The untended grounds of 26, Alipur Road, in New Delhi’s upscale Civil Lines neighbourhood, give a telling foretaste of the overall neglect of the building. It’s hard to believe that this is the Dr Ambedkar National Memorial, where the man spent his twilight years and breathed his last. The visitor’s book here reveals more than the walls themselves—scribbled in by the few visitors it receives, some all the way from Maharashtra, Haryana, Gujarat, are urgent requests, not only for a ‘better’ memorial, but for basic amenities like fans, lights and some ventilation. One of the scant names in the log is Ramesh Sabharwal, an Ambedkarite who visited from Sonepat, Haryana, just last month. “I have visited the memorial a few times before and I spend a lot of time reading Ambedkar’s books at the library. But this time, I found it hard to bear the heat, with no fans and no drinking water. This is hardly what I expected at a place of such historical importance,” he says. Other guests complain that while the memorial has its highlights—in particular, a collection of rare photographs of the leader is on display in the bedroom-turned-photo gallery—even those are not without jarring incongruencies: of what use are pictures without accompanying captions? The day we visit, the helpful security guards—the only sign of life at the memorial—usher us in, saying, “We get very few guests here, so many of the rooms remain closed.”
But for those familiar with the goings-on related to the memorial—and it’s a list that includes both officials and Ambedkarites—the sorry state of affairs will come as no surprise. The fate of 26, Alipur Road, has been stuck in a state of limbo for more than a decade. After Ambedkar passed away on December 6, 1956, ownership passed on from the Raja of Sirohi (Ambedkar was his tenant) to the Jindal family. The Jindals demolished the original building and built their residence there— few at the time had imagined the political import the site would gain decades after Ambedkar’s death. It was at his birth centenary in 1991 that the demand to acquire the house in which he had lived his last days gained momentum. A full decade later, under the then NDA government, the bungalow was bought from the Jindals and the memorial inaugurated in 2003. “The memorial should have been completed by now. The land was acquired nearly a decade ago, and there were funds to develop it well. Whatever development took place, it happened when the NDA was in power at the Centre. But for the last eight years, with the UPA in power, not much has happened in the right direction. The intent to complete it is clearly missing,” says Ambedkar’s grandson and politician Prakash Yashwant Ambedkar. Says a senior bureaucrat who didn’t want to be named, “What followed the acquisition was a less than enthusiastic movement to see it turned into a worthy memorial. The momentum created by Ambedkar’s followers earlier had weakened.”
And thus it lies in its current state of neglect. A few years ago, there was again a bit of interest generated around the memorial, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Ambedkar Foundation and the ministry of social justice and empowerment. The bungalow was whitewashed, the lawns were beautified and the galleries were cleaned up. Yet, what the place needed was not simply such sporadic repair, but a complete overhaul. It calls for an entirely new structure, as befits a memorial—large halls, a proper library, the identification and proper display of Ambedkar’s material possessions for visitors.
The issue, though, has grown to become much larger than the premises of a building in general disrepair, and the subtext has been difficult for Ambedkarites to ignore—much less swallow. Many point to the fact that the movement to convert the bungalow into a memorial slowed once the UPA came to power in 2004. “It could be a deliberate move on the part of this government to neglect it,” says Dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah. “The Congress has never accepted Dr Ambedkar—even after his death,” believes Prakash Ambedkar.
What has also been hard for his followers to come to terms with is the step-motherly treatment that has been meted out to the Ambedkar memorial when compared to the historical sites related to other national icons, chiefly Mahatma Gandhi. “The current government has cheated us on this count. Our long-standing demand has been that there should be an Act for the Ambedkar memorial—like the Rajghat Samadhi Act for Gandhi’s samadhi—that will ensure the upkeep and preservation of the site. Why are they so clearly discriminating between Gandhi and Ambedkar?” wonders National Dalit Mahapanchayat president Indresh Gajbhiye. He recently oversaw the Ambedkar Parinirvan Bhumi Samman Samiti serving the government an ultimatum to start work on the Delhi memorial. Incidentally, the three other Ambedkar sites of significance, in Mhow, Nagpur and Mumbai, have already been developed.
As it stands, there seems to be renewed interest in officialdom to take up the case of the neglected memorial. Last year, prime minister Manmohan Singh directed a high-level committee to get the ball rolling. Officials claim the report from the committee is close to being ready and, once approved, will see the current bungalow demolished within a year and a new structure erected in its place, with a provision of Rs 100 crore. But Prakash Ambedkar is cynical about the project taking any shape all. “Not as long as the UPA government is at the Centre,” he says. While some of Ambedkar’s followers argue that a Rs 100-crore fund dished out by the NDA government has already been frittered away by the current government, others like Gajbhiye prefer to see a silver lining amidst the debris. “I have just sent off a letter to home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde relaying the sentiment that our faith may have been broken, but we will fight this out to the very end. We need this central memorial to strengthen Ambedkar’s revolutionary views, to carry them forward and to continue to be an inspiration to all of us.”
Whether the Ambedkar memorial will see the queues that throng the Nehru Memorial, though, remains to be seen.
Have The Body?
Framing the law of the land needed an iron will. Maintaining its sanctity required a stronger box.
The preamble to the Constitution of India stands framed on the wall in one of the galleries at the National Ambedkar Memorial. Below it is a wooden display box with a red velvet cloth and a glass lid to hold a copy of the Constitution, fitting in a memorial dedicated to the ‘Father of the Constitution’. Only, the copy is missing at the moment—a fact that puzzled Ramesh Sabharwal on a recent visit, for he had seen it earlier. “I wondered why it had disappeared, and since there were no officials around at the memorial, I asked the security guards. They told me it had been taken away for safekeeping. I was disappointed.” On probing further, Outlook learnt that the copy of the Constitution in question, a limited edition publication meant for public display, had been put away in a locker because of security concerns. It appears that the lid of the wooden box had been damaged and there was fear that the Constitution could be stolen.
