A long-buried BBC interview with Dr B.R. Ambedkar has come up for air again, and it is doing what Ambedkar usually does when allowed to speak freely – spoiling the mood at the Gandhi-Godse nostalgia party.
In this remarkable 1955 exchange with broadcaster Lionel Fielden, Ambedkar slices through the Mahatma’s saintly packaging with surgical disdain. He accuses Gandhi of running a bilingual con – one liberal sermon in English for the Empire, another conservative bhajan in Gujarati for the caste-ridden home crowd. Or as Ambedkar essentially puts it, Gandhi spoke like Lincoln to London and Manusmriti to Morbi.
Two newspapers, two messages
Consider the evidence. Gandhi’s English-language papers, Young India and Harijan, waxed lyrical about untouchability being a ‘blot’ on Hinduism. He declared it a sin, swore by reform, and assured the Raj’s missionaries that the rot was being self-corrected.
But in his Gujarati organ Deenabandhu, read by his base of caste Hindus, he sang a rather different tune – varnashrama dharma as divinely ordained, caste as a benign social order, and shudras knowing their place.
Ambedkar, ever the critic of Hindu hypocrisies, read both sets of sermons and blew the whistle. ‘In the English paper he posed as an opponent of caste… in the Gujarati paper he was all the time supporting the caste system,’ he said.
The pity performance
This was not a new allegation. Ambedkar had already written an entire indictment – What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables – describing Gandhi’s Harijan upliftment campaign as an elaborate pity performance. Gandhi wanted the untouchable to be loved – Ambedkar wanted him to be left alone, electorally and constitutionally.
The poona pact and the price of unity
And then there is the Poona Pact of 1932 – the one where Gandhi fasted, Ambedkar caved, and India applauded. Gandhi was reportedly willing to die rather than see Dalits have separate electorates. Ambedkar agreed to a compromise. The result – Gandhi lived. Dalit political power died.
To Gandhi, separate electorates would divide Hindus. To Ambedkar, the caste system had already done that, and the division was not horizontal but vertical, with millions ground underfoot. ‘What unity between the priest and the pariah, ’ Ambedkar might well have asked.
Harijan versus Dalit
Even the term Harijan, which Gandhi coined to sweeten the bitter truth, was rejected by Ambedkar as spiritual eyewash. He preferred the unvarnished word, Dalit – the broken. Gandhi wanted to spiritually redeem them; Ambedkar wanted to politically empower them.
Two tongues, one legacy
And now, as the BBC clip makes the rounds, the Mahatma’s pious hedging is again under scrutiny. If Gandhi was a saint, he was a strategic one – a man of many cloths, homespun in attire, ambivalent in intent.
Ambedkar’s message is as relevant now as then – beware of leaders who speak two languages, especially when one is used to pacify the oppressed and the other to placate the oppressor.
Perhaps the true irony is that the man who drafted the Constitution never made it to India’s currency notes – but the one who spoke in tongues did.
