Yesterday, India celebrated Gandhi’s birth anniversary. A national holiday, statue garlanding by local politicians, school indoctrination sessions, and most ironically speeches on Gandhi’s greatness by members of the ruling party that identifies itself with the organisation that arranged for his murder. For many on the “left”, we have for the past few years been forced to defend Gandhi against the rightwing hindu groups who see Gandhi’s rather pitiful appeasement (towards the upper castes) filled attempts at egalitarianism as a threat to their divinely ordained birth-right entitlements.
The liberals comprising mostly the “woke” upper castes see Gandhi's soft liberalism as a counter to the hard-line hindutva brigade because they are uncomfortable with the radicalism of Ambedkar. Gandhi allowed them to display a sense of self righteous indignation without endangering their own privileged positions. Gandhi’s own prejudices are quite well known. He had quite strong racist opinions in Africa which to his credit he did drop during his later years, but he continued to believe that caste was an important cultural artefact and if “used” properly, it would contribute to the greatness of the nation.
Where Gandhi insisted that casteism should be reformed and preserved, Dr. Ambedkar wanted the destruction of Brahminism and quite rightly saw that as long as Hinduism existed, casteism would continue. This makes the entitled liberals in India uncomfortable as Hinduism’s existence is firmly rooted in the socio-economics of casteism.
This has also resulted in any real attempts at emancipation becoming diluted to appease upper caste interests.