Write short note with a sociological perspective: How far Gandhi was trusted by the untouchables. (2015)
The question asks for degree, not applause or indictment. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi commanded real trust among sections of the Depressed Classes as a benefactor, and very little among their organised leadership as a representative. Sociologically the divide is between patronage and representation.
Grounds on which trust was given
- He made untouchability a national political issue rather than private charity, wrote it into the Congress constructive programme, and mobilised caste-Hindu conscience through temple-entry satyagrahas such as Vaikom (1924–25) and Guruvayur.
- The Harijan Sevak Sangh (1932) and the weekly Harijan (1933) delivered schools, hostels, wells and scholarships — tangible goods reaching people no autonomous Dalit organisation had reached.
- By the mid-1940s he had travelled far from his early defence of varnashrama, holding that caste must go and urging caste Hindus to marry Harijans.
- Recent archival scholarship by Sujay Biswas finds that under the reserved-seat system Congress-linked Dalit legislators did win Dalit votes and press Dalit interests, with Gandhi as a critical ally: the Depressed Classes were never one bloc arrayed against him.
Grounds on which trust was withheld
- Paternalism in the name itself. Harijan was a name conferred, resting on divine grace rather than right; Dalits later rejected it, and courts have recognised that it is now used as a term of insult.
- Structure of the Sangh. Its management rested with caste Hindus, making untouchables objects of service rather than agents. B. R. Ambedkar called the Gandhian effort an attempt to buy over the untouchables with kindness, and warned his followers against it.
- The diagnosis. So long as untouchability was a blot on Hinduism rather than its product, the shastric sanction survived — and with it, for Ambedkar, the disease.
The decisive test
The Poona Pact of September 1932 is where the question is settled. Gandhi’s fast unto death against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, granted by the Communal Award, forced Ambedkar to accept reserved seats within joint electorates under the threat of Gandhi’s death and of violent reprisals. Whatever its later electoral yield, consent extracted this way is not trust; Ambedkarites have read it ever since as the founding betrayal.
Degree and variation
Trust was thinnest where Dalits were already organised — the Mahar movement of western India, Ad-Dharm in Punjab, the Dravidian self-respecters — and strongest where the Congress programme was the only agency available. Gail Omvedt‘s account fits: the more a community had its own leadership, the less it needed Gandhi’s.
Conclusion
Gandhi was trusted as far as benevolence reaches and no further. He shifted the moral centre of Hindu opinion, but could not concede the political autonomy the untouchables were demanding — which is why their chosen name became Dalit and not Harijan.