Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (15 page)
The thousands attending the conference were in a militant mood, and wanted to defy the court injunction and march to the tank. Ambedkar decided against it, hoping that after hearing the matter, the courts would declare that Untouchables had the right to use public wells. He thought that a judicial order would be a substantial step forward from just a municipal resolution. Although the High Court did eventually lift the injunction, it found a technical way around making a legal declaration in favour of the Untouchables.
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(Like the judge who, almost eighty years later, wrote the Khairlanji verdict.)
That same month (December 1927), Gandhi spoke at the
All-India Suppressed Classes Conference in Lahore, where he preached a gospel opposite to Ambedkar’s. He urged Untouchables to fight for their rights by “sweet persuasion and not by Satyagraha which becomes
Duragraha when it is intended to give rude shock to the deep-rooted prejudices of the people”.
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Duragraha, he defined as “devilish force”, which was the polar opposite of Satyagraha, “soul force”.
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Ambedkar never forgot Gandhi’s response to the
Mahad Satyagraha. Writing in 1945, in
What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
he said:
The Untouchables were not without hope of getting the moral support of Mr Gandhi. Indeed they had very good ground for getting it. For the weapon of satyagraha—the essence of which is to melt the heart of the opponent by suffering—was the weapon which was forged by Mr Gandhi, and who had led the Congress to practise it against the British Government for winning
swaraj. Naturally the Untouchables expected full support from Mr Gandhi to their satyagraha against the Hindus the object of which was to establish their right to take water from public wells and to
enter public Hindu temples. Mr Gandhi however did not give his support to the satyagraha. Not only did he not give his support, he condemned it in strong terms.
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Logically, the direction in which Ambedkar was moving ought to have made him a natural ally of the
Communist Party of India, founded in 1925, two years before the Mahad Satyagraha.
Bolshevism was in the air.
The Russian Revolution had inspired communists around the world. In the Bombay Presidency, the trade union leader
S.A. Dange, a Maharashtrian
Brahmin, organised a large section of the Bombay textile workers into a breakaway union—India’s first communist trade union—the
Girni Kamgar Union, with seventy thousand members. At the time a large section of the workforce in the mills were Untouchables, many of them Mahars, who were employed only in the much lower paid spinning department, because in the weaving department workers had to hold thread in their mouths, and the Untouchables’ saliva was believed to be polluting to the product. In 1928, Dange led the Girni Kamgar Union’s first major strike. Ambedkar suggested that one of the issues that ought to be raised was equality and equal entitlement
within
the ranks of workers. Dange did not agree, and this led to a long and bitter falling out.
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Years later, in 1949, Dange, who is still a revered figure in the communist pantheon, wrote a book,
Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture: India from Primitive Communism to Slavery
, in which he argued that ancient Hindu culture was a form of primitive communism in which “Brahman is the commune of
Aryan man and
yagnya [ritual fire sacrifice] is its means of production, the primitive commune with the collective mode of production.”
D.D. Kosambi, the mathematician and Marxist historian, said in a review: “This is so wildly improbable as to plunge into the ridiculous.”
209
The
Bombay mills have since closed down, though the Girni Kamgar Union still exists. Mill workers are fighting for compensation and housing and resisting the takeover of mill lands for the construction of malls. The
Communist Party has lost its influence, and the union has been taken over by the
Shiv Sena, a party of militant Maharashtrian Hindu chauvinists.
Years before Ambedkar and Dange were disagreeing about the internal inequalities between labourers, Gandhi was already an established labour organiser. What were his views on workers and strikes?
Gandhi returned from South Africa at a time of continuous labour unrest.
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The textile industry had done well for itself during the
First World War, but the prosperity was not reflected in workers’ wages. In February 1918, millworkers in Ahmedabad went on strike. To mediate the dispute, Ambalal Sarabhai, president of the Ahmedabad Mill Owners’ Association, turned to Gandhi, who had set up his ashram in Sabarmati, just outside Ahmedabad. It was the beginning of Gandhi’s lifelong career as a labour union organiser in India. By 1920, he had managed to set up a labour union called the
Majoor Mahajan Sangh—which translates as the Workers and Mill-Owners Association. The English name was the Textile Labour Union. Anusuyaben, Ambalal Sarabhai’s sister, a labour organiser, was elected president for life, and Gandhi became a pivotal member of the advisory committee, also for life. The union did work at improving the hygiene and living conditions of workers, but no worker was ever elected to the union leadership. No worker was permitted to be present at closed-door arbitrations between the management and the union. The union was divided up into a federation of smaller, occupation-based unions whose members
worked in the different stages of the production process. In other words, the structure of the union institutionalised caste divisions. According to a worker interviewed by the scholar Jan Breman, Untouchables were not allowed into the common canteen, they had separate drinking water tanks and segregated housing.
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In the union, Gandhi was the prime organiser, negotiator and decision-maker. In 1921, when workers did not turn up for work for three days, Gandhi was infuriated:
Hindu and Muslim workers have dishonoured and humiliated themselves by abstaining from mills. Labour cannot discount me. I believe no one in India can do so. I am trying to free India from bondage and I refuse to be enslaved by workers.
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Here is a 1925 entry from a report of the Textile Labour Union. We don’t know who wrote it, but its content and its literary cadence are unmistakably similar to what Gandhi had said about indentured labour in South Africa more than thirty years before:
They are not as a rule armed with sufficient intelligence and moral development to resist the degrading influences which surround them on all sides in a city like this. So many of them sink in one way or another. A large number of them lose their moral balance and become slaves to liquor habits, many go down as physical wrecks and waste away from tuberculosis.
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Since Gandhi’s main sponsor was a mill-owner and his main constituency was supposed to be the labouring class, Gandhi developed a convoluted thesis on capitalists and the working class:
The mill-owner may be wholly in the wrong. In the struggle between capital and labour, it may be generally said that more often than not capitalists are in the wrong box. But when labour comes fully to realise its strength, I know it can become more tyrannical than capital. The mill-owners will have to work on
the terms dictated by labour, if the latter could command the intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour will never attain to that intelligence … It would be suicidal if the labourers rely upon their numbers or brute-force, i.e., violence. By doing so they would do harm to industries in the country. If on the other hand they take their stand on pure
justice and suffer in their person to secure it, not only will they always succeed but they will reform their masters, develop industries, and both masters and men will be as members of one and the same family.
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Gandhi took a dim view of strikes. But his views on
sweepers’ strikes, which he published in 1946, were even more stringent than those on other workers’ strikes:
There are certain matters on which strikes would be wrong. Sweepers’ grievances come in this category. My opinion against sweepers’ strikes dates back to about 1897 when I was in
Durban. A general strike was mooted there, and the question arose as to whether scavengers should join it. My vote was registered against the proposal. Just as a man cannot live without air, so too he cannot exist for long if his home and surroundings are not clean. One or the other epidemic is bound to break out, especially when modern drainage is put out of action … A
Bhangi [scavengers] may not give up his work even for a day. And there are many other ways open to him for securing justice.
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It’s not clear what the “other” ways were for securing justice: Untouchables on satyagraha were committing
duragraha. Sweepers on strike were sinning. Everything other than ‘sweet persuasion’ was unacceptable.
While workers could not strike for fair wages, it was perfectly correct for Gandhi to be generously sponsored by big industrialists. (It was with this same sense of exceptionalism that in his reply to
Annihilation of Caste
he wrote, as point number one, “He [Ambedkar] has priced it at 8 annas, I would have advised 2 or at least 4 annas.”)
The differences between Ambedkar and the new
Communist Party of India were not superficial. They went back to first principles. Communists were people of The Book, and The Book was written by a German
Jew who had heard of, but had not actually encountered,
Brahminism. This left Indian communists without theoretical tools to deal with caste. Since they were people of The Book, and since the caste system had denied Shudra and Untouchable castes the opportunity of learning, by default the leaders of the Communist Party of India and its subsequent offshoots belonged to (and by and large continue to belong to) the privileged castes, mostly Brahmin. Despite intentions that may have been genuinely revolutionary, it was not just theoretical tools they lacked, but also a ground-level understanding and empathy with ‘the masses’ who belonged to the subordinated castes. While Ambedkar believed that class was an important—and even primary—prism through which to view and understand society, he did not believe it was the only one. Ambedkar believed that the two enemies of the Indian working class were
capitalism (in the liberal sense of the word)
and
Brahminism. Reflecting perhaps on his experience in the 1928 textile workers’ strike, in
Annihilation of Caste
he asks:
That seizure of power must be by a proletariat. The first question I ask is: Will the proletariat of India combine to bring about this revolution?…Can it be said that the proletariat of India, poor as it is, recognises no distinctions except that of the rich and poor? Can it be said that the poor in India recognise no such distinctions of caste or creed, high or low?
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To Indian communists, who treated caste as a sort of folk dialect derived from the classical language of class analysis, rather than as a unique, fully developed language of its own,
Ambedkar said, “[T]he caste system is not merely a division of labour.
It is also a division of labourers
.”
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Unable to reconcile his differences with the communists, and still looking for a political home for his ideas, Ambedkar decided to try and build one himself. In 1938, he founded his own political party, the
Independent Labour Party (ILP). As its name suggests, the programme of the ILP was broad-based, overtly socialist and was not limited to issues of caste. Its manifesto announced “the principle of State management and State ownership of industry whenever it may become necessary in the interests of the people”. It promised a separation between the judiciary and the executive. It said it would set up land mortgage banks, agriculturist producers’ cooperatives and marketing societies.
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Though it was a young party, the ILP did extremely well in the 1937 elections, winning sixteen of the eighteen seats it contested in the Bombay Presidency and the
Central Provinces and Berar. In 1939, the British government, without consulting any Indians, declared that India was at war with Germany. In protest, the Congress party resigned from all provincial ministries and the provincial assemblies were dissolved. The brief but vigorous political life of the ILP came to an abrupt end.