste norms by ruling priestly and
warrior classes. Ambedkar considered “graded inequality” to be distinct from “inequality,” writing
in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India that “none have realized [how] in addition
13 Ibid., 101-102.
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to equality and inequality there is such a thing as graded inequality.”14 According to historians’
and social scientists’ regnant understandings of “inequality,” oppressors and oppressed could be
easily distinguished from each other, and the oppressed would eventually become aware of and
seek to challenge the system that rendered them subordinate. “Graded inequality,” in contrast,
blurred the line between victim and perpetrator, conscripted caste groups into becoming willing
agents of hierarchy and disunity, and prevented “general discontent against inequity.”15
Given the prevalence of “graded inequality” in India, it followed that each Hindu sub-group
was involved in domination and exclusion of others on the basis of rank. In an unpublished
pamphlet from the 1940s entitled India and the Prerequisites of Communism, Ambedkar
concluded that the “Hindu social order” was the embodiment of a deeply anti-egalitarian ethos.
Castes barred lower groups from sharing in their daily practices (eating, drinking, habitation, or
marriage), and worked to deny them “opportunities to rise” through “education” or armed
resistance.16 “The interests of the common man as well as of society” as a whole were “denied,
14 Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India,” BAWS Vol. 3, 320.
15 Ibid. Ambedkar’s emphasis on distinguishing the “graded inequality” of Hindu caste from the
“inequality” of both European aristocracy and modern industrial societies anticipated an
important strand of postwar sociology and anthropology, on the distinct forms of social
stratification in India. For a discussion, see Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and
Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), 37-38.
16 Ambedkar, “India and the Pre-Requisites of Communism,” BAWS Vol. 3, 126.
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suppressed, and sacrificed” for groups’ collective self-interest.17 Ambedkar found the closest
philosophical parallel to Indian society in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, with its contempt for the
“crowd” and its emphasis on affirming always-present group-based differences in ability and
worth. He recognized the “astonishment and resentment” such a comparison might elicit from
Indian readers in the early 1940s, given the close links being drawn in Western Europe between
Nietzschean philosophy and German Nationalism.18 But Ambedkar insisted that castes essentially
expressed the disdain for shared interest and the lack of sympathy for—indeed, the desire to control
and command—perceived inferiors which Nietzsche idealized in The Antichrist. “The Hindu
social order” was in effect “Nietzsche’s Gospel put into action.”19 Whenever a caste perceived
itself as “higher” relative to another, it did not feel “bound to do charity for the uplift of the
Common man.”20 If anything, castes reduced all those of lower rank to servitude and “perpetual
degradation” and, like Nietzsche’s übermensch nobles, used them as tools to maintain their own
communal “supremacy.”21
Indian society was, then, a site of oppression cascading from ruling classes down to workers.
The complex of kinship groups at the very bottom of India’s social order, classified as
17 Ibid., 77.
18 Ibid., 75. On Ambedkar as a reader of Nietzsche, see Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality:
Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 268-
70.
19 Ambedkar, “India and the Pre-Requisites of Communism,” 116.
20 Ibid., 121.
21 Ibid.
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Untouchables (ati-sudra), were the most victimized of all, excluded and kept in a state of near-
slavery (bahishkar) even by other laborers who saw themselves as having slightly higher rank. The
moral psychology of “graded inequality” informed each social institution in India. Villages, for
instance, were never cohesive “single social units,” but were always segregated along caste lines
and organized to allow the domination of inferiors.22 Each caste viewed itself as “superior” to those
beneath: “as an overlord, [a member of a caste] feels it absolutely essential to maintain his prestige.
This prestige he cannot maintain unless he has at his command a retinue to dance attendance on
him.”23 Village India was where caste ties were strictest and at their most oppressive. The only
thing uniting different groups was their shared debasement of those at the bottom. The lowest
castes were “stamped as an inferior and…held down to that status by all ways and means which a
majority can command.”24 Caste Hindus had absolute command over lower castes and
Untouchables and sought to keep them in servility and segregate them “outside the fold” of their
own associated life.25 The lowest could not “insist on rights” against caste Hindus: “they should
pray for mercy and favor and rest content with what is offered.”26
22 Ambedkar, “Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto,” 20.
23 Ibid., 22.
24 Ibid., 25.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
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The “Village Republic,” as Ambedkar sardonically called it, was “the very negation of a
Republic,” with “no room for equality [or] fraternity.”27 An exact equivalent of the Indian village
was the market economy introduced through British colonial rule. Here, too, Hindus separated
themselves from each other and subjugated the lowest castes. Economic institutions provided an
easy way for castes to consolidate their power and to keep groups like the Untouchables in servile
positions. Any market transaction in India was characterized by, on the one hand, “tyranny, vanity,
pride, arrogance, greed, [and] selfishness” displayed by a powerful group, and, on the other,
“insecurity, poverty, [and] degradation” imposed onto a weaker one.28 In “Annihilation of Caste,”
the speech he was scheduled to deliver in Lahore in May 1936 (later cancelled due to a fear of
27 Ibid., 26. In his denunciations of village life, Ambedkar departed very significantly from anti-
imperial development economics and the strand of Indian nationalism around M.K. Gandhi in
the 1940s. Here, villages were seen as self-sufficient, mutualistic communities which could be
the basis for decentralization and an “Indian” socialism. Ambedkar acknowledged his dislike of
“the love of intellectual Indians for the village community” while introducing the Draft
Constitution on November 4, 1948. Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (CAD). Vol.
7 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1966), 38-39. Also see the discussions in Surinder S.
Jodhka, “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar,” Economic
and Political Weekly 37.32 (2002): 3343-53 and Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United
States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2015), 85-86.
28 Ambedkar, “What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,” BAWS Vol. 9, 285.
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backlash from social conservatives), Ambedkar argued that caste oppression was the key to
understanding Indian political economy:
The Caste System is not merely division of labor. It is also a division of laborers. Civilized
society undoubtedly needs division of labor. But in no civilized society is division of labor
accompanied by this unnatural division of laborers into water-tight compartments. [The]
Caste System…is a hierarchy, in which divisions of laborers are graded one above the other.
In no other country is the division of labor accompanied by this gradation of laborers.29
One could not analyze modern economic life in India “without having to grapple with the problems
created by prejudices which make Indian people observe the distinctions of high and low, clean
and unclean.”30 Grafted onto a society committed to ordered hierarchy and rank, the market
economy in colonial India reproduced the norms and practices of the traditional village.
In more concrete terms, caste Hindus used the market to determine the kinds of work that
those they considered beneath themselves could undertake, as well as the conditions under which
they would undertake their labor. Since the purpose of caste identity was to command the “low”
and the “unclean,” economic institutions were means to ensure that low castes catered to the needs
of the powerful. Each low caste was compelled to perform some sort of labor to economically
support its immediate superiors, ranging from menial household and ritual chores to tenant
farming. Untouchables at the base of the Hindu pyramid performed such tasks for all other classes.
29 Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste,” BAWS Vol. 1, 47.
30 Ibid.
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Further, the servile labor required of low castes was enforced under threat of violence and
collective punishment. In Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables in 1943,
Ambedkar cited findings from a Bombay Provincial Government report on caste relations he
himself had co-authored in 1928-29 to illustrate the nature of such enforcement:
The Depressed Classes have no economic independence in most parts of the Presidency. Some
cultivate the lands of the orthodox classes as their tenants at will. Others live on their earnings
as farm laborers employed by the orthodox classes and the rest subsist on the food or grain
given to them by the orthodox classes in lieu of service rendered to them as village servants.
We have heard of numerous instances where the orthodox classes have used their economic
power as a weapon against those Depressed Classes in their villages, when the latter have
dared to exercise their rights, and have evicted them from their land, and stopped their
employment and discontinued their remuneration as village servants. This boycott is often
planned on such an extensive scale as to include the prevention of the Depressed Classes from
using the commonly used paths and the stoppage of sale of the necessaries of life by the village
Bania [moneylender].31
31 Ambedkar, “Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables,” BAWS Vol. 9, 420.
Ambedkar’s use of the terms “Depressed Classes” and “orthodox classes” was the standard way
of referring to Untouchable castes and upper caste Hindus, respectively, by the British state as
well as low-caste movements during the first half of the twentieth century. “Depressed Classes”
was gradually replaced by the terms “Scheduled Castes” and “Dalit” [‘broken down/oppressed’]
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“Economic power” was therefore a “weapon” directed at those of lower rank in order to keep them
bound within relations of “service.” It was “the chief weapon in the armory of the Hindus.”32 As a
concept, “economic power” described the ability of caste Hindus to dictate labor conditions for the
Depressed Classes through ostracism and punishment.
Ambedkar brought these strands of economic analysis together in a remarkable speech at the
All India Trade Union Workers’ Study Camp in September 1943, organized by the Indian
Federation of Labor. Ambedkar’s main target in the speech was the “ideology” of “freedom of
contract.”33 He argued that thinkers who “sanctified and upheld” contracts “in the name of liberty,”
as expressions of reciprocal benefit and individual need, assumed equality of status between parties
to a contract.34 This assumption was untrue in any modern society, but especially in a caste system
structured around “graded inequality.” In this context, contracts merely “gave the strong the
opportunity to defraud the weak.”35 To support economic freedom in India based on individualistic
principles of “liberty, property or the pursuit of happiness” was to overlook the desire for
from the 1940s. For a discussion of the origin and fluidity of these categories, see Anupama Rao,
The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009), 1-80 and Ramnarayan Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit
History in North India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1-23.
32 Ambedkar, “Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables,” 419.
33 Ambedkar, “Labor and Parliamentary Democracy,” BAWS Vol. 10, 108.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
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“economic power” over the vulnerable which animated caste identity.36 Where advocates of the
free market saw rational individual decisions between autonomous equals needing to be protected
from political tyranny, Ambedkar saw an aspiration to dominate and an already existing system of
group-based tyranny.37 Diagnosing the collective psychology of caste society unmasked the
realities of power underneath the surface of the market economy. Given the social conditions of
India, unregulated or unchecked forms of contractual exchange between castes would turn into
hierarchical means of command and discipline. Caste made it much more likely that the danger of
private tyranny by the powerful and wealthy within modern commerce would emerge to the fore
and undermine equality.
The relationship of the caste system to “economic power” was the key to Ambedkar’s
diagnosis of labor contracts in India. The rootedness of the latter within an existing social hierarchy
undermined any claims about equality between participants or about rational thought and
36 Ibid.
37 In this sense, as Gopal Guru notes, it was society rather than the state which was the main source
of tyranny for Ambedkar. The focus on social psychology and practice rather than abstract
commodity labor as the source of oppression also marked a key departure from Indian Marxism.
See Gopal Guru, “Ambedkar’s Idea of Social Justice,” in Dalits and the State, ed. Ghanshyam
Shah (Mussoorie: Center for Rural Studies, 2002), 40-50. On the latter point about departing
from Marxism, see Anupama Rao, “Revisiting Interwar Thought: Stigma, Labor, and the
Immanence of Caste-Class,” in The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R.
Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and Subalterns, ed. Cosimo Zene (London: Routledge, 2013),
43-58.
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individual need as the sole motivations for a contractual relation.38 Consequently, the fundamental
problem of a free market in the Indian context was the abuse of decision-making power within any
contract, created out of caste Hindus’ drive to co-opt market instruments in order to oppress. But
despite its centrality to Ambedkar’s critique of the market, his theory of domination through
contract has generally been overlooked in the secondary literature. Within the reading of
Ambedkar as a radical or welfare-state liberal, the effects of caste on the market are understood in
terms of a corrosion of Lockean universalism, which then, as a philosophy and political project,
stood needing to be recovered and redeemed. Since caste hierarchies created unequal divisions of
wealth and ownership, Ambedkar’s goal, the interpretation goes, was to ensure a robust scheme of
individual property rights for all citizens. The distribution of private property (especially land) to
Depressed Classes and the legal recognition and protection of their possessions would offset the
material inequality of caste and ensure a more egalitarian, ethical market economy enabled through
38 There are clear echoes here of Henry Sumner Maine’s influential argument in his 1861 book
Ancient Law that traditional societies like India’s were based on ascribed “status” rather than
voluntary “contract.” Ambedkar regularly referenced Ancient Law, and his argument about the
role of caste identity in market transactions can be considered a novel extension and
appropriation of Maine’s thesis. The most important idea Ambedkar drew from Ancient Law was
that introducing modern commercial practices based on private ownership and exchange into a
communal society would result in violence. He used this to build a larger critique of colonial
capitalism for the ease with which it magnified existing pre-capitalist forms of oppression. For
Maine’s account, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal
Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 119-47.
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state action.39 As Jon Soske argues in a recent study, Ambedkar “attempted to expand the scope,
instruments, and character of constitutional law” beyond laissez-faire liberalism, in order to better
and more fully guarantee “individual freedoms” for all and to realize the emancipatory potential
of “Locke’s language of liberty and property.”40 But reducing Ambedkar’s economics to property
rights and individual security elides his trenchant critique of private market transactions as such.
Ambedkar’s concern was not simply that poor social groups lacked property and could not
participate in the market as equals, but that, given the psychology of Hindu society, the Depressed
Classes would always be targets of fraud and subjugation from higher castes. The problem was
not simply material poverty but the inevitable tyrannical violence resulting from private exchange;
since the market in India became enveloped within caste domination, its processes would always
be unjust. Market reform had to exceed resource allocation in order to regulate relationships
between contracting agents. As Ambedkar began to develop proposals for constitutional reform in
British India in the mid-1930s and early 1940s, he equated such transformative regulation with
giving greater decision-making power to those who were most vulnerable within the caste system.
39 See Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 306; Narendra Jadhav, Dr. Ambedkar’s Economic Thought
and Philosophy (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1993), 56-76; and Sukhadeo Thorat, “Ambedkar’s
Interpretation of the Caste System, its Economic Consequences, and Suggested Remedies,”
in Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, ed. S.M. Michael (Los Angeles: Sage Publications,
2007), 287-301.
40 Jon Soske, “The Other Prince: Ambedkar, Constitutional Democracy, and the Agency of the
Law,” in The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar, 59-71.
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III. Theory of the State
Ambedkar’s views on the possibility of using a centralized state to combat the problems of the
colonial economy were outlined in detail between 1936 and 1946, the decade during which he was
elected to the Bombay legislature from the Independent Labor Party (ILP, or the Swatantra Majur
Paksha in Marathi) and then served a four-year term as Member for Labor in the Viceroy’s
Council. We can identify three general economic principles that Ambedkar made foundational to
his theory of the state during these years: (1) extensive government oversight over the ownership
and use of both industrial and agricultural property, (2) a transfer of wealth to the poor through
land resettlement in rural areas, a higher minimum wage in all industries, and progressive taxation,
and (3) separate political representation for low caste groups in economic governance bodies.
On the first point, Ambedkar shared much with other socialists in the 1930s, especially those
associated with the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) established in 1934, the All India Kisan Sabha
(AIKS) established in 1936, and other regional peasant-workers’ organizations formed after 1935
out of disillusionment with the increasingly centrist nature of INC politics. Like these groups, the
ILP under Ambedkar’s leadership espoused expansive state powers over industry and agriculture.
Its party platform leading up to the 1937 provincial elections, published in the Times of India in
August 1936, underlined that the colonial state should either have strong regulatory oversight over
market actors or bring them under its direct control: “the Party accepts the principle of State
management and State ownership of industry whenever it may be necessary in the interest of the
people.”41 State ownership entailed replacing private credit and moneylending with regulated
41 “New Political Party Formed by Dr. Ambedkar,” Times of India, August 15, 1936.
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government funds, along with restructuring production through publicly-owned “cooperative
societies.”42 The commitment to comprehensive public management of the economy challenged
what many in the ILP considered to be the consolidation of a dangerous pro-business line in the
Congress since the early 1930s, given leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel and C. Rajagpolachari’s
appeasements of mill-owners and entrepreneurs in Bombay and elsewhere. For Ambedkar, the
mainstream Congress of the 1930s, despite all its claims to anti-imperialism and socialism, was
quickly revealing itself to be an industrialist-landlord party unwilling to alienate its core support
base of property-owning castes.43 Demanding direct state ownership of industry was his principled
rejection of the commitment to private property rights underlying Congress’ socio-economic
conservatism.
As a “labor organization” meant to “advance the welfare of the laboring” and “Depressed”
classes, the ILP insisted that state ownership should prioritize workers across all industries. In any
context, the economic needs of laborers—whether factory workers in the Bombay mills (whose
one-day general strike the ILP helped organize in November 1938) or tenant agriculturalists in the
countryside—overrode the needs of their supervisors or landlords. There was a strongly
42 Ibid.
43 E.g., “Workers’ Splendid Response: Appeal to Labor to Organize,” Times of India, November
8, 1938. Between 1937 and 1940, Ambedkar also outlined his opposition to Congress economic
policy in Bombay through his Marathi journal Janata (The People), which he had begun editing
in 1930. See the discussion in Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, 190-94. On the
Congress’ pro-business stance in Bombay during the 1930s, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India:
1885-1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 361-62.
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redistributionist element to the vision of the state Ambedkar articulated during these years. The
ILP election manifesto listed the following policies as foundational to its platform: a mandatory
minimum wage, nationalized social security, strict regulatory oversight over the treatment of
employees, land settlement to provide economic security for rural laborers, and progressive
taxation to fund public schemes (i.e., significantly reducing colonial tax rates on small-scale
peasants and increasing them for larger land and business owners).44 The state as a whole was to
favor one group of citizens (workers) over all others, distributing resources directly to them and
extending disciplinary regulations over employers towards this end. In his opening speech at the
Plenary Labor Conference in New Delhi in September 1943, Ambedkar argued that labor
empowerment had to be the guiding motivation for postwar rebuilding and planning in India: “it
will not be enough to bend our energies for the production of more wealth in India. We shall have
to agree not merely to recognize the basic right of all Indians to share in that wealth as a means for
a decent and dignified existence but to devise ways and means to insure [the workman] against
insecurity.”45
Much of the legislation Ambedkar proposed as an ILP member of the Bombay Legislative
Assembly (1937-39) and then in the Viceroy’s Council (1942-46) shared a general focus on
privileging workers’ concerns over their employers’ property rights. These included the Khoti
Abolition Bill (1937), which sought to control the power that large-scale landholding peasants
(khot) in the Deccan region had over their tenant cultivators by establishing direct relationships
between these cultivators and the state; the Mahar Watan Abolition Bill (1939), which forbade
44 “New Political Party Formed by Dr. Ambedkar.”
45 Ambedkar, “First Session of Plenary Labor Conference,” BAWS, Vol. 10, 104.
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upper caste landowners from making the untouchable Mahar caste in Bombay work as servants in
exchange for leased plots of land; and the Factories (Amendment) Bill (1946), which sought to
limit working hours in India and ensure overtime pay in accordance with standards set by the
International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1919.46 Combined with Ambedkar’s broader adherence
to public ownership of production, such policies evinced a view of government that obliged it to
override absolute proprietary rights in order to set the terms of economic association.
The third aspect of Ambedkar’s theory of the state was the most far-reaching. He insisted that
state action protecting and empowering laborers had to be carried out by laborers themselves. The
transformation of economic relationships through legislatures and administrative bodies would be
compromised if these institutions did not include laborers. Ambedkar was especially critical of
legislatures dominated by parties like the Congress, which espoused a politics of redistribution but
overwhelmingly drew its rank and file membership from propertied classes. In his 1943 speech at
the Workers’ Study Camp, he delivered an impassioned polemic against reducing workers’
movements to trade unionism. What was required, he argued, was not just being empowered vis à
vis employers in the workplace but transferring this into political power, in order to ensure that
redistributive and pro-labor laws in fact aligned with workers’ needs:
46 See S.S. Narwade, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Indian Independent Labor Party: Issues Related to
Social Justice Raised in Bombay Legislature, 1937-39 (Pune: Snehavardhan Publishing House,
1997). Ambedkar’s engagement with ILO conventions to argue for regulated working hours is
available in Central Legislative Assembly Debates: Official Report, Vol. I, no. 7 (Delhi:
Government of India Press, 1946), 1304-6.
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I am not against Trade Unions. They serve a very useful purpose. But it would be a great
mistake to suppose that Trade Unions are a panacea for all the ills of labor. Trade Unions, even
if they are powerful, are not strong enough to compel capitalists to run capitalism better. Trade
Unions would be much more effective if they had behind them a Labor Government to rely on.
Control of Government must be the target for Labor to aim at. Unless Trade Unionism aims at
controlling government, trade unions will do very little good to the workers and will be a source
of perpetual squabbles among Trade Union Leaders.47
The regime Ambedkar referred to here as a “Labor Government” was a directly ruled workers’
republic. Labor representatives participated in government rather than voting as a constituency for
parties to enact favorable policies.
In the context of Indian society, achieving such participation meant securing separate
legislative representation for caste groups who comprised the country’s laboring population. The
“Depressed Classes” compelled into service as tenant farmers, household servants, and
increasingly as property-less urban laborers by upper castes should be elected through separate
electorates in which they would select amongst candidates from their own community. Separate
electorates for the Depressed Classes ensured that there would always be a set number of
Scheduled Caste representatives in every legislature, regardless of electoral outcome, and that the
most vulnerable laborers would themselves be directly choosing their representatives, instead of
having representatives be nominated by a party of mixed socio-economic formation. For
Ambedkar, separate electorates protected against the co-optation of politics for elite gain and
47 Ambedkar, “Labor and Parliamentary Democracy,” 110. Emphasis added.
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maintained the state as a true workers’ institution, under the premise that members of the
Depressed Classes would best understand and enact their community’s concerns. In the 1945 book
What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, his most thorough treatment of the
topic, Ambedkar referred to separate electorates as “controls” placed upon the lawmaking process:
“the reservations demanded by the servile classes are really controls over the power of the
governing classes…. The reservations do no more than correlate the constitution to the social
institutions of the country in order to prevent political power from falling into the hands of the
Governing class.”48 The main intended effect of separate representation was to make laboring
castes into agents of the state’s regulation of working conditions and contracts.
The proposal for caste-based electorates was one of Ambedkar’s most distinctive and most
controversial conceptual moves. It marked him as a radical anti-Hindu populist for socialists and
trade union leaders who were otherwise supportive of pro-labor economic policy. The most
prominent denunciations came from Gandhi, for whom separate electorates opened the door to
dangerous sectarianism and class warfare within the Hindu community.49 Contemporary scholars
have taken the separate electorates program as an illustration of Ambedkar’s support for minority
rights and group representation. For historians of South Asian democracy, Ambedkar’s attempts
to constitutionally secure representation for the Scheduled Castes, as a dominated minority,
48 Ambedkar, “What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,” 234.
49 M.K. Gandhi, “Speech at Minorities Committee Meeting (November 13 1931),” in The
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), Vol. 54 (New Delhi: Publications Division
Government of India, 1999), 154-59. Also see Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability, 63-
68.
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expressed the emphases on differentiated citizenship and group-based mobilization and benefits
which have been characteristic features of Indian politics through the twentieth century.50 In my
interpretation, however, once we situate separate electorates alongside the broader demand for
“Labor Government,” then the proposal comes to also embody an alternative to private economic
activity. Given the state’s capacity to override property rights and voluntary contracts within
Ambedkar’s thought, separate representation would give Depressed Class representatives power
over individual market actors, especially over employers and landowners. Because they had a
direct voice in the state and the state had wide-ranging discretion over the market, those at the
bottom of the Hindu economic order could control the actions of their superiors. When
implemented within the structures of a managed economy, separate representation became a new
form of public economic governance. It replaced the personal authority of property-owners with
the rule of an elected body of the most dominated workers.51
50 See Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); Niraja Gopal Jayal, “A False Dichotomy? The Unresolved
Tension between Universal and Differentiated Citizenship in India,” Oxford Development
Studies 39.2 (2011): 185-204; Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal
Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42-43; and Gurpreet
Mahajan, Identities and Rights: Aspects of Liberal Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 115-48.
51 My interpretation of separate electorates as a form of transformative economic rule thus departs
from much of the secondary literature on the topic. My reading is informed by older strands
within the Ambedkarite tradition, especially the literature of the Dalit Panthers and the
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Ambedkar’s political thought between the early 1930s and 1946 therefore saw the state as
fundamentally opposed to the free market. A deeply oppressive system of caste-based economic
practices rendered the market a source of subordination for vulnerable groups. A state that had the
capacity to control private enterprise through participatory popular institutions emerged as the
correlative response. During the important four years between 1946 and 1950, when South Asia
attained its formal independence from the British Empire, Ambedkar began to give further
institutional shape to these ideas. In July 1947, Ambedkar was elected from Bombay Province
with the support of some prominent Congress members to the Constituent Assembly of India, the
body proposed by Viceroy Mountbatten as responsible for creating an independent, post-Partition
constitution. In August of that year, Ambedkar was appointed by Jawaharlal Nehru as both the
first Law Minister of independent India and the Chairman of the Constitutional Drafting
Committee. He accepted these positions on the grounds that they would allow him to translate his
views about representation and planning into concrete policy.52 In reality, the conservative nature
Satyashodak Communist Party (SCP) in the 1970s. Inspired by Black Power movements in the
United States and workers’ revolts in southern Africa and Southeast Asia, these radical outfits
tried to recover the economically revolutionary core of Ambedkar’s political thought, and
equated the political empowerment of the low-caste poor with overcoming the exploitation of
private capital. See, as an example, “Dalit Panthers Manifesto,” in Untouchable! Voices of the
Dalit Liberation Movement, ed. Barbara Joshi (London: Minority Rights Group International,
1986), 141-46.
52 Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, Life and Mission (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962), 394-
416.
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of the Assembly and the need to conciliate a range of factions and parties significantly undercut
Ambedkar’s radical intentions.53 The Draft Constitution he finalized in 1949 closely followed the
British-authored 1935 Government of India Act. During a debate in Parliament in September 1953,
Ambedkar famously conceded that the Constitution he had agreed to three years earlier “did not
suit anybody.”54 But at the very least, Ambedkar’s leadership roles in the Constituent Assembly
gave him an opportunity to bring together and expand on different aspects of his political thought.
In 1947, he submitted a long memorandum to the Constituent Assembly entitled States and
Minorities: What are their Rights and How to Protect Them in the Constitution of Free India on
behalf of the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF), a party he established in 1942. States and
Minorities was the most comprehensive of Ambedkar’s political writings from the 1940s. It
outlined in detail what a postcolonial constitution based on his philosophy might look like.
One of the most consistent arguments Ambedkar made in States and Minorities was that the
free market was essentially anti-democratic. He identified four key principles of any democratic
regime: “(1) the individual is an end in himself, (2) the individual has certain inalienable rights
which must be guaranteed to him by the constitution, (3) the individual shall not be required to
relinquish any of his constitutional rights as a condition precedent to the receipt of a privilege, and
(4) the State shall not delegate powers to private persons to govern others.”55 While the first two
principles resonated with natural right justifications for sovereignty in Anglo-American
53 See Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), 144-62.
54 “Andhra State Bill Debate (1953),” BAWS, Vol. 15, 862.
55 Ambedkar, “States and Minorities,” BAWS, Vol. 1, 409.
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jurisprudence, the fourth principle in particular signaled Ambedkar’s distinctive statism and
concern about private power. A democratic regime could only remain so as long as its state
continued to have exclusive right of rule over society. Once Ambedkar had defined democracy in
these terms, he argued that the existence of a free market within democratic society contradicted
his fourth principle. Private enterprise gave individual market actors power to set the conditions
under which workers would engage and interact with them. They usurped the role of the state,
without having any of the rights-based constitutional constraints which controlled state action.
Those who were forced to labor within free or unregulated markets inevitably had to “subject
themselves to be governed by private employers.”56 They had to forego the rights and
constitutional provisions that applied to them as public citizens.
Ambedkar described the power of private employers as a “dictatorship,” for its arbitrary and
unchecked nature:
It is true that where the State refrains from intervention what remains is liberty. But this does
not dispose of the matter. One more question remains to be answered. To whom and for whom
is this liberty? Obviously this liberty is liberty to the landlords to increase rents, for capitalists
to increase hours of work and reduce rate of wages…. In other words what is called liberty
from the control of the State is another name for the dictatorship of the private employer.57
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 410.
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In effect, then, a democracy which encouraged private enterprise was a contradiction in terms. Its
goal of equality between citizens would be “completely set at naught by the forces which emerge
from the economic structure”—namely, the domination of workers by their employers.58 A key
problem in liberal models of Western democracy was the assumption that the economic and
political structures of society could harmonize and complement each other on their own. Such
regimes were democracies more in name than in fact, and would eventually be consumed by
internal violence and inequality created by the market. Ambedkar considered liberal democracy to
be a cautionary warning rather than an aspirational ideal for decolonizing countries in the non-
West: “all countries like India which are late-comers in the field of Constitution-making should
not copy the faults of other countries. They should profit by the experience of their predecessors.”59
This section of States and Minorities was one of Ambedkar’s most direct statements of his
divergence from the philosophical ideal of economic individualism, especially as it was expressed
in the legal traditions of nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.
While the unchecked private power of employers and property-owners was a recurrent problem
across all capitalist societies, it was particularly acute in India. Drawing on his own writings from
the 1930s and early 1940s, Ambedkar argued in States and Minorities that the “Hindu Code of
life” championed labor oppression.60 It motivated upper and intermediate castes to “give
themselves many privileges” and to “heap upon” the lowest social groups (Untouchables) “many
58 Ibid., 412.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 426.
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indignities…incompatible with the dignity and sanctity of human life.”61 Economically, caste
Hindus sought to keep Untouchable laboring castes in a state of subordination. They were reduced
to “landless laborers entirely dependent upon such employment as Hindus may choose to give
them and on such wages as Hindus may find it profitable to pay.”62 They were “handicapped in
the struggle for a free and honorable life” because of how easily their complete “economic
dependence” on higher castes transformed into a condition of “perpetual slavery.”63 As he had
done in “Annihilation of Caste” in 1936 and his speech at the Trade Union Workers’ Study Camp
in 1943, Ambedkar again underlined that the introduction of free enterprise into India consolidated
the “anti-social” psychology of Hindu society.64 Turning landless Scheduled Castes into property-
owning farmers and independent entrepreneurs would have no transformative effects if the
contracts they entered into with upper castes continued to be used to dominate and subjugate:
“consolidation of holdings and tenancy legislation are worse than useless…. [They cannot] be of
any help to the 60 millions of Untouchables who are just landless laborers.”65
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 425-26.
63 Ibid., 426.
64 Ibid., 414.
65 Ibid., 408. By “tenancy legislation,” Ambedkar referred to laws like the Bengal Tenancy Act
(1885), which controlled rent increases and recognized occupancy rights of tenants in rural areas.
These laws were critical in the development of private property and a class of small-scale,
landowning occupancy tenants in British India. See Peter Robb, Ancient Rights and Future
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What was required instead was eliminating the subjection that occurred through arbitrary and
overbearing caste power, propped up through freedom of contract laws. “State ownership in
agriculture” and “State Socialism in the field of industry” were key to the economic plan of States
and Minorities.66 Public ownership overcame the problem of subjection in two ways. First, it
controlled the decision-making power of employers who might impose conditions that maintained
their caste superiority and worked against the needs and interests of laborers from the Depressed
Classes. Ambedkar argued that restraining the decision-making capacity of individual actors
through public action was necessary in order to secure laboring castes against dependency. It was
important, he observed, to “limit not only the power of Government to impose arbitrary restraints,”
but also to remove the existence of such power in the hands of “more powerful individuals.”67
State ownership would “eliminate the possibility of the more powerful having the power to impose
arbitrary restraints on the less powerful,” by “withdrawing the control he has over the economic
life of the people.68 As such, Ambedkar laid out a detailed program of government-led
industrialization and agriculture. Instead of distributing equal amounts of private wealth or
property to laboring groups and leaving contract law and employers’ rights otherwise untouched,
Ambedkar proposed that industry be fully brought under the purview of the state. The state needed
to have jurisdiction over private actors so that it could always determine that rates of credit and
Comfort: Bihar, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and British Rule in India (Richmond, UK:
Curzon, 1997).
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 410.
68 Ibid.
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insurance, the allocation of profits, the use of resources, and the conditions of labor were to the
benefit of laborers.69 If a private actor proved unable or unwilling to abide by constitutional
directives, then the state had authority to acquire their property upon payment of adequate
compensation.70 All this was “protection against the economic exploitation” of the lowest castes
inherent to Hindu commercial practices.71
But what guaranteed that the state itself would not undertake such exploitation? What
prevented legislative and administrative bodies from being co-opted by the very socio-economic
interests they were supposed to override, so that policies for labor empowerment would either
never be implemented or would only be applied in ways that strategically benefited powerful
castes? Far from being a conjecture, this was the dark reality that Ambedkar saw confronting
independent India under Congress leadership. Here, socialist constitutional principles would be
left up to the will of property-owning castes to apply. Ambedkar had no illusions about the result:
“such swaraj [self-rule] would aggravate the sufferings of the Untouchables. For, in addition to a
hostile administration, there will be an indifferent Legislature and a callous Executive. The result
will be that the administration unbridled in venom and in harshness, uncontrolled by the
Legislature and the Executive, may pursue its policy of inequity…without any curb.”72 To address
69 Ibid., 396-97.
70 Ibid., 396.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 414. Tellingly, around the same time he started work on States and Minorities in mid-
1946, Ambedkar castigated the Congress as an elitist “pseudo-socialist organization” in an
interview with the Bombay Chronicle. “Ambedkar Parades as Congress Benefactor,” Bombay
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the threats of elite capture and potentially unaccountable government, Ambedkar gave a detailed
formulation of his “separate electorates” proposal. Article 2, Section 4 of the draft constitution
provided in States and Minorities argued that Scheduled Caste groups should have a minimum
percentage of representation in every legislative and executive body at both central and state levels.
Representation would be through separate electorates based on universal franchise, and the number
of candidates contesting in a Scheduled Caste electorate would be calculated according to the “ratio
of their population to the total population.”73 In constituencies where the caste Hindu population
was overwhelmingly large, the ratio of representation would be weighted, so that Scheduled Castes
were assigned an adequate number of candidates even with a small numerical minority.74
To achieve power-sharing in multiple branches of government, Ambedkar proposed breaking
with the Westminster model of a parliamentary executive, which was implemented at the
provincial level in British India through the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, and
instead adopting the American system of separate elections for the legislature and the executive.75
The American system provided an additional and more effective check on the possibility of upper-
caste monopolization of power. Under the British system, parliamentary majorities had the right
to appoint all cabinet positions and to thereby shape the executive. In the event that the legislature’s
Chronicle, July 25, 1946. Reproduced in Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for
Independence in India, 1946, Part I, ed. Sumit Sarkar (New Delhi: Indian Council for Historical
Research, 2008), 905.
73 Ibid., 401.
74 Ibid., 402.
75 Ibid., 398.
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elections had not been conducted under sufficiently representative or egalitarian conditions, the
executive would also become a site of elite co-optation. If the formation of the executive was kept
separate and non-parliamentary, on the other hand, then there would be an alternate popularly
elected branch of government to challenge parliamentary supremacy.76 Ambedkar also emphasized
weighted proportional representation of Scheduled Castes within local government and
administrative bodies for this purpose. Local bodies were the most immediate agents of
government policy and could resist the possible corrosion of the federal legislature.77
Separate representation secured a political voice at every level of government for those who
“had no possibility of…being placed in a position to govern.”78 In the Indian context, its “object
was to free the Untouchables from thralldom.”79 It was assigned not on the basis of cultural or
religious difference but “by reference to social considerations”—that is, based on the question of
whether or not socio-economic relations between groups were marked by a disproportionate
76 Ibid., 413. Ambedkar first developed an admiration for American-style separate elections during
a series of lectures on English law he delivered at Government Law College Bombay during the
1934-35 academic year, in which he critically analyzed the English jurist A.V. Dicey’s writings
on parliamentary supremacy. See Ambedkar, “Lectures on the English Constitution,” BAWS,
Vol. 12, 155-95.
77 Ibid., 402.
78 Ibid., 424.
79 Ibid., 425.
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allocation of power, putting one group in a position to oppress another.80 As a system for “the
sharing of power,” separate electorates allowed the subjugated group to have an equal say in how
economic relationships between its members and the rest of society functioned, rather than leaving
policymaking about these relationships vulnerable to the “Divine Right of the Majority” to govern
and change according to its own wishes.81 Ambedkar thus understood political justice as the state’s
transformation of the transaction structures of the market, replacing private action with public
bodies consisting of representatives from the most subjugated laboring groups.
States and Minorities was the most detailed exposition of Ambedkar’s mature political thought.
He returned to many of its core themes near the end of his life in December 1955, when he
proposed the formation of the Republican Party of India (RPI) to challenge the electoral hegemony
of Congress. In his initial program for the RPI platform, Ambedkar lobbied for organizing
Scheduled Castes dependent on wage labor into a party that could secure parliamentary seats and
work towards wealth and land redistribution.82 There was a strong continuity between these later
political writings and Ambedkar’s earliest scholarship on caste and Hinduism. Ambedkar’s
emphasis on political empowerment and building state capacity in relation to the market during
80 Ibid., 422. This point about socio-economic hierarchy rather than religious difference as the
justification for separate electorates was another of Ambedkar’s key arguments against Gandhi,
who insisted that, unlike Muslim and Christian minorities, the Scheduled Castes were Hindus
and so did not need separate group-based representation.
81 Ibid., 427.
82 Ambedkar, “Republican Party Stands for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Justice,” BAWS, Vol.
17, 151-57
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his years in the ILP, the Scheduled Castes Federation, the Constituent Assembly, and finally the
Republican Party was a natural consequence of his diagnosis of Indian society as an oppressive
structure. Since caste divided the Indian population into segments dominating those below,
freedom of contract was a form of compulsion for caste Hindus to subject Dalit laborers to their
own wills. The appeal of state sovereignty based on representative institutions was its capacity to
impose constitutional norms onto acts of private power and to make the market more egalitarian
than it could ever become on its own within the strictures of caste. As a result, this was a state
occupied not so much with protecting the rights of abstract individual citizens as with distributing
sovereign authority amongst groups of economic actors.
IV. Conclusion
That poverty and political economy were formative problems for the Indian founding, and that
Ambedkar as Chairman of the constitutional Drafting Committee was a key figure in discourses
about market regulation, post-independence industrialization, and anti-poverty legislation, has
been widely noted by scholars of the period.83 Yet the framing of Ambedkar as a liberal thinker
means that his approach to the economy has only been seen in terms of individual rights—rights
83 See, especially, Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: A History of the Indian
Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Uday Singh Mehta, “Indian
Constitutionalism: Crisis, Unity, and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian
Constitution, eds. Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 38-54.
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to property, work, non-discrimination, and so on. My main assertion is not that the liberal
interpretation is wholly wrong—Ambedkar never discounted the importance of fundamental civil
and economic rights inhering to individual citizens—but that it only partly captures his
multifaceted philosophy. In analyzing Ambedkar’s view of labor contracts in relation to his theory
of “graded inequality” within Hinduism, it becomes clear that the primary source of corruption for
markets in India were unequal structures of collective decision-making and bargaining power.
These structures produced unchecked oppression by those who were relatively empowered in
Hindu society and dependence and subjugation for those at the bottom—the “tyranny” of the
powerful and the “degradation” of the weak.84 To focus simply on how Ambedkar critiqued
violations of individual autonomy and dignity is to overlook his diagnosis of the problem of
hierarchical inter-group relations.
The domination inherent to private contracts led Ambedkar to formulate a constitutional state
that extended far beyond guarantees of rights and capacities. From his involvement with the
Independent Labor Party onwards, Ambedkar outlined a regime targeted towards the
empowerment of dominated laboring castes. State management of property and industry checked
the authority of property-owners and employers, while separate caste-based electorates and
parliamentary seats gave the most oppressed laborers in Indian society a voice in setting the
conditions of work and commercial exchange. The result was a democratic workers’ state
responding to the group stratification and pervasive, internalized psychology of oppression within
the powerful that caused violence in the free market. As the Dalit Panthers powerfully asserted in
1973, almost three decades after the initial publication of States and Minorities, the animating
84 Ambedkar, “What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,” 285.
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principle of Ambedkar’s constitutional philosophy was to ensure that the economically exploited
had institutional power to determine their own working lives: “in a democracy where those who
with their blood wet every grain of the country’s soil have to starve, where men have to forgo the
land under their feet, the roof over their heads, where the upright have to break down and fall…in
such a democracy, independence cannot be called true independence. The struggle for
independence was a struggle under the leadership of national capitalists, landlords, feudals, for
their own benefit. It was not under the leadership of the people…. And Dr. Ambedkar had always
said that it should be of the latter.”85
What revolutionary groups like the Dalit Panthers found in Ambedkar in the years after Indian
independence, and what emerged through the link Ambedkar drew between socialism and group
representation, was a view of democracy as the self-determination of the economically
subordinated across political and economic institutions. Ambedkarite constitutionalism sought to
overturn interpretations of popular sovereignty—broadly, the power citizens held over law-
making—as a way of holding government accountable to abstract individual subjects of equal
capacity and status. In the context of a caste society which pervaded and was bolstered by the
market, the sovereignty of dominant classes had to be distinguished from that of the vulnerable—
and it was the latter which needed to be promoted by opening up access to the state. If modern
theories of popular sovereignty, with their argument that political society was only authorized due
to its ability to speak and act on behalf of the public in some way, laid the groundwork for
legitimizing participatory government, then their assumptions needed to be modified to account
for the fact that the ‘public’ in India was a body riven by conflict between the powerful and the
85 “Dalit Panthers Manifesto,” 143.
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weak. By demanding separate electorates and greater decision-making power along group lines,
against Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, Ambedkar transformed the goal of participatory
government from actualizing the socio-economic sovereignty of the people, as a collection of
disparate and equal individuals, to actualizing the economic sovereignty of subordinated groups.
Without disaggregating the constitution of the people and re-evaluating the role of popular
government in this way, democracy in independent India would become another tool of elite
domination.
At stake in re-framing Ambedkar as a thinker of caste empowerment rather than liberal
individualism, then, is a broader argument about his reinvention or modification of the tradition of
popular sovereignty within modern European politics and philosophy. Whereas liberal
representative government has historically been committed in principle to the equal and unbiased
sovereignty of all those it recognizes as rights-bearing citizens, Ambedkar’s democracy specified
the need to protect demographic groups based on socio-economic status—Dalits and lower
castes—as the agents of rule.86 As a consequence, the political sovereignty underlying his model
86 The protection of difference-blind, universal, and abstractly equal individual natural rights
(socio-economic and otherwise) as an effect of popular sovereignty has been an important part
of liberal accounts of contract-based government since Hobbes. See the discussions in Russell
Hardin, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 277-310 and Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal
Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31-41.
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of the state was a way of overcoming the collective economic subjection of some, rather than
promising the individual economic freedom and security of all. From this standpoint, intellectual
historians can get a better appreciation of the global significance of Ambedkar’s thought for studies
of democracy and decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. Ambedkar provides a particularly
acute illustration of how an important strand of justifying postcolonial democracy in South Asia
emerged by foregrounding the corrosive interactions between native society and modern markets,
and the ease with which markets could be made into institutions for majoritarian power. Ambedkar
pushes us, in other words, to analyze the discourse of postcolonial popular sovereignty as a
contribution to the intellectual problem of making democracy responsive to the different forms
that modern market domination took outside the West.
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