Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
While the First Round Table Conference was in session in London, India was in turmoil. In January 1930, the Congress had declared its demand for
Poorna Swaraj—complete independence. Gandhi showcased his genius as a political organiser and launched his most imaginative political action
yet—the
Salt Satyagraha. He called on Indians to march to the sea and break the British salt tax laws. Hundreds of thousands of Indians rallied to his call. Jails filled to overflowing. Ninety thousand people were arrested. Between salt and water, between the Touchables’ satyagraha and the Untouchables’ ‘
duragraha’ lay a sharply divided universe—of politics, of philosophy and of morality.
At its Karachi Session in March 1931, the Congress passed a Resolution of Fundamental Rights for a free India.
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It was a valuable, enlightened document, and it included some of the rights Ambedkar had been campaigning for. It laid the foundation for a modern, secular and largely socialist state. The rights included the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and association, equality before law, universal adult franchise, free and compulsory primary education, a guaranteed living wage for every citizen and limited hours of work. It underlined the protection of women and peasants, and state ownership or control of key industries, mines and transport. Most important, it created a firewall between religion and the state.
Notwithstanding the admirable principles of the Resolution of Fundamental Rights that had been passed, the view from the bottom was slightly different. The 1930 elections to the provincial legislatures coincided with the Salt Satyagraha. The Congress had boycotted the elections. In order to embarrass ‘respectable’ Hindus who did not heed the boycott and stood as independent candidates, the Congress fielded mock candidates who were Untouchables—two cobblers, a barber, a milkman and a sweeper. The idea was that no self-respecting, privileged-caste Hindu would want to be part of an institution where he or she was put on a par with Untouchables.
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Putting up Untouchables as mock candidates was a Congress party tactic that had begun with the 1920 elections and went on right up to 1943. Ambedkar says:
What were the means adopted by the Congress to prevent Hindus from standing on an independent ticket? The means were to make the legislatures objects of contempt. Accordingly, the Congress, in various provinces, started processions carrying placards saying, ‘Who will go to the Legislatures? Only barbers, cobblers, potters and
sweepers.’ In the processions, one man would utter the question as part of the slogan and the whole crowd would repeat as answer the second part of the slogan.
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At the Round Table Conference, Gandhi and Ambedkar clashed, both claiming that they were the real representatives of the Untouchables. The conference went on for weeks. Gandhi eventually agreed to separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs, but would not countenance Ambedkar’s argument for a separate electorate for Untouchables. He resorted to his usual rhetoric: “I would far rather that Hinduism died than that
Untouchability lived.”
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Gandhi refused to acknowledge that Ambedkar had the right to represent Untouchables. Ambedkar would not back down either. Nor was there a call for him to. Untouchable groups from across India, including Mangoo Ram of the
Ad Dharm movement, sent telegrams in support of Ambedkar. Eventually Gandhi said, “Those who speak of the political rights of Untouchables do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed, and therefore I want to say with all the emphasis that I can command that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.”
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Having delivered his threat, Gandhi took the boat back to India. On the way, he dropped in on
Mussolini in Rome and was extremely impressed by him and his “care of the poor, his opposition to super-urbanisation, his efforts to bring about co-ordination between capital and labour”.
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A year later, Ramsay MacDonald announced the British government’s decision on the Communal Question. It awarded
the Untouchables a separate electorate for a period of twenty years. At the time, Gandhi was serving a sentence in
Yerawada Central Jail in Poona. From prison, he announced that unless the provision of separate electorates for Untouchables was revoked, he would fast to death.
He waited for a month. When he did not get his way, Gandhi began his fast from prison. This fast was completely against his own maxims of satyagraha. It was barefaced blackmail, nothing less manipulative than the threat of committing public suicide. The British government said it would revoke the provision only if the Untouchables agreed. The country spun like a top. Public statements were issued, petitions signed, prayers offered, meetings held, appeals made. It was a preposterous situation: privileged-caste Hindus, who segregated themselves from Untouchables in every possible way, who deemed them unworthy of human association, who shunned their very touch, who wanted separate food, water, schools, roads, temples and wells, now said that India would be balkanised if Untouchables had a separate electorate. And Gandhi, who believed so fervently and so vocally in the system that upheld that separation was starving himself to death to deny Untouchables a separate electorate.
The gist of it was that the caste Hindus wanted the power to close the door on Untouchables, but on no account could Untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The masters knew that choice was power.
As the frenzy mounted, Ambedkar became the villain, the traitor, the man who wanted to dissever India, the man who was trying to kill Gandhi. Political heavyweights of the garam dal (militants) as well as the naram dal (moderates), including Tagore, Nehru and C. Rajagopalachari, weighed in on Gandhi’s side. To placate Gandhi, privileged-caste Hindus made a show of sharing food on the streets with Untouchables, and many Hindu temples were thrown open to them, albeit temporarily. Behind
those gestures of accommodation, a wall of tension built up too. Several Untouchable leaders feared that Ambedkar would be held responsible if Gandhi succumbed to his fast, and this in turn, could put the lives of ordinary Untouchables in danger. One of them was M.C. Rajah, the Untouchable leader from Madras, who, according to an eyewitness account of the events, said:
For thousands of years we had been treated as Untouchables, downtrodden, insulted, despised. The Mahatma is staking his life for our sake, and if he dies, for the next thousands of years we shall be where we have been, if not worse. There will be such a strong feeling against us that we brought about his death, that the mind of the whole Hindu community and the whole civilised community will kick us downstairs further still. I am not going to stand by you any longer. I will join the conference and find a solution and I will part company from you.
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What could Ambedkar do? He tried to hold out with his usual arsenal of logic and reason, but the situation was way beyond all that. He didn’t stand a chance. After four days of the fast, on 24 September 1932, Ambedkar visited Gandhi in Yerawada prison and signed the Poona Pact. The next day in Bombay he made a public speech in which he was uncharacteristically gracious about Gandhi: “I was astounded to see that the man who held such divergent views from mine at the Round Table Conference came immediately to my rescue and not to the rescue of the other side.”
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Later, though, having recovered from the trauma, Ambedkar wrote:
There was nothing noble in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act…[I]t was the worst form of coercion against a helpless people to give up the constitutional safeguards of which they had become possessed under the Prime Minister’s Award and agree to live on the mercy of the Hindus. It was a vile and wicked act. How can
the Untouchables regard such a man as honest and sincere?
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According to the Pact, instead of separate electorates, the Untouchables would have reserved seats in general constituencies. The number of seats they were allotted in the provincial legislatures increased (from seventy-eight to 148), but the candidates, because they would now have to be acceptable to their privileged-caste–dominated constituencies, lost their teeth.
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Uncle Tom won the day. Gandhi saw to it that leadership remained in the hands of the privileged castes.
In
The New Jim Crow
,
Michelle Alexander
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describes how, in the United States, criminalisation and mass incarceration has led to the disenfranchisement of an extraordinary percentage of the African American population. In India, in a far slyer way, an apparently generous form of enfranchisement has ensured the virtual disenfranchisement of the Dalit population.
Nevertheless, what to Ambedkar was a foul and filthy act appeared to others as nothing less than a divine miracle. Louis Fischer, author of perhaps the most widely read biography of Gandhi ever written, said:
The fast could not kill the curse of
untouchability which was more than three thousand years old … but after the fast, untouchability forfeited its public approval; the belief in it was destroyed … Gandhi’s ‘Epic Fast’ snapped a long chain that stretched back into antiquity and had enslaved tens of millions. Some links of the chain remained. Many wounds from the chain remained. But nobody would forge new links, nobody would link the links together again … It [the Poona Pact] marked a religious reformation, a psychological revolution. Hinduism was purging itself of a millennial sickness. The mass purified itself in practice … If Gandhi had done nothing else in his life but shatter the structure of untouchability he would have been a great social reformer … Gandhi’s agony gave vicarious pain to his adorers who knew they must not kill God’s messenger on earth. It was evil to prolong his
suffering. It was blessed to save him by being good to those whom he had called ‘The Children of God’.
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On the great occasion of the Poona Pact, contradicting the stand he took at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi was quite willing to accept Ambedkar’s signature on the pact as the representative of the Untouchables. Gandhi himself did not sign the pact, but the list of the other signatories is interesting:
G.D. Birla, Gandhi’s industrialist-patron;
Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a conservative
Brahmin leader and founder of the right-wing
Hindu Mahasabha (of which Gandhi’s future assassin,
Nathuram Godse, was a member); V.D. Savarkar, accused of conspiracy in Gandhi’s assassination, who also served as president of the Mahasabha;
Palwankar Baloo, an Untouchable cricketer of the
Chambhar caste, who was celebrated earlier as a sporting idol by Ambedkar, and whom the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha propped up as an opponent of Ambedkar;
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and, of course, M.C. Rajah (who would, much later, regret his collusion with Gandhi, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Congress).
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Among the (many) reasons that criticism of Gandhi is not just frowned upon, but often censored in India, ‘secularists’ tell us, is that Hindu nationalists (from whose midst Gandhi’s assassins arose, and whose star is on the ascendant in India these days) will seize upon such criticism and turn it to their advantage. The fact is there was never much daylight between Gandhi’s views on caste and those of the Hindu right. From a Dalit point of view, Gandhi’s assassination could appear to be more a fratricidal killing than an assassination by an ideological opponent. Even today,
Narendra Modi, Hindu
nationalism’s most aggressive proponent, and a possible future prime minister, is able to invoke Gandhi in his public speeches without the slightest discomfort. (Modi invoked Gandhi to justify the introduction of two anti-
minority legislations in Gujarat—the anti-conversion law of
2003, called the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, and the amendment to the old cow-slaughter law in 2011.
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) Many of Modi’s pronouncements are delivered from the Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, a spanking new convention hall whose foundation contains sand brought in special urns from each of Gujarat’s 18,000 villages, many of which continue to practise egregious forms of
untouchability.
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After the Poona Pact, Gandhi directed all his energy and passion towards the eradication of untouchability. For a start, he rebaptised Untouchables and gave them a patronising name:
Harijans. ‘Hari’ is the name for a male deity in Hinduism, ‘jan’ is people. So Harijans are People of God, though in order to infantilise them even further, in translation they are referred to as ‘Children of God’. In this way, Gandhi anchored Untouchables firmly to the Hindu faith.
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He founded a new newspaper called
Harijan
. He started the Harijan Sevak Sangh (Harijan Service Society), which he insisted would be manned only by privileged-caste Hindus who had to do penance for their past sins against Untouchables. Ambedkar saw all this as the Congress’s plan to “kill Untouchables by kindness”.
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Gandhi toured the country, preaching against untouchability. He was heckled and attacked by Hindus even more conservative than himself, but he did not swerve from his purpose. Everything that happened was harnessed to the cause of eradicating caste. In January 1934, there was a major earthquake in Bihar. Almost twenty thousand people lost their lives. Writing in the
Harijan
on 24 February, Gandhi shocked even his colleagues in the Congress when he said it was god’s punishment to the people for the sin of practising untouchability. None of this stopped the Congress party from continuing with a tradition it had invented: it once again fielded mock Untouchable candidates in the 1934 elections to the Central Legislature.
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Gandhi could not, it appears, conceive of a role for
Untouchables other than as victims in need of ministration. That they had also been psychologically hardwired into the caste system, that they too might need to be roused out of thousands of years of being conditioned to think of themselves as subhuman, was an antithetical, intimidating idea to Gandhi. The Poona Pact was meant to defuse or at least delay the political awakening of Untouchables.