Reading Gandhi in Ambedkar’s Shoes: Reclaiming Democracy — Part 1

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.

by George Thadathil- Sep 2, 2018

( September 2, 2018, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Ambedkar and Gandhi, as individuals have led, the communities of people they were concerned with, is beyond doubt. Their initiatives and interventions have brought about lasting impact in the society for which they felt responsible. However, the communities, in their turn, to what extent have been agents of transformation is a matter subject to exploration. Have the Ambedkarites, the Dalits, become agents of communal transformation themselves in terms of overcoming the ‘burden of injustice’ inflicted on them in the past, and are they ready to prevent or repair further the ‘hurts’ and ‘injuries’? Are the inheritors and promoters of the Gandhian approach to re-visioning India and even the world, continuing to work towards overcoming the injustice of casteism in India, by granting equal status, by ‘recognizing’ and ‘respecting’ the other on equal footing? An exploration of this continued engagement with the concerns of Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on ”modernising’ Indian society might prove to be beneficial an underlying in revisiting their persons and histories. Even further, it might give hints as to how in any society where similar forms of ‘non recognition’ of the other and the resultant hurts searching for repair might stand to gain.

Neera Chandhoke has drawn attention to the fact that “the one vital good that redistributive justice tries to secure – recognition – continues to elude attempts at repair.” She draws on’ empirical work on the practice of untouchability’ done in 1969, by sociologist IP Desai, in rural Gujarat, presenting the findings of his research project commenting that while “in pubic arenas governed by law, untouchability was the least practiced, when it came to the private sphere of personal transactions, matters were different. In the public sphere Dalits had come into their own as citizens of independent India. In the private sphere, the domain where social transactions not only foster friendship, companionship and intimacy, but also govern life chances, Dalits are still discriminated against.” A repeat of a similar study among college students, thirty years down the line she says, showed ‘the attitude of caste Hindus had not changed’: “Dalit students and colleagues were not invited into homes of caste Hindus and were barred from worlds of friendship and familiarity”. Not only, a 2006 research project across 565 villages in 11 states across India showed the prevalence of atrocities against Dalits, as a continuing factor despite a stronger Dalit movement.[1] I want to carry further this submission of Chandhoke in this paper by looking for the source of the non-recognition of the other and the interest of the other in the history of ‘modernising India’ as originating in the Father of the Nation, Gandhi. This will be visible if he is looked through the eyes of Ambedkar or read standing in Ambedkar’s shoes.

The republication of the annotated and with an introduction by Arundhati Roy of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936)opened up a discourse across the world: it is as if they – Ambedkar and Gandhi – are continuing to critique contemporary modern’s conscience, when it comes to the aspirations and the realizations of being a modern democratic society committed to fraternity, equality and freedom. Many are the participants in this debate and I will draw on, not all but a few, significant studies in this line. My intent thereby are twofold: one, that may be a reappraisal of the vision Gandhi had for India is necessary, to be true to the critical exegesis of his writings continuing to unfold, and secondly, that to do justice to his vision for a resurgent India, an incorporation of what Ambedkar thought of him – ideologically and as a person – is a necessity.[2]

Concluding a long drawn out debate on the Ambedkar-Gandhi differences and possible areas of convergence on issues of conversion, untouchability, modernity and the future vision of an emergent India, Palshikar, comments that

“if contemporary Gandhism fights shy of caste struggles, it has lost the core of Gandhi’s discourse. The restrictive interpretation of Gandhi will have to be rejected in favour of a creative interpretation. Non-recognition of categories like shudra-atishudra does not form the core of Gandhism. In fact, use of a term like daridranarayana  presupposes readiness to understand social reality on the basis of exploitative relations”. [3]

Reading Gandhi in the shoes of Ambedkar is an attempt to evaluate the contributions of both towards emancipation of the untouchables/dalits/tribals/women/children of this country and the reasons for the ideal and vision for making a modern democratic India still faltering. The debate itself has a definitive role in Indian society, in as much as the glorification of one leader/thinker against the other, the exclusion of one or the other from the scheme of affairs needs challenge. Given the diversity of India, envisaging the future calls for the acceptance and mutual critique of opposing ideological figures without negating the constituencies they stood for, until the eventual merging of differences and an ideal ‘inclusive and democratic community’ arrives on the scene. Wherever the force of the argument and the need of the time requires, the willingness to move away from platitudes and sanctimonious ascriptions to new conceptions and reworking the ideals of the founding fathers, in the most inclusive manner, alone can help attain all of their goals. In this vein, it is indeed true to say that  our understanding of leading historic figures like “Gandhi or Nehru is bound to remain incomplete, both in the sense of biography and history, in the absence of the grasp of their relations with Ambedkar.”[4]

Ambedkar Vs Gandhi

Gandhi’s admiration for Ambedkar and his intellect is well documented, and his difference with Ambedkar is centred around the latter’s insistence on seeking separate identity for the Untouchables. In the justification of that demand armed with the radical critique of Hinduism as a religion with a fatal flaw due to its blind justification of ‘caste system’, which is for the advantage of the few and disadvantage of the many, prevented he argued, the Indian society from ever becoming a modern nation-state based on the democratic premises of  ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Ambedkar’s strong language in distancing himself from Gandhi, therefore, has on the one hand, a theologico-philosophical core, wherein Gandhi operates within the Dharmic sanatanist, eastern/indian worldview while Ambedkar is western/modern/rational in thinking, and on the other, a political core, wherein Gandhi wants to represent entire India and Ambedkar questioning that political assumption of his politically:

I know Gandhi better than his disciples. They came to him as devotees and saw only the Mahatma. I was an opponent, and I saw the bare man in him. He showed me his fangs…. He was never a Mahatma. I refused to call him Mahatma…He doesn’t deserve that title. Not even from the point of view of his morality…. In Gandhism, the common man has no hope.…Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people.[5]…. [He phrased it differently, but poignantly when he told Gandhi:] …let there be no repetition of the old method when the reformer claimed to know more of the requirements of his victims than the victims themselves.[6]

In a way history has [at least thus far] favoured Gandhi and was not kind to Ambedkar. In having saved Gandhi’s life for the ‘nation’, probably fearing the backlash against his own people in case of Gandhi’s death due to fast, having agreed to the Poona Pact he became embittered at the bio-politics Gandhi was engaging in, as a strategy. Ambedkar’s indignance towards Gandhi is based on his rational insight into the necessity of reforming Hinduism and the obstinacy of Gandhi in wanting to preserve Hinduism, with mere cosmetic changes, and to that too being not fully committed. He says: “If I am disgusted with Hindus and Hinduism, it is because I am convinced that they cherish wrong ideals and live a wrong social life. My quarrel with Hindus and Hinduism is not over the imperfections of their social conduct. It is much more fundamental. It is over their ideals.”[7] The ongoing intellectual battle, ever since that submission, is to come back to the point of equal treatment that Ambedkar argued for, and it is in returning to – or as an attempt to reclaim – the progress towards equality that the debate itself, even as it is being re-visited by contemporary scholars is to be positioned, whether in the media, contemporary politics or academic discourses.

For a start, as to revisit the issue at hand, we could begin with what Ramachandra Guha summarises:

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.[8]

In this assessment of Guha, on the first point of comparison, to be honest to Ambedkar’s intelligence and rational assessment of the origin of the problem of untouchability and its decimation, if a logical action is to be sought for, it cannot but be seen as lying in infusing radical equality into Indian society. Therefore, in the process, whatever is of Hinduism if it is known to subscribe untouchability is to be done away with and what promotes equality is to be accepted, if India wants to move forward as a ‘democratic nation’ is Ambedkar’s core argument, and not simply as Guha seems to give the impression in his assessment and summation – of the untouchables as a group, wanting to leave Hindu fold. As for his final comment on the constitutionalism introduced by Ambedkar for preservation of state, it is to be noted, as scholars have shown that he also said that he was ready to burn it – and that is a strong indictment of constitutionalism itself. What he aspires is the vigilant rational critique of a people to constantly keep alive equal respect for its citizens.

Akash Singh in his attempt to summarize the various attempts at reconciliation, takes into consideration, Thomas Pantham, Partha Chatterjee and Guha, and sees in Pantham the greatest homogeneity premise built around what Palshikar had proposed as their fundamental orientation to emancipation, though in different modes. He identifies a historical reconciliation streak in Pantham as that of a contemporaneous reconciliation attempt by Guha and a futuristic projection of this reconciliation as that which should engage us with both of them, as premised by Palshikar and nuanced in both homogenous and heterogeneous conflation of theory and practice by Partha. These reconciliation attempts by neither are fully accepted by Singh for two reasons: first, for the fact that Gandhi remained attached to the varna system undisputedly, the homogeneity of purpose or aim, as made by Pantham, falls apart because Ambedkar’s aim was to do away with caste itself and not merely untouchability and its stigma (though Gandhi believed that minus untouchability, varna would become bearable) and  as for the historicisation argument of trying to reconcile them in the present for our national goal, the distancing act is a privileging of a particular viewpoint nonetheless, and does probable violence to the cause of the marginalised; the second, that while Gandhi was a rural romanticist, Ambedkar was a thoroughgoing enlightenment modernist is an issue over which they continue to remain as irreconcilable then as of now. He tries to substantiate his case by drawing on key pronouncements and statements on either side.

Taking Pantham’s case to be the most compelling it is summed up by Aakash Singh by quoting him as follows:

Gandhi seems to me to have been appreciative of the fact that Ambedkar’s emancipatory approach…was, in a broad sense, compatible with, if not complementary to, his own approach… Hence, we may conclude that Gandhi and Ambedkar made, sometimes together and sometimes separately, truly pioneering contributions to a mass political movement for an as yet incomplete multifaceted programme for human freedom from untouchability…Recognizing the compatibility if not a mutual supplementarity between their emancipatory legacies in the religious and political spheres may perhaps be needed today for a cooperative movement against untouchability.[9]

However, Singh is unable to see a possible reconciliation, despite the desirable and tedious efforts by others, due to what he poses as the defining questions concerning the common goal of emancipation – ‘from what’ and ‘into what’ – as being radically different for both Gandhi and Ambedkar, given their life positions and ideological/religious choices. The need of the debate is not to diminish the contribution of Gandhi, rather to highlight the vision and stature of Ambedkar and the manner in which Gandhi failed or succeeded to do justice to Ambedkar and not only to his constituency as a political group, but his vision of India as a Politically robust space. This intellectual, philosophical history of working for an egalitarian society needs to be revisited if one is an authentic Gandhian “in experiment with Truth”.[10] An exercise of this nature will probably take us to the root of the lack of recognition of the other, that we began with.

Whether the adamant stand of Ambedkar came to change Gandhi, which is a position that Pantham and Coward takes, and noting that it should be measured by what Ambedkar thought about it, having outlived Gandhi, Aakash goes on to say that most Gandhians have come over to the side of Ambedkar in undoing untouchability and granting equality of status that is substantive and therefore the issue should be rested.[11]  However, if the differences are irreconcilable, this submission, on his part is too quick and one could  have a legitimate grouse on this claim and as to how we measure the same, if the premise that the non-equal treatment of the Dalits is a continued fact in Indian society. Are we talking of theoretical non-objection with an actual condoning of the contrary? This is what brings us to Arundhati Roy, carrying forward the earlier submission made by Neera Chandhoke. The critique to Gandhi that Arundhati Roy, taking on the debate headlong in her ‘Saint and the Doctor’   exposes, as a keen activist-journalist and research-academic, is the dark and shadow side of Gandhi, as if to sift through the foliage of fame built around Gandhi, in a deconstructive manner as to see him through the Ambekarian eyes.

Gandhian Integrity

The attempt to read Gandhi from an Ambedkarian angle of vision shall be restricted to the issue of ‘sincerity’ and ‘integrity’ for which a Gandhian scholar like Akeel Bilgrami would offer philosophical justification.[12] In contrast Roy looks to what Ambedkar does to demolish the ‘aura of sanctity’ and moral superiority around Gandhi by quoting Gandhi to show how he is insincere and thus not honest to the Truth he wants to uphold as God. This is done by showing the ‘numerous examples in Gandhi’s writings and speeches wherein he simultaneously speaks of the abhorrence of untouchability, the equality of all, the freedom for all to pursue their hobbies or interests whatever their caste and class, and the mandate that a person’s livelihood ought nevertheless be dictated by that of his forefathers’.[13] For Ambedkar, to be sure, equality did not mean mere equality of or within  varnas, but truly substantial political, social, and material economic equality across classes and castes. Though she addresses the political, social and the moral realms of conflict, it is the latter that she exposes most abrasively.  She attempts to deconstruct Gandhi in order to see what Ambedkar was saying and thinks there is hope for equality – ‘not until we rearrange the stars in our firmament’. In other words, she is critiquing

the way establishment historisation sanitizes the past and retrieves only that which is comfortable; that Gandhi despite the accusation and his own avowal that only small minds are consistent, has been consistent on issues of labour, caste, women. To have excised Ambedkar from Gandhi’s story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a travesty. Equally, to ignore Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar is to do Ambedkar a disservice, because Gandhi loomed over Ambedkar’s world in myriad and un-wonderful ways.”[14]

Roy, having presented the relevance of reading Ambedkar against the issue of persisting discrimination even in a 70 year old democracy, India, says that the two – Gandhi and Ambedkar – are and continue to be irreconcilable.

The point about Gandhi being consistent (on core issues unlike the other issue of inconsistency in speaking differently different times) is taken up by Arundhati Roy when she describes a little-known side of Gandhi about how his disturbing views on race during his years in South Africa presaged his public pronouncements on caste.[15] As she puts it: “Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally. He cast not only aspersions, but seemed to expose pointedly the insincerity behind his posturing to be saviour of the untouchables.”[16] This prevarication and ‘casuistry’ of explaining the same thing in minute or nuanced ways on different occasions as pointed out by MN Roy, even while Gandhi was alive, is explained by him as the result of ‘neurosis’ which for him is the ‘psychological foundation of demonstrative saintliness’.[17] MN Roy highlighted the authoritarian streak in Gandhian politics of the day, and linked it with fascist tendencies  usurping its head that time despite the aura of non-violence.[18]

Akeel Bilgrami, not denying the problem with reading Gandhi and his oft repeated but with additional nuances the same concept and thus difficult to interpret, yet again asserts that Gandhi had a logic in him and a consistency which he terms his ‘integrity’. Akeel builds this interpretation on the analysis of the notion of ‘non violence’ in Gandhi as based on his understanding of the moral principle of not hurting another as going to the extent of not even thinking ill or lending to criticism of another, in which lies the root cause of violence in as much as therein is sown the seed of discontent exposing the inability to truly understand the other. The non-violence which he applies on the British as intended to be outside the legal, constitutional framework of demands placed on the British up till the arrival of Gandhi on the scene and as Gandhi’s initiation of an alternative to the western paradigm of goodness (enshrined in the constitutionalism and to which the earlier nationalists had succumbed) itself as being the integrity he unveils, in challenging the European moral framework, of ‘acting so as to make of your action a principle’ as made famous by Kant and introducing the Gandhian way of ‘so acting as to make of yourself an exemplar’.[19]

Though this nuanced critique offers a good alternate epistemological thought-frame on ethics and morality, however, does not exonerate Gandhi because in his conceptualization of the ‘exemplar’, the Dalit or the untouchable is not his own self. Because, if that were so, he would not have resisted Ambedkar and his vision of truth and pathway to justice in a society that had denied justice to his people, and not have stood on their way of redressing it, and making thereby the society more equal. Gandhi, in other words is criticizing or leveling the very criticism he says should not be there in the ahimsapractitioner, in not understanding or sympathizing or upholding the vision of Ambedkar, of a casteless India. Thus, the Ambedkarian criticism of Gandhi holds good that he is not sincere – that he does not walk the talk. In other words, Bilgrami does not succeed to take the wind out of the sail of Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi with his argument of ahimsa being rooted in ‘non-criticism’.

Did Gandhi Do Justice to Ambedkar

Asha Krishan’s study on the ‘Gandhi-Ambedkar’ phenomenon comes to state that the final two decisions of Ambedkar’s indicate how far he had been influenced by Gandhi: first in his formation of the new political party – the National Republican Party, aimed at ‘a larger constituency, namely, the scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Backward Classes together constituting over 30% of India’s population’ and second by ‘registering the protest of the scheduled castes against the treatment meted out to them under Hinduism by conversion to Buddhism’, thus fulfilling his words at Yeola – “I will not die in the Hindu religion”. She says that Ambedkar’s conduct here smacks of Gandhian tactics where ‘protest against injustice is lodged but good relations maintained with the opposite side’.[20]

Most assessors of their unique roles do grant that the combined roles of both Gandhi and Ambedkar made India make sweeping progress, or at least lay the foundations of a successful democracy in intent and practice.  “If Mahatma Gandhi gave a moral purpose and mass dimension to our freedom movement, Dr Ambedkar gave it a profound social content and a challenging vision of a democratic and egalitarian social order. Both put the suffering common man at the centre stage of our struggle for independence and the national reconstruction process.”[21] The latter claim becomes difficult to substantiate when placed against the record of anti-African sentiments and action in Africa and in the reduction of caste and its evils purely to Untouchability and within it purely to the work of the Bhangi’s is the reading of Arundhati Roy.

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To be continued 

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[1] Madhura Swaminathan and Vikas Rawal, “Income Inequality in village India: The Role of Caste” Working Paper Series, ECINE Society for the study of Income Inequality, http://fas.org.in/wp-content/themes/zakat/pdf/Publications/ECINEQ2011-207.pdf

[2] I had originally intended to end with the possibility of bringing in a third figure – Sri Narayana Guru – into the discourse in order to envision this future journey.  However, due to the allowed length of the paper this will become a project in itself and another article to be presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Backwaters Collective: Metaphysics and Politics due to be held in Le Meridien, Cochin, 15-18 July 2016.

[3] Suhash Palshikar, “Gandhi-Ambedkar Interface: …When shall the twain meet? Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 31, No. 31 (Aug. 3, 1996), pp. 2070-2072

[4]Upendra Baxi, “Justice as Emancipation: The Legacy of Babasaheb Ambedkar” (1995) quoted in Aakash Singh, “Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences?” in International Journal of Hindu Studies Vol.18,No.3, 2014, pp.413-449.

[5]Aakash Singh, “Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Difference?” International Journal of Hindu Studies

18, 3: 415–451, 2014 Springer

[6] Gandhi, The Right Way and the Wrong Way”, 320, in Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality, p.277.

[7] BRA, AoC, S. Anand, Ed., p.353.

[8] He continues, “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 bhadraloks 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.” Ramachandra Guha, “Gandhi and Ambedkar: Heroes in their own right” in The Indian Express, July 24, ‘97..

[9] Thomas Pantham, “Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar,” in Gopal Guru, ed., Humiliation: Claims and Context, 179–208,  New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 179-208 in Aakash Singh, Ibid. p.435.

[10] In reconciling, without favouring one or negating the other, he proposes to place them in a constellation, as to carry forward the creative dialogicality that is required in order to fully understand either of them, for the good of the nation in the making of India and beyond.

[11] Akash Singh, op cit.

[12] Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi’s integrity”, Raritan. New Brunswick, Vol. 21(Fall 2001), 2;   48- 21

[13] Arundhati Roy, Doctor and the Saint, Introduction to Annihilation of Caste, op cit.

[14] BR Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, S. Anand (ed), with Annotations,  Delhi, Navayana, 2014, Editor’s Note, p.13 and Introduction: Doctor and the Saint, p.39.

[15] Cfr. G B Singh, Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity, New York, Prometheus Books, 2004. He objects to the African American espousal of Gandhi, when the latter was anti African in his South African career, and by self admission, a point that Roy too highlights.

[16] Arundhati Roy, Doctor and the Saint, op.cit.

[17] MN Roy, Problem of Freedom, Kolkata, Renaissance Publishers, 2006, p.10. “It is an observed psychological phenomenon that neurotic persons, even if they are subjectively sincere, are often driven unconsciously by motives which are contradictory to what they believe to be their motives; they attempt to harmonise the contradictions of their own feelings, their emotional conflicts, by ideological constructions or fallacious moralisings without ever doubting their moral integrity.”

[18] Ibid., p.26.

[19] Akeel Bilgrami, op.cit.

[20] Asha Krishan, Ambedkar and Gandhi: Emancipators of Untouchables in Modern India, Mumbai, Himalaya Publishing House, 1997, pp194-96. She sees it this way because the Constitution’s explanation II to article 25(2) enables the Buddhists to be part of Hinduism and this she says is a ‘tribute to Gandhi’ by Ambedkar.

[21] KR Narayanan, “Message” in SN Busi, Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar: Crusaders against caste and untouchability, Hyderabad, Saroja Publications, 1997,p.iii.

Fr. Prof. George Thadathil is Principal of Salesian College Sonada and Siliguri Extended Campus, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. His area of specialization is Cross Cultural Social Philosophy. He has organized various research seminars engaging local scholarship with contemporary concerns of identity, language and ethnicity. He is the author of Vision from the Margin:Study of the Sri Narayana Guru Movement in the Literature of Nitya Chaitanya Yati (2007) and has edited and co-edited books like Communities and Identity Consciousness: South Indian Trajectories (2004), Cultural Identity in Nepali Language and Literature (2005), Subaltern Perspectives: Philosophizing in Context (2005), Cultural Linguistic Transitions in the Nepali Speech Community of Darjeeling (2009)besides contributing to a number of journals and edited volumes on Philosophy, Literature and Social Sciences. His publications are the outcome of an attempt to apply the research findings in South India (SNGM) onto the Language and Ethnicity based identity formations in Darjeeling District, North East India. He continues with his research interests in this field and is in the process of bringing out a volume on “Owning Locations: Transforming Small Worlds”. He is the Founder and Series editor of Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences in its seventh year as a biannual peer reviewed publication and the Founder Director of Salesian Publications.