The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste

by Arundhati Roy

The presumption is that ‘merit’ exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility towards the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, ‘merit’ has become a euphemism for nepotism.

Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the rich. He is the Saint of the Status Quo.

As the earth warms up, as glaciers melt and forests disappear, Gandhi’s words have turned out to be prophetic. But his horror of modern civilization led him to eulogise a mythical Indian past that was, in his telling, just and beautiful. Ambedkar, on his part, was painfully aware of the iniquity of that past, but in his urgency to move away from it, he failed to recognize the catastrophic dangers of Western modernity.

Indians have too much in common with the Africans to think of isolating themselves from them. They cannot exist in South Africa for any length of time without the active sympathy and friendship of the Africans. I am not aware of the general body of the Indians having ever adopted an air of superiority towards their African brethren, and it would be a tragedy if any such movement were to gain ground among the Indian settlers of South Africa.138

The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.

Let not the people of Vykom or any other place fear that Mahatmaji wants caste abolished. Mahatmaji does not want the caste system abolished but holds that untouchability should be abolished . . . Mahatmaji does not want you to dine with Thiyas or Pulayas. What he wants is that we must be prepared to touch or go near other human beings as you go near a cow or a horse . . . Mahatmaji wants you to look upon so-called untouchables as you do at the cow and the dog and other harmless creatures.196

How different are Ambedkar’s words on Adivasis from Gandhi’s words on Untouchables when he said: Muslims and Sikhs are all well organised. The ‘Untouchables’ are not. There is very little political consciousness among them, and they are so horribly treated that I want to save them against themselves. If they had separate electorates, their lives would be miserable in villages which are the strongholds of Hindu orthodoxy. It is the superior class of Hindus who have to do penance for having neglected the

‘Untouchables’ for ages. That penance can be done by active social reform and by making the lot of the ‘Untouchables’ more bearable by acts of service, but not by asking for separate electorates for them.228

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.

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.

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.