This article challenges the false dichotomy, created in much of the existing historical and political analysis concerning the welfare programmes for ‘Harijans’ as put forward by Gandhi and Ambedkar, claiming that Ambedkar’s proposals were more progressive than Gandhi’s approach. The article draws on a detailed letter written by Ambedkar in 1932, proposing a programme of action that the Harijan Sevak Sangh should undertake for the welfare of ‘Harijans’. It compares this with the Constitution of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, drafted by Gandhi himself, to argue that the programmes of these two leaders actually show significant similarities in their intent and content concerning welfare measures for uplifting ‘Harijans’ in India, but seem to differ regarding strategies.

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It has now become a fashion among many historians, notably from the West, to denounce Gandhi’s fast and the Poona Pact of 1932 as a great betrayal of the ‘Untouchables’. This view essentially overlooks the constant effort of British imperialism to divide the Indian people into a number of special-interest groups at loggerheads with each other and so weaken the National Movement. This paper weighs the critics’ assertions in the light of the British Government’s own statements and those of the leaders of the Depressed Castes. It is also forgotten that the Poona Pact greatly increased Depressed Castes’ representation; and that no separate electorates have been ever established in Western democracies to avoid majoritarian rule.

Gandhi and Ambedkar offer a fascinating picture of community organizers fighting against caste oppression and caste discrimination. Both were committed to transforming the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions of ‘Dalits’†. They claimed that only through social action could societal transformation take place. As a result, they placed a strong emphasis on mobilizing the public against untouchability. They envisioned the removal of untouchability through popular struggles and popular participation. Not only did Gandhi and Ambedkar undertake popular campaigns, but they also saw them as necessary and beneficial. This paper explores the implications of integrating the constructs of the Gandhian and Ambedkarian models to tackle the problem of untouchability. It re-reads the Constitution of the Anti-Untouchability League (AUL) which was prepared by Gandhi himself in January 1935 in conjunction with a comprehensive letter penned by Ambedkar in November 1932, containing a plan of action for the AUL to carry out for the uplift of ‘Dalits’, to shed light on the lessons that are still important for the modern-day community organizers in India. The paper argues that synergizing Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s emancipatory discourses can enrich the present-day activism for social action combatting untouchability.

This article discusses the Habermasian public sphere as a realm constructed through communication and offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas's concept of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld among the participants as a fundamental prerequisite for communicative rationality in the discursive field. The article contends that the emergence of communicative rationality in the public sphere is unlikely to be facilitated by a singular and unitary modern public whose participants have commensurable languages and worlds. This argument is elaborated through an analysis of a public debate that occurred on August 10, 1888, between the Mahajan (headman) of the Modh Baniya caste council and Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Modh Baniya himself. Even though the discussion involved two people with an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, who were engaged in the deliberation as equals, the dialogue broke down, deepening divides. This article argues that the need to protect the spiritual domain from the polluting touch of the material domain led to the breakdown of communicative rationality.