ABSTRACT
Looking back at Ambedkar and Gandhi as dissident thinkers, we can talk about a key moment of the remaking of Zola’s “J’Accuse” in India. It is actually not the reading of Zola, but the spirit of “J’Accuse” which repeats itself in the dissident works of Gandhi and Ambedkar. Here again, we can evaluate the broader contribution of Gandhi and Ambedkar to the process of living in Truth and struggling for it. The Czech philosopher, Jan Patocka, once wrote that, “a life not willing to sacrifice itself to what makes it meaningful is not worth living”. Zola was ready to sacrifice his life for the truth in motion. As for Gandhi, he saw Truth as a necessary tightrope which needed to be walked on in order to be lived and understood. Therefore, he considered that without moral conscience any approach to Truth would be a failure from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, the Dreyfusard legacy that we can find in both Gandhi and Ambedkar is that of a moral conscience in resistance against injustice. As such, the voice of conscience always transcends that of the state. Here again, we can evaluate the broader contribution of Gandhi and Ambedkar to the civic and intellectual movements in India. Both Gandhi and Ambedkar have been inspirations to several generations of Indian dissenters for whom the process of democratization of democracy has been at the center of social and political debates. And among all these, Zola’s “J’Accuse” remains our contemporary, mainly because its mode of questioning continues to be different from our habitual practices of asking questions.
