Radical Equality
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Radical Equality

Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy

Aishwary Kumar

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Radical Equality

Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy

Aishwary Kumar

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B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty.

Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.

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1
Of Faith in Equality
Toward a Global Measure
“Modern India,” apart from naming a time and place, has come to stand in for an interminable struggle with history—the struggle to formulate, despite the violence of its antiquity, an ethics of justice for the present; the struggle to affirm, in spite of the exclusions of its modernity, a belief in democracy that is still to come. This book examines the intellectual and political history of the encounter between Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), two of the most formidable non-Western thinkers of the twentieth century, whose visions of moral and political life have left the deepest imprints on that struggle and the paradox that sustains it. One was a prodigious “untouchable” who, lifting himself against the exclusion and violence that surrounded him, became a revolutionary constitutionalist, a thinker whose laborious draftsmanship and exegetical rigor produced a new constitution for the free republic in 1950. The other, born in a community of Hindu Vaishnava merchants, was an inept lawyer who galvanized through the sheer force of his convictions and prose—and often through his commitment to the virtues of such quotidian and solitary practices as spinning and weaving—an as-yet-unformed people against the most powerful empire of his time. Never had the colonial world’s right to justice been formulated in such proximity by two thinkers who had otherwise struggled so ceaselessly, with such scruple and hostility, against each other. But perhaps more crucially, never had this right to justice been sought in the shadows of a religion known to be so persistently oppressive and violent toward those it claimed as its very own. Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s struggle was waged as much over the modern and secularist “faith in equality” as it was around the place and boundaries of faith in secularist notions of equality itself.1 Radical Equality reconstructs the morals and methods of that formidable struggle for justice and its consequences for a global genealogy of democratic ethics.
The struggle for an egalitarian India, even in their own time, was not reducible to the impasse between Ambedkar and Gandhi alone. Yet the complexity of their kinship anticipated and amplified the paradoxes of the “mentality of democracy,” as Akeel Bilgrami calls it, in the colonial world in a manner few other relationships did.2 With the arrival of Gandhi and Ambedkar within the first two decades of the twentieth century, the nationalist demand for freedom from empire, which had until then driven liberal and revolutionary anticolonialisms of various hues, was for the first time integrated into a rigorous pursuit of equality. For both Gandhi and Ambedkar, political life—the sense of belonging to a community and constituting a people—was inconceivable without an unconditional equality in moral and social relations. The right to live equally, even and especially in the shadows of imperial unfreedom, was the indispensable mediating force between the otherwise sequestered existences of the colonized and colonizer, Shudra and Brahmin, “untouchable” and “touchable.” It was this egalitarian commitment, which was never afraid of embracing a certain hierarchy (of suffering, skills, traditions, and faiths), never shy of expounding the virtues of sovereignty and force, even segregation, which would bring Gandhi and Ambedkar together and pull them apart in a remarkable kinship forged during the three most decisive decades of India’s anticolonial struggle.
A distinctive notion of equality was thereby placed at the moral center of India’s incipient democracy. This was not the seed of an imperfect and faltering democracy, as liberal proponents of the empire since the nineteenth century had often predicted the rule of the people in the non-Western world might be. Such people’s ruling themselves without adequate institutional and psychological preparation, the colonizers had warned, would lead to a democracy bound by a morally corruptible and socially unequal structure whose idioms, imported from the language of European political thought, would be deployed in the colonies for mere rhetorical effect, even as democracy’s substantive essence, its European spirit, would be compromised beyond recognition.3 A sustained attention to Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s ethics and politics—their attempt to imagine a people bound together not as much by institutions and the law as grounded in shared moral and fraternal commitments—reveals, however, that anticolonial political thought came to be rooted not so much in the compromised democracy that metropolitan intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill had feared that the colonized, in the absence of the tutelage of their masters, might end up with. What emerged instead is a democracy of antinomies, a democracy whose matrices reflect an unremitting and radically original approach to the modern egalitarian imperative. And yet beneath its great striving for a community of equals, this approach also nourished a self-oriented, self-conserving—indeed, conservative—“spirit of democracy” peculiar to the history of twentieth-century anticolonialism,4 one in which the concern with sovereignty (whether of the self or of the collective), the essence of being free and human, came to be articulated just as often without a commitment to inclusion and equality. No two thinkers in the modern non-West would struggle with this risk of an inegalitarian democracy, this sacrifice of equality in the very name of an ethical and political community, more productively than Ambedkar and Gandhi.
In this chapter, covering a wider and deeper ground than a conventional introduction, I turn toward the political and philosophical conditions, the complex set of interwar moral, theological, and republican attitudes, under which this sacrificial politics took its originary form. I do not intend to recuperate the lives of Ambedkar and Gandhi in the mode of intellectual biography, each of them either placed on the terrain of his own moral psychology and convictions or rehabilitated into a world of argument where the entire sum of his thought might be seen merely as response to the other’s claims and maneuvers. Instead, I trace their conceptual innovations and linguistic choices to delineate the symptoms of what otherwise looks like an irreparable disjuncture in the colonial world’s attempt to fashion a society of equals.5 For many, I accept, the claim of a discursive and structural disjuncture between European and anticolonial formulations of the political (and almost as a corollary, the seeming irreparability of the relationship between Ambedkar and Gandhi) might well be tenable, even ideologically necessary. But such a claim still leaves untouched the task of explaining why and in what forms equality, in the wake of twentieth-century struggles waged for the emancipation of society (national and international), became at once global in its rhetorical and moral reach and hierarchical in its institutional and political form. Conceived as an archeology of this egalitarian commitment, Radical Equality seeks to shed light on the conjoined ethics of justice and exclusion that has given global democratic thought its paradoxical form.
But a study of the global life of democracy—the tension between popular sovereignty and civic virtue, the struggle for balance between insurrection and constitution—entails not simply an inquiry into the processes by which the meanings, values, and practices of “the political” (or theologico-political) came to acquire their ambiguous universality (spreading outward from Europe since the late eighteenth century until they were rendered at different moments and under varying conditions into a universal language of political ideas and ideals). Such a study also requires an archeology of the limits—conceptual, rhetorical, material, and symbolic—lodged at the center of the political as such, limits at which the founding norms of democracy exclude its most insurrectionary practitioners, just as, in a moment of striking unity between force and justice, the excluded turn against those norms and rules of democracy that structure their oppressive existence.
It is at this limit, in a moment of risk at once classical and radical, even constitutive of democracy, that I mine the depths of what Gandhi, in his response to Ambedkar’s 1936 treatise Annihilation of Caste, had called his aloneness—indeed, attributed a political and ethical singularity to it.6 As a way to put Ambedkar’s aloneness in its time and place, one that he would steadily, deliberately, and sensitively transform into a political and philosophical attitude singular to him, I begin with two texts and a history—a history because I am interested not so much in the insurmountable discontinuities between the texts and their authors as I am in those practices of reading and reception that betray, despite the history of mutual hostility that surrounds Gandhi and Ambedkar, their ambivalent and silent affirmations. This is less a history of enunciations and universality of meaning, then, than it is a history of rarity and exception, a history of depths.
Two Strikes at Freedom
In December 1935, the Jat Pat Todak Mandal, an organization dedicated to the abolition of caste and untouchability, invited forty-five-year-old Bhimrao Ambedkar to deliver its annual keynote lecture in the northern Indian city of Lahore. Born in Mhow, a cantonment in Madhya Pradesh, into the family of a military schoolteacher, Bhimrao began his public life in the 1920s as an anticaste crusader in Bombay Presidency. By the 1930s he had emerged, in the wake of his galvanizing and widely publicized speeches at the Round Table Conferences in London in 1930–1931, as one of the leading authorities on colonial franchise and republican constitutions—an authority, however, who would develop a rather conflicted relationship with the norms and rationales of interwar nationalist and republican thought. Ambedkar would in many ways mature into a republican thinker in the classical sense of the term, condensing in his thought all the rigor and tension that constitute that formidable tradition in Europe and elsewhere. He would, despite his affinities for republican ethics and ideals of citizen virtue, remain uncompromisingly resistant to the oppressive national-spiritual rhetoric in which anticolonial thinkers couched their own struggle for sovereignty. His decision in December 1927 to publicly burn a copy of the Manusmriti, the ancient work of Indic jurisprudence considered unimpeachable in Hindu moral and political culture, had endeared him neither to liberal social reformers nor conservative nationalists of his time. As the Jat Pat Todak Mandal would soon realize, once they were confronted by Ambedkar’s uncompromising faith in equality, an encounter with sacrilege was always round the corner.
Despite serious misgivings about the Mandal’s liberal reformist methods and susceptibility to conservative Hindu opinion, Ambedkar accepted their invitation. Having by now freed himself decisively from the fundamental impasse of his time—the claim of abstract equality between India and Europe on which nationalists of various persuasions had mounted their demand for freedom from the empire for more than two generations—Ambedkar envisioned the lecture giving him a proper stage to formulate the conditions of another freedom, another equality, perhaps another politics for colonial India altogether. As news of his imminent visit to the Punjab spread, however, office bearers of majoritarian and extremist organizations such as the Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha mounted pressure, rebuking the Mandal for having chosen Ambedkar as the speaker for their annual event and asking it to withdraw the invitation. The Mandal initially resisted the reactionary offensive. But by April 1936, it began to insist that Ambedkar allow copies of his lecture to be printed in Lahore, where they could potentially limit its impact and distribution, rather than in Bombay, where they would have no control over the text’s circulation. Ambedkar, already put off by a series of ambiguous messages from the Mandal, refused to concede ground.7 By May 1936, his presidential lecture had been successfully killed. Its theme would have been the annihilation of caste.
The death of the lecture in the British Punjab marked the birth in Bombay of a treatise unparalleled in the history of anticolonial emancipation, a treatise that promised to emancipate not simply politics but the moral psychology of freedom itself from the dialectic of nation and empire. As soon as the invitation to lecture was rescinded, Ambedkar went ahead and published the text of his speech as a slim volume of less than hundred pages, composed in a fashion that defied all standards of genre, dissent, and circulation. Within the first two months of its publication, Annihilation of Caste sold more than 1,500 copies. By the end of its first year, translations into Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, and Punjabi were under way or already published. The second edition of the English original was published in 1937, and a third edition in 1944. Like much of Ambedkar’s prolific writing spread over four decades of public life (including the republican constitution of free India, which he helped author between 1947 and 1950 as the elected chairman of its drafting committee), Annihilation of Caste drew disengaged criticism and sometimes deafening silence in nationalist and reformist circles. Much of the response, when it came, was predictably derogatory and hostile.8 But foremost among those who responded to it with any degree of rigor and reserve was Ambedkar’s political antagonist and philosophical peer, M. K. Gandhi.
Annihilation of Caste was published just a year before the general elections of 1937 and a year after the Government of India Act of 1935. It came, then, at the crest of a democratic wave swelled with dreams of Indian franchise. Yet for millions of religious minorities and outcastes, justice and even freedom still looked like a receding horizon. It was this receding tide of freedom (in both its moral and political sense) that Ambedkar perhaps sought to stem. The work must therefore be approached, first and foremost, as a conceptual event in the philosophical history of Indian democracy. It certainly facilitated the most potent and decisive philosophical encounter between Ambedkar and Gandhi, an encounter that amplified in as clear a manner as possible the kinship and difference between the two. In fact, Annihilation of Caste revealed those impulses in their thinking of transformative action, those elements in their critique of force, which would remain unbridgeable. And if nationalists would henceforth refuse to associate Ambedkar with their good conscience and pursuit of freedom, it was not because he had renounced his commitment to freedom but rather because he alone had thought courageously of the possibility of such sovereignty in the most egalitarian and forceful fashion—a sovereignty whose earliest expression could be traced back to Gandhi’s own masterwork composed earlier in the century, Hind Swaraj (1909).
Annihilation of Caste and Hind Swaraj are discordant constituents of a shared moral psychology that had begun to coalesce in early twentieth-century India. Although the two texts attempt to think anew the conditions of resistance and truth in the ineradicable shadows of force, they were equally out of joint with their times. For neither simply poses questions about the efficacy of abstract ends such as freedom, to which nationalists of their time were so fervently and blindly committed. On the contrary, they both shift nationalism’s obsessive interest in ends and seek to reformulate the means and force proper to justice. What kind of force—routine, infinitesimal, even invisible—constitutes a free and equal life? Could the people’s commitment to civic duty and practical knowledges alone—say, the art of spinning, spending time on cleaning up public spaces, or forging a weapon—retrieve such life? What might such minutiae of practices—which Gandhi often assembled under the term “sacrifice,” thereby investing in routine activities the power to acquire a state indifferent to the inequities of everyday life—prepare one for? Could death, at war or through self-sacrifice, be the ground of equality? Could suffering, especially when mandated by religious injunctions and inflicted by the involuntary force of law, be transformed into ameliorative acts of justice through a voluntary embrace of pain, even mortality? Might the return in any simple sense to religion—and there has never been a religion (or state) that has not demanded sacrifice—restore the irreducible dignity of life?9 Could sacrifice, in other words, bring justice to those who were already most poor, most untouchable, and irreparably violated by the law? And what form, if vulnerability and death might be construed as the ground of equality at all, might the sacrifice of the already sacrificed take?
As figure, metaphor, ritual, and skill, “sacrifice,” for both Ambedkar and Gandhi, referred to the art of offering one’s own life before taking another’s. It entailed the disciplinary rigor and method of self-dissolution, one that could be cultivated only in a firm and fearless knowledge of life’s inevitable and incurable mortality. But this understanding, when translated into the idiom of mass politics, could not have been immune to ethical regressions. In fact, “sacrifice,” which frequently appears in Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s speeches and writings in one form or another, in terms such as “fearless sacrifice” or “limitless sacrifice,” only accentuates the difficulty of this moral and political ontology. Few cl...

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