Were Gandhi and Ambedkar enemies?
They were opponents for twenty-five years, on a question neither could concede without giving up the thing that made him what he was. Whether that makes them enemies depends on the use of the word, and both answers are argued seriously. The disagreement was not about whether untouchability was wrong — Gandhi said publicly and often that it was a sin that had to end. It was about three other things.
What they actually disagreed about
- Who is entitled to speak for a group. Gandhi held that the Untouchables were Hindus, that Congress spoke for all Hindus, and that he spoke for the Untouchables. Ambedkar held that a body led by caste Hindus could not represent the people it excluded.
- Whether the disease was Hinduism or its practitioners. Gandhi defended varna, the ideal order, as distinct from caste as practised, and said a religion is judged by its best exponents. Ambedkar answered that an ideal never once practised is not judged unfairly by its results, and that untouchability was established by scripture rather than tolerated by it.
- Method. Gandhi's instrument was moral pressure on the majority's conscience, including on his own body. Ambedkar's was legal and constitutional machinery that would work whether or not anybody's conscience moved.
They met for the first time in Bombay on 14 August 1931, and it went badly. Their positions collided at Poona in September 1932, when Gandhi fasted against the separate electorates Ambedkar had just won and Ambedkar signed them away to end it. In 1936 Gandhi answered Annihilation of Caste in Harijan and Ambedkar conceded nothing; in 1945 he published What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, a book-length and untemperate indictment.
One reading holds this was a genuine argument between two men who each had a serious answer to the other, that Gandhi moved further on caste than any mass leader of his generation, and that they are best read as opposed, not as hero and villain. The other holds that a fast to the death used against the weaker party is coercion whatever its author intended, that only one man could have his people held responsible for the other's life, and that softening it into a difference of emphasis is how the coercion gets forgotten. This site sets out both and settles neither. Not in dispute: they disagreed in public and in print for a quarter of a century and never resolved it; both replies to Annihilation of Caste are printed at the back of later editions — the right way to read the book, as one half of something.