Preamble #7: Dignity
Dignity. There is that (in)famous incident of Gandhi being thrown out from the first-class carriage of a train in South Africa. It led Gandhi to write that Indians had “become the untouchables of South Africa”, says Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . It took a “real” untouchable, Ambedkar, to point out that the discrimination Indians faced abroad, while routine and condemnable, was a false analogy to what the untouchables faced in India. After all, pointed out Ambedkar, in South Africa, Gandhi was the boss of several white employees. He had whites as house guests, he dined with white South Africans, he owned property and handled significant amounts of money. Contrast that with what untouchables experienced and suffered back home, pointed out Ambedkar. Hence the charge of the false analogy. As Rathore says: “Only a visa got Dr Ambedkar out of this hostile land that was his homeland, so he could travel abroad, far from the dominion of Brahmanism, and only then enj...