The Democracy to Come-Ambedkar, Fanon, and the Time of Counter-Revolution

The Democracy to Come

Ambedkar, Fanon, and the Time of Counter-Revolution  

Speaker: Dr Aishwary Kumar, Professor of History of Political Thought and Institutions, and Director of The Democracy Institute at Cal Poly Pomona, Chair, The GIFT Project and the American Institutions Common Core

Chair: Dr Mujibur Rehman, faculty, Jamia Millia Central University, New Delhi

Introductory Remarks: Dr Usha Munshi, Chief Librarian, IIC

The concept of “counter-revolution” occupies a galvanizing place in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought and moral psychology. Unlike nationalists of his time, Ambedkar rarely speaks of extreme violence and exploitation as a function simply of modern colonial bondage. Instead, for him, “inequality” is force, a spectrum of compulsions, a desire even. Which is why its cruelty can be grasped only as a counter-revolutionary form that alters our very relationship to time and authority. Counter-revolution as a neo-democratic form: this singular insight—what I call "the caste contract"—puts Ambedkar in an exemplary constellation of abolitionist thinkers on human freedom and moral judgment who return to us today with a dark urgency.