Part 7 (1/2)

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 nonent.i.ties as a way of diminis.h.i.+ng, 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 reb.u.t.tal. 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 Cla.s.ses, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Cla.s.ses 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.”

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Ambedkar, lower right; Gandhi, center, at Round Table Conference (photo credit i8.3) (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 Cla.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 cla.s.sified as a separate cla.s.s...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 const.i.tutional formulas with Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other Muslim leaders. Now here he was clas.h.i.+ng 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 impa.s.se 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 pa.s.sion 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.”

The rising young politician was unaware that Mahatmaji's stand wasn't nearly as clear-cut as he wors.h.i.+pfully imagined, that seven years earlier, at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, Gandhi had actually ruled that the national movement shouldn't get involved in ”local” temple-entry campaigns. Nehru didn't go into that history in his reply. He ducked the issue of temple entry for untouchables altogether, saying simply that satyagraha ”should not be abused and made a cheap weapon.” The issue plainly struck him as a diversion from the main goals of the national struggle. By birth, a Kashmiri pandit, or Brahman, he'd dropped caste from his vocabulary in favor of cla.s.s. Abolis.h.i.+ng untouchability, in his view, was a task for an independent India, something that could be deferred until that long-awaited dawn. Nehru's brush-off of Patil stands as a timely reminder of why Ambedkar was so sore. Congress could not, in fact, be relied on to ”share the honor” of representing the untouchables. That was-and would remain-the weak point in Gandhi's otherwise pa.s.sionate stand.

London had been only round one. Gandhi and Ambedkar would soon clash again, over even higher stakes. Thereafter it wouldn't be long before the rotund future Buddhist would give up on temple-entry campaigns, on Hinduism in general, and on Congress in particular. Gandhi, who'd promised to resist ”this thing” with his life, may have been the only one who sensed what was coming.

GANDHI'S GOOD-BYE TODAY, said the headline in London's Daily Herald Daily Herald on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that ”something indefinable” had changed in the att.i.tude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi's great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of ”a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence...Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air.” The best evidence for Orwell's argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression. on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that ”something indefinable” had changed in the att.i.tude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi's great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of ”a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence...Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air.” The best evidence for Orwell's argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression.

After stops in Paris and Switzerland, he arrived in Italy on December 11, hoping to meet the pope and Mussolini. The time in London inflated his sense of his stature on the world scene. Now he heard a calling to do what he could to head off another war in Europe. He was hopeful, he confided to the French writer Romain Rolland, that he could make some impression on his Rome stopover. Rolland had written a hagiographic tract hailing Gandhi as India's ”Messiah,” going so far as to compare him to Buddha and Christ as a ”mortal half-G.o.d.” But he was skeptical about the Mahatma's ability to move Il Duce.

Pope Pius XI sent his regrets but arranged for Gandhi to visit the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately, there's no image, other than what we can summon to our imaginations, of the slight figure in his loincloth and shawl gazing up contemplatively at a similarly attired, incomparably heftier Christ in The Last Judgment The Last Judgment. More than likely, it was the Mahatma's first and only real experience of Western painting on religious themes, if we omit the Jesus print he kept over his desk in his Johannesburg law office. He took it in with some patience, later p.r.o.nouncing himself deeply moved by a pieta: probably the Michelangelo in St. Peter's, possibly the Bellini in the Vatican museum. Then at six o'clock he was ushered into Mussolini's s.p.a.cious office (”as big as a ballroom, completely empty except for one big writing table,” wrote Gandhi's English follower Madeleine Slade, the admiral's daughter whom Gandhi had renamed Mirabehn). The dictator (in what Mirabehn described as ”quite good English”) led the conversation, asking his visitor whether he'd ”got anything” at the Round Table Conference.

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At Bombay rally on return from Europe, December 1931 (photo credit i8.4) (photo credit i8.4)

”No indeed,” Gandhi replied, ”but I had not hoped I would get anything out of it.”

What would he do next? Mussolini wanted to know. ”It seems I shall have to start a campaign of civil disobedience,” his guest said.

It remained a back-and-forth in this vein between two seasoned politicians until Mussolini solicited Gandhi's thoughts on Europe. ”Now you ask the question that I have been waiting for you to ask,” said the Mahatma, launching into what was effectively a summary of arguments about Western decadence he'd set down twenty-two years earlier in Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. ”Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on,” he said. ”The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system.” as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. ”Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on,” he said. ”The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system.”

Gandhi, who hadn't bothered to study up on fascism, may have thought he was speaking against industrialization and colonialism, and therefore, by his lights, for peace. But his actual words could have been spliced seamlessly into one of Il Duce's strident orations. The meeting thus ended on a note of harmony, but it was hardly a meeting of minds, in part because Gandhi had misread his host's.

He sailed from Brindisi for home two days later. From s.h.i.+pboard he wrote to Romain Rolland praising Mussolini for his ”service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor...[and] his pa.s.sionate love for ”his people.” Appalled, Rolland wrote an emotional reb.u.t.tal, upbraiding his Messiah for pa.s.sing such casual, ill-informed judgments. Before the letter could be mailed, he learned that Gandhi had been taken out of circulation.

On January 4, 1932, seven days after disembarking in Bombay, the Mahatma awakened at three in the morning to find the commissioner of police, an Englishman in full uniform, standing at the foot of his bed. ”Bapu just waking [looked] old, fragile and rather pathetic with the mists of sleep still on his face,” a sympathetic British onlooker later wrote.

”Mr. Gandhi,” the commissioner said, ”it is my duty to arrest you.”

”A beautiful smile of welcome broke out on Bapu's face,” the onlooker went on, ”and now he looked young, strong and confident.”

9.

FAST UNTO DEATH.

THE CASTE SYSTEM SUPPORTED by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans.” Among India's ex-untouchables, this wasn't a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia's by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an ”enemy” of the most oppressed and deprived of India's poor-the very people to whom he'd professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he'd deliberately remade his own-lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cybers.p.a.ce. It's, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured p.r.o.nouncements, branded Gandhi ”the number one enemy” of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it's usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi ”India's greatest man.” by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans.” Among India's ex-untouchables, this wasn't a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia's by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an ”enemy” of the most oppressed and deprived of India's poor-the very people to whom he'd professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he'd deliberately remade his own-lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cybers.p.a.ce. It's, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured p.r.o.nouncements, branded Gandhi ”the number one enemy” of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it's usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi ”India's greatest man.”

In ongoing debates about Gandhi's att.i.tude to untouchables and caste, it's never difficult to quote the Mahatma against himself. Over half a century he wrote and spoke on the subject with deep conviction, in most instances anyway, but his tactics needed readjusting in different places, at different times. Decades after encouraging intercaste and intercommunal dining at the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, or among field workers in his early Indian campaigns such as in the Champaran district of Bihar, he told caste-obsessed audiences in South India, where he was seeking to open minds on the untouchability question, that intercaste dining was a matter of private choice, a personal issue. Before such audiences, he was even more chary about discussing intercaste marriage. Without putting it quite so cra.s.sly, he all but a.s.sured high-caste Hindus that they could give up the wicked practice of untouchability without ever having to worry about their daughters marrying beneath themselves in the caste system, let alone marrying untouchables. Yet the same Gandhi, in defiance of orthodox Hindus, finally decreed that only intercaste marriages could be performed at his ashram. Eventually he concluded that intercaste marriage wasn't merely permissible but possibly the solution since it would tend to produce ”only one caste, known by the beautiful name Bhangi.” Considering that a Bhangi, or sweeper, is sometimes despised even by other untouchables, it was a radical thought. (One that remains radical, a lifetime later, in an India in which three fourths of those approached in opinion surveys still voice disapproval of intercaste unions, and where that disapproval not infrequently gets expressed in so-called honor killings of daughters and sisters who stray.) When Ambedkar unsettled many of his followers by taking a Brahman wife after independence and Gandhi's death, his fellow cabinet member Vallabhbhai Patel wrote him a congratulatory letter noting kindly, or maybe pointedly, that the leader whose sincerity he'd so fiercely questioned would have been pleased. ”I agree that Bapu, if he had been alive, would have blessed the marriage,” a more mellow Ambedkar wrote back.

To say that Gandhi wasn't absolutely consistent isn't to convict him of hypocrisy; it's to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together. This is never clearer than in a reply he sent to his soul mate Charlie Andrews, the Anglican priest he first encountered at the end of his stay in South Africa. Andrews, who regularly functioned as Gandhi's personal emissary in England and farther-flung parts of the empire, had urged him to concentrate all his efforts on his fight against untouchability, even if that meant stepping back from the independence movement. ”My life is one indivisible whole,” Gandhi wrote back. And so were his causes and concerns, listed in the letter to Andrews as ”satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity”-plus, he might have said, a.s.sorted add-ons such as diet, prohibition, spinning, hygiene, sanitation, education through vernacular languages, and women's rights, including the right of widows to remarry and the abolition of child marriage-all ”indivisible parts of a whole which is truth.” And if they were all thought of as one, Gandhi went on in direct reply to the plea from Andrews: I can't devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, ”Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj.” All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.

In this case, the pianist also sees himself as composer and conductor. ”Full and final removal of untouchability,” he now says, ”is utterly impossible without swaraj.” This from the man who as early as 1921 had described ”the removal of untouchability as an indispensable condition of the attainment of swaraj.” It's hard not to view this as a reversal or contradiction. But for the pianist himself, it was just a variation on a theme, a matter of emphasizing now one note and now another. His friend Andrews should have recognized it as such. The man he addressed familiarly as Mohan had long ago warned him, as we've seen, that English domination would probably have to end before India could ”become free of the curse of untouchability.” That was also back in 1921, so this particular contradiction could hardly be described as newly minted; if anything, it was closer to being a constant feature of his effort to keep India on the path he'd tried to chart. In Gandhi's view, the fact that his best efforts had put an end to neither English domination nor untouchability by 1933 seemed only to strengthen his conviction that these struggles were indivisible parts of a whole. So if he now decided to concentrate on untouchability, he wasn't backing off from the swaraj struggle as Andrews urged and Nehru feared. By his own lights, he was plunging in again.