Zoomed Vinay Special · First-person editorial

Ambedkar Was Not a Quit India Freedom Fighter. In 1942 He Sat in the Viceroy's Council That Jailed Its Leaders

On 21 July 1942 Ambedkar called civil disobedience "treachery to India"; on 8 August the Viceroy's Council he had just joined gave its "unanimous support" to the Quit India arrests, and in September he defended them in the Central Legislative Assembly. But his own question was "freedom for what and freedom for whom": he wrote that the Untouchables were "not opposed to freedom from British Imperialism", and he would not fight for a freedom that left them under the rule of caste. Eight claims, told straight and tested against the British government's papers and his collected works, with volume and page, and neither camp's slogan comes out whole. Then his own judgement gets the same test, and Gandhi's too: from his forecast, as the Governor reported it, that the Congress "might be possible to ignore" to the "all Untouchables" of Plassey, where each man was wrong, the file says so, and where each was right, it says that too.