Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing’

Brunhilde Pomsel worked at the heart of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. As a film about her life is released, she discusses her lack of remorse and the private side of her monstrous boss 

Kate Connolly

Monday 15 August 2016 16.05 BST

‘Everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing. It was all kept secret’ ... Brunhilde Pomsel. Photograph: Blackbox Film & Medienproduktion 

 ‘It was rare for us to see him in the mornings,” says Brunhilde Pomsel, her eyes closed and chin in her hand as she recalls her former boss. “He’d walk up the steps from his little palace near the Brandenburg Gate, on to which his huge propaganda ministry was attached. He’d trip up the steps like a little duke, through his library into his beautiful office on Unter den Linden.”

She smiles at the image, noting how elegant the furniture was, the carefree atmosphere where she sat in an ante-chamber off Joseph Goebbels’ office with five other secretaries, how his nails were always neatly manicured.

“We always knew once he had arrived, but we didn’t normally see him until he left his office, coming through a door that led directly into our room, so we could ask him any questions we had, or let him know who had called. Sometimes, his children came to visit and were so excited to visit Daddy at his work. They would come with the family’s lovely Airedale. They were very polite and would curtsy and shake our hands.”

Pomsel is giving one of the first, and last, in-depth interviews of her life; at the age of 105, and having lost her sight last year, she says she is relieved that her days are numbered. “In the little time that’s left to me – and I hope it will be months rather than years – I just cling to the hope that the world doesn’t turn upside down again as it did then, though there have been some ghastly developments, haven’t there? I’m relieved I never had any children that I have to worry about.”

So what is the motivation for effectively breaking her silence only now, as probably the last living survivor from the Nazi leadership’s inner circle?

“It is absolutely not about clearing my conscience,” she says.

‘They were both very nice to me’ ... Goebbels and his wife, Magda, with Hitler.

While she admits she was at the heart of the Nazi propaganda machine, with her tasks including massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Red Army, she describes it, somewhat bizarrely, as “just another job”.

A German Life, compiled from 30 hours of conversation with her, was recently released at the Munich film festival. It is the reason why she is willing to “politely answer” my questions. “It is important for me, when I watch the film, to recognise that mirror image in which I can understand everything I’ve done wrong,” she says. “But really, I didn’t do anything other than type in Goebbels’ office.”

Goebbels was a good actor, says Brunhilde Pomsel in the trailer for A German Life.

Often, end-of-life statements such as these are suffused with a sense of guilt. But Pomsel is unrepentant. As she holds court, gesticulating wildly, with a broad grin on her face, it seems as if she even takes something restorative from her insistence that she simply acted the same way as most other Germans.

“Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.” After the rise of the Nazi party, “the whole country was as if under a kind of a spell,” she insists. “I could open myself up to the accusations that I wasn’t interested in politics but the truth is, the idealism of youth might easily have led to you having your neck broken.”

She recalls being handed the case file of the anti-Nazi activist and student Sophie Scholl, who was active in the White Rose resistance movement. Scholl was executed for high treason in February 1943 after distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich. “I was told by one of Goebbels’ special advisers to put it in the safe, and not to look at it. So I didn’t, and was quite pleased with myself that he trusted me, and that my keenness to honour that trust was stronger than my curiosity to open that file.”

Pomsel describes herself as a product of Prussian discipline, recalling a father who, when he returned from fighting in the first world war, when she was seven, banned chamber pots from the family bedrooms. “If we wanted to go to the toilet, we had to brave all the witches and evil spirits to get to the water closet.” She and her siblings were “spanked with the carpet beater” whenever they were disobedient. “That stayed with me, that Prussian something, that sense of duty.”

She was 31 and working for the state broadcaster as a well-paid secretary – a job she secured only after she became a paid-up member of the Nazi party – when someone recommended her for a transfer to the ministry of propaganda in 1942. “Only an infectious disease would have stopped me,” she insists. “I was flattered, because it was a reward for being the fastest typist at the radio station.”

She remembers her payslip, on which a range of tax-free allowances was listed, alongside the 275-mark salary – a small fortune compared with what most of her friends were earning.

She notes how life for her vivacious, red-haired Jewish friend, Eva Löwenthal, became increasingly difficult after Adolf Hitler came to power. Pomsel was also shocked by the arrest of a hugely popular announcer at the radio station, who was sent to a concentration camp as punishment for being gay. But she says that largely, she remained in a bubble, unaware of the destruction being meted out by the Nazi regime on its enemies, despite the fact she was at the physical heart of the system.

Brunhilde Pomsel, in about 1943, in a suit given to her by Magda Goebbels Photograph:
Blackbox Film & Medienproduktion GmbH

“I know no one ever believes us nowadays – everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret.” She refuses to admit she was naive in believing that Jews who had been “disappeared” – including her friend Eva – had been sent to villages in the Sudetenland on the grounds that those territories were in need of being repopulated. “We believed it – we swallowed it – it seemed entirely plausible,” she says.

When the flat she shared with her parents was destroyed in a bombing raid, Goebbels’ wife, Magda, helped to soften the blow by presenting her with a silk-lined suit of blue Cheviot wool. “I’ve never possessed anything as chic as that before or since,” she says. “They were both very nice to me.”

She recalls her boss as being “short but well kept”, of a “gentlemanly countenance”, who wore “suits of the best cloth, and always had a light tan”. “He had well-groomed hands – he probably had a manicure every day,” she says, laughing at the thought. “There was really nothing to criticise about him.” She even felt sorry for him because of the limp he had, “which he made up for by being a bit arrogant”. Only occasionally did she get a glimpse of the the man who turned lying into an art in pursuit of the Nazi’s murderous goals. She was terrified to see him on stage at Berlin’s sportpalast delivering his infamous “total war” speech in February 1943. She and another colleague had been given ringside seats, just behind Magda Goebbels. It was shortly after the battle of Stalingrad and, Goebbels hoped to get popular support to pull out all the stops to fight the threats facing Germany. “No actor could have been any better at the transformation from a civilised, serious person into a ranting, rowdy man … In the office he had a kind of noble elegance, and then to see him there like a raging midget – you just can’t imagine a greater contrast.”

The details Pomsel chooses to focus on may reflect the way she has edited her own story so that she feels more comfortable with it. But it is also conceivable that a combination of ignorance and awe, as well as the protection offered by the huge office complex in the government quarter really did shield her from much of reality.

It was the day after Hitler’s birthday in 1945 that her life as she knew it came to an abrupt halt. Goebbels and his entourage were ordered to join Hitler in his subterranean air raid shelter – the so-called Führerbunker – during the last days of the war. “It felt as if something inside me had died,” says Pomsel. “We tried to make sure we didn’t run out of alcohol. That was urgently needed in order to retain the numbness.” She lifts an index finger as she takes pains to tell events in their right order, recalling how Goebbels’ assistant Günther Schwägermann came with the news on 30 April that Hitler had killed himself, followed a day later by Goebbels. “We asked him: ‘And his wife as well?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And the children?’ ‘And the children too.’” She bows her head and shakes it as she adds: “We were dumbstruck.”

She and her fellow secretaries set about cutting up white food sacks and turning them into a large surrender flag to present to the Russians.

Discussing their strategy ahead of their inevitable arrest, Pomsel told her colleagues she would tell the truth, “That I had worked as a shorthand typist in Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.” She was sentenced to five years’ incarceration in various Russian prison camps in and around Berlin. “It was no bed of roses,” is all she will say about that time. It was only when she returned home that she became aware of the Holocaust, she insists, referring to it as “the matter of the Jews”.

She quickly resumed a life not dissimilar to the one she had had, when she found secretarial work at the state broadcaster once again, working her way up to become the executive secretary to its director of programmes and enjoying a privileged life of well-paid work and travel before retiring, aged 60, in 1971.

But it would take her a full six decades after the end of the war before she made any inquiries about her Jewish schoolfriend, Eva. When the Holocaust memorial was unveiled in 2005, she took a trip from her home in Munich to see it for herself. “I went into the information centre and told them I myself was missing someone, an Eva Löwenthal.” A man went through the records and soon tracked down her friend, who had been deported to Auschwitz in November 1943, and had been declared dead in 1945.

“The list of names on the machine on which we found her just kept on rolling non-stop down the screen,” she says, leaning her head back, the finger tips of one hand tracing the line of her necklace.

Source: theguardian

The Narendra Jadhav interview: 'Caste system is the most brilliantly administered scam in history'

Dalit Movement

The Rajya Sabha MP, a prominent Dalit voice, is arguing for an end to the practice of using surnames.

Image credit:  Narendra Jadhav/Facebook

Mayank Jain

At a time when the country has just witnessed a big Dalit uprising in the Bharatiya Janata Party ruled state of Gujarat against atrocities, the conversation is rife about the ways in which the country can end caste-based discrimination. On this front Rajya Sabha's nominated Member of Parliament Narendra Jadhav has emerged as a prominent Dalit voice who has been advocating for his proposed bill that seeks to eliminate the practice of caste implying surnames.

Jadhav is also an economist and an erstwhile member of the Planning Commission and he has given multiple policy inputs in making sure that India's financial decision making is just and fair to the most unprivileged sections of society. Scroll.in sat down with Jadhav for a discussion about the current Dalit movement and its antecedents in the history where he described how there's a silent revolution going on in the country that nobody has yet taken note of. Edited excerpts from the interview follow:

There’s turmoil across the social fabric of India as minorities feel threatened and there’s cow vigilantism on the rise which has resulted into attacks on Dalits. Is there some sort of caste conflict undercurrent here which is fuelling these incidents and the pushback from the Dalit community?

What is happening right now in Gujarat and elsewhere is really a reaction to the most unfortunate incident that happened in the recent past. The truth is that atrocities against the Dalits all across the country are getting a lot of media coverage. These atrocities have been taking place for years but there’s now a sizeable increase in the number.

The Una incident is a typical point of departure for this movement. After this incident, there has been a lot of discussion about Dalit atrocities in the media already. And as a reaction to the Una incident – which was of course, a heinous crime against humanity – Dalits are refusing to undertake the activities which were conventionally entrusted to them.

In fact, they went to the extent of putting cow carcasses in front of the collector’s office. But this should be seen as a reaction rather than a provocative action in itself. So, we are not talking about an anti-caste revolution. Dalits are coming up and responding to the violence of upper-castes.

The recent Dalit rally in Una announced that Dalits of the state will stand together against atrocities and won’t do the job of cleaning up carcasses. There’s a long history of Dalit struggle but this time, there’s a sense of a united uprising. Do you think that Ambedkar’s dream is finally going to come true with these push-backs?

Why should they be doing these things at all? It is a baggage of the caste system that we carry. We divided the society into four varnas – Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra and there’s an underbelly below Shudras which has thousands of castes who are clubbed as untouchables. So this four-fold stratification is further divided into caste system which has more than 4,000 castes and sub-castes and sub-sub-castes.

In this regard, Dr. BR Ambedkar correctly described the Indian social system as a system of graded inequality in the ascending order of reverence and descending order of contempt. In the hierarchy of the caste system, jobs were earlier allocated depending on the caste in which one was born.

There was a big debate regarding this between no less than Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar about whether this system is division of labour. Gandhi defended the system by giving examples of UK and USA claiming that it’s simple division of labour. Ambedkar’s response to this assertion was phenomenal. He said that what we have is not really a division of labour, super-imposed on the division of labour is the division of labourers.

Division of labour has happened across the world but India is the only country where there’s a superimposed division of labourers. This was completely dependent on the accident of birth. So whether you become a scholar or a scavenger didn’t depend on your intrinsic talent or abilities, it depended on the caste you were born into.

But the conflict is not going to go away any time soon and as more Dalits realise the extent of atrocities, they are going to rise up and question the unchecked power and privilege of the upper caste communities. Should those who have monopolised much of the resources for the so called high born now be scared?

It was Ambedkar who made Dalits realise that it is because of the connivance of the so-called high-born, that they have perpetuated the system using the law of karma. The law of karma said you have to carry human excreta because you had done wrong things in your previous birth. This is something which was fed to us for generations.

I sincerely believe that the caste system in India is the most brilliantly administered scam in the history of human society. It is so intricate and well-designed that it has continued for ages.

What is happening now is a part of the response but it is not happening now. Ambedkar exhorted his followers to think about their position in society and question themselves about their human rights. The current struggle is a sign that those in power are very keen to perpetuate the traditional order of things while young Dalits are coming up and questioning this power. They have received education, at least a lot of them are now literate and they are asking for their human rights.

There’s a silent revolution going on in the country. Today, whichever way you look, you will find Dalits asserting themselves. Be it painting, sculpture or neurology, you will find a young boy or a girl trying to carve out a space for himself/herself. The political vacuum continues for them but Dalits are following Ambedkar’s call to educate, organise and agitate.

In this process, there’s an implicit conflict involved. These people are challenging the traditional order of society and those who want the traditional order continue to find it uncomfortable to deal with challenges coming from the underprivileged quarters. This is why there has been an increase in atrocities and violence against Dalits.

You just said that Dalits are slowly rising the ranks in fields like neurology and architecture which is a good sign. But there hasn’t been any report of upper caste people, for instance, joining the workforce for manual scavenging or cleaning sewers? Are Dalits forever going to be appropriated for the tasks that are considered ‘menial’?

It is very strange and surprising that so called high-born are asking or punishing Dalits for not doing their jobs. In 1929, Ambedkar gave a call in Maharashtra to stop taking the caracasses. The basic division was that the Mahar community was assigned the job of taking away the dead cattle. Ambedkar also belonged to this community. So it was the job of Mahars to skin and take the flush. The skin would be given to Chamars who would process it and make footwear and so on.

It was then that Dr. Ambedkar had made that appeal and it was followed by Dalits. In many villages, there were riots and social boycott of Dalits because they were not doing the menial jobs entrusted to them. The Dalits simply refused to do the dirty work for the upper-castes.

The current power-struggle is bringing out these reactions from the Dalit community and it is going to continue for a long time till we achieve social equality.

To achieve that end you have also proposed introducing a bill that aims to put an end to the practice of people using surnames in India. How do you think removal of surnames can end caste-based discrimination?

I propose to bring a private member’s bill in Rajya Sabha which will focus on dropping or deleting caste implying surname. I don’t think it will solve all the problems, it won’t. But it will be a giant leap forward. In all these years, the form of caste-discrimination has undergone a massive change.

Less than 100 years ago, in Maharashtra, Dalits had to carry an earthen pot around their neck to prevent their spit from falling on the ground. They also had to tie brooms to their waists to prevent their shadows from touching the ground. That kind of obvious form is gone now.

Now, it will be foolish to believe that the caste-system is gone. This has now acquired a sophisticated form and it resides in the minds of the people. It doesn’t show up in the raw and blood form anymore but it is always there. In this form, I believe, it is more pernicious than the earlier forms.

In the US, there was an experiment conducted where they sent identical resumes for some job opening. The resume was ideal and perfect but it was sent under different names. There were two groups of the names – the white sounding names and the black sounding names.

The proportion of people among blacks who got invited was miniscule while most of the white people were invited. This is how the mindset works. Similar studies have also happened in India for upper-castes and Dalits on a smaller scale and the results were no different.

In India, if you compare the conviction rates, the rate is much higher for general population while conviction rate for atrocities against Dalits is only 22% and that again varies from state to it. That is because a lot of people in judicial as well as the bureaucracy carry the caste bias they have to their duty.

To my mind, a very effective way to delete the surnames which indicate the caste. It is not the first time that this has been spoken about. Everyone from Periyar to Jagjivan Ram have spoken about this.

But nothing ever happened on that front…

Which is why I am trying to introduce a bill to change the situation. In southern India, people actually drop their surnames and suffix the name of the place they come from or simply choose a different name. What is the caste of Rajnikanth?

Earlier, in many parts, caste was the surname. Suresh Gopi, the great actor in Malayalam and Tamil films has dropped Nair from his name. There are umpteen examples of people dropping their surnames.

Even in the north, if you remember, after the Jaiprakash Narayan movement, lots of people dropped their surnames and chose neutral surnames like Kumar. Narayan advocated that actively. What we are talking about is dropping the surnames.

Did Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar ever discuss or debate this idea?

Of course they did but they were talking about opposite things. While Gandhi was asking his followers to go back to villages since he saw villages as a self-contained region based on self-reliance. Ambedkar called villages “cesspots” and he exhorted his followers to the leave the village and go to the city. Why?

Because, in a village you will always be identified by your caste. What you can do or cannot do will depend on the caste that villagers already know but cities afford you anonymity since people didn’t know these migrants and hence, their caste was hidden from the larger population.

There’s going to be a massive urbanisation in the next 20 years. With this urbanisation, one effective way is to drop the caste-based surnames. In one generation, we can relegate this discrimination to the past.

But you also support the caste-system for its diversity, if I am right? How does that fit in with this vision of having a casteless society?

Please understand that I am not against caste systems per se. Each caste has its own culture and traditions. That is a part of our rich diversity. I am not against that. The problem comes when you arrange that as a graded inequality and you force people to do things based on the accident of their birth rather than their capabilities.

It is not just in the society’s interest that we need to move beyond this discrimination but it is also in our country’s economic interests.

How do you think we can improve our economic situation by removing caste-based discrimination?

Just imagine how many Einsteins would have been born if everyone got the same access and opportunity to education. For a very long time, only about 3% of the people had access to education and if the British had not come, this would have persisted for even longer.

These 3% made the laws and exercised the laws and everyone else was kept out. In the shastras, there’s a punishment for shudras for listening to the vedas which is that molten lead should be poured in their ears. And if they have the temerity of studying vedas, their tongues should be cut. No wonder, Ambedkar said that to annihilate the caste system you have to put dynamite to the dharma-shastras.

But how did the British help make education more inclusive?

I am not here to talk about the good and bad they had done. Whatever their motivations may be, they did a very good thing by making education free and compulsory for the children of those enrolled in the British military. That is how Dr Ambedkar got his primary education because his father was enrolled in the British Army and as a part of that, Ambedkar got a chance to study.

Everyone blames Macaulay for many things but I am grateful to him. He was the first person to take education outside the confines of a temple and he kept it outside. His motives may be any, I don’t care about it. What I know is that a large part of the society which could not enter temples and were deprived of education suddenly started receiving education.

There is a lot of push by this current government to skill India and provide digital literacy but much of it seems to be on paper. What are some of the ways in which we can effectively uplift the socio-economic status of Dalits without being partisan and treating them like vote-banks like the governments traditionally have?

There are two things to be done. Dalits are not given the same level access to the judiciary. I gave the example of low conviction rates when it comes to crimes against Dalits but there’s a lot more to be done. Last year, the Prevention of Atrocities Act was strengthened, revised and passed by both the houses of the parliament. But we need a rigorous implementation of that act.

In some states, the conviction rate is as low as 3% and there’s always under-reporting of cases. It means that in 97% of the cases, the perpetrators of heinous crimes go scott free.

In 1975 and 1979, Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister came out with a very good scheme that was called Scheduled Caste Sub Plan and Tribal Sub Plan. Essentially, it meant that from the plan expenditure of the government they must earmark for Dalits and Adivasis which corresponds to their population in the total population.

Dalit population is 16.8% and tribal population is about 8.6% so they should spend that much amount from plan expenditure to uplift these communities directly. It was to be done for states similarly depending on their ratios.

So what happened after this scheme? Did it achieve expected results?

You won’t believe that in all these years, this scheme has never been implemented properly in letter and spirit. When I took over as a member of Planning Commission, the first thing I did was to check on this scheme and the proportion was 7% instead of 16.8%. And even in this earmarking, a large amount of money was siphoned off for non-Dalit purposes.

For instance, in Delhi, about Rs 700 crore were diverted to the Commonwealth Games. And this is not an exception, it is a rule. Out of 68 different departments and ministries in the central government, only one department had opened that subhead after 40 years of the scheme.

Even today, it is less than 10%.

On the other hand, many people feel that there is a lot of appeasement. Dalits are facing a double whammy as what is being announced or told to them is much more than what is actually reaching them. This is creating a kind of animosity between the general population and Dalits whereas on the ground, very little work is happening for their welfare.

This is actually quite interesting since debates around reservations always revolve around the idea of having a meritocracy and people advocate that educational institutions should get rid of reservations? What is your stand on this?

What meritocracy are we talking about? This is hypocritical. How do you compare a little boy whose mother is a sweeper and his father is a peon somewhere? He doesn’t have electricity at home. How do you compare him to someone who has not only had private schooling but coaching as well? And even though we know marks are not reflective of intelligence or capabilities, we still can’t let this false equivalence to perpetuate.

In our own enlightened self-interest, we must have reservations because if we don’t expand the gene pool, we can’t expect to make progress.

You have advocated extending them to the private sector as well but why do we have reservations in the first place and can we expect them to go away ever?

Reservations are needed because of the innate inability of our social system to be just and fair. Why is our system not just and fair? It is because of the caste-ridden mindset. As long as it is unjust and unfair, we need reservations. Have we come close to a system where we are just and fair? We have not.

There should be reservations in private sector jobs also. How private is really private? Aren’t we giving them all kinds of concessional land, electricity and tax concessions? I am not saying we are obliging them but we give huge loan waivers to the industrialists. And if private is not entirely private, I think as part of corporate social responsibility, we should expand and extend reservations to the private sector as well.

And this must be done in our enlightened self interested. When Ambedkar presented the final draft of the constitution, he gave a most brilliant speech which said the following:

    On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.

    In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.

    In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.

    How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?

    How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?

    If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

Final question: what do you think about the appropriation of Ambedkar by political parties and especially the Bharatiya Janata Party?

Everyone is appropriating Ambedkar and what is wrong with that? First of all, we need to know that we have not recognised Ambedkar as a national leader. We have this caste-ridden mindset. We looked at him only as an emancipator of Dalits which he was, of course. But he was an intellectual colossus who was truly a national leader. His entire contribution needs to be seen in the enormity.

Dr Ambedkar awakened the social conscience of modern India. To brand him as a Dalit and a leader of Dalits, we have done a grave injustice to him. That is now changing as all political parties have understood this and now they are trying to recognise Ambedkar for what he was. But their motivations might be different.

It’s perfectly fine to recognise Ambedkar but I am saying that it should be done in the right letter and spirit. It should not only be symbolic, it should be substantial.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

How the Una protests reflect Ambedkar's great wisdom in the Constituent Assembly

The Dalit icon had said that continued marginalisation would lead to class struggle and noted that fraternity was integral to nation-building.

 

 Image credit:  Sam Panthaky/AFP

Madhav Chandavarkar

India celebrated its 70th Independence Day on August 15 against the backdrop of widespread agitations by Dalits over the increased boldness of cow protection vigilante groups in Gujarat.

But these protests are not just about gaurakshaks, they are another instance of a community rallying against discrimination in society. As one of the most recognisable Dalit icons, BR Ambedkar was aware of this and stated multiple times in the Constituent Assembly Debates that unless this disenfranchisement could be curbed, such sentiments would threaten the stability of the document with which he is most associated – India’s Constitution.

Some people may assume that as the “father of the Constitution”, Ambedkar is its sole author, but the document on the basis of which India is governed was actually the product of the Constituent Assembly. The Assembly comprised leading figures from the Congress party and members of other communities who sat and discussed the provisions of the Constitution, and were assisted in this capacity by various committees.

Though he had other roles, as the head of the drafting committee, Ambedkar was in charge of making sure that decisions made by the Assembly and the various committees were translated into the final draft.

Despite the hegemony of the Congress, the Assembly was remarkably diverse – the party actively sought out non-members (like Ambedkar) and allowed its own members to vote freely. Any given issue elicited a host of conflicting stands and the members would hammer out their differences until they came as close as possible to a unanimous decision.

The idea of India

Reading the proceedings of the Assembly (of which the Debates are just a part) thus provides a more textural understanding to the Constitution and acts as a window to the kind of India its founding fathers wished to create.

Ambedkar, unsurprisingly, is one of the prominent speakers in the Debates. One of his standout speeches was on the eve of the Constitution’s adoption. He spoke on the conditions that he felt would benecessary to ensure that the Constitution would last and that democracy in India would be achieved in reality.

Ambedkar felt that “democracy in India was only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic” and pointed out that ensuring political democracy would be insufficient without creating social democracy.

Granting political equality through voting, without simultaneously ensuring social and economic equality would be creating an unsustainable set of contradictions, he felt. This is why he included Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in the preamble and viewed them as inseparable.

What is paramount

Ambedkar valued fraternity as the most integral part of nation-building and felt that without it, liberty and equality “will be no deeper than coats of paint”. He dubbed castes as “anti-national” as they created social divisions in social life. He must have spoken from personal experience when he said that the historical monopoly of political power reduced many to “beasts of burden” and “beasts of prey” in a manner that sapped their “significance of life”.

He surmised that these subjugated peoples were “tired of being governed” and were impatient for self-governance. He felt that the longer they were denied this urge for self-actualisation, the more likely they were to resort to a class struggle. And in his view, nothing threatened the health of the Constitution more than societal divisions.

However, fraternity is extremely hard to create because unlike liberty and equality, it cannot be secured through laws. One way to achieve it could be to delve more into the founding of our nation as a society. This would mean school lessons that are not a drab timeline of events, well-researched biographies (not hagiographies) as well as plays, movies and stories.

Educating India

Knowledge of the founding of a nation is invariably accompanied by literacy in the core principles that the founders fought for and that the nation holds dear. Sadly, the average constitutional literacy of Indians is a fraction of that of citizens in other countries, such as the United States.

Most Americans are taught about the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights at an early age. Aside from giving the average American a working knowledge of the rights granted to him or her, this education has come to shape public discourse quite remarkably. Almost all civil-rights movements in the US, be it those for women, African-Americans, or more recently, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, draw their legitimacy from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

The remarkable response to the Broadway play Hamilton – a musical about Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the US – shows that the American polity recognises the worth of Constitutional history. However, in India these subjects have historically been handled dryly in Civics classes and a system of rote regurgitation prevents these lessons from having any permanency in children’s minds.

The long road to equality

The flogging of Dalit youth in Gujarat’s Una last month for skinning the carcass of a dead cow and the resultant protests show that India is still a long way off the vision of equality held by our founding fathers. But the longer that certain sections of the society – be it Dalits or Kashmiris – continue to feel marginalised, the greater the threat to the Constitution.

It is to their credit that the protestors in Gujarat followed another tenet of Ambedkar and used constitutional methods to express their dissent. But unless such sections of society feel more included, stability will be difficult to sustain – as Abraham Lincoln said, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

It is, therefore, time to inculcate the fraternity Ambedkar spoke of by rediscovering our constitutional history, both inside and outside schools. Not only would this help give Indians a better knowledge of their rights but also a sense of the idea of India. This could be the umbrella under which Indians discover a sense of fraternity – and if nothing else, create public literacy in the rich language of constitutionalism that people looking to reform India can capitalise on.

Madhav Chandavarkar is a research associate at Takshashila Institution, an independent, non-partisan think tank and school of public policy. 

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

How the Una protests reflect Ambedkar's great wisdom in the Constituent Assembly

The Dalit icon had said that continued marginalisation would lead to class struggle and noted that fraternity was integral to nation-building.

 

 Image credit:  Sam Panthaky/AFP

Madhav Chandavarkar

India celebrated its 70th Independence Day on August 15 against the backdrop of widespread agitations by Dalits over the increased boldness of cow protection vigilante groups in Gujarat.

But these protests are not just about gaurakshaks, they are another instance of a community rallying against discrimination in society. As one of the most recognisable Dalit icons, BR Ambedkar was aware of this and stated multiple times in the Constituent Assembly Debates that unless this disenfranchisement could be curbed, such sentiments would threaten the stability of the document with which he is most associated – India’s Constitution.

Some people may assume that as the “father of the Constitution”, Ambedkar is its sole author, but the document on the basis of which India is governed was actually the product of the Constituent Assembly. The Assembly comprised leading figures from the Congress party and members of other communities who sat and discussed the provisions of the Constitution, and were assisted in this capacity by various committees.

Though he had other roles, as the head of the drafting committee, Ambedkar was in charge of making sure that decisions made by the Assembly and the various committees were translated into the final draft.

Despite the hegemony of the Congress, the Assembly was remarkably diverse – the party actively sought out non-members (like Ambedkar) and allowed its own members to vote freely. Any given issue elicited a host of conflicting stands and the members would hammer out their differences until they came as close as possible to a unanimous decision.

The idea of India

Reading the proceedings of the Assembly (of which the Debates are just a part) thus provides a more textural understanding to the Constitution and acts as a window to the kind of India its founding fathers wished to create.

Ambedkar, unsurprisingly, is one of the prominent speakers in the Debates. One of his standout speeches was on the eve of the Constitution’s adoption. He spoke on the conditions that he felt would benecessary to ensure that the Constitution would last and that democracy in India would be achieved in reality.

Ambedkar felt that “democracy in India was only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic” and pointed out that ensuring political democracy would be insufficient without creating social democracy.

Granting political equality through voting, without simultaneously ensuring social and economic equality would be creating an unsustainable set of contradictions, he felt. This is why he included Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in the preamble and viewed them as inseparable.

What is paramount

Ambedkar valued fraternity as the most integral part of nation-building and felt that without it, liberty and equality “will be no deeper than coats of paint”. He dubbed castes as “anti-national” as they created social divisions in social life. He must have spoken from personal experience when he said that the historical monopoly of political power reduced many to “beasts of burden” and “beasts of prey” in a manner that sapped their “significance of life”.

He surmised that these subjugated peoples were “tired of being governed” and were impatient for self-governance. He felt that the longer they were denied this urge for self-actualisation, the more likely they were to resort to a class struggle. And in his view, nothing threatened the health of the Constitution more than societal divisions.

However, fraternity is extremely hard to create because unlike liberty and equality, it cannot be secured through laws. One way to achieve it could be to delve more into the founding of our nation as a society. This would mean school lessons that are not a drab timeline of events, well-researched biographies (not hagiographies) as well as plays, movies and stories.

Educating India

Knowledge of the founding of a nation is invariably accompanied by literacy in the core principles that the founders fought for and that the nation holds dear. Sadly, the average constitutional literacy of Indians is a fraction of that of citizens in other countries, such as the United States.

Most Americans are taught about the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights at an early age. Aside from giving the average American a working knowledge of the rights granted to him or her, this education has come to shape public discourse quite remarkably. Almost all civil-rights movements in the US, be it those for women, African-Americans, or more recently, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, draw their legitimacy from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

The remarkable response to the Broadway play Hamilton – a musical about Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the US – shows that the American polity recognises the worth of Constitutional history. However, in India these subjects have historically been handled dryly in Civics classes and a system of rote regurgitation prevents these lessons from having any permanency in children’s minds.

The long road to equality

The flogging of Dalit youth in Gujarat’s Una last month for skinning the carcass of a dead cow and the resultant protests show that India is still a long way off the vision of equality held by our founding fathers. But the longer that certain sections of the society – be it Dalits or Kashmiris – continue to feel marginalised, the greater the threat to the Constitution.

It is to their credit that the protestors in Gujarat followed another tenet of Ambedkar and used constitutional methods to express their dissent. But unless such sections of society feel more included, stability will be difficult to sustain – as Abraham Lincoln said, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

It is, therefore, time to inculcate the fraternity Ambedkar spoke of by rediscovering our constitutional history, both inside and outside schools. Not only would this help give Indians a better knowledge of their rights but also a sense of the idea of India. This could be the umbrella under which Indians discover a sense of fraternity – and if nothing else, create public literacy in the rich language of constitutionalism that people looking to reform India can capitalise on.

Madhav Chandavarkar is a research associate at Takshashila Institution, an independent, non-partisan think tank and school of public policy. 

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin