We usually assume that Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar are in an antagonistic relation with each other. This is not incorrect. And certainly, Ambedkar’s astute criticisms of Gandhi are quite justified both in their times and ours. But to focus only on the antagonism is misleading. Rather, the antagonism itself occurs as part of a parallax relation, with the parallax organised around the equality of the minor.
To unpack that previous sentence: I draw on the term minor to refer to the figure who embodies practices, actions, or even ways of being that are inassimilable to the norms of the majority. So the minor are all those who face domination and violence, whether as individuals or as groups, because of who they are – for example, Dalits, women, Muslims, Adivasis, LGBTQ+ groups, dissenters of all stripes.
As such, the minor – minoritised, really – face challenges somewhat different from the exploited, who face domination and violence because of what they are – for example, small farmers, migrant workers, labourers, or the precariat broadly (though the minoritised are overwhelmingly also exploited, and vice versa).
We usually think of democratic equality and freedom in terms of participation in the sovereignty of the state through the rights of citizen. This could be described as an equality of the major, for here we claim equality by participating in the power and majority of being a citizen.
To this we can counterpoint the freedom and equality of the minor.
Negatively, the latter involves a striving for an equality that is not centred around participation in the sovereignty of the state, or even around the exercise of the will that underpins sovereignty. Positively, the equality of the minor involves striving for a non-privative vulnerability, rather than the invulnerability that characterises citizenship.
A commonsensical example of non-privative vulnerability would be the relation of intimate friendship. We may make demands of our friends but these demands are not rights: we are vulnerable to our friends, and this vulnerability itself sustains our friendship and its distinctive equality. The equality of the minor involves making friendship political or, to put the same thing differently, making neighbourliness democratic. And because neither friendship nor neighbourliness are organised around the will, this equality of the minor could also be described as a politics of non-willing.
If Gandhi and Ambedkar are indispensable to political thought today, this is not least because they are arguably the two most important thinkers anywhere of an equality of the minor – of political friendship and democratic neighbourliness. Both Gandhi and Ambedkar are deeply committed to the figure of the minor, and to an equality centred around this figure.
In Gandhi’s 1910 book Hind Swaraj, the “Editor” declares: “It is a superstition and ungodly thing to believe that an act of the many [ghana; “majority” in Gandhi’s own English translation] binds the few [thoda; “minority”]. Many examples can be given in which acts of majorities will be found to have been wrong and those of minorities to have been right. All reforms owe their origin to the initiation of minorities in opposition to majorities.”
And in the preface to his States and Minorities, Ambedkar acidly takes issue with the “spokesmen” of the “High and Mighty Hindu Majority” who proposed that the Scheduled Castes were not a minority:
Anyone with a fresh and free mind, reading it as a general proposition, would be justified in saying that it is capable of double interpretation. I interpret it to mean that the Scheduled Castes are more than a minority and that any protection given to the citizens and to the minorities will not be adequate for the Scheduled Castes. In other words it means that their social, economic and educational condition is so much worse than that of the citizens and other minorities that in addition to protection they would get as citizens and as minorities the Scheduled Castes would require special safeguards against the tyranny and discrimination of the majority.
This is why, Ambedkar goes on, the Scheduled Castes need not only the “Fundamental Rights of citizens” but also “all the benefit of the Provisions for the Protection of the minorities and in addition special Safeguards.”
But Gandhi and Ambedkar strive for the equality of the minor from different starting points. A simple, almost simplistic, way of describing this difference would be to say that Gandhi affirms the equality of the minor from a perspective which recognizes that it is, despite its aspirations, implicated by virtue of its social position in the exercise of domination; conversely, Ambedkar affirms the equality of the minor from a perspective which recognises that it is, again despite its aspirations, unavoidably implicated by virtue of its social position in the experience of subalternity.
These two perspectives can sometimes appear antagonistic, and sometimes complementary. But they are best understood as parallax views – comportments, really – of the equality of the minor. In a way, they are incommensurable. Yet all of us are inevitably implicated both in relations where we dominate others and in those where we are subordinate to others, even if some are more implicated in the former and some more in the latter. So even though they are incommensurable, the striving for an equality of the minor must inevitably inhabit both comportments. How this occurs, despite or perhaps because of their incommensurability, can be understood better if we consider the segues between Gandhi’s emphasis on relinquishing sovereign power and Ambedkar’s emphasis on annihilating at least some forms of that power.
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Riyas Komu, “Swaraj/Control,” from On International Workers’ Day, Gandhi From Kochi (2015), oil on canvas, 72 × 54 inches, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
Gandhi, faced with sovereignty, constantly stresses the need to relinquish it. Relinquishment is quite different from rejection. For example, Gandhi both led the struggle for parliamentary swaraj or republican democracy and insisted that this was not the swaraj he sought. As this suggests, he was not rejecting parliamentary swaraj or political democracy. He could not. He was too acutely aware that most Indians around him desired it; arguably he desired it himself. To simply reject that desire for parliamentary swaraj would have been to exercise a willed relation over it. The point, really, is to not desire it. So he sought to cultivate a discipline amongst satyagrahis that would enable them to relinquish the desire for the equality of citizenship and embrace instead the equality of political friendship. Only such relinquishment would be in keeping with the politics of non-willing, for to will relinquishment would be to violate the very character of relinquishment
But what is this relinquishment? Let us not be misled by the passivity the term seems to imply. Relinquishment is an intense modality of action: it is the enactment of the equality involved in satyagraha or ahimsa. Only through the enactment of this other equality can the equality of citizenship be relinquished.
The enactment of this other equality must work through formidable challenges. To begin with, there is the inevitable tension between satyagrahis’ aspiration for the equality of all being on the one hand and the obdurate inequalities of the social relations they are thrown into on the other hand. Put differently, while satyagrahis may strive for the equality of vulnerability, they live in a world of profound social inequalities.
These inequalities cut both ways: satyagrahis are dominated in some relations, but there are structural and institutional ways in which even the most committed satyagrahis will almost always find themselves involved in oppressing and exploiting. They can exit some of these latter relations, but they cannot exit all.
Riyas Komu, “Ahimsa/Violence,” from On International Workers’ Day, Gandhi From Kochi (2015), oil on canvas, 72 × 54 inches, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
This is why in Hind Swaraj the Editor says: “Going to the root of the matter, nobody is ahimsak because we do destroy life. But we wish to be free of that, hence ahimsak.”
So satyagrahis necessarily have to work through the question: how to enact political friendship?
Enacting this equality is especially challenging because there can be no institutionalisable protocols for navigating the tension between the injunction to equality and actual inequality. They cannot be like the practitioners of citizenly equality, who navigate this tension by striving to realise fictional equality (which is the paradigmatic liberal form of equality: it is the form that allows political or citizenly equality to coexist with social and economic inequality), to infuse fictional equality with social and economic equality. Rather, they must relinquish fictional equality, and strive instead for an equality centred around a non-privative vulnerability, for it is through such vulnerability that political friendship is always enacted.
In the absence of institutionalisable protocols, doing so requires satyagrahis to fashion different comportments of political friendship for each cluster of relations they encounter. That is to say: they must constantly ask: what kind of relation of power is at work in this cluster of relations, and what comportment of offering non-privative vulnerability can transform it into a political friendship? With this question, Gandhi struggled memorably and instructively.
It is possible to identify at least six different clusters that relations of power take in his formulations, and corresponding comportments of non-privative vulnerability. Some of these comportments are quite troubling in their implications, while two, we can now clearly see, must push relinquishment in directions where it relinquishes itself and yields to the comportment associated with Ambedkar – that of annihilation.
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First, there is the question of what vulnerability the dominated can offer to the dominant so as to transform colonial rule into a political friendship. One comportment of such vulnerability is at work in his most celebrated conceptualisation – civil disobedience. If we are to describe this engagement in the terms I have been offering, it was an encounter between the ideologies of citizenship and democratic neighbourliness.
Amongst the most crucial aspects of modernity is that neighbourly relations – relations which are organised around a privative or non-privative vulnerability to or of the other which cannot be redressed by sovereignty – come to be increasingly dominated by abstract ones, even though the latter never erase the former. Such abstract relations are at work not only in capitalist commodity relations, but also in citizenship; they come to be especially dominant with the consolidation of what Enrique Dussel calls the Anglo-Germanic modernity. Thus, even though Indians were by no means equal citizens, the ideology of citizenship governed colonial rule in myriad ways, not least in the rhetoric of rule of law, of equality also between coloniser and colonised in some distant future.
This does not at all mean that neighbourly relations were erased. They never can be. But it does mean that they could be repressed, become increasingly recessive or optional for some – especially for the dominant in their relations with each other, or for the dominant in their relations with the dominated. The dominated do not have that luxury. If there were such a thing as a pure capitalism, then perhaps it would be possible to be dominated without experiencing a neighbourly relation with the dominant. Since such a thing is absolutely impossible, the dominated always experience the dominant as neighbours, those who they are vulnerable to. As with myriad neighbourly relations historically, this is a privative vulnerability, whether in a highly visible way, as with slavery, or in more quiet ways, as when the putative equality of citizenship is undercut in the everyday interactions between those from minority and majority communities. It is to acknowledge the neighbourly – and phenomenological – dimension of domination that we often resort to the term “oppression.”
In this context, at the heart of civil disobedience was an audacious strategy: challenging the colonial ideology of citizenship by bringing out and democratising the neighbourliness that always undergirds it. The neighbourliness is brought out in the very act of quietly breaking the laws without resorting to an alternative language of citizenship; in other words, by revealing to the colonisers that they too are vulnerable, are neighbours to those whom they dominate. Further, by accepting the punishment for breaking the laws, satyagrahis practice a surrender without subordination with the colonisers, accept a non-privative vulnerability; this is why I say it is a democratic neighbourliness.
Second, there is the question of what vulnerability the dominant can offer to the dominated so as to transform their relation into a political friendship. As a member of the dominant castes, this question Gandhi encounters especially sharply in the context of the intimate oppression involved in caste. And what he conceives of in response as a non-privative vulnerability is especially troubling. He attempts a penance that sacralizes the “untouchable” castes – revering them as “Harijan” or “children of God.” More broadly, he insists that the “Harijan,” as the figure who offers service, exemplifies what is most central to Hinduism.
This extended reinterpretation of Hinduism is what Lalit Batra insightfully calls the “bhangi-isation of Hinduism” in his ongoing dissertation at the University of Minnesota.
Unsurprisingly, this reworking of Hinduism found little purchase amongst dominant castes. When they took up the term “Harijan,” they most often entirely drained it of the reverence with which Gandhi had sought to imbue it; it even became sometimes one more derogatory term in their arsenal of violence and discrimination. As for Gandhi himself, while he vigorously fought explicit forms of discrimination against oppressed castes, and continued to revere the idea of the “Harijan,” his own attitude towards them in social relations remained notoriously paternalistic. The entire process as it unfolded was, as D.R. Nagaraj famously pointed out, capable of having only one hero – the dominant caste penitent, Gandhi. For the oppressed castes, indeed, the entire process was effectively most often nothing but a reliving of the trauma of disprivilege and oppression. Arguably, this too is why Ambedkar repudiated – annihilated – the term “Harijan” with such ferocity.
Also read: ‘Never a Mahatma’: A Look at Ambedkar’s Gandhi
So, there was something grievously inadequate, both in conceptualisation and execution, about Gandhi’s answer to the question of how the dominant are to practice political friendship with those who have historically borne the brunt of their intimate oppression and continue to bear its aftereffects. But that inadequacy only throws the question itself into sharper relief. Since we are all dominant in some context or the other, this is not a question that just the 1% or 20% need concern themselves with. All the same, it is not a question we have paid much attention to. We often take the answer to be straightforward – offer allyship as well as material and social reparation. That should be a bare minimum, of course, and amongst the problems with Gandhi’s responses was that he did not do this. But by itself this would only put in place a political democracy, not a political friendship.
Political friendship also requires something from the dominant: reparation for oppression: what Gandhi calls penitence or repentance, and what we who have come to prefer more neutral language might wish to describe as moral reparation. How should the dominant offer this moral reparation of non-privative vulnerability to the historically dominated? – for those seeking to nurture the traditions of political friendship, perhaps few questions are as urgent to think through as this one. It is also one of the questions that we still struggle to even formulate in concrete situations.
Third, there is how political friendship is to be cultivated with social intimates – those who do not necessarily know us in intimate personal relations, but who nevertheless find themselves bearing a love for us even if they do not agree with us. Through the refashioning from the 1900s onwards of ascetic traditions by imbuing them with an intense vulnerability, Gandhi had created an immense world of social intimates, and his effort was to make this also a world of political friendship. It is here that Gandhi emphasises fasts, at least for himself (he emphatically opposed most others going on fasts, stressing that unless carried out properly, they could become “duragraha,” or the opposite of satyagraha):
Fasting in satyagraha has well-defined limits. You cannot fast against a tyrant, for it will be as a piece of violence done to him. You invite penalty from him for disobedience of his orders, but you cannot inflict on yourself penalties when he refuses to punish and renders it impossible for you to disobey his orders so as to compel infliction of penalty. Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a parent who drinks. My fast at Bombay, and then at Bardoli, was of that character. I fasted to reform those who loved me. But I will not fast to reform, say General Dyer who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.
Gandhi himself often fails notoriously to live up to this and other exacting injunctions around fasting. Of the 27 or so major fasts he undertook, he retrospectively recognises that in at least two cases he had fasted wrongly.
To these two we should surely add the 1932 fast against separate electorates. For however Gandhi might have conceived matters (he described it as directed against the dominant castes), there can be little doubt that Ambedkar, who led the demand for separate electorates, experienced the fast as violently coercive. But yet again, despite these occasions where fasting turned coercive, we can hardly in his case dismiss it as a comportment of political friendship with social intimates: during what is described often as his finest hour, he went on fasts to stop the violence of Partition, and his authority persuaded tens of thousands to stop killing, thus saving innumerable lives.
And even if we are reluctant, in the dramatically changed circumstances of our world today, to countenance fasting as a way of practicing non-privative vulnerability with social intimates, the question does remain: how do we offer a non-privative vulnerability to them at moments of intense disagreement, how do we convert relations of social intimacy to those of political friendship?
Fourth, there is the question of what vulnerability can be offered to create and sustain political friendship to those who may regard us as their social enemies, or at least as opposed to them.
Here it is instructive to recall Gandhi’s efforts, beginning from the time of the Khilafat movement, to offer “friendship” to the subcontinent’s Muslim communities:
I consider myself to be among the staunchest of Hindus. I am as eager to save the cow from the Mussulman’s knife as any Hindu. But on that very account I refuse to make my support of the Mussulman claim on the khilafat conditional upon his saving the cow. The Mussulman is my neighbour. He is in distress. His grievance is legitimate and it is my bounden duty to help him to secure redress by every legitimate means in my power even to the extent of losing my life and property. That is the way I can win permanent friendship with Mussulmans. . . . The nobility of the help will be rendered nugatory if it was rendered conditionally. That the result will be the saving of the cow is a certainty. But should it turn out to be otherwise, my view will not be affected in any manner whatsoever. The test of friendship is a spirit of love and sacrifice independent of expectation of any return.
This passage demands a closer reading than I am able to offer in the limited space here. Suffice to note for now what is at stake here: the question of how to practice a non-private vulnerability with social intimates, or how, indeed, more broadly, to make sure that the world of social intimates we create is shot through with intimations of non-privative vulnerability – something that Gandhi did through his refashioning of ascetic practices, and that would likely be created today through very different practices.
Riyas Komu, Salt and Pepper (2017), Diptych, Oil on canvas, Recycled wood, 72 x 54 inches, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Fifth, there is a question on which reading Gandhi offers less direct help, but on which his failure is itself revealing. Earlier, addressing the question of how the dominated could offer political friendship to the dominant, I dwelt on the confrontation between two ways of claiming equality – the ideology of citizenship on the one hand, where the colonised were promised a future equality, and the ideology of democratic neighbourliness on the other.
But what happens where the confrontation is somewhat different? What happens where the practitioners of democratic neighbourliness encounter those who refuse to countenance the very possibility of their equality?
The most ready example of this would be Nazism, which refused to acknowledge the humanity of the Jews it massacred, often treated them not even as monsters but merely as objects.
Another quite different example could be surely be the caste order, which is a particularly violent instantiation of neighbourly relations – the dominant castes profess a ritual vulnerability to the dominated castes, and this very claim becomes the reason for inflicting a vicious violence on the dominated castes, a violence which is simultaneously economic, political, social and personal, which proceeds through a characteristically neighbourly mechanism that Gopal Guru has taught us to recognise – humiliation.
So, could the dominated castes have offered civil disobedience to the dominant? The most famous satyagraha by Dalits, that in Mahad which Ambedkar led in 1927, failed, not least because of Gandhi’s refusal to support it. But it is also unlikely that Gandhi’s support for a civil disobedience movement by the oppressed castes would have swayed the dominant castes. For example, by the time of the Dandi salt march just a few years later, as Harmony Siganporia and Tridip Suhrud have argued, Gandhi himself was being treated by many dominant caste Gujaratis as an “untouchable” – no longer welcome to their homes even as they honoured him publicly, and being relegated during the march itself to staying overnight either in public buildings such as schools, or being hosted in temporary grass huts which were later burnt so as avoid being polluted by him.
I do not wish to suggest that neighbourly violence can never be redressed by the democratic neighbourliness involved in civil disobedience. But given the immense difficulty of civil disobedience against caste as a quintessentially neighbourly form of violence, perhaps relinquishment must here relinquish itself, yield to another comportment – annihilation. Perhaps also, after 1927, Ambedkar himself came to be convinced that the satyagraha of civil disobedience would not work against the dominant castes; this is why he called for the annihilation of caste.
What is annihilation? As comportments, annihilation and relinquishment have a parallax relation. Clearly, Ambedkar does not assume that everything he is critical of is to be annihilated. For example, even though he is sharply critical of political democracy, he does not call for its annihilation. Annihilation is the proper response, rather, to a distinctive kind of phenomenon – that which does not countenance even the possibility of equality. Here we see also its difference from relinquishment. Where relinquishment is the relation with that which we cannot not want, annihilation is the relation with that which we absolutely cannot want. In both cases– “cannot not want” or “cannot want”’– the wanting is a desire that has a moral dimension. One cannot not want justice; one cannot want injustice.
Ambedkar cannot not want political democracy because it is driven by the desire for equality, albeit an abstract one; he absolutely cannot want caste because it is nothing but graded inequality.
True, unlike relinquishment, annihilation does involve sovereign acts – for example, the criminalisation in the constitution of explicit forms of caste violence such as boycott. Still, caste violence is also a set of dispositions that are both social and inscribed in the individual bodies of the perpetrators and perpetrated. As such, this disposition cannot be annihilated by sovereign acts—not by sovereign acts of disciplining citizens, as a progressive state might seek to do, nor even by sovereign acts of self-discipline, which cannot ever entirely eradicate internalised dispositions.
So far more than sovereign acts, annihilation requires a long and slow cultivation of the self and of the other, both as individuals and as communities; it is this multigenerational and multi-pronged annihilation that Ambedkar describes with the slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organise.” Such organising will also, of course, try to mobilise the resources of the state, as of sovereignty, to annihilate caste. But that does not obviate the need for an annihilation that is not sovereign, and yet requires the cultivation of a certain self-discipline.
Why call the relation between annihilation and relinquishment a parallax one?
Because neither Ambedkar nor Gandhi are sovereign subjects of the sort who can move without remainder between these two comportments (in fact, they have freely given up on this sovereignty). As such, they remain marked by where they begin from, what they are thrown into. Gandhi begins from the relinquishment of parliamentary swaraj or political democracy; Ambedkar begins from the annihilation of caste. Gandhi moves reluctantly but inexorably to the annihilation of caste; Ambedkar moves reluctantly but inexorably to the relinquishment of political democracy. But the annihilation of caste cannot be to Gandhi what it is Ambedkar, nor can the relinquishment of political democracy be to Ambedkar what it is to Gandhi.
Sixth, annihilation in this sense also allows us reframe one of the most intriguing and underdeveloped of the comportments of political friendship – that involved in swadeshi.
As Gandhi stressed over and again, swadeshi in his sense had nothing in common with the exclusionary swadeshi of the mainstream nationalist movement. His swadeshi was centred around the “Constructive Program,” his effort at a social movement to not just relinquish structural domination, but to do so in a manner that embraces human finitude – specifically, the neighbour, and the most marginal and oppressed amongst neighbours. The most famous aspect of the swadeshi movement was khadi, but there were several other dimensions, including education. Gandhi himself regarded the Constructive Programme as the most crucial dimension of satyagraha. But despite his spending more time on it than on any other aspect of satyagraha, the Programme limped along even in his own times, and died out by the fifties, hurried into its grave by government Gandhians such as Vinoba Bhave.
That failure was surely in part because the Programme as Gandhi pushed it remained purely “constructive” rather than annihilatory. Indeed, as his contemporaries on the left, including Ambedkar, forcefully pointed out, the Programme did not challenge forms of domination frontally or even elliptically; all too often, it seemed to work with dominant groups and oppressor castes, depending on their largesse. And yet, at a time when climate change has given new salience to the emphasis on human finitude, has aggressively politicised old ideas such as sustainable development by imparting to them a new degrowth twist, the emphasis on the neighbour in their finitude is especially resonant. What would be an annihilatory constructive programme for our times?
And in being addressed by this question, as also the framing question of what political friendship is, Gandhi remains an indispensable interlocutor, even if our answers often cannot and must not be the same as his.
Ajay Skaria is a historian who teaches at the University of Minnesota. This essay is partially adapted from a longer piece, ‘Revisiting Non-Willing Freedom: How Gandhi Matters today,’ in Cultural Critique Online. It also draws on a forthcoming essay ‘The Subaltern and the Minor: For Qadri Ismail,’ in Critical Times, 5:3.
