Colour speaks a lot about politics, be it the conventional “red” salute of the left parties or the saffron robe worn by the right-wing leaders. Colours also lend themselves to spectacle. In 2018, former Union finance minister Arun Jaitley presented a pink economic survey report to underline the gender-related concerns of the then government. In 2019, Nirmala Sitharaman wore a pink sari while presenting the budget. In this colourful display of metaphors and symbols, there is a new addition: The colour blue.
Following Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s alleged “insult” to Babasaheb Ambedkar in the Rajya Sabha, the Opposition embraced “blue”. On December 18, the leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, came to Parliament wearing a blue t-shirt. Since the Bharat Jodo Yatra, he has mostly been seen in his now-iconic white t-shirt, meant to represent his message of “love” (mohabbat) and “peace” in the “nafrat ka bazaar” (environment of hate). His sudden switch to blue didn’t go unnoticed.
As the colour is associated with the Dalit movement, the political messaging was clear. Gandhi was throwing a challenge at the BJP that had alleged that Congress dishonoured Ambedkar by neither awarding him the Bharat Ratna nor giving him any political leeway to win elections.
Colour of resistance
Though it is not clear why blue was conceived as the symbol of the Dalit movement, Ambedkarite scholars say that it is due to the colour of the sky beneath which everyone is equal. A few scholars think that the popularity of the iconic Ambedkar statue in a blue three-piece suit makes it the colour of the Dalit movement.
Ambedkar wearing a suit was a symbol of Dalit emancipation — not many from his caste and social conditioning could have imagined aspiring to such heights. It is said that blue or navy suits were very popular among US presidents. Ambedkar’s visit to Columbia University for his PhD broke the social and cultural barriers that denied Dalits their rights.
In 1942, when he floated the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, he chose blue as the colour of his flag. It also had an Ashok chakra in the centre. Later, as the party was dissolved and the Samata Sainik Dal (SSD), also known as the Republican Party of India, came into being, they kept the colour of the flag intact. According to the constitution of SSD, “The flag of the Party shall consist of Ashok Chakra in white colour in Centre against a blue cloth in rectangle, length and breadth being in 3 to 2 proportion.”
In 2018, blue became the bone of political contention when a statue of Ambedkar was demolished in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh. Though a new statue was reinstalled the very next day, it was painted saffron. For Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the saffron sherwani-clad Ambedkar was everything that he stood against. Within hours, the BSP leader Hemendra Gautam painted it blue.
A 2017 paper titled ‘Fabric-Rendered Identity: A Study of Dalit Representation in Pa. Ranjith’s Attakathi, Madras and Kabali’ points out that Mahars embraced blue as their colour of identity. In the words of the authors Benson Ranjan and Shreya Venkatraman, “A Dalit dressed in a blue-coloured suit is making an assertion of power to break the caste barrier in a society that has historically prohibited his expression through clothing.”
The year 2024 witnessed different dimensions of caste assertions as the consolidated opposition centred its Loksabha election campaign on the caste census. To some extent, it worked as well, leading to the BJP’s poor performance in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. The latest row over Ambedkar signals another contest that is “blue” in its essence.
Colour of indigo
Interestingly, beyond its connotation of Dalit politics, blue also symbolises a movement that shaped the history of the anti-colonial movement in India. The Indigo movement in Bengal against the Britishers was an assertion of the peasants against the forceful indigo plantation. The blue dye extracted from the indigo plant since 1777 led to an unprecedented uprising.
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To understand the significance of blue, one may listen to the then lieutenant governor of Bengal, John Peter Grant, who said, “If anyone thinks that such a demonstration of strong feeling by hundreds of thousands of people as we have just witnessed in Bengal has no meaning of greater importance than an ordinary commercial question concerning a particular blue dye, such a person, in my opinion, is fatally mistaken in the science of the dye.”
The blue that shines in the backdrop of the Republican Party of India’s flag also adorns India’s flag. During a lecture at the India International Centre on ‘The Culture of Indigo: Exploring the Asian Panorama-Aspects of Plant, Product, Power and Arts’ on November 29, 2008, former West Bengal Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi said, “There is one observation I wish to make about ‘blue’. India’s national flag is commonly described as a tricolour (tiranga), after its saffron (called bhagwa, or the colour of renunciation), its white and its green. But we forget that our flag also carries a fourth colour: The wheel of Ashoka’s Dhamma, which is a deep, navy blue. This wheel of law, which is central to the flag, reminds us also of the charkha, the spinning wheel that Gandhi made famous the world over.”
As the Congress celebrates 100 years of Gandhi’s presidency in Karnataka and adopts Jai Bhim as a foundational slogan, one can, it appears, find a blue bridge between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
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