Gandhi vs Ambedkar

A snippet from this Hindu article with an excerpt from Rama Chandra Guha’s Arguments with Gandhi:

Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer. Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition. This disjuncture in viewpoints brings to mind some comments of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass on his great white contemporary Abraham Lincoln. In a speech of 1876, Douglass remarked that ‘viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’

The two greatest opponents of untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century were Gandhi and Ambedkar. Their differing social locations and political affiliations produced sharp disagreements between the two men. In recent decades, as Dalits have grown more self-aware and better organised, they have turned more, much more, to Ambedkar than to Gandhi, to the activist intellectual who was himself a Dalit rather than to the guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer. This elevation of Ambedkar over Gandhi was inevitable, and appropriate. However, the politics of the present have also led to a wholesale repudiation of Gandhi on the part of those who seek to fight against the injustices of caste.