Postulating Political Truth Procedure and Ethics in B.R. Ambedkar

Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism was certainly a political event, as it stood in stark contrast to the prevailing political climate. This subjectivity was also formalized through the organizations that followed after the conversion. The question that concerns this paper is the following: can there be an ethics derived from the Ambedkarite truth process? This paper tries to assert the universality of Ambedkar’s ethics that stem from a political truth process, one that cannot be named as traditional Buddhist ethics or pragmatism. In this sense, Ambedkar’s singular ethical position emerges in a situation as an exception to the situation, forming a subjectivity. There are consequences of Ambedkar’s political interventions. However, the truth of these interventions must be seen as truth processes that are infinite. This paper asserts Ambedkar’s political events as what Badiou calls, truth processes. It examines Ambedkar’s texts and political interventions through the four determinations of truths, the ‘ethic of truths’ and philosophical virtues proposed by Alain Badiou, such as unnameability and moderation. Through the conversion to Buddhism, a liturgy of Dalit Buddhism emerges as a possible mode of existence. This insistence on ethical principles is due to Ambedkar’s singular political truths that are at once collective and universal

Buddhism · Political ethics · Political subjectivity · Politics · Subjectivity · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Diaspora