‘No freedom, dignity to SCs’

Christodas Gandhi’s father, M Ramdas, wasn’t a Gandhian but he named his son after the Mahatma because it seemed like the right thing to do in 1952. “In those days people had a rousing regard for Gandhi.” A superintendent of police based in Chennai, his father, who belonged to a Scheduled Caste, taught his children the value of shaping their future through education. “He showed us how to be a person of self determination.” Christodas, a class topper, made it into the Indian Administrative Service. “The consciousness of me being an SC was not there. As a good student, you are respected everywhere,” he said. One of the rewards he received year after year for his academic performance was “umpteen copies of My Experiments with Truth”.

“In the books, we are told he was a man of truth. He stood for simplicity. He cared for the common man,” he said. Later, Christodas realised this wasn’t an objective interpretation of Gandhi’s life and legacy. “He was none of these things as far as SCs were concerned. It’s only after reading Ambedkar and getting into civil service that I could get a sense of his impact on society,” he said.

Now 66 and retired, Christodas, who served as additional chief secretary of Tamil Nadu, continues to question what he calls the textbook view of Mahatma Gandhi.

“He liberated Indians from white people, but he paved the way for some of them to be enslaved by others — in other words, subjugation of a whole mass of Scheduled Castes in the country,” he said.

For Christodas, the problem is rooted in Gandhi’s tethering of India’s Scheduled Castes to Hinduism. He said the fact that the Indian Constitution defines SCs as Hindus, Buddhists and Sikh sets them against those outside of this fold. “Because of that, Dalits couldn’t form any unity because they are many who follow Islam and Christianity. Collectively we could have counted as 25% of the population, but by this definition SCs only count as 16%,” he said. If Gandhi had not regarded Dalits as different or special, they would have had a better chance at inclusion, he argued.

“The Harijan wasn’t the son of god. He was the son of a Vaishnava god. Hari does not stand for a universal god or a spiritual god; he is a Hindutva entity. The word carried a dark portent for India’s Dalit population. Look at where things stand now, from the state of Harijan hostels to the institution of manual scavenging. The root of this is Mahatma Gandhi. Why did he not go on a hunger strike until untouchability was abolished?” he said.

Throughout the years of his service as an IAS officer, Christodas Gandhi said he never followed the teachings of the man he is named for. “I didn’t have a portrait of Gandhi in any of my offices. I had my junior officers put up portraits of Ambedkar. We took in a lot of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe staffers,” he said. “I did things in either the Ambedkar way or my way.”