Ambedkar's Agonism, Sovereign Violence and Pakistan as Peace

Abstract

In focusing primarily on B.R. Ambedkar, this article will reconstruct and interpret the work of hostility and antagonism that was central to his political thought and writings. As a thinker, Ambedkar remained singular in taking account of the full and potential measure of violence predominantly in caste relations but beyond in the comparative contexts of revolutions and formations of nation-states in the modern world. The article reconstructs and interprets Ambedkar as a foundational thinker of sovereignty, republicanism and agonism. In so doing, it analyses in the same analytic rubric, his writings on caste and Pakistan and the salience of separation to his political thought. Violence, power and antagonism are elaborated here as these were redirected to agonistic ends for the assumption of republicanism. The consideration of Pakistan as a political idea, it argues needs to be understood in relation to the historic source of sovereignty as Ambedkar uncovered namely in the figure of the Brahmin as a dispersed monarchy. Singular in his apprehension of radical futurity of the idea of Pakistan, the article intervenes in and contributes to global political thought and modern Indian history and the formation of Pakistan