Was Ambedkar a British collaborator?
The charge is old, was made in his lifetime, and rests on four episodes that are all real. Worth putting them down first, because an answer that begins by defending him is not an answer.
What is actually alleged, and all of it happened
- In 1928 Congress boycotted the Simon Commission for having no Indian member, meeting it with black flags. Ambedkar gave evidence to it.
- He attended all three Round Table Conferences in London between 1930 and 1932 for the Depressed Classes, the first with Congress absent and its leaders in jail.
- He accepted separate electorates in the Communal Award of 1932, which Congress regarded as a device for dividing Indians from each other.
- In July 1942 he took office as Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council and held it through the war. Quit India broke out three weeks later, and most of the Congress leadership spent the period in prison.
His answer never varied, and it is a single argument, not four excuses. A body that will write the rules writes them whether or not you are in the room, and the Depressed Classes could not afford a gesture. Independence, he held, was a transfer of power from one set of hands to another, and the fate of fifty million people whose disabilities were social rather than statutory would be settled by whoever was in the room. He intended to be there, and said so from 1919 onward.
There is also a factual problem with the picture of a man serving British interests — the decade nobody summarises. In 1936 he founded the Independent Labour Party, a labour party and not a caste one, running non-Untouchable candidates on tenancy and wages. In 1937 he moved a bill to abolish the khoti landlord tenure of the Konkan, whose tenants were mostly not Untouchables. In November 1938 he opposed a Congress government's Industrial Disputes Bill, which criminalised certain strikes, joining the communist-led unions in a general strike that stopped something like a hundred thousand workers. And with the labour portfolio he is accused of taking, he brought the factory week from fifty-four hours to forty-eight and the day from ten to nine, against the cotton mills.
The strongest form of the charge is not about motives at all: that whatever his reasoning, separate electorates and a wartime office weakened a national movement when it was most exposed, and that a subordinated group is not served by a settlement from a colonial power that will be gone within a decade. That is a serious argument, made by serious people. His answer — that the settlement the national movement offered him was to be spoken for by others — does not reconcile with it, and this site does not reconcile them. Not in dispute: he held no office under the British after 1946, sat in the Constituent Assembly of independent India, was its first Law Minister, and chaired the committee that drafted its constitution. Whatever else the charge explains, it does not explain that.
In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946