On Counter-Revolution

The concept of “counter-revolution” occupies a galvanizing place in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought and moral psychology. Unlike nationalists of his time, Ambedkar rarely speaks of exclusion and exploitation as a function simply of modern colonial bondage. Instead, for him, Aishwary argues, “inequality” is force, a spectrum of compulsions, a desire for enmity with those we do not care to know. And it is in this lack of care — the delirium of indifference — that Ambedkar comes closest to the Algerian revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. 

Let us note, as Aishwary cautions: in the established consensus of postcolonial orthodoxy, these two thinkers are rarely seen in one anticolonial, anti-caste, and anti-majoritarian frame.  For both, however, the psychopathology that shapes our desire for inequality today has a durable, archaic relationship to majoritarian forms of social tyranny, one whose violence will well outlast colonial power and national independence. 

Which is why…