Gandhi's Ambedkar

'Inside every thinking Indian there is a Gandhian and a Marxist struggling for supremacy,' says noted historian
and biographer RAMACHANDRA GUHA in the opening sentence of this publication, which has just been
released. A significant portion of the book expands on this salvo. In short, it examines and discusses all those
who comprise the life of thinking Indians today. Exclusive extracts from the book released yesterday .

MAHATMA GANDHI was not so much the Father of the Nation as the mother of all debates regarding its
future. All his life he fought in a friendly spirit with compatriots whose views on this or that topic diverged
sharply from his. He disagreed with Communists and the bhadralok on the efficacy and morality of violence as
a political strategy. He fought with radical Muslims on the one side and with radical Hindus on the other, both of
whom sought to build a state on theological principles. He argued with Nehru and other scientists on whether
economic development in a free India should centre on the village or the factory. And with that other giant,
Rabindranath Tagore, he disputed the merits of such varied affiliations as the English language, nationalism,
and the spinning wheel.

In some ways the most intense, interesting and long-running of these debates was between Gandhi and
Ambedkar. Gandhi wished to save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, whereas Ambedkar saw a solution
for his people outside the fold of the dominant religion of the Indian people. Gandhi was a rural romantic, who
wished to make the self-governing village the bedrock of free India; Ambedkar an admirer of city life and
modern technology who dismissed the Indian village as a den of iniquity. Gandhi was a crypto-anarchist who
favoured non-violent protest while being suspicious of the state; Ambedkar a steadfast constitutionalist, who
worked within the state and sought solutions to social problems with the aid of the state.

Perhaps the most telling difference was in the choice of political instrument. For Gandhi, the Congress
represented all of India, the Dalits too. Had he not made their cause their own from the time of his first ashram
in South Africa? Ambedkar however made a clear distinction between freedom and power. The Congress
wanted the British to transfer power to them, but to obtain freedom the Dalits had to organise themselves as a
separate bloc, to form a separate party, so as to more effectively articulate their interests in the crucible of
electoral politics. It was thus that in his lifetime, and for long afterwards, Ambedkar came to represent a
dangerously subversive threat to the authoritative, and sometimes authoritarian, equation: Gandhi = Congress
= Nation.

Here then is the stuff of epic drama, the argument between the Hindu who did most to reform caste and the ex-
Hindu who did most to do away with caste altogether. Recent accounts represent it as a fight between a hero
and a villain, the writer's caste position generally determining who gets cast as hero, who as villain. In truth
both figures should be seen as heroes, albeit tragic ones.

The tragedy, from Gandhi's point of view, was that his colleagues in the national movement either did not
understand his concern with untouchability or even actively deplored it. Priests and motley shankaracharyas
thought he was going too fast in his challenge to caste - and why did he not first take their permission?
Communists wondered why he wanted everyone to clean their own latrines when he could be speaking of
class struggle. And Congressmen in general thought Harijan work came in the way of an all-out effort for
national freedom. Thus Stanley Reid, a former editor of the Times of India quotes an Indian patriot who
complained in the late thirties that "Gandhi is wrapped up in the Harijan movement. He does not care a jot
whether we live or die; whether we are bond or free."

The opposition that he faced from his fellow Hindus meant that Gandhi had perforce to move slowly, and in
stages. He started by accepting that untouchability was bad, but added a cautionary caveat - that inter-dining
and inter-marriage were also bad. He moved on to accepting inter-mingling and inter-dining (hence the
movement for temple entry), and to arguing that all men and all varnas were equal. The last and most far-
reaching step, taken only in 1946, was to challenge caste directly by accepting and sanctioning inter-marriage
itself.
The tragedy, from Ambedkar's point of view, was that to fight for his people he had to make common cause
with the British. In his book, Worshipping False Gods, Arun Shourie has made much of this. Shourie takes all
of 600 pages to make two points: (i) that Ambedkar was a political opponent of both Gandhi and the Congress,
and generally preferred the British to either; (ii) that Ambedkar cannot be called the "Father of the Constitution"
as that implies sole authorship, whereas several other people, such as K. M. Munshi and B. N. Rau, also
contributed significantly to the wording of the document. Reading Worshipping False Gods, one might likewise
conclude that it has been mistakenly advertised as being the work of one hand. Entire chapters are based
entirely on one or other volume of the Transfer of Power, the collection of official papers put out some years
ago by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The editor of that series, Nicholas Mansergh, might with reason claim
co-authorship of Shourie's book. In a just world he would be granted a share of the royalties too.

Practised in the arts of over-kill and over-quote, Shourie is a pamphleteer parading as a historian. He speaks
on Gandhi only as "Gandhiji" and of the national movement only as the "National Movement", indicating that he
has judged the case beforehand. For to use the suffix and the capitals is to simultaneously elevate and
intimidate, to set up the man and his movement as the ideal, above and beyond criticism. But the Congress'
claim to represent all of India was always under challenge. The Communists said it was the party of landlords
and capitalists. The Muslim League said it was a party of the Hindus. Ambedkar then appended a devastating
caveat, saying that the party did not even represent all Hindus, but only the upper castes.

Shourie would deny that these critics had any valid arguments whatsoever. He is in the business of awarding,
and more often withholding, certificates of patriotism. The opponents of the Congress are thus all suspect to
him, simply because they dared point out that the National Movement was not always as national as it set out
to be, or that the Freedom Struggle promised unfreedom for some. But how did these men outside the
Congress come to enjoy such a wide following? This is a question Shourie does not pause to answer, partly
because he had made up his mind in advance, but also because he is woefully ill-informed. Consider now
some key facts erased or ignored by him.

That Ambedkar preferred the British to the Congress is entirely defensible. Relevant here is a remark of the
18th-Century English writer Samuel Johnson. When the American colonists asked for independence from
Britain, Johnson said: "How is it that we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"
Untouchability was to the Indian freedom movement what slavery had been to the American struggle, the basic
contradiction it sought to paper over. Before Ambedkar, another outstanding leader of the lower castes, Jotiba
Phule, also distrusted the Congress, in his time a party dominated by Poona Brahmins. He too preferred the
British, in whose armies and factories low castes could find opportunities denied to them in the past. The
opening up of the economy and the growth of the colonial cities also helped many untouchables escape the
tyranny of the village. The British might have been unwitting agents of change; nonetheless, under their rule
life for the lower castes was less unpleasant by far than it had been under the Peshwas.

Shourie also seems unaware of work by worthy historians on low- caste movements in other parts of India.
Mark Juergensmeyer has documented the struggles of untouchables in Punjab, which under its remarkable
leader Mangu Ram, rejected the Congress and the Arya Samaj to form a new sect, Adi-Dharm, which was
opposed to both. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has written of the Namasudras in Bengal, who like Ambedkar and
his Mahars, were not convinced that a future Congress government would be sympathetic to their interests.
And countless scholars have documented the rise of the Dravidian movement in South India, that took as its
point of departure Brahmin domination of the Congress in Madras: the movement's founder, E. V. Ramaswami
"Periyar", also fought bitterly with Gandhi.

The leaders of these movements, and the millions who followed them, worked outside the Congress and often
in opposition to it. Enough reason perhaps for Shourie to dismiss them all as anti- national. Indeed, Shourie's
attitude is comparable to that of White Americans who question the patriotism of those Blacks who dare speak
out against racism. For asking Blacks to stand up for their rights, men of such stature as W.E.B. Du Bois and
Paul Robeson were called all kind of names, of which "anti-American" was much the politest. Later, the great
Martin Luther King was persecuted by the most powerful of American agencies, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, equated patriotism with acquiescence to White domination.
Much of the time, Shourie writes as if there is a singular truth, with him as its repository and guarantor. Time
and again he equates Ambedkar with Jinnah as an "accomplice of Imperial politics". He dismisses all that
Ambedkar wrote about Hinduism "caricature" and "calumnies". Not once does he acknowledge that there was
much truth to the criticisms. There is not one admission here of the horrendous and continuing sufferings of
Dalit as the hands of caste Hindus that might explain and justify Ambedkar's rhetoric and political choices. For
Shourie, the fact that Ambedkar disagreed long and often with Gandhi is proof enough that he was anti-
national. He even insinuates that Ambedkar "pushed Gandhi to the edge of death" by not interfering with the
Mahatma's decision to fast in captivity. Of the same fast other historians have written, in my view more
plausibly, that by threatening to die Gandhi blackmailed Ambedkar into signing a pact with him.

Somewhere in the middle of Worshipping False Gods, the author complains that Ambedkar's "statues, dressed
in garish blue, holding a copy of the Constitution - have been put up in city after city." However, this aesthetic
distaste seems rather pointless. For the background to the statues and the reverence they command lies in the
continuing social practices of the religion to which Shourie and I belong. If caste lives, so will the memory of the
man who fought to annihilate it. The remarkable thing is that 50 years after independence, the only politician,
dead or alive, who has a truly pan-Indian appeal is B. R. Ambedkar. Where Gandhi is forgotten in his native
Gujarat and Nehru vilified in his native Kashmir, Ambedkar is worshipped in hamlets all across the land. For
Dalits everywhere he is the symbol of their struggle, the scholar, theoretician and activist whose own life
represented a stirring triumph over the barriers of caste.

Shourie's attacks on Dalits and their hero follow in quick succession the books he has published attacking
Communists, Christians and Muslims. Truth be told, the only category of Indians he has not attacked - and
going by his present political persuasion will not attack - are high-caste Hindus. Oddly enough, this bilious
polemicist and baiter of the minorities was once an anti-religious leftist who excoriated Hinduism. To see
Shourie's career in its totality is to recall these words of Issac Deutscher, on the communist turned anti-
communist.

He brings to his job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard of truth, and the intense hatred
with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see
the world in black and white, but now the colours are differently distributed ... The ex- communist ... is haunted
by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society ... He then
tries to suppress the guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frantic
aggressiveness. He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience
of all. He may no longer be concerned with any cause except one - self- justification.

Ambedkar is a figure who commands great respect from one end of the social spectrum. But he is also, among
some non-Dalits, an object of great resentment, chiefly for his decision to carve out a political career
independent of and sometimes in opposition to Gandhi's Congress. That is of course the burden of Shourie's
critique but curiously, the very week his book was published, at a political rally in Lucknow the Samajvadi
Party's Beni Prasad Verma likewise dismissed Ambedkar as one who "did nothing else except create trouble
for Gandhiji". This line, that Ambedkar had no business to criticise, challenge or argue with Gandhi, was of
course made with much vigour and malice during the national movement as well.

I think, however, that for Ambedkar to stand up to the uncrowned king and anointed Mahatma of the Indian
people required extraordinary courage and will-power. Gandhi thought so too. Speaking at a meeting in Oxford
in October 1931, Gandhi said he had "the highest regard for Dr. Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter.
That he does not break our heads is an act of self- restraint on his part." Writing to an English friend two years
later, he said he found "nothing unnatural" in Ambedkar's hostility to the Congress and its supporters. "He has
not only witnessed the inhuman wrongs done to the social pariahs of Hinduism", reflected this Hindu, "but in
spite of all his culture, all the honours that he has received, he has, when he is in India, still to suffer many
insults to which untouchables are exposed." In June 1936 Gandhi pointed out once again that Dr. Ambedkar
"has had to suffer humiliations and insults which should make any one of us bitter and resentful." "Had I been
in his place," he remarked, "I would have been as angry."

Gandhi's latter-day admirers might question Ambedkar's patriotism and probity, but the Mahatma had no such
suspicions himself. Addressing a bunch of Karachi students in June 1934, he told them that "the magnitude of
(Dr. Ambedkar's) sacrifice is great. He is absorbed in his own work. He leads a simple life. He is capable of
earning one to two thousand rupees a month. He is also in a position to settle down in Europe if he so desires.
But he does not want to stay there. He is only concerned about the welfare of the Harijians."

To Gandhi, Ambedkar's protest held out a lesson to the upper castes. In March 1936 he said that if Ambedkar
and his followers were to embrace another religion, "We deserve such treatment and our task (now) is to wake
up to the situation and purify ourselves." Not many heeded the warning, for towards the end of his life Gandhi
spoke with some bitterness about the indifference to Harijan work among his fellow Hindus: "The tragedy is
that those who should have especially devoted themselves to the work of (caste) reform did not put their hearts
into it. What wonder that Harijan brethren feel suspicious, and show opposition and bitterness."

The words quoted in the preceding paragraphs have been taken from that reliable and easily accessible
source: the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The 100 volumes of that set rest lightly on my shelves as,
going by other evidence, they rest on the shelves of the man who compiled Worshipping False Gods. Perhaps
the most perverse aspect of an altogether perverse book is that Shourie does not once tell us what Gandhi
said or wrote about his great adversary. A curious thing or, on reflection, a not-so-curious thing: for if that
scholarly courtesy was restored to, the case that Ambedkar was an anti-national careerist would be blown sky-
high.

One of the few Gandhians who understood the cogency of the Dalit critique of the Congress was C.
Rajagopalachari. In the second half of 1932, Rajaji became involved in the campaign to allow the so-called
untouchables to enter the Guruvayoor temple in Kerala. The campaign was led by that doughty fighter for the
rights of the dispossessed, K. Kelappan Nair. In a speech at Guruvayoor on December 20, 1932, Rajaji told the
high castes that it would certainly help us in the fight for Swaraj if we open the doors of the temple (to
Harijans). One of the many causes that keeps Swaraj away from us is that we are divided among ourselves.
Mahatmaji received many wounds in London (during the Second Round Table Conference of 1931). But Dr.
Ambedkar's darts were the worst. Mahatmaji did not quake before the Churchills of England. But as repressing
the nation he had to plead guilty to Dr. Ambedkar's charges.

As it was, the managers of temples across the land could count upon the support of many among their
clientele, the suvarna Hindus who agreed with the Shankaracharyas that the Gandhians were dangerous
revolutionaries who had to be kept out at the gate. Unhappily, while upper-caste Hindus thought that Gandhi
moved too fast, Dalits today feel he was much too slow. The Dalit politician Mayawati has, more than once,
spoken of the Mahatma as a shallow paternalist who sought only to smooth the path for more effective long-
term domination by the suvarna. Likewise, in his book Why I am Not a Hindu Kancha Illiah writes of Gandhi as
wanting to "build a modern consent system for the continued maintenance of brahminical hegemony" - a
judgment as unfair as Shourie's on Ambedkar.

Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals, now, decades after their death, it should
be possible to see their contributions as complementing one another's. The Kannada critic D. R. Nagaraj once
noted that in the narratives of Indian nationalism the "heroic stature of the caste-Hindu reformer", Gandhi,
"further dwarfed the Harijan personality" of Ambedkar. In the Ramayana there is only one hero but, as Nagaraj
points out, Ambedkar was too proud, intelligent and self- respecting a man to settle for the role of Hanuman or
Sugreeva. By the same token, Dalit hagiographers and pamphleteers generally seek to elevate Ambedkar by
diminishing Gandhi. For the scriptwriter and the mythmaker there can only be one hero. But the historian is
bound by no such constraint. The history of Dalit emancipation is unfinished, and for the most part unwritten. It
should, and will, find space for many heroes. Ambedkar and Gandhi will do nicely for a start.

An Anthropologist Among The Marxists And Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha, Permanent Black 2001, New Delhi, Rs.
450.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian, biographer and cricket writer. Once a visiting professor at Stanford University, Oslo
University and the University of California at Berkeley, he is now a full- time writer based in Bangalore. His books include
The Unquiet Woods and Environmentalism: A Global History. He is the editor of the forthcoming Picador Book of Cricket.

http://www.ambedkar.org/research/GandhiAmbedkar.htm