Ambedkar: Why Indian Labour is Determined to Win the War

In one line

Speaking on All India Radio while the Quit India movement was under way, Ambedkar explained why Indian labour was helping the British war effort instead of opposing it, and argued that the only thing worth getting out of the war was a new social order.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: this is the text of a broadcast delivered by Dr B.R. Ambedkar from the Bombay station of All India Radio while he was Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, published in Indian Information on 1 January 1943, in which he set out the reasons for Indian labour's support of the war against Nazism and for its demand that victory be followed by a new order founded on liberty, equality and fraternity.

The occasion, which decides how the speech reads

Who was speaking. Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, 1891 to 1956. Born into the Mahar community, then treated as untouchable. Educated at Elphinstone College in Bombay, Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics, and called to the bar at Gray's Inn. Later the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution of India and independent India's first Law Minister.

In what capacity. As Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, an office he took up in July 1942 and held until October 1946. That is a government post: he was, in effect, the labour minister of the Government of India during the war, and the reforms of working hours, welfare and wage machinery of those years came out of his department.

When. The broadcast was published in Indian Information on 1 January 1943, so it belongs to the last weeks of 1942 or the first days of 1943.

And what was happening at the time. The Second World War was going badly in Asia. Singapore had fallen and Burma had been overrun. Within India, the Congress had passed the Quit India resolution in August 1942, weeks after Ambedkar took office, and its leaders were in prison. The country was in the middle of a mass movement against the very government Ambedkar had just joined.

Why the occasion matters more here than for any other text on this paper. Ambedkar is not writing an essay. He is a member of the wartime government, on government radio, explaining to a country in revolt why one section of it is co-operating. Every choice in the speech follows from that position, and a student who describes the broadcast without the situation has described half of it.

The opening move

He begins with what he calls a fact that must arrest the attention of all: that in the midst of "this sudden surge of non-co-operation with and opposition to the war effort which we are witnessing in India", labour has been actively co-operating in the prosecution of the war.