Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (38 page)

He may have meant to offer Ambedkar “the gentlest treatment,” may not have been thinking of Ambedkar at all, when he led off with a political barb, noting in the politest possible terms that the British had stacked the conference with political lightweights and nonentities as a way of diminishing, of getting around, the national movement. Gandhi, the recognized national leader, was just one of fifty-six delegates, placed by the imperial stage managers on an equal footing with British businessmen, maharajahs, and representatives of various minorities and sects. So Gandhi had a point, but the untouchable spokesman could have once again discerned condescension and taken offense. Then, heedless of overstatement, Gandhi allowed himself to claim, “
Above all, the Congress represents, in its essence, the dumb, semi-starved millions scattered over the length and breadth of the land in its 700,000 villages.” Now we know this wasn’t really his reading of Indian reality. In the setting of St. James’s Palace, Gandhi was plainly glossing over his own disappointment in the Congress’s failure to do more than pay lip service to his “constructive program” for renewal at the village level. Less than two years earlier, he’d told Nehru that the movement couldn’t be trusted to conduct a civil disobedience campaign. But here he was allowing himself rhetorical leeway as the Congress’s spokesman and plenipotentiary, staking his claim on what was still not much more than an aspiration.

To Ambedkar’s sensitive ears, it was propaganda calculated to belittle him and his struggle for the recognition of untouchables as a distinct and persecuted Indian minority, therefore demanding rebuttal. If the Congress represented the poorest, what role could he have, standing outside the national movement as he did?
Three days later Gandhi made a potentially soothing gesture, saying, “Of course, the Congress will share the honor with Dr. Ambedkar of representing the interests of the untouchables.” But in the next breath he swept Ambedkar’s ideas for untouchable representation off the table. “Special representation” for them, he said, would run counter to their interests.

The clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi became personal in a session of what was named the
Minorities Committee, on October 8, 1931, a day after Prime Minister MacDonald called a snap election that would produce a Tory landslide behind the facade of a national unity government, giving the Tories more than three-quarters of the seats in the new
House of Commons. It was Ambedkar who lit the fuse, ignoring the Mahatma’s offer to “share the honor” of representing the untouchables. He may have been nominated by the British, but, nevertheless, Ambedkar said, “
I fully represent the claims of my community.” Gandhi had no claim, he now seemed to argue, on the support of untouchables: “The Mahatma has always been saying that the Congress stands for the Depressed Classes, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Classes more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I can only say that it is one of the many false claims which irresponsible people keep on making.”

Ambedkar, lower right; Gandhi, center,
at Round Table Conference
(photo credit i8.3)

The untouchable leader didn’t stop there. He went on to suggest that the takeover of British India by caste Hindus could be a threat to his people—the bulk of Gandhi’s “dumb millions”—fifty or sixty million untouchables by the estimates then in use. “The Depressed Classes are not anxious, they are not clamorous,” he said, “they have not started any
movement for claiming that there shall be an immediate transfer of power from the British to the Indian people.”

Gandhi didn’t raise his voice—that was never his way—but he was plainly stung. In his long public life of more than half a century, there’s probably no other moment when he spoke as sharply—or as personally—as he now did in picking up the gauntlet Ambedkar had thrown down. This time there was no mention of sharing the honor of representing the untouchables. “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables,” he said. “Here I speak not merely on behalf of the Congress, but I speak on my own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the untouchables, their vote, and I would top the poll.” In that highly charged instant, the Mahatma’s ego was as bare as his person.

However it’s regarded—as a challenge and response between two political leaders over an issue that was central to each man’s sense of mission, or as a description of reality as it then existed in the villages and slums of colonial India, or as a weighty constitutional issue bearing on the best interests of a minority, or as a portent of India’s future—the clash was heavily laden with meanings. After eight decades, these require some sorting out.

On the level of mundane Indian reality as it existed in the depths of the Depression era, Gandhi was unquestionably right when he said as he did that morning in the old Tudor palace, “It is not a proper claim which is registered by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of the untouchables of India.” Most untouchables in India then would probably not have heard of Ambedkar; he was still little known outside his own region. If most untouchables had heard of any single political leader, it would have been Gandhi. So, yes, he might well have been expected to “top” his imagined poll. This is true even though, in his insistence that the problem of untouchability started with the warped values of caste Hindus and not with the untouchables themselves, he’d done next to nothing to organize and lead untouchables, whose cause, he again insisted, was “as dear to me as life itself.”

For all his ambition and maneuvering, Ambedkar would never fare well
in electoral politics, and the parties he founded never achieved anything like a national following. Even today in
Nagpur, in the heart of Ambedkar country, the last of his parties, the
Republican Party, has mutated into no fewer than four distinct versions, each aligned with a particular Dalit leader sitting under a portrait of Ambedkar, claiming to be his true heir. Nevertheless, if a poll were held today in an attempt to
measure the relative standing of the Mahatma and the man revered as Babasaheb among the former untouchables, now calling themselves Dalits, there can be little doubt that Ambedkar has finally caught up to Gandhi, that he would “top” it. He stood for the idea that they were the keepers of their own destiny, that they deserved their own movement, their own leaders, like all other Indian communities, castes, and subcastes, an idea that after four or five generations—despite all the fragmentation and corruption of caste-based electoral politics in the “world’s greatest democracy”—most Dalits finally appear to embrace.

On the constitutional issue and the best interests of untouchables, Gandhi had more to say that morning in the palace than his challenger. His essential argument was that any special representation for untouchables—in the form of separate electorates or reserved seats that only untouchables could hold—would work to perpetuate untouchability. “Let the whole world know,” he said, “that today there is a body of Hindu reformers who are pledged to remove this blot of untouchability. We do not want on our register and on our census untouchables classified as a separate class … Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity? I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.”

This was as forceful and pure a statement of principle on the subject as this remarkable advocate ever managed. But he didn’t stop there. The encounter had shaken him. The previous week he’d negotiated futilely on constitutional formulas with Jinnah, the
Aga Khan, and other Muslim leaders. Now here he was clashing with an untouchable, and even if he had the better of the argument for the moment, he was shrewd enough to understand that the forecast he’d made about the imminent collapse of untouchability remained a far-fetched boast. He’d already declared his sense of helplessness on the question of Hindu-Muslim unity. Did he now glimpse a similar impasse in his fight against untouchability? The achievement of communal unity and the end of caste persecution had been two of his
four “pillars” of Indian freedom. At this turning point in London, he could hardly have felt confident about either cause.

How he really felt was implicit in what he had to say about his surprisingly staunch opponent that day. “The great wrong under which he has labored and perhaps the bitter experiences that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment,” Gandhi said of Ambedkar, after praising his dedication and ability. The Mahatma was again in the grip of the same caution that had led him to predict, during the Vaikom
campaign, that “chaos and confusion” could be the result if the cause of temple entry were taken up by the national movement. If the untouchables were fortified with separate political rights, he now said, that would “create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to … Those who speak of the political rights of untouchables do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed.” Much lay between the lines here. Though he had not solved the question of untouchability, Gandhi had built a national movement and not just a movement; he’d evoked the sense of nationhood on which it was based. He needed to believe that this could finally be the answer to untouchability. He feared that caste conflict could be its undoing. Implicitly, he was acknowledging that the problem remained to be solved and pledging, once again, to be the one whose passion and example would bring the solution.

“I want to say with all the emphasis I can command,” he concluded with a vague but ominous warning, “that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.” Here he was paraphrasing a line from his life-transforming speech in Johannesburg’s Empire Theater a quarter of a century earlier. At the turning points of Gandhi’s political life, it was always “do or die.”

It’s not clear that the British or Ambedkar or others at the Round Table Conference grasped the meaning of this warning on hearing it. They may have shrugged it off as rhetoric, failing to understand the importance of vows in the Mahatma’s life. But heading off “this thing”—the move not just to give untouchables supposed legal guarantees of equal rights but separate political rights that could be bartered for some measure of political power—had now become a Gandhian vow, complicating and making even more urgent his vow to end untouchability.

Both sides went away with hurt feelings. “
This has been the most humiliating day of my life,” Gandhi remarked that evening. For his part, Ambedkar would later be quoted as having said of Gandhi that “
a more ignorant and more tactless representative could not have been sent” to speak for the Congress at the conference.
Gandhi claimed to be a unifying force and a man full of humanity, Ambedkar went on, but he had shown how petty he could be. Ambedkar is not the first person to feel personally offended by Gandhi in this way. If we cast our minds back over two decades to South Africa, we can hear echoes in Ambedkar of the bitter tirades Gandhi evoked from Durban’s
P. S. Aiyar, the maverick Indian editor who complained that Gandhi presented himself as “a soul of perfection,” though he’d produced “no tangible good for anyone.”

Gandhi had taken no notice of the editor’s attempt to fight the head tax imposed on former indentured laborers, just as he’d later take no notice of
Ambedkar’s adoption of satyagraha as a tactic to open up Hindu temples and village wells to untouchables. An ocean separated
Ambedkar and Aiyar. They probably never heard of each other, but they ended up with the same sense of bitterness over a Gandhi they found elusive and immovable, a Gandhi who seemed to feel that fighting for the indentured or untouchables—causes with which he’d long identified himself—was illegitimate if it was done without his sanction, on time-tables other than his own. Ambedkar eventually revealed a sense of injury he’d nursed for years, so like Aiyar’s. “
Mr. Gandhi made nonsense of satyagraha,” he wrote, referring to the Mahatma’s refusal to back one of his temple-entry campaigns. “Why did Mr. Gandhi do this? Only because he did not want to annoy and exasperate the Hindus.”

As the London conference was concluding, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to a supporter of the untouchable leader complaining that Ambedkar’s “behavior to Gandhiji had been exceedingly discourteous.” More than sharp words was at stake. In the archive of the Nehru Memorial in New Delhi, I came upon a letter Nehru wrote several days later in his official capacity as general secretary of the
All India Congress Committee, tossing cold water on an ardent appeal on the subject of untouchability from a rising young congressman in Bombay named
S. K. Patil. What the young congressman wanted was a clear stand in support of the Nasik satyagraha, which Ambedkar had launched before heading to London. It was time, he wrote, for Congress to “take sides” on the matter of temple entry; an “authoritative statement” was needed in support of the Nasik satyagraha. Patil, who’d emerge three decades later as a tough political boss in Bombay and a powerful member of the Nehru cabinet, was especially incensed by a Congress leader’s statement that the weapon of satyagraha should be reserved for the cause of independence, not be wasted on lesser, more parochial issues like temple entry. If that was the movement’s stand, he wrote, then “many of us have not understood Mahatmaji for whom satyagraha is a panacea for all evils.”