The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate

Gandhi's response to Annihilation of Caste begins with a crucial concession: caste as practised, with its untouchability and hereditary humiliation, must go. But he defends Varna — the ideal fourfold division of society into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras — as a rational principle of social organisation based on inherited occupation and moral duty. He argues that Ambedkar has confused the corrupt practice of caste with the pure ideal of Varna, and that the solution is to restore the ideal rather than to reject the principle.

Ambedkar's reply is withering. Gandhi's Varna is not the untainted ideal he claims: the Manusmriti — the text Gandhi appeals to as the source of the ideal — prescribes the most degrading treatment of Shudras and Untouchables. There is no "pure Varna" separable from the caste system as practised; the ideal and the practice arise from the same scriptural sources and the same religious authority. To defend Varna is to defend caste. Gandhi's position, Ambedkar concludes, is not a middle way but an attempt to preserve the religious authority of Brahminism while softening its most visible cruelties.

Beneath the theological argument is a political one. Gandhi needs Hindu unity for the independence struggle — he cannot afford to alienate high-caste Hindus by endorsing the full programme of Dalit liberation. Ambedkar sees this calculation and names it: Gandhi's moderation is not spiritual principle but political strategy, and it comes at the expense of the eighty million people at the bottom. The debate exposed a fault line within Indian nationalism that has not been resolved to this day.

Gandhi's response to Annihilation of Caste was published in Harijan in July 1936. Ambedkar's reply, "A Reply to the Mahatma," was included in subsequent editions of Annihilation of Caste.