During the last parliamentary session, opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, wore blue to protest Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s alleged insult to Dr BR Ambedkar.
Blue is not a random choice; it has for decades now been the colour of Indian politics, resonating greatly with Dalits and Babasaheb Ambedkar as a whole.
In the three to four decades of his life, rarely was Dr Ambedkar seen wearing anything other than a splendid three-piece suit.
Historian Ramachandra Guha in an article published in The Hindu observed that the suit encapsulated the essence of his being.
“By the canons of tradition and history, this man was not supposed to wear a suit, blue or otherwise. That he did was a consequence of his extraordinary personal achievements: a law degree from Lincoln’s Inn, a PhD from America and another one from England, the drafting of the Constitution of India. By memorialising him in a suit, the Dalits were celebrating his successful storming of an upper caste citadel,” Guha wrote in the article, a section of which was published by The Indian Express.
Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, in Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (1996), disagreed quite blatantly. “It is no coincidence that while Gandhi, who came from the Vaniya [Bania] caste, chose to represent the Harijans [Dalits] by dressing as a poor man in the deshi style, Ambedkar, himself a Harijan, chose to represent them by wearing a full set of European clothes. Coming from a Harijan background, and having felt the full weight of social prejudice, he needed to break with tradition and had no nostalgia for the deshi past which summed up centuries of poverty and degradation,” she wrote.
Nonetheless, it’s Ambedkarite scholars who stress the “ontological coordinates of the colour blue”. “One interpretation is that blue stands for the sky which spells equality. No one is above anyone else when under the sky,” said political scientist Valerian Rodrigues, the author of the book Ambedkar’s Philosophy (2024).
Several scholars claim that Dr Ambedkar used to plug India’s blue colour for Buddhism. Dr Ambedkar believed that Buddhism preached universal love and compassion. For Dr Ambedkar, it was crucial to pick a colour that did not have any other overt political association. Maybe, that’s the reason Dr Ambedkar chose blue as the flag of the Scheduled Caste Federation in 1942.
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