how did ambedkar fight for equality
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Ambedkar fights like a aremed
Answer:
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) was born into a Mahar (‘Untouchable’/ Dalit) family. His father served in the British Indian Army at the Mhow cantonment in the Central Provinces (now in Madhya Pradesh). Unlike most children of his caste, young Bhim attended school. However, he and his Dalit friends were not allowed to sit inside the class. Teachers would not touch their notebooks. When they pleaded to drink water, the school peon (who belonged to the upper caste) poured water from a height for them to drink. On days the peon was unavailable, young Bhim and his friends had to spend the day without water.
Due to his deep interest in learning, Bhim went on to become the first Dalit to be enrolled into the prestigious Elphinstone High School in Bombay. He later won the Baroda State Scholarship for three years and finished his postgraduate education from Columbia University in New York. He passed his M.A. exam in June 1915 and continued his research. In his thesis on Castes in India (1916) presented at the Columbia University, he wrote –
“The caste problem is a vast one, both theoretically and practically. Practically, it is an institution that portends tremendous consequences. It is a local problem, but one capable of much wider mischief, for as long as caste in India does exist, Hindus will hardly intermarry or have any social intercourse with outsiders; and if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.”
After completing three important theses that dealt with Indian society, economics, and history, Dr Ambedkar enrolled at the London School of Economics where he started working on a doctoral thesis. He stayed in London for the next four years and finished two doctorates. He was conferred with two more honorary doctorate degrees much later in the fifties.
After returning to India in 1924, Dr Ambedkar decided to launch an active movement against untouchability. In 1924, he founded the Bahishkrut Hitkaraini Sabha, aimed at uprooting caste system in India. The organisation ran free schools and libraries for all age groups. Dr Ambedkar took the grievances of the Dalits to court, and brought them justice.
Over the following years, Dr Ambedkar organised marches demanding Dalit’s rights to drinking water from public resources, and their right to enter temples. Despite severe attacks from the upper-caste Hindu men, Dr Ambedkar walked with fellow Dalits into public tanks and reservoirs and drank from its water.
In a conference in late 1927, Dr Ambedkar publicly condemned the Manusmriti for justifying caste discrimination and untouchability. On December 25, 1927, Dr Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits and burnt copies of the text.
Dr Ambedkar continued to ferociously protest the caste system. In 1935, at a conference at Nasik, he asked Dalits to convert to a religion where there is no hierarchy. In his undelivered speech titled Annihilation of Caste (1936), Dr Ambedkar claimed that political reform without social reform is a farce. He sought social equality and believed that political freedom from the British will automatically follow. He also claimed that caste is not a division of labour, but a division of labourers. He called the idea of racial purity absurd, and argued that inter-caste dining and inter-caste marriages are not sufficient to annihilate the caste system. “The real method of breaking up the Caste System was not to bring about inter-caste dinners and inter-caste marriages but to destroy the religious notions on which Caste was founded,” he wrote.
Mahatma Gandhi, unlike Dr Ambedkar, was a believer of the Varna System. He accepted untouchability as a serious problem, and advocated for Dalits to gain acceptance as the fifth caste. In a newspaper article titled Dr Ambedkar & Caste (1933), Gandhi wrote –
“The present joint fight is restricted to the removal of untouchability, and I would invite Dr Ambedkar and those who think with him to throw themselves, heart and soul, into the campaign against the monster of untouchability. It is highly likely that at the end of it we shall all find that there is nothing to fight against in Varnashram. If, however, Varnashram even then looks an ugly thing, the whole of Hindu Society will fight it.”