How Gandhi made Ambedkar a villain in hi

the real representative of Dalits

When he did not get his way, Gandhi began his fast from prison. This was completely agai
satyagraha – it was pure blackmail.
ARUNDHATI ROY 22 May, 2019 12:02 pm IST

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BR Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi | Commons

A
t the Round Table Conference [in London], Gandhi and Ambedkar clashed, both claiming
representatives of the Untouchables.

The conference went on for weeks. Gandhi eventually agreed to separate electorates for M
not countenance Ambedkar’s argument for a separate electorate for Untouchables. He resorted t
rather that Hinduism died than that Untouchability lived.’

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Gandhi refused to acknowledge that Ambedkar had the right to represent Untouchables. Ambed
Nor was there a call for him to. Untouchable groups from across India, including Mangoo Ram o
telegrams in support of Ambedkar.
Eventually Gandhi said, ‘Those who speak of the political rights of Untouchables do not know th
Indian society is today constructed, and therefore I want to say with all the emphasis that I can
person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.’

Having delivered his threat, Gandhi took the boat back to India. On the way, he dropped in on M
extremely impressed by him and his ‘care of the poor, his opposition to super-urbanisation, his e
ordination between capital and labour’.

Also read: Ambedkar was wrong, Gandhi wrote against untouchability in Gujarati journals too

A year later, Ramsay MacDonald announced the British government’s decision on the Commun
Untouchables a separate electorate for a period of twenty years. At the time, Gandhi was serving
Jail in Poona. From prison, he announced that unless the provision of separate electorates for Un
would fast to death.

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He waited for a month. When he did not get his way, Gandhi began his fast from prison. This fas
maxims of satyagraha. It was barefaced blackmail, nothing less manipulative than the threat of
British government said it would revoke the provision only if the Untouchables agreed. The coun
statements were issued, petitions signed, prayers offered, meetings held, appeals made.

It was a preposterous situation: privileged caste Hindus, who segregated themselves from Untou
who deemed them unworthy of human association, who shunned their very touch, who wanted
roads, temples and wells, now said that India would be balkanized if Untouchables had a separa
believed so fervently and so vocally in the system that upheld that separation, was starving hims
Untouchables a separate electorate.

The gist of it was that the caste Hindus wanted the power to close the door on Untouchables, bu
Untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The masters knew that choice

As the frenzy mounted, Ambedkar became the villain, the traitor, the man who wanted to dissev
to kill Gandhi. Political heavyweights of the garam dal (militants) as well as the naram dal (mode
and C. Rajagopalachari, weighed in on Gandhi’s side. To placate Gandhi, privileged-caste Hindus
the streets with Untouchables, and many Hindu temples were thrown open to them, albeit temp
accommodation, a wall of tension built up too. Several Untouchable leaders feared that Ambedk
Gandhi succumbed to his fast, and this in turn, could put the lives of ordinary Untouchables in d
Rajah, the Untouchable leader from Madras, who, according to an eyewitness account of the eve

“For thousands of years we had been treated as Untouchables, downtrodden, insulted, despised.
for our sake, and if he dies, for the next thousands of years we shall be where we have been, if not
strong feeling against us that we brought about his death, that the mind of the whole Hindu com
community will kick us downstairs further still. I am not going to stand by you any longer. I will
solution and I will part company from you.”

Also read: 17th Lok Sabha looks set to confirm Ambedkar’s fears: no vocal Dalits in Parliament
What could Ambedkar do? He tried to hold out with his usual arsenal of logic and reason, but th
that. He didn’t stand a chance. After four days of the fast, on 24 September 1932, Ambedkar visite
and signed the Poona Pact. The next day in Bombay he made a public speech in which he was un
Gandhi: ‘I was astounded to see that the man who held such divergent views from mine at the R
immediately to my rescue and not to the rescue of the other side.’ Later, though, having recovere
wrote:

There was nothing noble in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act . . . [I]t was the worst form of coerc
give up the constitutional safeguards of which they had become possessed under the Prime Min
the mercy of the Hindus. It was a vile and wicked act. How can the Untouchables regard such a m

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According to the Pact, instead of separate electorates, the Untouchables would have reserved sea
number of seats they were allotted in the provincial legislatures increased (from seventy-eight to
because they would now have to be acceptable to their privileged caste–dominated constituenci
won the day. Gandhi saw to it that leadership remained in the hands of the privileged castes.

This excerpt from The Doctor And The Saint by Arundhati Roy has been

from Penguin Random House India.

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