The Poison Is Not in Ambedkar. It Is in the Fear of What Ambedkar Reveals.

— ✍️ Sachin Anand Tupere

On September 26, an anonymous account on X posted a list of books and academic readings taught in Indian universities and described them as “poison” being fed to young minds by a supposed “leftist cabal”. Among the works named were B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, Jyotirao Phule’s Gulamgiri, Sharmila Rege’s Against the Madness of Manu, works by Gail Omvedt and Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, writings associated with Periyar, and several scholarly works on caste, Brahminism, patriarchy and Indian history. Curiously, the list also included the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

What might otherwise have remained another specimen of social-media hysteria acquired a very different significance when, according to reports, the Prime Minister’s Office communicated the matter to the Higher Education Department. On September 27, the Department sent an “urgent” communication to Central Universities asking them to furnish comments on the post and provide enrolment details for the courses mentioned in it.

There has been no announcement that these books are being banned. No university syllabus has, as a result of this communication alone, been formally abolished. Those distinctions matter.
But another distinction matters too. A democracy does not become intellectually authoritarian only when it bans a book. Sometimes the more revealing moment comes earlier, when the state begins treating the existence of a book in a classroom as something requiring political explanation. And that is the question this episode leaves behind. Why did an anonymous social-media post acquire enough institutional importance to reach the highest levels of government?
Why should the presence of Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar or anti-caste scholarship in a university syllabus become a matter of executive concern? And, most importantly, what exactly is so dangerous about allowing young people to read them?

Perhaps the answer has less to do with what these books teach than with what they teach students to question. The crime of making the familiar strange. Every society has its sacred arrangements.
Some are explicitly religious. Others are social arrangements so old that they cease to appear political. They become “tradition”, “culture”, “custom”, “the way things are”. Caste is one such arrangement.

Its extraordinary durability has depended not only on coercion but on its ability to present hierarchy as normal, inherited and sometimes even sacred.

Ambedkar's intellectual intervention was devastating precisely because he refused to accept this normality. He did not merely ask whether untouchability was cruel. He asked what kind of social order produces untouchability in the first place. He did not merely ask whether Dalits should be treated better. He asked whether a society organised through graded inequality could genuinely call itself democratic. He did not merely seek reform within caste. He questioned caste itself.

That is why Annihilation of Caste remains so powerful. It does not ask the reader to feel sympathy. It asks the reader to interrogate structure. That distinction is crucial.

Sympathy can coexist comfortably with hierarchy. A person can feel compassion for the oppressed while leaving the architecture of oppression untouched.
Ambedkar was asking for something much more unsettling, the destruction of the architecture itself.

Phule had already begun this assault decades earlier. In Gulamgiri, the question was not simply whether particular individuals had behaved unjustly. Phule challenged the intellectual and religious narratives through which social domination had been legitimised. He asked who had written history, who controlled knowledge, who defined virtue, and who benefited when inequality was represented as a cosmic order.

This is why the politics surrounding these books cannot be understood merely as a disagreement between “left” and “right”.

The deeper conflict is over knowledge itself. Who gets to describe Indian society?
Who gets to define its history? Who gets to determine which injustices deserve intellectual attention? And who gets to decide when criticism of a social order becomes an attack on the culture supposedly represented by that order?
Calling Ambedkar “leftist” does not make him one.

One of the more revealing aspects of the controversy is the attempt to place such a diverse group of thinkers under the single label of a “leftist cabal”. Historically and intellectually, this is a remarkably crude classification. Ambedkar's relationship with Marxism was complex and often sharply critical. Phule belonged to a nineteenth-century anti-caste tradition that cannot simply be folded into twentieth-century European ideological categories. Periyar developed his own radically anti-caste, rationalist and Dravidian critique. Gail Omvedt's scholarship engaged Marxism but was deeply rooted in anti-caste movements and social history. Sharmila Rege's work opened important feminist questions about caste and knowledge. To call all of this “leftist propaganda” is to avoid engaging with the arguments themselves.
It is also to misunderstand the history of Indian radical thought.

The Indian Left has itself had a complicated relationship with caste. For decades, the tendency to understand social conflict primarily through the category of class often proved inadequate to the realities of caste hierarchy. Ambedkarite thinkers repeatedly insisted that caste could not simply be dissolved into the language of economic class. So the irony is almost unbearable.

A body of thought that has often criticised the traditional Left for failing to understand caste is now being dismissed as a homogeneous “Leftist” project.
That is not intellectual criticism. It is ideological labelling. And ideological labelling is what happens when the argument itself is inconvenient. The university is supposed to be inconvenient.
A university that never unsettles anyone is probably not doing much intellectual work.
Students should encounter ideas that make them uncomfortable. They should encounter arguments they consider offensive. They should encounter books that challenge their religious assumptions, their caste assumptions, their political beliefs and even their understanding of their own families. They should encounter arguments they ultimately reject. This is not a defect of higher education. It is its purpose.

It also misunderstands how education works. Reading is not surrender.

A university does not exist to manufacture agreement. It exists to create the conditions under which disagreement can become intellectually serious. If Ambedkar is wrong, argue with Ambedkar. If Phule's historical interpretation is flawed, demonstrate the flaw. If Rege's understanding of Brahmanical patriarchy is inadequate, write a better account. If Omvedt's sociology is methodologically weak, subject it to rigorous criticism.
That is how knowledge advances.

The answer to a controversial book is another book. The answer to an argument is a better argument. The answer to an uncomfortable history is not administrative surveillance.

What changes when the state enters the classroom?

This is where the present episode becomes more consequential than the original social-media post. Universities already possess mechanisms through which curricula are created and reviewed. Academic departments, Boards of Studies, faculties and academic councils participate in the process. The Wire reported that academics at universities circulated the government communication and questioned why an anonymous social-media post had become the basis for executive scrutiny of academic material.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about governments asking questions about public institutions. But the source and nature of the complaint matter. If an established academic body raises concerns about a text's scholarly quality, a review is perfectly reasonable. If historians challenge its evidence, that is scholarship.
If sociologists question its methodology, that is scholarship. If students complain that a course lacks ideological diversity, universities can debate the syllabus. But an anonymous account declaring that a collection of scholarly works is “poison” is not an academic argument. It is a political accusation. And when such an accusation travels into the administrative machinery of the state, the institutional question becomes unavoidable.

What happens to academic freedom when universities begin to anticipate political displeasure? The most effective form of censorship does not always arrive with a prohibition order. Sometimes it arrives as a question. “Why are you teaching this?”
Sometimes it arrives as an inquiry.
“Who is enrolled in this course?”
Sometimes it arrives as an informal warning. Sometimes nothing is officially banned at all. But teachers begin choosing safer texts. Departments avoid contentious subjects. Administrators become cautious.
The syllabus becomes narrower. And eventually the institution learns to censor itself. That is why institutional autonomy matters even when no book has formally been banned.

The politics of the Hindu past

There is another layer that cannot be ignored. The present political moment in India is deeply shaped by Hindutva. The BJP is the dominant political expression of that project, although neither the party nor its voters constitute a single ideological bloc.

Hindutva politics has repeatedly sought to construct a broad Hindu political identity.
Ambedkar's thought creates an uncomfortable complication. Because Ambedkar's central question is not simply:
Who are we? It is: What kind of social order have we created among ourselves?
A political project seeking civilisational unity may find it useful to speak of a common Hindu identity. Ambedkar forces the question of what happens inside that identity.
Who occupies the top?
Who occupies the bottom?
Who has historically controlled knowledge?
Who has been denied education?
Who was permitted to enter temples?
Who was permitted to draw water?
Who was allowed to accumulate property?
Who could read sacred texts?
Who was condemned to hereditary labour?

These questions do not disappear because a nation discovers a shared civilisational identity. In fact, they become more urgent.
Because unity without equality can become merely another name for hierarchy.
This is one reason Ambedkar remains so difficult to domesticate. He can be transformed into a national icon. He can be placed on currency-like commemorative material. His portrait can hang in government offices. His name can appear in political speeches. But the intellectual Ambedkar remains troublesome.

The Ambedkar who asks whether Hindu society can be democratic without destroying caste is considerably more difficult to celebrate. A statue is silent. A book is not.

The domestication of radical thinkers

There is a broader phenomenon here. States often domesticate radical thinkers by turning them into symbols.
The rebel becomes a national icon.
The critic becomes a commemorative figure. The revolutionary becomes a portrait. The difficult book disappears behind the familiar quotation. This is how societies neutralise uncomfortable intellectuals without formally rejecting them.

Ambedkar is particularly vulnerable to this process because almost every political formation in India wants some relationship with his legacy. The result can be a strange political theatre in which everyone claims Ambedkar while very few are willing to confront the full implications of his thought. But Ambedkar cannot be reduced to the Constitution alone. Nor can he be reduced to reservations. Nor can he be reduced to the phrase “social justice”.

He was a radical critic of caste, social hierarchy, religious authority and inherited inequality. His idea of democracy was inseparable from liberty, equality and fraternity. That is a much more demanding Ambedkar. And it is precisely that Ambedkar whom students encounter when they read him rather than merely commemorate him.

The most disturbing word is not “poison”
Oddly enough, the most disturbing word in this entire controversy may not be “poison”.
It may be “enrolment”.

Why does the state need to know how many students are taking the courses identified by an anonymous political account? The number of students studying Ambedkar is not, by itself, an academic measure. A course does not become more or less intellectually legitimate because ten students take it rather than a hundred.
The question is whether the course has scholarly merit. Whether its readings are academically defensible. Whether students are encouraged to engage critically with them. Whether competing interpretations are available. Those are academic questions. The number of students enrolled is an administrative fact. When administrative scrutiny follows ideological accusation, the distinction becomes important.

Do not make Ambedkar another scripture.

Yet there is a danger on the other side as well. The defence of Ambedkar must not become the creation of an Ambedkarite orthodoxy that refuses criticism. That would betray Ambedkar himself.

A serious intellectual defence of Ambedkar should insist on the freedom to disagree with him. Read Gandhi alongside Ambedkar. Read Marx alongside Ambedkar.
Read Savarkar alongside Ambedkar. Read conservative critics of Ambedkar. Read feminist critiques of Ambedkar. Read Dalit critiques of Ambedkar. Then argue.

The university should not become a temple of Ambedkar. It should remain a place where Ambedkar can be argued with.
That is precisely why the attempt to characterise his work as “poison” is so intellectually impoverished. It assumes that ideas spread like contamination.
But ideas do not become dangerous merely because students encounter them. They become dangerous to established certainties when students learn how to think with them.

What are they actually afraid of?

Perhaps this is the question at the centre of the controversy. What exactly is the fear?
Is it that students will become Marxists?
That explanation is historically weak.
Is it that students will become anti-Hindu?
Again, the list itself complicates the claim, since the same compilation reportedly included the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Or is the deeper fear that students might begin looking at familiar institutions historically? That they might ask why caste survived for so long. Why social hierarchy acquired religious legitimacy. Why knowledge was unequally distributed. Why women experienced oppression differently across caste locations. Why some communities were denied dignity as a matter of social custom. Why the language of tradition can sometimes conceal relations of power.

Those questions are not anti-national. They are not necessarily left-wing. They are the beginning of social inquiry. And a society that cannot tolerate inquiry into its own foundations has a problem much larger than its university syllabus. The poison is elsewhere.

There is a final irony worth considering.
The anonymous post appears to imagine that books can manufacture political dissidents. It invokes names such as Kanhaiya Kumar and Neha Bora and attributes their political formation to an education system supposedly “infested” with these books. This is an astonishingly authoritarian understanding of education.
It assumes that citizens can be manufactured by controlling their reading.
But if democracy depends upon citizens who can think independently, then the real danger is not that students encounter too many arguments. It is that they encounter too few. A democracy should not be afraid of books. A confident civilisation does not need to hide its contradictions from its students.

If Hindu society has arguments to make, let those arguments be made. If Hindutva has an intellectual defence, let students read it.
If Ambedkar can be defeated in argument, defeat him in argument. If Phule can be refuted, refute him. If Periyar is wrong, demonstrate why. But do not ask the state to protect students from reading. That is not confidence. That is fear. And perhaps this is why the title of the controversy deserves to be turned upside down.
The poison is not in Ambedkar. The poison is not in Phule. The poison is not in a student encountering an uncomfortable book.
The poison lies in the belief that citizens cannot be trusted with ideas. It lies in the suspicion that reading itself is a form of contamination. It lies in the desire to create a generation that knows its civilisation only through officially approved memory.

And it lies in the transformation of the university from a place where inherited truths are interrogated into a place where inherited truths are protected from interrogation. Ambedkar's most unsettling legacy is not that he gave India another ideology. It is that he gave millions of Indians permission to ask questions they had been taught not to ask. That permission is difficult to take back once it has been given. A book can be removed from a syllabus. A course can be altered.
A university can be pressured. But once a student has learned to ask why, the question cannot easily be put back into silence. That is the real reason Ambedkar remains dangerous. Not because his books contain poison. But because they expose the places where society has hidden its poison for generations.

The poison is not in Ambedkar.
It is in the fear of what Ambedkar reveals.

-Sachin Anand Tupere is a research scholar and freelance writer based in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra.