The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.

In 1931 Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. B R Ambedkar met in London and clashed on the future of India's electoral system. Later in 1932 when the British announced reserved seats for dalits, Gandhi went on a fast unto death. Ambedkar saved his life by agreeing to the changed terms of representation, which changed the course of electoral system of India. The Gandhi - Ambedkar engagement was only on the electoral system and method of election by separate electorates which Muslims enjoyed till then. Till the partition of India in 1947, the draft Constitution provided reserved seats for minorities and Dalits, which Sardar Patel chose to abolish. The fate of India's electoral system shifted to Ambedkar and Sardar Patel after Gandhi's assassination in 1948. Sardar Patel tried to abolish reserved seats for Dalits also in 1948 only to be thwarted by Ambedkar. Those reserved seats continue. Based on a singular pursuit of tracing the electoral system and methods that define India-the world's largest democracy, this book is the first to document the evolution and account of electoral history of colonial and independent India. Do we know how Sardar Patel and Gandhi used electoral system to integrate India? Since the first provincial elections in 1937, do we know that double member constituencies existed till 1961, only to be abolished by Jawaharlal Nehru? Do we know that Ambedkar lost his first election in independent India because voters threw away their ballots? If we need women reserved seats, we need to know that we might have to try to double member constituencies. This book tells all. The story of electoral thoughts and ideas of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Patel and Ambedkar's struggle to get a representative electoral system appear for the first time in a book. In India only election results are predicted, analysed and compiled. The electoral method that determines India's every election comes into focus in this book. Can any political party get away without offering tickets to one minority community or Dalits? The history is the answer to the future - through this book.

Geopolitics and Development examines the historical emergence of development as a form of governmentality, from the end of empire to the Cold War and the War on Terror. It illustrates the various ways in which the meanings and relations of development as a discourse, an apparatus and an aspiration, have been geopolitically imagined and enframed. The book traces some of the multiple historical associations between development and diplomacy and seeks to underline the centrality of questions of territory, security, statehood and sovereignty to the pursuit of development, along with its enrolment in various (b)ordering practices. In making a case for greater attention to the evolving nexus between geopolitics and development and with particular reference to Africa, the book explores the historical and contemporary geopolitics of foreign aid, the interconnections between development and counterinsurgency, the role of the state and social movements in (re)imagining development, the rise of (re)emerging donors like China, India and Brazil, and the growing significance of South–South flows of investment, trade and development cooperation. Drawing on post-colonial and postdevelopment approaches and on some of the author’s own original empirical research, this is an essential, critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex and dynamic political geographies of global development. Primarily intended for scholars and post-graduate students in development studies, human geography, African studies and international relations, this book provides an engaging, invaluable and up-to-date resource for making sense of the complex entanglement between geopolitics and development, past and present.

“What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

The book investigates in depth the outcomes of the Provincial Legislative Elections held in February 1937 in accordance with the Government of India Act of 1935. In sharp contrast to the dominant, bourgeois-dominated Congress party, Dr. Ambedkar provides a perceptive picture of the absence of political rights enjoyed by Scheduled Caste candidates (during the election). This book also seeks to debunk the misconception that Mahatma Gandhi was the "benefactor" of the Dalit.

In response to the invitation of the Chairman of the Indian section of the Institute of Pacific Relations, I wrote in August last year a Paper on the Problem of the Untouchables of India for the Session of the Conference which was due to be held on December 1942 at Mont' Tramblant in Quebec in Canada. The Paper is printed in the proceedings of the Conference. Ever since it became known that I had written such a Paper, the leaders of the Untouchables and Americans interested in their problem have been pressing me to issue it separately in the form of a book and make it available to the general public. It was not possible to refuse the demand. At the same time I could not without breach of etiquette publish the paper until the proceedings of the Conference were made public. I am now told by the Secretary of the Pacific Relations Conference that the proceedings have been made public and there can be no objection to the publication of my Paper if I desired it. This will explain why the Paper is published nearly 10 months after it was written.