Ambedkar didn't convert to Buddhism. He virtually created a new religion and force-fitted Buddha into it, as he had earlier theorized that Untouchables were Buddhists men who were vanquished.
The Navayana Buddhism that Ambedkar created is primarily based on negation of Hinduism rather than seeking any truth or peace. It builds a negative identity rather than something original of its own.
Possibly no other religion, not even Islam, is so strongly based on negation even though the Islamic shahada literally begins with "there is no God but Allah"; it's a generic negation, rather than specific one that Ambedkar introduced through his 22 vows. Pagan religions were wiped out from Arabia but Islam survived as it didn't merely create a negative identity.
Possibly that's why Islamists like Sharjeel Imam love Ambedkarites. He knows, rather hopes, that once the original target is finished, a negative identity can't survive for long. It's a fertile ground for second round of conversion. It's another matter that Christian missionaries end up winning that round more successfully.
You do not need political philosophy, metaphysics or quantum mechanics to understand why a poisonous snake like Sharjeel Imam deserves no sympathy.
After his latest Quint interview, spare me the nonsense about a tragically misunderstood liberal intellectual whose only crime was protesting the government.
Read the man himself.
Strip away the Iqbal quotations, academic vocabulary and academic CV, and what remains is an Islamist project dressed up as scholarship.
Sharjeel calls the Constitution a roadblock to the dignified existence of Muslims and says he is not part of the Save the Constitution club. He argues that the 1950 settlement denied Muslims political rights.
Fine. At least the mask is off.
Why certain sections of the left are still trying to whitewash him is beyond comprehension.
Sharjeel dismisses civilisational Indian unity as nationalist mythology and invokes a tradition in which Indian Muslims form a distinct political community requiring communal guarantees and autonomy.
And this is emancipation?
He said that with five lakh organised people, Hindustan and the North-East could be permanently cut off. How do you justify that?
Then Jinnah.
Sharjeel calls Jinnah a great democratic leader of Indian Muslims, argues Partition was effectively forced by Congress centralisation and presents League politics as a democratic struggle for Muslim autonomy.
You have to be special kind of retard to examine the catastrophe of communal nationalism and conclude that India needs another experiment of religious politics.
His treatment of Gandhi is equally revealing. He places Gandhi inside a story in which Congress became essentially Hindu, Muslim demands were suppressed and secular nationalism became a mythology Muslims must discard.
Notice what disappears: Muslims who rejected the League, Muslims who fought for a united India like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
He speaks about Indian Muslims as though we are a besieged body requiring liberation by Sharjeel Imam.
No, thank you.
I do not need Jinnah to explain my citizenship. I do not require Iqbal's political theology to tell me whether India is my country. I do not require a self-appointed vanguard to rescue me from the illusion of belonging to a common Indian nation.
This is not liberation.
It is communalism with a bibliography.
Then comes secularism. Sharjeel treats secular nationalism as oppressive because it expects communities to participate in a common Indian political identity. Religion becomes a basis for collective political organisation.
And then the intellectual superiority complex.
The implication is always that critics simply have not read enough.
You misunderstood me. You have not studied Partition.
No, mate.
Sometimes people understand you perfectly well and still think your conclusion is garbage.
Reading fifty books does not convert communal politics into enlightenment. An IIT education does not turn every conclusion into genius. Putting reactionary ideas through an academic thesaurus does not make them progressive.
A man can know an extraordinary amount of history and still learn the wrong lesson from it.
His interview destroys the sanitised version of Sharjeel Imam.
Indian Muslims deserve more than another generation being told that our political destiny lies in rehearsing the categories that once tore the subcontinent apart.
We deserve to move forward.
Sharjeel Imam wants to drag us backwards and call the journey emancipation.
This is a message from an Indian Muslim to Sharjeel Imam.
From the bottom of my heart, fuck you and your ideology.
@CatWomaniya Idiot ! the protestors that identify themselves as cockroaches are allunemployed parasites.
Working class kaha se aa gayi? They don’t have the time and energy to waste on scums like you.
@rohini_sgh No matter how much buttlicking of Islamists you do , they’ll slap you hard the same way they are doing it to Shekhar Gupta.
Or may be that is your end goal then you’re on the right path.
@will_seaborn@vonbrauckmann For him, Muslims killing Hindus was a peaceful co-existence. But the rising of RSS and BjP which means Hindu voice, is now a threat to secularism.
Ignorant fools like him have only made radicals more resolute.
Every force on Earth is lined up against him.
Trump schemes against him. Xi schemes against him. Pakistan schemes against him. Bangladesh schemes against him. The deep state, global elites, the opposition, liberals, radicals, Islamists, and leftists, all of them are locked in a coordinated war to break him.
From the day Modi entered politics, not a single day has passed without a manufactured crisis, a planted scandal, or a calculated attack designed to derail him.
These aren’t genuine challenges. They are deliberate traps, year after year, engineered from inside India and outside it to distract him, exhaust him, and sabotage the work of transforming the country.
The plots have been relentless and vicious. New fronts open every year. Yet he keeps advancing, working without pause, without regard for himself, solely for India and its people.
At times I wonder, if Indians even deserve him. And then I am reminded of the millions that put their faith in him, year after year, election after election.