Now, Arundhati Roy wants 'casteist' Gandhi's name erased from institutions

Arundhati Roy, the Booker-prize-winning author who likes to shock us periodically with her outlandish statements, is now in the business of rubbishing Gandhi. She is sailing in the same boat as Babasaheb Ambedkar – and Nathuram Godse, one might add. For Roy, Gandhi is Caste Bigot, not Mahatma.

Godse put bullets into the Mahatma because he was allegedly too pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu; Roy wants to erase the name of Gandhi from every institution that currently carries it because, she says, Gandhi was an out-and-out casteist.

According to this Times of India report , Roy, speaking in the memory of the late Dalit leader Mahatma Ayyankali at Kerala University, said universities named after Gandhi should be renamed. Her reference was probably to Mahatma Gandhi University, a leading educational institution in God’s Own Country.

The newspaper quotes Roy as excoriating Gandhi for an essay he wrote in 1936 titled The Ideal Bhangi to prove that Gandhi was casteist and patronising towards Dalits. Today nobody would use the word “bhangi” without inviting the charge of gross political incorrectness, but Gandhi lived in politically incorrect times. Much of Ambedkar’s writings on caste and religion too would not pass muster in today’s identity-charged political discourse.

There is some validity to the caste charge levelled against Gandhi. He was a social conservative keen to reform caste, not annihilate it. Ambedkar was irritated by Gandhi’s claim that caste was not central to Hinduism but a sin committed by caste Hindus for which they must atone. Many Dalits also see Gandhi’s decision to call “untouchables” Harijans as condescending and obnoxious.

Gail Omvedt, another writer influenced by Marxist thinking, explains Gandhi’s approach thus: “Gandhi was not simply a devoted Hindu, but also a fervent believer in his idealised version of ‘varnashrama dharma.’ He felt that what he considered to be the benign aspects of caste – its encouragement of a certain kind of solidarity — could be maintained while removing hierarchy and the extreme evil of untouchability. This was in fact the essence of his reformism.” Ambedkar saw caste as the very basis of evil, which needed to be excised completely from the body politic.

Godse, a Brahmin, had views on caste that Gandhi would not have disapproved of. In his trial statement , he says that he “worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession….I used publicly to take part in organised anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and B—–s participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other.”

The interesting point is Godse hated Gandhi for his “appeasement” of Muslims while Arundhati Roy criticises Gandhi for his alleged casteism. Godse wanted Gandhi excised from this world, Roy wants Gandhi excised from public memory for espousing the evil of caste.

Despite present-day antagonisms between Ambedkarites and Gandhians, it is doubtful if Ambedkar himself, unlike Roy, would want Gandhi forgotten, though he would certainly want him removed from a pedestal.

But if so far Roy’s views are analogous to Ambedkar’s, she seems to despise Gandhi as much for his impractical idealism. In contrast, she can forgive the murderous ideas of Naxal theoretician Charu Mazumdar for being a visionary. This is what she wrote some years ago about her travels in Naxal-land titled, “ Gandhi, but with guns .”

After acknowledging that Mazumdar’s “ _ abrasive rhetoric fetishses violence , blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal”,_ Roy finds that despite all this bloodlust Charu “was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of ‘the non-violent way’ and his notion of Trusteeship: ‘The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.’”

Put another way, Charu’s murderous idealism was fine, but not Gandhi’s.

Roy’s views, in fact, are in sync with what Godse himself had to say about Gandhi, who said: _“_He (Gandhi) was, paradoxical as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence.”

Just as Roy ridicules Gandhi’s idealism about trusteeship, Godse mocks Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence thus: “His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a dream if you imagine the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life…In fact, honour, duty and love of one’s own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust.”

Roy eulogises Charu for his revolutionary ideals, even if achieved through violence. But Gandhi’s idealism pursued without violence is “humbug.”

It would appear that if Godse had only been a murderous Marxist, Roy would have approved of his act.