In my book on Gandhi & Ambedkar, I was willing to 'repair' the views both expressed in the light of subsequent developments in the disciplines they were familiar with. In Ambedkar's case, this can be productive but nobody wants a sensible Ambedkar. They want a paranoid cretin & by God, they are welcome to him. Gandhi's importance was a tactician. He built esprit de corps within Congress & reconciled the 'naram' & 'garam' dal. It is not his fault he couldn't tackle the land question- i.e. the only thing which mattered. But that would take hard work at the local level involving cadastral surveys & the creation of an efficient Land Registration system. This could have been done by elected governments any time after 1937 but the incentive to do so was lacking.
Ram Guha's 'Argments with Gandhi' does not attempt to 'repair' the views of either Gandhi or anyone he disagreed with. It accepts myths as facts and creates new myths on that basis.
His first chapter gives a flavour of the whole-
Articulating Non-Violence
The British had established the rule of Law, justiciable property and civil rights, and created a peaceful country where non-violent methods- i.e. buying and selling or going to court to settle disputes- had prevailed over 'matysanyaya' (the big fish eating the little fish).
Gandhi was a barrister. He had been taught to articulate non-violence using a protocol bound legal vocabulary. As a vegetarian- like A.O Hume, the founder of the INC- he naturally associated non killing or eating animals with non-violence. This was where he differed from most British (or, indeed, Indian) people. One other point. Gandhi was influenced by both Tolstoy and the British Quakers. The Cadbury & Rowntree families bought newspapers at the behest of the Liberal party. They tended to be critical of the Boer War in which Gandhi participated as the head of an Indian ambulance corps.
Guha quotes Gandhi as saying 'The acid test of non-violence is that one thinks, speaks and acts
non-violently, even when there is the gravest provocation to be
violent.'
Clearly this is false. A weak person may be very obsequious even while he is being beaten & buggered. The acid test of non-violence is solving problems peacefully even if you have overwhelming physical superiority.
One may say that there is a spiritual benefit in avoiding sexy or violent thoughts. But a hired assassin may do so. He isn't non-violent at all.
To understand an argument, you need to be smart enough to evaluate statements in a rational manner. If you can't do so, you have no business writing a book about arguments. Why? You have no way to separate what is doxastic from what is merely tactical or strategic.
In contemporary times, 11 September, or 9/11 for short, is a
date remembered for the terrorist attack in 2001 on the World
Trade Center in New York. Itself an act of cruel violence,
the attack provoked the US government into invading lands far
distant, leading to a cycle of death and destruction that has yet
to fully run its course. In the long sweep of history, however, it is
another 9/11 that may yet prove to be more significant.
No. The war on terror & its aftermath is the single most important event of this century. But for it, Russia wouldn't have made its move on Ukraine. China wouldn't have risen so rapidly in economic might that it is now accepted as an equal by the US.
On that
day in 1906, some three thousand men and women assembled
in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa.
They were Indian. Indians don't matter in South Africa.
They had come to
protest a new racial law imposed by the government of the Transvaal, of which province Johannesburg was the capital.
The Transvaal government had passed an ordinance seeking
to end Asian immigration and place sharp restrictions on Asians
already in the colony. Asians were to produce fingerprints, carry
an identity card at all times and be confined to living in designated locations so that they would not, so to say, ‘contaminate’ the ruling whites.
The Boers were angry with the Indians who had sided with the British. They would use the issue of 'Asiatic immigration' so as to gain support from the new Liberal government in England. Would they also be able to intimidate the Mine owners by threatening their labour supply? Thanks to Smuts, the Boers lost the war but won the peace.
Gandhi did go to jail for a few weeks for refusing to carry a Pass. Then he changed his mind. He got out of jail and went around saying that the Pass was a good thing. All Indians should voluntarily carry one. The Boers were wrong to say that Indians were too stupid to see that Passes are freakin' fabulous. But Indians are smarter than Africans. You may have to force Africans to carry a pass, but it is insulting to Indians to say they can't see the great advantage of doing so.
Naturally, some Indians thought he had been bribed. Some Pathans beat the shit out of Gandhi. He then realised that it is safer to stay in jail if some stupid shit you pulled backfires.
The resistance to the ordinance was led by the
thirty-six-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi. A lawyer-turned-activist,
Gandhi was a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant
community. At the time, he had been in South Africa for a little
over a decade.
This protest meeting on 11 September 1906 was held in a building named the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. It passed a series
of resolutions, drafted by Gandhi, of which the most significant
was the fourth, that stated: ‘This mass meeting of British Indians
here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than
submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid
down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the
Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.’1
In other words, Gandhi- like the Tory MP Bhownagree- was an Imperialist. He wanted the Milner 'kindergarden' rather than the rule of the native Boers (forget about Africans!). Sadly, multi-ethnic Empires were obsolete. Nationalism would triumph everywhere.
The threat to court arrest was, for Indians in South Africa, a
considerable departure from past practice. In the previous decade
they had asked patiently, and extremely politely, in writing for
greater rights or fairer treatment from the white rulers.
The problem was that the Brits, who had put Transvaal back under British control in 1902, were negotiating with Smuts & Botha to give self-rule back to it. This came to pass in December of 1906. Gandhi was arrested in Transvaal in January 1908 even though Royal Assent to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act was only given in May 1908. Gandhi had compromised with Smuts & released after 20 days. With hindsight, this was a ghastly mistake.
Since his
arrival in the colony in 1893, as a young lawyer in his early twenties, Gandhi had dispatched a series of respectfully worded petitions, requesting that educated Indians be allowed to vote;
Transvaal had passed a Pass law for Indians and Africans since 1885. In 1891, citizenship & grant of crown land to Indian labourers in Natal was withdrawn. Prior to 1894, some Indians had the vote in Natal. This was cancelled despite Gndhi's petition. Some Cape Province Indians retained the vote even after joining the South African Union but this was chipped away over subsequent decades.
Gandhi may have hoped that there would be British direct rule after the Boer War but the British hd no stomach for another expensive war. If the Boers wanted to be beastly to darkies- let them get on with it.
that
Indian traders be allowed to sell goods and open stores wherever
they pleased; that Indians of all classes be allowed to travel freely
between the coastal colony of Natal, controlled by the British, and
the inland province of Transvaal, which was controlled by Afrikaners of largely Dutch origin.
The meeting of 11 September rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition writers.
It failed utterly and completely.
But it also rejected the violent methods
then fashionable among revolutionaries.
Hilarious! The Boers were doughty fighters. If the Indians had rebelled, they would have been slaughtered within a couple of days.
In Europe, anarchists
and socialists hoped to bring about political change by assassinating kings,
Indian revolutionaries were doing the same thing.
generals and Prime Ministers. These methods were
being emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to
kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into
leaving the country.
Indians thought the assassination attempts on two Viceroys (Minto & Hardinge) did pave the way for reforms.
When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and
his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes—or
burnt them—defied nighttime curfews and hawked goods without a licence. Between 1907 and 1914, several thousand Indians
were put in jail by the South African authorities. Gandhi himself
served several terms in prison.
The methods of protest mandated by that first 9/11 were given
a particular name by Gandhi. He called them satyagraha, or truth
force.
The truth was that they failed completely and utterly. Why did Smuts concede the 1914 Indian Relief Act? The answer is three-fold
1) Poorer Indians couldn't pay the £3 tax. If they were deported, the British Government would have to pay for their resettlement. Smuts had already got rid of the Chinese. Getting rid of Indians (who were British subjects) would harm the economy
2) refusal to recognize non-Christian marriages was simply malicious. Wealthy Indians (like the Tatas) were pouring money into Gandhi's agitation.
3) the danger was that the Indians would ally with the Coloureds & White Trade Unionists. Sooner or later the African majority would take leadership of this.
Some believe that Smuts had foreseen the German threat from 1913 onward. But the Maritz rebellion was easily crushed. The real danger was that the Germans would arm Africans who knew the land even better than the Boers. In other words, the Whites in South Africa needed the British Navy which meant they couldn't be too horrible to His Brittanic Majesty's Indian subjects.
After he returned to his homeland from South Africa
from London
in
1915, he applied them with even greater effect to mobilize public
opinion in favour of political freedom from colonial rule.
He tried to raise troops for the King Emperor.
In
India, Gandhi led four countrywide campaigns of civil disobedience against the British Raj: in 1919, 1920–22, 1930–32 and 1942
respectively.
They failed. Still, he and his people were only jailed for sedition. They weren't hanged or transported to the Andamans for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.
Where did Gandhi’s technique of non-violent resistance come
from?
In 1902, the Tories passed an Education bill which resulted in 'Dissenters' having to pay for Anglican schools through their rates (property taxes). They created a 'Passive Resistance Committee'.The idea was to fill up the jail with people who refused to pay their rates. Interestingly, an 'Anti-Martydom League' was formed to pay the outstanding taxes of such people! Still, the Liberals gained greatly from this campaign.
I may mention the Sufragettes who used hunger strikes to great effect around this time. However, they were prepared to actually die when they fasted to death. The solution was to shove a tube doen their throat and forcibly feed them.
Some commentators have seen the heavy, if not determining, influence of Henry David Thoreau’s tract of 1848, Civil Disobedience.
Gandhi read Thoreau in 1907. However, he may have heard of him through his friend, the vegetarian, Henry Salt.
Gandhi was a disciple of Gokhale & opposed the revolutionaries championed by Bal, Pal & Lal. His friendship with Pranjivan Mehta- whose brother-in-law was the great Jain avadhanam Raichandbhai- probably reinforced his attachment to traditional Vaishnav Bania beliefs.
I may mention, prior to the establishment of Pax Brittanica, Gandhi's ancestors couldn't be Dewans (i.e. occupy the top job) in a Princely State because they lacked martial ability. Thus, his people had risen because non-violence is only viable where there is the Rule of Law backed up with military supremacy. Indeed, one might say universal relgions of an irenic stripe spread most in multi-ethnic empires with well developed commercial networks.
Gandhi told an Indian friend that ‘the statement that I
had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of
Thoreau is wrong’. Gandhi continued:
The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced
before I got the essay of Thoreau on Civil Disobedience. But
the movement was then known as passive resistance.
which was credited with helping the Liberls win in 1905.
Gandhi was a firm believer in karma. This meant that a Hindu arguing with him could always say to him, 'this nutter wants to get reborn on Vaikuntha or some other paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures and everybody lives for ten billion years. Perhaps doing stupid shit in this life really will get you to such a boring paradise. At any rate, there may be some way in which this fool can be made useful.'
In Hinduism we differentiate between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (praxis). Gandhi succeeded for a time because his 'vigyan' was a way of exchanging a bit of jail time for political power- or the chance of gaining it. Sadly, only spontaneous demonstrations can bring about political change. That's what happened in Egypt in 1922. Gandhi's satygraha failed in that year because it was planned. The rioters in Chauri Chaura had paid money to get enrolled as Congress members. This meant that the authorities would first want to arrest 'ring-leaders' & roll up their networks so as to strengthen their own hand before sitting down to negotiate. If an uprising was spontaneous, on the other hand, then you had to find popular leaders with whom to do a deal.
Why was this not obvious to all concerned? The truth, I think, is it was always fucking obvious that the only thing which mattered was the land question. To solve it required doing some actual work not talking bollocks incessantly.
Barristers are trained to argue. But they need to present actual facts and use valid methods of logical deduction. Sadly, Gandhi & Ambedkar & Jinnah & so forth were 'ultracrepidarian'. They didn't want to confine themselves to the work for which they had been trained. Instead, they turned into religious figure- Gandhi became a Mahatma, Ambedkar became a Boddhisattvas & Jinnah became the founder of a theocratic State.
We may say that Ambedkar supported British rule- as he was perfectly entitled to do- and only went crazy after Independence. Thus, he is a different league from the two Gujjus.
I should explain, B.R Ambedkar was nominated by the British authorities to sit in the Bombay Legislative Council from 1927 to 1937. He represented the British policy of turning the Hindu majority into an artificial minority. The problem was that Dalits feared the Muslim more than they feared the Brahmins and Banias who dominated Congress. Thus, to win an election, Ambedkar had to do a deal with Congress's supremo- Mahatma Gandhi. The spadework had been done by Rajah & Moonje. Since Dalits were Nationalists, Congress didn't mind having more Dalit MPs provided they were elected by the general population. Ambedkar had to take what he was offered because he was a British nominee. If the Brits believed Churchill's claim that the Dalit hated the caste Hindu, then they could have no objection to Dalits getting more MPs. Indeed, the Tory toffs who passed the 1935 Act firmly believed that Congress wouldn't get a majority in any Province!
Guha, shithead that he is, takes a different view. In his new book 'Arguments with Gandhi' he writes-
When meeting Gandhi in jail in 1932, Ambedkar told him: ‘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.’
Gandhi had believed Ambedkar was a Brahmin whose foreign education and well-cut suits ensured that he knew nothing about the plight of 'Harijans'.
Reading this warning now, almost a century later, one can see it as prescient.
Not if we studied a bit of Indian history to pass the competitive exams. We know that Ambedkar beleived that money raised for Harijans was being used to pay high caste lawyers not to practice law.
Still, we may say Ambedkar's claim was like the slogan 'nothing about us, without us'. But this does not require separate electorates.
There had to come a time when Dalits would be represented by one of their own,
that had already happened under the nomination system.
rather than spoken for by a reformer from the upper-castes, however well-meaning he might be.
At the time, Ambedkar appeared intelligent. He had studied Sociology, Anthropology & Economics at Columbia & the LSE. He was a barrister with two PhDs. Sadly, he was a cretin. He converted to Buddhism- the religion which had spread untouchability to Japan.
Ambedkar’s posthumous emergence as the great icon and exemplar of Dalits is thus entirely understandable.
No. If Jagjivan Ram had become PM in 1977, he would be the icon. Ambedkar's Republican party had factionalised and was clearly useless. One could say Kanshi Ram, Trade Unionising Dalit Government servants, helped spread the fame of Ambedkar to the cow-belt.
But whether the attacks on Gandhi by Ambedkarites are entirely merited is another matter.
Gandhi was a shithead. Attack him by all means.
For Gandhi’s own campaign against untouchability was conducted with great courage and resolve.
No. He was a late-comer to the party & remained something of a bigot all his life.
Had he not been around, the issue may never have acquired the salience and importance that it did.
It was Churchill's 1931 speech which gave Ambedkar salience and importance. Since he was out of office, he could say what he liked. If Tories believed him, they would ask why Dalits were not getting what Muslims had been given. After all, it is that cunning Brahmin, Nehru, who is behind all this mischief.
None of his important colleagues in the Congress Party — not Jawaharlal Nehru, not Vallabhbhai Patel, not Subhas Chandra Bose — understood how gravely the cause of Indian independence was undermined by the pervasive inequalities of caste.
It made no difference whatsoever. Elsewhere, on this blog,I have explained Gandhi's 'game of tag' (his Mum told him, if you touch a Dalit, immediately touch a Muslim so the contagion passes to him).
Separate electorates for Muslims probably did make partition inevitable. But there could be no 'Dalitstan' because Dalits were nowhere in the majority.
Nor did left-wing anti-imperialists such as Bhagat Singh and company.
It is obvious that a poor minority does not matter in the slightest. Virtue signalling merely helps pass the time. It doesn't get you power or wealth.
Indeed, Indian Marxists completely ignored the caste question. This was because they looked at justice exclusively in economic terms, through the prism of their master category of ‘class’.
No. All parties and all who exercised authority or who sought power, kept in touch with (or threatened) community leaders. As the franchise expanded, every jat panchayat or caste association was courted by different political parties. When the first Communist administration was formed in Kerala, foreign journalists noted that caste, not class, had been used to win the election.
Derived from Marx’s own focus on European history, this analytical framework had little (and often no) room for the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of caste discrimination in India.
All educated Indians chafed against caste-based legal restrictions. Thus Nehru, in his autobiography, bitterly complained that his sister had to pretend to convert to Brahmoism so as to marry a non-Brahmin. Indians wanted elected representatives to get rid of laws of this sort. Ambedkar could have played a role in this but, silly man that he was, chose to resign in a huff after the first Hindu Code was dropped.
Among the major Indian nationalists of the day, only Gandhi recognised the hypocrisy inherent in demanding freedom from the British while allowing so many Indians to live and suffer in conditions of unfreedom.
The two were completely unconnected. America had slavery but still kicked out the Brits. Guha truly has shit for brains.
Moreover, he saw it not just as a political problem, but a moral one.
It was neither. Untouchability arose from a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. As Western medicine grew more and more successful, people gave up these primitive ideas. Sadly, Gandhi (& his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta) didn't believe the germ theory of disease.
Ignorance is no crime. We can admire a guy who lived long ago and thus who held some stupid ideas which, however, were not known to be utterly false, at that time.
Untouchables had to be given equal rights so as to make a more persuasive case for India’s political independence.
No. If the Brits really cared about it, they would have tried to do it themselves. They genuinely didn't give a shit about Dalits but Churchill's speech meant that they had to try to see if Dalits, like Muslims, could be turned against the Caste Hindus.
Incidentally, Gandhi's Rajkot satyagraha failed because the Dewan played the caste card- i.e. brought in Muslim, Rajput & Garasia nominees to tilt the balance in his favour. This is an early example of the KHAM strategy in Gujarat.
At the same time, upper-castes Hindus had to atone for the ‘sin’ that untouchability represented.
This involved giving Gandhi money. That fucker always need more of that commodity.
While his fellow Congressmen were, by and large, indifferent to Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, a broad swathe of the general public was implacably opposed to it.
They didn't give a shit about it. The thing simply wasn't important. On the other hand the fight for Lebsian marriage was a defining feature of the French Revolution. Not till Madam Defarge was permited to marry her cat, Mitzi, in the Notre Dame cathedral could Marie Antoinette's head be cut off.
Indeed, the unreasoning and extreme hostility to Gandhi from orthodox Hindus
he was himself a sanaatani Hindu as were most of his followers.
helps explain why he adopted an incremental approach in challenging caste prejudice.
He was engaged in a game of tag, running between Muslim & Dalit when he had nothing better to do.
Between 1915 and 1920, when he was first establishing himself in Indian politics, he attacked untouchability without calling into question the caste system itself.
He initially supported 'varna' and was a bit slow to adopt the neo-Hindu position that birth should not determine occupation or affect validity of marriage.
One reason for this was that Gandhi was aware that Brahmin leaders- like Tilak- had to appease their own ultra-conservative caste fellows. This meant that there was a non-Brahmin party in Bombay which attracted what we would call OBC leaders like Phule & S.K Bole. Amedkar took forward Bole's program but Bole himself, after losing his seat in 1937, joined forces with Savarkar. One consequence of reserved seats for Dalits was that many OBC leaders lost their tickets and had to look for new political homes.
As he grew more certain of his hold over the Indian people, and especially the Hindus among them, he began to encourage inter-mingling, inter-dining, and, eventually, inter-marriage itself.
His son married a Tamil Brahmin girl. Nobody raised an eyebrow. The country had changed. A younger generation was taking over. They older generation liked Gandhi because he broke the 'kala-pani' taboo & married his son out of caste. The younger generation wanted all caste based law to be scrapped. However, what really mattered was the land question. Since nobody wanted to grasp that nettle, everybody ran around talking worthless bollocks.
Notably, as Gandhi’s challenge to social orthodoxy became more direct, the opposition to him intensified.
He was a stupid shithead. Sadly, it was the stupid shit- stuff like khaddar- which gave him mass appeal. After all, religious rituals often involve doing mindless shite. What could be more mindless than spinning cotton? Maybe it really would get you into Heaven.
There was an unrelenting barrage of hate mails received by Gandhi for daring to question what his right-wing critics claimed was the divinely ordained hierarchy of caste.
It is safer to direct your hate mail at a cowardly guy. What is illegal is sending him dick pics.
Adding to the verbal abuse were threats of violence, with at least one assassination attempt provoked by his anti-untouchability campaign.
The Brits thought he had cooked up the bomb attack (1934) himself. We don't know who was behind it.
Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer.
He saw him as an hypocritical autocrat with little education or understanding of the modern world.
Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition.
No. The guy was a bania who didn't know Sanskrit. If he could pull the wool over the eyes of the Muslims- well and good. If not, shoot the fucker.
This disjuncture in viewpoints brings to mind some comments of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass on his great white contemporary Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln had power. Douglass didn't.
In a speech of 1876,
Which is when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 by which the Republican,
Rutherford B. Hayes , was awarded the presidency under an agreement to remove remaining federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida
Douglass remarked that ‘viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’
Douglass was pretending the Civil War was about being nice to darkies. It really wasn't. Still, Douglass had to play the hand he had been dealt.
The two greatest opponents of untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century were Gandhi and Ambedkar.
No wonder it persisted! When the Brits didn't like a thing- e.g. Suttee or Slavery- they got rid of it. Indian barristers were useless.
Their differing social locations and political affiliations produced sharp disagreements between the two men.
Their agreement mattered. Their disagreements did not. Why? They had shit for brains. Politics is about solving collective action problems in a sensible manner. It isn't about converting to Buddhism or sleeping naked with young girls.
In recent decades, as Dalits have grown more self-aware and better organised, they have
lost power. Channi was the last Dalit C.M. He didn't last long. It is difficult now to believe that Mayawati was once considered a future PM.
The question now is whether reservations will be renewed in 2030.
turned more, much more, to Ambedkar than to Gandhi, to the activist intellectual who was himself a Dalit rather than to the guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer.
The problem is that Ambedkarites are crazy hatemongers who alienate everybody. Smart Dalits can join the BJP and rise. Better yet, stay clear of politics and focus on building a business.
This elevation of Ambedkar over Gandhi was inevitable, and appropriate.
It was silly. True, you could repair Ambedkar by turning him into a Law & Econ type maven. But nobody is interested in doing so. Thus one may as well dismiss him a hate-mongering narcissist with a Messiah (or Boddhisattva) complex.
However, the politics of the present have also led to a wholesale repudiation of Gandhi on the part of those who seek to fight against the injustices of caste.
Nobody is fighting shit. Gandhi was a fool who died long ago. Same goes for Ambedkar. Forget them. All that matters is productivity. Talking bollocks helps nobody.
A posthumous reconciliation
When, back in the 1990s, this demonisation of Gandhi by Dalit activists was gathering pace,
Back then, Mayawati looked like a contender.
the social theorist
aka shithead
D. R. Nagaraj wrote an essay with the telling title ‘Self-Purification versus Self-Respect’, capturing the different paths taken by the two reformers.
Gandhi is important if there is a Gandhi capable of taking the top job. Ambedkar is important if a Dalit party (e.g. BSP) can take the lead in forming a government.
The self-purification of Gandhi sought to make upper castes abandon their arrogance and contempt for those whom the mere accident of birth had consigned to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Fuck off! All that matters is money. Ambedkar had plenty & thus was able to marry a Brahmin doctor. Raising productivity is how peeps get more money at which point they get plenty of respect from smart people who want to sell them stuff.
The self-respect of Ambedkar was aimed at his fellow Dalits, urging them, as he famously put it, to ‘educate, agitate, and organise’ to claim rights of full and equal citizenship in the Indian Republic.
He claimed his full and equal right to support the British in India as their nominee. Nothing wrong in that at all.
With the star of Ambedkar in the ascendance, Nagaraj reminded his readers that it was Gandhi who first made the eradication of untouchability ‘one of the central questions of Indian politics.’
Why didn't he ask the Viceroy to ban it? Interestingly, it was only in 1941 that Mahar recrutiment into the army was resumed.
Now, ‘from the point of view of the present’, he argued, there was ‘a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis’ of the legacies of Ambedkar and Gandhi.
This is a compelling necessity only for people who enjoy eating their own shit.
To build a more caring and just society, one
needs to stop teaching or writing worthless shite
needed both to awaken afresh the upper-caste conscience
The upper castes have come to loathe reservations.
and to consolidate the efforts for Dalit self-respect. Hence, insisted Nagaraj, ‘Gandhiji and Ambedkar can and should be made complementary to each other.’
Add in Godse, Mao, Hitler & Barbara Streisland and you might be on to something.
Nagaraj understood that his call for a posthumous reconciliation between two figures whom both history and politics had made implacable adversaries
Ambedkar scratched Gandhi's face after the latter pulled his hair.
might not meet with approval. As he presciently wrote, ‘surely such efforts will be met with stiff opposition from hardened ideologues and researchers, and they are bound to unearth fresh evidence to fuel the fire between the two’.
Ambedkar was educated and smart. Gandhi wasn't. But, since Dalits aren't interested in anything smart Ambedkar said, we have to condemn both as worthless shitheads.
D. R. Nagaraj died a few years after writing these words. His call to bring these apparently opposed legacies in productive conversation has been continued by his friend, the Dalit novelist and activist Devanuru Mahadeva.
The question is whether Priyank Kharge can get the job his father was denied in Karnataka. On the other hand, he may prefer a seat in the Union Cabinet if a Congress led alliance wins the National Election.
Speaking to the journalist Amrita Dutta on the eve of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Mahadeva urged democrats not to view Ambedkar and Gandhi as rivals and adversaries. In the journey towards true equality, he said, they should rather be seen as colleagues and co-workers. Thus, as Mahadeva remarked, ‘Ambedkar had to awaken the sleeping Dalits and then make the journey. Gandhi had to make the immense effort of uplifting, correcting, changing those who were drowned in Hindu caste religion, in caste wells, to take a step forward. When you see all this, maybe Gandhi would not have traversed far without the presence of Ambedkar. Similarly, I feel that without the liberal tolerant atmosphere created by Gandhi in the wells of Hindu caste religion, then this cruel Savarna [upper caste] society may not have tolerated Ambedkar as much as it did then.’
Ambedkar could have joined 'the Lal, Bal, Pal' militant section of Congress. He preferred to rise under British patronage. Gandhi too had ingratiated himself with the Brits. By unilaterally surrendering in 1922, he did the Brits a favour. Sadly, the end of British rule meant that both would lose salience. Nehru, it must be said, had a international, rather than parochial, perspective. It was his vision for India which prevailed.
Mahadeva continued: ‘If it is our understanding that it is the Savarnas who need to change if India has to liberate itself from caste,
the Japanese had gotten rid of caste. They also burnt down Temples & beat Buddhist monks and forced them to get married. Ambedkar knew this well enough, yet converted to that highly casteist religion.
then Gandhi is necessary. In the fight for Dalit civil rights, Ambedkar is absolutely necessary. Hence, I say that both should be brought together.’ This is a sentiment which I whole-heartedly endorse.
Because you have yet another worthless book to sell.
Why actually 'argued with Gandhi'?
