Mahad: Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Struggles for Citizenship Rights of the Working Classes

14 April has been a holiday for decades now. However, the rise in mass consciousness about the Phule-Ambedkar tradition and its contemporary significance has made Babasaheb’s birthday more significant than ever. It is a day on which we commemorate his many struggles and draw lessons and inspirations from his work. 

The April issue of the Workers’ Resistance in previous years have carried detailed discussions on Babasaheb’s contributions in securing crucial workplace rights: eight-hour workday, minimum wages, social security, maternity benefit and others. This year we shall recall Babasaheb’s fight for equal access to public resources for all, through the example of the Mahad Satyagraha. 

In August 1923, the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution allowing Dalits to use government-maintained water bodies, but it faced opposition from Savarna Hindus. In January 1924, Mahad passed a resolution in its municipal council to enforce the act but failed to implement it due to protests.

In 1927, Ambedkar launched a satyagraha to assert the Dalit peoples’ rights to use water in public places. Mahad was chosen for the event due to the local support that Ambedkar enjoyed there. Surendranath Tipnis, president of the Mahad municipality, invited Ambedkar to hold a meeting there. On 20 March, Ambedkar drank water from the tank, followed by thousands of Dalits.

Ambedkar had planned a second conference in Mahad in December 1927 but faced legal obstacles due to a case filed by caste Hindus. On 25 December 1937, the Bombay High Court ruled that Dalits had the right to use water from the tank. On 19 March 1940, Ambedkar arranged a rally in Mahad to commemorate the Satyagraha as “Empowerment Day.”

Mahad satyagraha was a land mark event in more ways than one. It was of course a landmark event in the Dalit struggle for rights and dignity, but it has important consequences for the working-class movement as well. At the heart of the Mahad satyagraha lay a quest for equality against all forms of socio-economic discrimination and dehumanization. The Dalits were the laboring classes and their exclusion from access to water tanks was part of a larger social phenomenon of excluding the working people from access to resources.  

In the context of the freedom struggle, the Mahad satyagraha a deep meaning. While the Gandhian Congress was using the satyagraha as a weapon of struggle against imperialism, Babasaheb turned it into a weapon against oppressors within the nation. To many upper castes, including a section of the nationalist leadership, this was a distraction and could disrupt the freedom struggle. For Ambedkar, and revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, the struggle against internal oppression had to happen alongside with the fight against imperialism. Mahad satyagraha played an instrumental role in establishing this “peoples’ democratic” approach. 

This “peoples’ democratic” approach matured over the years to ensure that the oppressed and the exploited had a set of fundamental rights guaranteed through the constitution. This included the prohibition of discrimination against the use of tanks and other public water bodies on the grounds of race, religion, caste sex and place of birth (Article 15). 
While the achievement of notional equality through the constitution was historic, today we find that substantive equality is a long way off. In our deeply unequal and stratified society, large sections of Dalits and working classes are deprived from access to clean air, water, and of equal participation in public spaces. 

Mahad satyagraha has left behind a legacy of struggle for equal citizenship for all, which the constitution guaranteed, but which will not be fulfilled without a powerful peoples’ assertion for their rights. Babasaheb not only gave us the constitution also gave us stellar examples of how to wage the battles for constitutional rights. Mahad satyagraha is one of those shining examples. 

On 14 April 2025, we pay tribute to the man who led the satyagraha and helped pave the path for today’s battles for equality for workers – in workplaces, as well as in society as citizens deserving of equal access to resources, amenities, public life, and all that is needed to live a life of dignity and self-respect.