Ambedkar as Ornament, Sikhism as Alrogacy? No. Sikhism as Alibi
K.B.S. Sidhu’s essay wants to be read as interfaith reflection. It should be read as something else: damage control in silk robes. It borrows Ambedkar’s moral prestige, quotes Sikh scripture with tenderness, acknowledges Buddhism with courtesy, and then quietly arranges the podium so that Sikhism can finish first. The prose is polished. The maneuver is familiar. Ambedkar is invited in not as a judge, but as a witness for the defense.
That is the first thing to notice. The second is the timing. This is not 1956. This is not a seminar room. This is a moment in which caste is once again embarrassingly alive in public life, including in California, where the fight over explicit caste protection exposed exactly how badly dominant South Asian institutions want the word itself kept at bay. The Hindu American Foundation publicly opposed California’s SB 403, arguing that the bill maligned South Asians and Hindus, and Governor Newsom later vetoed it even as advocates continued to argue that existing law was not enough unless caste was named directly.
So when Sidhu produces a graceful essay in which Sikhism appears as the spiritually mature answer to Ambedkar’s anxieties, one has to ask the obvious question: answer where? In scripture? In metaphor? In ceremonial memory? Or in the actual social life of Punjabi and Sikh institutions, where caste, region, surname, kinship, marriage circle, and language continue to do their quiet work under more respectable names? That is the hole in the middle of the essay. It confuses theology with audit.
The Guru Knelt. Caste Did Not
Sidhu’s central move is elegant enough to impress readers who prefer beauty to sociology. He lines up the Buddha’s “be a light unto yourself,” Guru Amar Das’s man tu jot saroop hai, and the Vaisakhi scene of Guru Gobind Singh kneeling before the Panj Pyare. Then he offers the reader a conclusion so smooth it almost conceals its own ambition: Sikhism does not negate Ambedkar’s Buddhist instinct, it completes it. Inner light is real, yes, but in Sikhism it is revealed most fully through the Guru. It is a lovely argument. It is also a dodge.
Because Ambedkar’s problem was never merely whether a tradition could produce beautiful lines about dignity. India is full of beautiful lines. Ambedkar’s problem was whether a social order could be trusted not to crush human beings while praising equality in public. He was not shopping for spiritual eloquence. He was investigating structures of humiliation. Sidhu answers that political question with a theological tableau. Guru Gobind Singh kneels; therefore Sikhism has already answered the fear of hierarchy. It is the sort of argument that works best on people who are already looking for reasons to be reassured.
But the Guru’s kneeling does not settle the caste question. It settles a proposition about sacred authority. It does not tell us whether caste continues to regulate trust, leadership, belonging, marriage, patronage, and social rank among the people who lovingly repeat that story. Ambedkar, of all people, would have known the difference. He did not spend his life asking whether a tradition had noble scenes. He asked whether it had reliable consequences.
Ambedkar Needed Guarantees, Not Atmosphere
The essay’s softest deception is also its most revealing one. Sidhu presents Ambedkar as a seeker standing between Buddhism and Sikhism, as though the great undecided issue were philosophical completeness. But Ambedkar did not finally turn away from Sikhism because he lacked exposure to dignity-language. He turned away because he was measuring risk, absorption, power, and autonomy. Even Sidhu concedes part of this when he notes concerns about Dalit identity being absorbed into Sikh political life and Ambedkar’s desire for a path he could shape on his own terms. Once that concession is made, the rest of the essay becomes a kind of aesthetic compensation package. Sikhism is made to look so morally elevated that the refusal can be domesticated into a regrettable near-miss.
That is the move. Ambedkar’s refusal is acknowledged, but only after being rendered safe. He is permitted his exit, but not his indictment.
The problem is that the public record will not cooperate with this soft landing. India’s own legal architecture continues to recognize Scheduled Caste status within Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist categories under the relevant constitutional order. However one reads the doctrine, the point is clear enough: caste has not vanished from Sikh and Buddhist social reality simply because theology disapproves of it. The Supreme Court’s recent discussion of the scope of Scheduled Caste status only underscores that the law itself still treats caste disability as legible within those traditions for specific statutory purposes. That alone should make one wary of triumphalist prose suggesting Sikhism has already solved what Ambedkar feared.
In other words, the Constitution is less sentimental than Sidhu’s essay. The law, for all its defects, is not fooled by atmosphere.
From Social Power to Scriptural Glow
This is where the article stops being merely soft and becomes politically useful. It arrives in a moment when caste in the diaspora is not just a village memory but a workplace dispute, a hiring pattern, a professional network, a boardroom silence, a Silicon Valley whisper, a regional clique with clean shoes and American accents. Anti-caste advocates in California have argued repeatedly that caste discrimination survives precisely by borrowing new vocabularies: ancestry, culture, language comfort, family connection, community fit. That is why the fight over naming caste mattered so much. Dominant groups always prefer euphemism. Explicit naming is what they fear.
Sidhu’s essay, whether consciously or not, serves that euphemistic instinct. It turns caste from a social structure into a spiritual problem supposedly answered long ago by Sikh doctrine. It relocates the crisis from institutions to scripture, from networks to metaphysics, from patronage to poetry. It is exquisitely written avoidance. The kind that sounds broad-minded enough to pass for courage while actually protecting the comfort of people who would prefer not to inspect their own social arrangements too closely.
And this is why the HAF angle matters. HAF opposed California’s effort to name caste explicitly as a protected category. Sidhu, in a different register and with more refinement, performs a parallel act of containment. He does not deny caste’s moral seriousness. He simply absorbs it into a civilizational story in which Sikhism has already done the right thing, already said the right words, already staged the right scenes. That kind of prose is not identical to lobbying, but it belongs to the same family of reassurance: do not look too hard at the social structure; the tradition has already spoken nobly.
Elite Sikhism Wants Ambedkar’s Halo, Not His Method
That, in the end, is the real scandal of the piece. It wants Ambedkar’s moral gravity without accepting Ambedkar’s discipline. Ambedkar’s method was ruthless. He did not judge traditions by their highest verse or their most moving anecdote. He judged them by what happened to human beings inside them. Who could marry whom. Who could eat with whom. Who led, who bowed, who waited outside, who entered, who inherited humiliation, and whether the structure had any reliable mechanism to stop reproducing it.
Sidhu gives us Guru Amar Das, Guru Gobind Singh, the Panj Pyare, Bhai Gurdas, the Buddha, and Ambedkar as a seeker between worlds. What he does not give us is the one thing Ambedkar would have demanded before any poetry began: a hard audit of caste in Sikh social life as actually lived. Without that, the essay is not brave. It is ornamental. It is a mirror held up to elite self-regard.
The sharpest line is also the simplest:
This is not Ambedkar in dialogue with Sikhism. This is elite Sikhism auditioning for Ambedkar’s approval after quietly setting aside Ambedkar’s questions.
And Ambedkar’s questions were not mystical. They were administrative, social, humiliating, concrete. Who gets excluded? Who gets absorbed? Who gets named equal and then managed as unequal anyway?
Until those questions are asked without incense, essays like Sidhu’s will remain what they really are: not interfaith courage, but caste anxiety translated into respectable prose.