Dr. Ambedkar, one of the greatest minds of modern India, had problems with Hindu culture, but not with Vedanta. Our culture is based on the very periphery of religion and does not resonate with Vedanta. That’s the reason it is in conflict with the Constitution. The Constitution and true religiosity—which you can call self-knowledge or Vedanta—go together.
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Dr. Anjor: Dr. Ambedkar, the chief architect of our Constitution has famously said that democracy in India is only a top dressing on a soil that is essentially undemocratic. Recently a US organization called Pew Research did a survey in India. And many other Countries. They found that in India, the majority of the people believe that an authoritarian government would be more preferable. And that proportion was the highest in India among all the countries that they surveyed.
So while our Constitution gives us a democracy and that democracy has certain values aligned with it, the values of Liberty, equality, fraternity, justice, the question is that are those values aligned with our societal values? Many researchers feel that democracy in India is only superficial because at the heart of it, we are a very religious society. And many researchers have pointed out this data. If you look at the number of religious places of worship in India, that is far, far greater than the number of schools, hospitals, health centers in the country and that they use this, as a kind of argument to say that is why you don't have democratic culture, but you have the dominance of religion and culture in India.
The question is, are these actually in conflict with each other? Is democracy and the Constitution in conflict with our religion and our culture?
