Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (18 page)

What Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability did, and did effectively, was to rub balm on injuries that were centuries old. To a vast mass of Untouchables, accustomed only to being terrorised, shunned and brutalised, this missionary activity would have induced feelings of gratitude and even worship. Gandhi knew that. He was a politician. Ambedkar was not. Or, at any rate, not a very good one. Gandhi knew how to make charity an event, a piece of theatre, a spectacular display of fireworks. So, while the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.

The chief concern of the Harijan Sevak Sangh was to persuade privileged castes to open up temples to Untouchables—ironic, because Gandhi was no temple-goer himself. Nor was his sponsor G.D. Birla, who, in an interview to
Margaret Bourke-White, said, “Frankly speaking, we build temples but we don’t believe in temples. We build temples to spread a kind of religious mentality.”
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The opening of temples had already begun during the days of Gandhi’s epic fast. Under pressure from the Harijan Sevak Sangh, hundreds of temples were thrown open to Untouchables. (Some, like the
Guruvayur temple in Kerala, refused point-blank. Gandhi contemplated a fast but soon changed his mind.
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) Others announced that they were open to Untouchables but found ways of humiliating them and making it impossible for them to enter with any sort of dignity.

A
Temple Entry Bill was tabled in the Central Legislature in 1933. Gandhi and the Congress supported it enthusiastically.
But when it became apparent that the privileged castes were seriously opposed to it, they backed out.
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Ambedkar was sceptical about the temple entry programme. He saw that it had a tremendous psychological impact on Untouchables, but he recognised temple entry as the beginning of ‘
assimilation’—of Hinduising and Brahminising Untouchables, drawing them further into being partners in their own humiliation. If the “infection of imitation” of
Brahminism had been implanted in Untouchables even when they had been denied entry into temples for centuries, what would temple entry do for them? On 14 February 1933, Ambedkar issued a statement on temple entry:

Ambedkar was only echoing what a fourteen-year-old Untouchable
Mang girl,
Muktabai Salve, had said long ago. She was a student in the school for Untouchable children that Jotiba and
Savitri Phule ran in Poona. In 1855, she said, “Let that religion, where only one person is privileged and the rest are deprived, perish from the earth and let it never enter our minds to be proud of such a religion.”
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Ambedkar had learned from experience that
Christianity, Sikhism,
Islam and Zoroastrianism were not impervious to caste discrimination. In 1934, he had a reprise of his old experiences. He was visiting the Daulatabad fort, in the princely state of Hyderabad, with a group of friends and co-workers. It was the month of
Ramzan. Dusty and tired from their journey,
Ambedkar and his friends stopped to drink water and wash their faces from a public tank. They were surrounded by a mob of angry Muslims calling them ‘
Dheds’ (a derogatory term for Untouchables). They were abused, nearly assaulted and prevented from touching the water. “This will show,” Ambedkar writes in his
Autobiographical Notes
, “that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu, is also Untouchable to a Mohammedan.”
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A new spiritual home was nowhere in sight.

Still, at the 1935 Yeola conference, Ambedkar renounced Hinduism. In 1936, he published the incendiary (and overpriced, as Gandhi patronisingly commented) text of
Annihilation of Caste
that set out the reasons for why he had done so.

That same year, Gandhiji too made a memorable contribution to literature. He was by now sixty-eight years old. He wrote a classic essay called “The Ideal
Bhangi”:

He then outlined the educational requirements, practical skills and etiquette an ideal Bhangi should possess:

The
Manusmriti
says a Shudra should not amass wealth even if he has the ability, for a Shudra who amasses wealth annoys the
Brahmin.
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Gandhi, a
Bania, for whom the
Manusmriti
prescribes usury as a divine calling, says: “Such an ideal Bhangi, while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words, he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it.”
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Seventy years later, in his book
Karmayogi
(which he withdrew after the Balmiki community protested),
Narendra Modi proved he was a diligent disciple of the Mahatma:

The naram dal and the garam dal may be separate political parties today, but ideologically they are not as far apart from each other as we think they are.

Like all the other Hindu reformers, Gandhi too was alarmed by Ambedkar’s talk of renouncing Hinduism. He adamantly opposed the religious conversion of Untouchables. In November
1936, in a now-famous conversation with John Mott—an American evangelist and chairman of the International Missionary Council—
Gandhi said:

It’s true that Gandhi often contradicted himself. It’s also true that he was capable of being remarkably consistent. For more than half a century—throughout his adult life—his pronouncements on the inherent qualities of Black Africans, Untouchables and the labouring classes remained consistently insulting. His refusal to allow working-class people and Untouchables to create their own political organisations and elect their own representatives (which Ambedkar considered to be fundamental to the notion of citizenship) remained consistent too.
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Gandhi’s political instincts served the Congress party extremely well. His campaign of temple entry drew the Untouchable population in great numbers to the Congress.

Though Ambedkar had a formidable intellect, he didn’t have the sense of timing, the duplicity, the craftiness and the ability to be unscrupulous—qualities that a good politician needs. His constituency was made up of the poorest, most oppressed sections of the population. He had no financial backing. In 1942, Ambedkar reconfigured the Independent Labour Party into the much more self-limiting
Scheduled Castes Federation. The timing was wrong. By then, the national movement was reigniting. Gandhi had announced the Quit India Movement. The
Muslim League’s demand for
Pakistan was gaining traction, and for a while caste identity became less important that the Hindu–Muslim issue.

By the mid-1940s, as the prospect of partition loomed, the subordinated castes in several states had been ‘assimilated’ into
Hinduism. They began to participate in militant Hindu rallies; in
Noakhali in Bengal, for instance, they functioned as an outlying vigilante army in the run-up to the bloodbath of partition.
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In 1947 Pakistan became the world’s first Islamic republic. More than six decades later, as the War on Terror continues in its many avatars, political Islam is turning inwards, narrowing and hardening its precincts. Meanwhile, political Hinduism is expanding and broadening. Today, even the
Bhakti movement has been ‘assimilated’ as a form of popular, folk Hinduism.
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The naram dal, often dressed up as ‘secular
nationalism’, has recruited
Jotiba Phule,
Pandita Ramabai and even Ambedkar, all of whom denounced Hinduism, back into the ‘Hindu fold’ as people Hindus can be ‘proud’ of.
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Ambedkar is being assimilated in another way too—as Gandhi’s junior partner in their joint fight against untouchability.

The anxiety around demography has by no means abated. Hindu supremacist organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the
Shiv Sena are working hard (and
successfully) at luring Dalits and Adivasis into the ‘Hindu fold’. In the forests of Central India, where a corporate war for minerals is raging, the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the
Bajrang Dal (both organisations that are loosely linked to the RSS) run mass conversion programmes called ‘ghar wapsi’—the return home—in which Adivasi people are ‘reconverted’ to Hinduism. Privileged-caste Hindus, who pride themselves on being descendants of
Aryan invaders, are busy persuading people who belong to indigenous, autochthonous tribes to return ‘home’. It makes you feel that irony is no longer a literary option in this part of the world.

Dalits who have been harnessed to the ‘Hindu fold’ serve another purpose: even if they have not been part of the outlying army, they can be used as scapegoats for the crimes the privileged castes commit.

In 2002, in the
Godhra railway station in Gujarat, a train compartment was mysteriously burned down, and fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims were charred to death. With not much evidence to prove their guilt, some Muslims were arrested as the perpetrators. The Muslim community as a whole was collectively blamed for the crime. Over the next few days, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal led a pogrom in which more than two thousand Muslims were murdered, women were mob-raped and burnt alive in broad daylight and a hundred and fifty thousand people were driven from their homes.
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After the pogrom, 287 people were arrested under the
Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Of them, 286 were Muslim and one was a Sikh.
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Most of them are still in prison.

If Muslims were the ‘terrorists’, who were the ‘rioters’? In his essay “Blood Under Saffron: The Myth of Dalit–Muslim Confrontation”,
Raju Solanki, a Gujarati Dalit writer who studied the pattern of arrests, says that of the 1,577 ‘Hindus’ who were arrested (not under POTA of course), 747 were Dalits
and 797 belonged to ‘Other Backward Classes’. Nineteen were Patels, two were
Banias and two were
Brahmins. The
massacres of Muslims occurred in several cities and villages in Gujarat. However, Solanki points out that not a single massacre took place in
bastis
where Dalits and Muslims lived together.
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Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat who presided over the pogrom, has since won the state elections three times in a row. Despite being a Shudra, he has endeared himself to the Hindu right by being more blatantly and ruthlessly anti-Muslim than any other Indian politician. When he was asked in a recent interview whether he regretted what happened in 2002, he said, “[I]f we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a Chief Minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”
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