[Reader-list] we need an ambedkar interview arundharti roy outlook

[Asit Das]

interview  outlook
"We Need Ambedkar--Now, Urgently..."
 The Booker prize-winning author on her essay *The Doctor and the
Saint*and more
 Saba Naqvi<http://www.outlookindia.com/peoplefnl.aspx?pid=3900&author=Saba+Naqvi>
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*In 1936, Dr B.R. Ambedkar was asked to deliver the annual lecture by the
Hindu reformist group, the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of
Caste) in Lahore. When the hosts received the text of the speech, they
found the contents "unbearable" and withdrew the invitation. Ambedkar then
printed 1,500 copies of his speech at his own expense and it was soon
translated into several languages. *Annihilation of Caste* would go on to
have a cult readership among the Dalit community, but remains largely
unread by the privileged castes for whom it was written.*

* Ambedkar's landmark speech has now been carefully annotated and
reprinted. What will certainly draw contemporary public attention to it is
the essay written as an introduction by the Booker prize-winning author
Arundhati Roy, titled *The Doctor and the Saint*.*

* Almost half of the 400-page book is Roy's essay, the other half *Annihilation
of Caste*. Roy writes about caste in contemporary India before getting into
the Gandhi-Ambedkar stand-off. Taking off from what Ambedkar described as
"the infection of imitation", the domino effect of each caste dominating
the ones lower down in the hierarchy, Roy says, "The 'infection of
imitation', like the half-life of a radioactive atom, decays exponentially
as it moves down the caste ladder, but never quite disappears. It has
created what Ambedkar describes as the system of 'graded inequality' in
which even the 'low is privileged as compared with lower. Each class being
privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system'".*

* However, the thrust of Roy's powerful but disturbing essay deals with her
exploration of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate, and the man deified as the
father of the nation does not come off well in this book. She writes:
"Ambedkar was Gandhi's most formidable adversary. He challenged him not
just politically or intellectually, but also morally. To have excised
Ambedkar from Gandhi's story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a
travesty. Equally, to ignore Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar is to do
Ambedkar a disservice, because Gandhi loomed over Ambedkar's world in
myriad and un-wonderful ways."*

*The Doctor and the Saint, your introduction to this new, annotated edition
of Dr Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, is also a deeply disturbing
critique of Gandhi, especially to those of us for whom Gandhi is a loved
and revered figure.*

Yes, I know. It wasn't easy to write it either. But in these times, when
all of us are groping in the dark, despairing, and unable to understand why
things are the way they are, I think revisiting this debate between Gandhi
and Ambedkar, however disturbing it may be for some people, however much it
disrupts old and settled patterns of thought, will actually, in the end,
help illuminate our path. I think *Annihilation of Caste* is absolutely
essential reading. Caste is at the heart of the rot in our society. Quite
apart from what it has done to the subordinated castes, it has corroded the
moral core of the privileged castes. We need Ambedkar--now, urgently.

* Why should Gandhi figure so prominently in a book about Ambedkar? How did
that come about?*

Ambedkar was Gandhi's most trenchant critic, not just politically and
intellectually, but also morally. And that has just been written out of the
mainstream narrative. It's a travesty. I could not write an introduction to
the book without addressing his debate with Gandhi, something which
continues to have an immense bearing on us even today.





Caste is at the heart of the rot in our society. Quite apart from what it
has done to the subordinated castes, it has corroded the moral core of the
privileged castes. We need to take Ambedkar seriously.



*Annihilation of Caste* is the text of a speech that Ambedkar never
delivered. When the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an offshoot of the Arya Samaj,
saw the text and realised Ambedkar was going to launch a direct attack on
Hinduism and its sacred texts, it withdrew its invitation. Ambedkar
publi-shed the text as a pamphlet. Gandhi published a response to it in his
magazine *Harijan*. But this exchange was only one part of a long and
bitter conflict between the two of them...when I say that Ambedkar has been
written out of the narrative, I'm not suggesting that he has been igno-red;
on the contrary, he is given a lot of attention--he's either valorised as
the 'Father of the Constitution' or ghettoised and then praised as a
"leader of the untouchables". But the anger and the passion that drove him
is more or less airbrushed out of the story. I think that if we are to find
a way out of the morass that we find ourselves in at present, we must take
Ambedkar seriously. Dalits have known that for years. It's time the rest of
the country caught up with them.

*Have you always held these views about Gandhi, or did you discover new
aspects to him as you explored him vis-a-vis Ambedkar?*

I am not naturally drawn to piety, particularly when it becomes a political
manifesto. I mean, for heaven's sake, Gandhi called eating a "filthy act"
and sex a "poison worse than snake-bite". Of course, he was prescient in
his understanding of the toll that the Western idea of modernity and
"development" was going to take on the earth and its inhabitants. On the
other hand, his Doctrine of Trusteeship, in which he says that the rich
should be left in possession of their wealth and be trusted to use it for
the welfare of the poor--what we call Corporate Social Responsibility
today--cannot possibly be taken seriously. His attitude to women has always
made me uncomfortable. But on the subject of caste and Gandhi's attitude
towards it, I was woolly and unclear. Reading *Annihilation of
Caste*prompted me to read Ambedkar's *What
Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables*. I was very disturbed by
that. I then began to read Gandhi--his letters, his articles in the
papers--tracing his views on caste right from 1909 when he wrote his most
famous tract, *Hind Swaraj*. In the months it took me to research and
write *The
Doctor and the Saint* I couldn't believe some of the things I was reading.
Look--Gandhi was a complex figure. We should have the courage to see him for
what he really was, a brilliant politician, a fascinating, flawed human
being--and those flaws were not to do with just his personal life or his
role as a husband and father. If we want to celebrate him, we must have the
courage to celebrate him for what he was. Not some ima-gined, constructed
idea we have of him.

*You could be accused of selectively picking out quotes from his writing to
suit your own imagined, constructed idea of Gandhi....*

When a man leaves behind 98 volumes of his *Collected Works*, what option
does anybody have other than to be selective? Of course I have been
selective, as selective as everybody else has been. And of course, those
choices say a lot about the politics of the person who has done the
selecting. My brief was to write an introduction to *Anni-hilation of Caste*.
Reading Ambed-kar made me realise how large Gandhi loomed in Ambedkar's
universe. When I read Gandhi's pronoun-cements supporting the caste system,
I wondered how his doctrine of non-violence and satyagraha could rest so
comfortably on the foundation of a system which can be held in place only
by the permanent threat of violence, and the frequ-ent application of
unimaginable violence. I grew curious about how Gandhi even came to be
called a Mahatma.

I found that the first time he was publicly called Mahatma was in 1915,
soon after he returned to India after spending 20 years in South Africa.
What had he done in South Africa to earn him that honour?




Ambedkar challenged Gandhi not just politically and intellectually, but
also morally. To excise him out of the mainstream narrative is a travesty.



That took me back to 1893, the year he first arrived in South Africa as a
24-year-old lawyer. I followed Gandhi's writings about caste over a period
of more than 50 years. So that answers questions like--"Did Gandhi change?
And if so, how? Did he start off badly and grow into a Mahatma?" I wasn't
really researching Gandhi's views on diet or natural cures, I was following
the caste trail, and in the process I stumbled on the race trail, and
eventually, through all the turbulence and mayhem, I found coherence. It
all made sense.

It was consistent, and consistently disturbing. The fact is that whatever
else he said and did, and however beautiful some of it was, he did say and
write and do some very disturbing things. Those must be explained and
accounted for. This applies to all of us, to everybody, sinner and saint
alike. Let's for the sake of argument imagine that someone driven by
extreme prejudice ransacks the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. I am not a
Tagore scholar, but I very much doubt that he or she would find letters,
articles, speeches and interviews that are as worrying as some of the
writings in the *Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi*.

* You say that Gandhi harboured attitudes that can only be described as
racist towards the Blacks during his years in South Africa, you seem to see
his positions as flawed and hypocritical. Would you agree with that?*

I have not used those adjectives. I think you have inferred them from
Gandhi's speeches and writings reproduced in my introduction, which is
perfectly understandable. Actually I don't think Gandhi was a hypocrite. On
the contrary, he was astonishingly frank. And I am impressed that all his
writings, some of them--in my view at least--seriously incriminating, have
been retained in the *Collected Works*.

That really is a courageous thing. I have written at length about Gandhi's
years in South Africa. I'll just say a couple of things here about that
period. First, the famous story about Gandhi's political awakening to
racism and imperialism because he was thrown out of a 'whites only'
compartment in Pietermaritzberg is only half the story. The other half is
that Gandhi was not opposed to racial segregation. Many of his campaigns in
South Africa were for separate treatment of Indians. He only objected to
Indians being treated on a par with 'raw kaffirs', which is what he called
Black Africans. One of his first political victories was a 'solution' to
the Durban post office 'problem'. He successfully campaigned to have a
third entrance opened so that Indians would not have to use the same door
as the 'kaffirs'. He worked with the British army in the Anglo-Boer war and
during the crushing of the Bambatha rebellion. In his speeches he said he
was looking forward to "an Imperial brotherhood". And so it goes, the
story. In 1913, after signing a settlement with the South African military
leader Jan Smuts, Gandhi left South Africa. On his way back to India he
stopped in London where he was awarded the Kaiser-e-Hind for public service
to the British Empire. How did that add up to fighting racism and
imperialism?

*But ultimately he did fight imperialism, did he not? He led our country to
freedom....*

What was 'freedom' for some was, for others, nothing more than a transfer
of power. Once again, I'd say the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate deepens and
complicates our understanding of words like "imperialism" and "freedom". In
1931, when Ambedkar met Gandhi for the first time, Gandhi questioned him
about his sharp criticism of the Congress, which at the time amounted to
criticising the struggle for the homeland. Ambedkar's famous, and
heart-breaking, reply was: "Gandhiji, I have no homeland. No untouchable
worth the name would be proud of this land."

Even after he returned from South Africa, Gandhi still saw himself as a
'responsible' subject of Empire. But in a few years, by the time of the
first national non-cooperation movement, Gandhi had turned against the
British. Millions of people rallied to his call, and though it would be
incorrect to say that he alone led India to freedom from British rule, of
course he played a stellar part. Yet in the struggle, though Gandhi spoke
about equality and sometimes even sounded like a socialist, he never
challenged traditional caste hierarchies or big zamindars.




The rise of Dalit parties has been dazzling. The real worry is that even as
Dalits become more influential in parliamentary politics, democracy itself
is being undermined in serious, structural ways.



Industrialists like the Birlas, the Tatas and the house of Bajaj bankrolled
Gandhi's political activity and he took care never to cross swords with
them. Many of them had made a lot of money during the First World War, and
had now come up against a glass ceiling.

They were irked and limited by British rule and by their own brushes with
racism. So they threw their weight behind the national movement.

Around the time Gandhi returned from South Africa, mill workers who had not
benefited from the managements' windfall profits had become restive and
there were a series of lightning strikes in the Ahmedabad mills. The
mill-owners asked Gandhi to mediate. I have written about Gandhi's
interventions over the years in labour disputes, his handling of labour
unions and his advice to workers about strikes--much of it is very puzzling.
In other areas too, the famous Gandhian 'pragmatism' took some very strange
turns. For example, in 1924, when villagers were protesting against the
Mulshi Dam being built by the Tatas some distance away from Pune, to
generate electricity for the Bombay mills, Gandhi wrote them a letter
advising them to give up their protest. His logic is so very similar to the
Supreme Court judgement of 2000 that allowed the construction of the World
Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar Dam to proceed...so Ambedkar was spot-on when he
said, "The question whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very
little importance as compared to the question for whose freedom is the
Congress fighting?"


Photograph by Corbis, From Outlook 10 March 2014

*In the past you have written powerful political essays based on reporting
from the field or on contemporary events as they unfold. But in this work,
you seem to have done some very serious historical research and drawn very
different conclusions from many known historians who have worked on the
national movement, Gandhi and Ambedkar. You are obviously going to be
challenged. Do tell us about the journey that writing The Doctor and the
Saint involved.*

You say I'll be challenged? Oh, and here I was imagining that it was me
that was doing the challenging! Several years ago, S. Anand, the publisher
of Navayana, gave me a spiral-bound copy of *Anni-hilation of Caste* and
asked me if I would write an introduction to it. I read it and found it
electrifying. But I was intimidated by the prospect of writing an
introduction to it--a real introduction, not just some quotes patched
together with praise and banalities. I didn't feel that I was equipped to
do that. I knew it would mean swimming through some pretty treacherous
waters. Anand said he would wait, and he did.




On the issue of Muslims, there were serious differences between Gandhi and
the Hindu Right. But on the issues of caste, religious conversion and cow
protection, Gandhi was in stride with the Hindu Right.



Meanwhile, he began work on the annotations which place *Annihilation of
Caste* in a context and make it an extraordinarily rich resource for
scholars interested in the subject. I was writing fiction and had promised
myself that I wasn't going to write anything that involved footnotes
anymore. But of course, when I started writing the introduction, given the
way my argument developed, I had to reference almost every sentence. After
a while I began to enjoy myself. The notes are not just references, they're
almost a parallel narrative, in and of themselves. I hope at least some
people take the trouble to read them....

But coming back to your question of *The Doctor and the Saint* being a
challenge--many historians have criticised Gandhi before, for other reasons,
so I don't think I am alone on this one at all. Many Dalits and Dalit
scholars have, over the decades, been very sharply critical of Gandhi and
Gandhism. Having said that, if this book begins another debate, a real
debate, it can only be a good thing. I think it's high time that there was
one. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to weigh in on
it.

*Given what happened to Wendy Doniger's book, are you worried?*

Not about this book in particular, no. It's Ambedkar's book. But it's true
that we are becoming less and less free to write and say what we think.
What the irreverent Mirza Ghalib could say in the 19th century about his
relationship with Islam, what Saadat Hasan Manto could say about mullahs in
the 1940s, what Ambedkar could say about Hinduism in the 1930s, what Nehru
or JP could say about Kashmir--none of us can say today without risking our
lives. The argument between Gandhi and Ambedkar that followed the
publication of *Annihilation of Caste* was a harsh, intense debate between
two extraordinary men--they were not afraid of real debate. Unlike
contemporary bigots who demand book-banning, Gandhi--who found the text of
Ambedkar's speech disagreeable--actually wanted people to read it. He said,
"No reformer can ignore the address.... It has to be read only because it
is open to serious objection. Dr Ambed-kar is a challenge to Hinduism."

*Your introduction begins with a powerful critique of the all-pervasive
domination of traditional upper castes in the establishment, including the
media, and you suggest that there has been a 'project of unseeing' across
the political establishment. Don't you think that the post-Mandal realities
of contemporary India have actually made caste a fundamental unit of all
politics?*

When you look at India, through the prism of caste, at who controls the
money, who owns the corporations, who owns the big media, who makes up the
judiciary, the bureaucracy, who owns land, who doesn't--contemporary India
suddenly begins to look extremely un-contemporary. Caste was the engine
that drove Indian society--not just Hindu society--much before the
recommendations of the Mandal Comm-ission. A long section of *The Doctor
and the Saint* is an analysis of how, in the late 19th century, when the
idea of 'empire' began to mutate into the idea of a 'nation', when the new
ideas of governance and 'representation' arrived on our shores, it led to
an immense anxiety about demography, about numbers. For centuries before
that, millions of people who belonged to the subordinated castes--those who
had been socially ostracised by privileged castes for thousands of
years--had been converting to Islam, and later to Sikhism and Christianity
to escape the stigma of their caste. But suddenly numbers began to matter.
The almost fifty million "untouchables" became crucial in the numbers game.
A raft of Hindu reformist outfits began to proselytise among them, to
prevent conversion. The Arya Samaj started the Shuddhi movement--to 'purify
the impure'--to try and woo untouchables and Adivasis back into the 'Hindu
fold'. A version of that is still going on today with the VHP and the
Bajrang Dal running their 'Ghar Vapasi' programmes in which Adivasi people
are 'purified' and 'returned' to Hinduism. So yes, caste was, and continues
to be, the fundamental unit of all politics in India.

* So how can you call it a 'project of unseeing'?*

The 'project of unseeing' that I write about is something else altogether.
It's about the ways in which influential Indian intellectuals today,
particularly those on the Left, for whom caste is just a footnote--an
awkward, inconvenient appendage of reductive Marxist class analysis--have
rendered caste invisible. To say "we don't believe in caste" sounds nice
and progressive. But it is either an act of evasion, or it comes from a
position of such rarefied privilege where caste is not encountered at all.
The 'project of unseeing' exists in almost all of our cultural
practice--does Bollywood deal with it? Never. How many of our high-profile
writers deal with it? Very few. Those who write about justice and identity,
about the ill effects of neo-liberalism--how many address the issue of
caste? Even some of our most militant people's movements elide caste.




Is there a version of Communism that I endorse? I don't know, I am not a
Communist. But we do need a robust, structural critique of capitalism.



The Indian government's churlish reaction to Dalits who wanted to be
represented at the 2001 World Conference against racism in Durban is part
of the 'project of unseeing'. In the same way, the Indian census entirely
elides caste in its data collection--leaving us all in the dark about what's
really going on--the scale of dispossession and violence against Dalits is
part of the 'project of unseeing'. Here's something to think about--in 1919,
during what came to be called 'The Red Summer' in the United States,
approximately 165 Black people were killed. Almost one century later, in
2012 in India--the year of the Delhi gang-rape and murder--according to
official statistics, 1,574 Dalit women were raped. And 651 Dalits were
murdered. That's just the criminal assault against Dalits. The economic
assault, notwithstanding the emergence of a clutch of Dalit millionaires,
is another matter altogether.

*You say that caste in India--"one of the most brutal modes of hierarchical
social organisation that human society has known--has managed to escape
censure because it is so fused with Hinduism, and by extension with so much
that is seen to be kind and good--mysticism, spiritualism, non-violence,
tolerance, vegetarianism, Gandhi, yoga, backpackers, the Beatles--that, at
least to outsiders, it seems impossible to pry it loose and try to
understand it". You argue that caste prejudice is on a par with racial
discrimination and apartheid but has not been treated as such. Many would
argue that electoral politics and reservation are adequate to deal with
historical injustice. But recen-tly a senior Congress leader, Janar-dhan
Dwivedi, said reservation should be discontinued. How would you respond to
such an argument?*

It was an outrageous thing for anyone to say. Reservation is extremely
important, and I have written at some length about it. To be eligible for
the reservation policy, a Scheduled Caste person needs to have completed
high school. Govern-ment figures say more than 70 per cent of Sche-duled
Caste students drop out before they matriculate. Which means for even
low-end government jobs only one in every four Dalits is eligible. For a
white-collar job, the minimum qualification is a graduate degree. Just over
2 per cent of Dalits are graduates. Even though it actually applies to so
few, the reservation policy has meant that Dalits at least have some
representation in the echelons of power. This is absolu-tely vital. Look at
what one Ambedkar, who had the good fortune to get a scholarship to study
in Columbia, managed to do. It is thanks to reservation that Dalits are now
lawyers, doctors, scholars and civil servants. But even this little window
of opportunity is resented and is under fire from the privileged. And the
track record of government institutions, the judiciary, the bureaucracy and
even supposedly progressive ins-titutions like jnu in implementing
reservation is appalling. There is only one government department in which
Dalits are over-represented by a factor of six.

Almost 90 per cent of those designated as municipal sweepers--people who
clean streets, who risk their lives to go down manholes and service the
sewage system, who clean toilets and do menial jobs--are Dalits. Even this
sector is up for privatisation now, which means private companies will be
able to subcontract jobs on a temporary basis to Dalits for less pay and
with no guarantee of job security. Of course there are problems with people
getting fake certificates and so on. Those need to be addressed. But to use
that to say reservation shouldn't exist is ridiculous.

*But surely you agree that the rise of Dalit parties like the BSP marks
something close to a revolution in Indian democracy?*

The rise of Dalit political parties has been a dazzling phenomenon.

But then our electoral politics, in the present shape, cannot really be
revolutionary, can it? The book, and not just the introduction, deals with
it in some detail. Ambedkar's confrontation with Gandhi at the Second Round
Table Conference in London in 1931 had precisely to do with that--with their
very different views on the matter of political representation of and for
Dalits.

Ambedkar believed that the right to representation was a basic right.




Reductive Marxist class analysis renders caste invisible. Very few
high-profile writers deal with it. Our most militant people's movements
elide the issue. It finds no place in Indian census data. It's a Project of
Unseeing.



And all his life he fought for untouchables to have that right. He thought
and wrote a great deal about the first-past-the-post electoral system and
how untouchables would never be able to emerge from the domination of
privileged castes in such a system because the population was scattered in
a way that they would never form a majority in a political constituency.
Gandhi, who worked among untouchables with missionary zeal, was not
prepared to allow them to represent themselves. And he explicitly worked
against that possibility. His Harijan Sevak Sangh--funded by G.D.
Birla--which fronted the Temple Entry movement was made up only of
privileged caste members. In the Mahajan Mazdoor Sangh, the mill workers'
union that Gandhi started in Ahmedabad, workers, many of whom were
untouchables, were not allowed to be office-bearers, they were not allowed
to represent themselves. At the Second Round Table Conference in London in
1931, Gandhi said, "I claim myself, in my own person, to represent the vast
mass of untouchables." In S. Anand's note on the Poona Pact at the back of
the book, he writes of how Gandhi, in a reply to a question from an
untouchable member of the Congress party asking if he would ensure that
Harijans were represented in state councils and panchayat boards, said the
principle was "dangerous".

Gandhi played a great part in seeing to it that Ambedkar's project of
developing untouchables into a political community that was aware of its
rights, that could choose its own representatives from among themselves,
was thwarted and undermined. Even today Dalits are paying the price for
that. Despite these odds, the Bahujan Samaj Party has emerged in UP. But
even there, it took more than half a century for Kanshi Ram--and then
Mayawati--to succeed. Kanshi Ram worked for years, painstakingly making
alliances with other subordinated castes, to achieve this victory. The BSP
needed the peculiar demography of Uttar Pradesh and the support of many
OBCs. But if it is to grow as a political party, it will have to make
alliances that will dilute its political thrust. For a Dalit candidate to
win an election from an open seat--even in UP--continues to be almost
impossible. Still, notwithstanding the charges of corruption and
malpractice, I don't think anybody should ever minimise the immense
contribution the BSP has made in building Dalit dignity. The real worry is
that even as Dalits are becoming more influential in parliamentary
politics, democracy itself is being undermined in serious and structural
ways.

*Your account of the manner in which Gandhi prevailed over Ambedkar on the
issue of the Communal Award, in which the British awarded a separate
electorate for untouchables, is fascinating--the description of how
Ambe-dkar had to give up his dream and sign the Poona Pact in 1932. But I
have a question about the issue of separate electorates. Many histo-rians
argue that this idea really was at the root of the problems that would lead
to Partition. And many would argue against separate electorates. Do you
think that India still needs separate electorates?*

I think our first-past-the-post electoral system is gravely flawed and is
failing us. We need to rethink it. But I think we should be careful of
collapsing all these very contentious issues about separate electorates,
the Communal Award and Partition into one big accusatory mess. As I said
earlier, Ambedkar had thought out the demand for a separate electorate and
separate representation for untou-chables very carefully. I really don't
want to restate what I've written...but let's just say that he had come up
with a brilliant and unique plan.

His idea really was to create a situation in which Dalits could develop
into a political community with its own leaders. His proposal for a
separate electorate was to last for only 10 years. And we are talking here
about a people who were ostracised by the privileged castes for thousands
of years in the most unimaginably crude and cruel manner--people who were
shunned, who were not allowed access to public wells, to education, to
temples, besides other things. People who were not entitled to anything
except violence and abuse. But when they asked for a separate electorate,
everybody behaved as though the world was ending.




Ambedkar speaks about the Adivasis in the same patronising way as Gandhi
speaks about untouchables. It's hard to understand how a man who saw the
insult to his own people so clearly could have done that.



Gandhi went on an indefinite hunger strike and public pressure forced
Ambedkar to give up his demand and sign the Poona Pact. It was
preposterous. How can we possibly say that Ambedkar's demand for a separate
electorate led to Partition? The impulse was exactly the opposite. He was
trying to bring liberty and equality to a society that practised a vicious
form of apartheid. He was talking about justice, brotherhood, unity and
fellow feeling--not Partition. But caste hierarchy means that only the
privileged can close the door on Dalits.

When Dalits close the door on themselves, it is made out to be an act of
treachery. Also, while we like to place all the blame for Partition on
Jinnah--using the word 'blame' presupposes that everybody agrees that
Partition was a terrible thing, but even that is not true--we forget that
people like Bhai Parmanand, a founder-member of the Ghadar Party, a pillar
of the Arya Samaj in Lahore, and later an important leader of the Hindu
Mahasabha, suggested, as far back as 1905, during the partition of Bengal,
that Sindh should be joined with Afghanistan and the North West Frontier
Province, and should be united into a great Muslim Kingdom. Partition
happened because a whole set of forces was set into play, and it all spun
out of the control of the men who had positioned themselves at the helm of
affairs.

*You criticise Ambedkar quite harshly for his views on Adivasis.*

Ambedkar speaks about Adivasis in the same patronising way that Gandhi
speaks about untouchables. It's hard to understand how a man who saw the
insult to his own people so clearly could have done that.

Ambedkar was a man of reason, and a man with a keen sense of justice. I
bel-ieve he would have taken the criticism seriously and would have changed
his views. But that's not the only criticism I have of him. In his embrace
of Western liberalism, his support of urbanisation and modern
'development', he failed to see the seeds of catastrophe that were embedded
in it. I have written about this at some length too.

*You have also explored the great failure of Communists to address caste.
You write that "they treated caste as a sort of folk dialect derived from
the classical language of class analysis". I think all Communists should
read your precise take on the great trade union leader S.A. Dange. My
question to you is this: Party communism has disappointed you. But is there
any version of Commu-nism that you support and endorse?*

My criticism of the way mainstream Communist parties have dealt with caste
goes all the way back to *The God of Small Things*. When the novel came out
in 1997, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was extremely angry with
the book. They were angry with my depiction of a character called Comrade
K.N.M. Pillai who was a member of the Communist Party and his prejudices
against Velutha, a Dalit who was one of the main characters in the book.
Communists and Dalits ought to have been natural allies, but sadly that has
just not happened. The rift began in the late 1920s, quite soon after the
Communist Party of India was formed. S.A. Dange--a Brahmin like many
Communist leaders tend to be even today, and one of its chief
ideologues--organised India's first Communist trade union, the Girni Kamgar
Union with 70,000 members. A large section of the workers were Mahars,
untouchables, the caste that Ambedkar belonged to. They were only employed
in the lower-paid jobs in the spinning department, because in the weaving
department, workers had to hold the thread in their mouths, and the
untouchables' saliva was considered 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 bitter falling out. That was when Ambedkar said, "Caste is not just a
division of labour, it is a division of labourers." There is a very very
compelling section in *Annihilation of Caste* in which Ambedkar writes
about *Caste and Socialism*. Is there a version of Communism that I support
and endorse? I'm not sure what that means. I am not a Communist. But I do
think that we are in dire need of a structural and robust criticism of
capitalism, and I do not mean just crony capitalism.

*Right now, the new player on the political scene, the Aam Aadmi Party,
which is obviously inspired by Gandhian symbolism, is taking on crony
capitalism. It has attacked Mukesh Ambani and RIL, who you wrote about in
your last big essay Capitalism: A Ghost Story
<http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280234>. What are your views on
AAP?*

It's a little difficult to have a coherent view on AAP because it doesn't
seem to have a coherent view of itself. I am not an admirer of
anti-corruption as a political ideology, because I think corruption is the
manifestation of a problem, and not the problem itself. Of course, it gets
a lot of political traction in an election year--after all even the corrupt
are against corruption--but eventually it will lead us down a blind alley.
But I was one of the people who cheered when AAP took on Mukesh Ambani.
Suddenly everybody, the mainstream media as well as the social media, began
to discuss the Ambanis and the gas-pricing issue--these are things that
hardly anybody dared to even whisper about only a few months ago. We all
remember how the news of the Ambani car crash in Mumbai was just blanked
out. On this score, the Aam Aadmi Party has put a little steel into
everybody's spine. They identify themselves with the Gandhi cap, but going
after industrial houses in this way is very un-Gandhian activity, and I'm
all for it. I just hope it doesn't end in a gladiatorial inter-corporate
war, where a new monster takes the place of the old one. Mud-slinging and
allegations about who has been bought over or bribed by whom is good
entertainment, but the rot is deeper than corruption and bribery. The real
problem as I see it is that the big corporations--Tata, Reliance, Jindals,
Vedanta and several others--run so many businesses simultaneously. Mukesh
Ambani is personally worth something like 1,000 billion rupees. But the
Tatas, Vedanta, Jindals, Adanis are not all that different. Even if
everything is completely above board there is a problem. Even if you are a
hard-core classical capitalist you have to see there is a problem here.
This kind of cross-ownership of businesses, this scale of profits--limitless
profits--accruing to fewer and fewer people, the conflict of interest
between corporates and the media--how can you have a free press that is
owned and run by corporations? I understand that as a political strategy,
AAP is singling out Mukesh Ambani and taking him on for the sheer spectacle
of it. Having a 27-storeyed tower built as a personal residence--it's
hubris, he was asking, begging, to be taken down. But at some point I would
be glad to see the problem being addressed in a more serious and structural
way. Particularly since we are looking to AAP to put a few roadblocks in
the way of what is being called the rise of Moditva--which is basically
corporate capitalism fused with primitive fascism.

*Many people will take issue with your interpretation when you say "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". You then go on to say that Narendra Modi is able to invoke
Gandhi without the slightest discomfort because of this. Are you therefore
handing Gandhi over to the Hindu Right? He is someone they have been eager
to appropriate, so are you not playing into their hands?*

Gandhi's not a stuffed toy, and who am I to hand him over to anyone?

Let me just say this--on the issue of Muslims and their place in the Indian
nation there surely were serious ideological differences between Gandhi and
the Hindu Right, and for this Gandhi paid with his life. But on the issues
of caste, religious conversion and cow protection, Gandhi was perfectly in
stride with the Hindu Right. At the turn of the century--the 19th and 20th
centuries--when various reformist organisations were proselytising to the
untouchable population, the right-wing was, if anything, more enthusiastic.
For example, V.D. Savarkar, a disciple of Tilak's, and a hero of the Hindu
Right, supported the 1927 Mahad satyagraha which Ambedkar led, for the
untouchables' right to use water from a public tank. Gandhi's support was
less forthcoming. Who were the signatories to the Poona Pact?

There were many, but among them were G.D. Birla, Gandhi's
industrialist-patron, who bankrolled him for most of his life; Pandit Madan
Mohan Malaviya, a conservative Brahmin and founder of the Hindu Mahasabha;
and Savarkar, who was accused of being an accomplice in the assassination
of Gandhi. They were all interconnected in complex ways.




One cannot have a coherent view on AAP as it doesn't have one of itself.
But it has put steel in everyone's spine. I just hope it doesn't end in a
gladiatorial inter-corporate war, where a new monster replaces the old.



Birla funded Gandhi as well as the Arya Samaj's Shuddhi movement. When the
RSS was banned after the assassination of Gandhi, Birla lobbied for the ban
to be lifted. A recent report in *Caravan* about Swami Aseemanand, a major
RSS leader and the son of a devout Gandhian, who is in jail, being tried
for orchestrating a series of bomb blasts including the Samjhauta Express
blast, in which about 80 people were killed, describes how boys in his
ashram in Gujarat were made to chant the Ekata mantra every morning, an ode
to national unity that invokes Gandhi as well as M.S. Golwalkar, the most
important RSS ideologue.

Narendra Modi delivers many of his hissy pronouncements from a spanking new
convention hall in Gujarat called Mahatma Mandir. In 1936, Gandhi wrote an
extraordinary essay called *The Ideal Bhangi* which he ends by saying--"Such
an ideal Bhangi, while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would
approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words, he would not dream of
amassing wealth out of it." Seventy years later, in his book,
*Karmayogi*(which he withdrew after the Balmiki community protested),
Narendra Modi
said: "I do not believe they have been doing this job just to sustain their
livelihood. Had this been so, they would not have continued with this kind
of job generation after generation.... At some point of time somebody must
have got the enlightenment that it is their (Balmikis') duty to work for
the happiness of the entire society and the Gods; that they have to do this
job bestowed upon them by Gods; and this job should continue as internal
spiritual activity for centuries." You tell me--where's the daylight?

*When Arundhati Roy does a scathing critique of a man as revered as Mahatma
Gandhi, it gets noticed around the world. Some would argue that keeping a
beautiful idea alive is more important than undermining it with a certain
reality.*

That's a good question. I actually thought about that quite a lot--as any
writer would, or should. I decided it was completely wrong, completely
unacceptable. That kind of a cover-up--and it would be nothing less than a
cover-up--comes at a price. And that price is Ambedkar. We have to deal with
Gandhi, with all his brilliance and all his flaws, in order to make room
for Ambedkar, with all his brilliance as well as his flaws. The Saint must
allow the Doctor a place in the light. Ambed-kar's time has come.