![[attachments/Radical-Equality-Ambedkar,-Gandhi,-and-the-Risk-of-Democracy.jpg|height=240]] ## Review The book aims to create a meta-understanding of the politics of Ambedkar & Gandhi, helping to build an understanding of the commonalities underlying their politics. It is organised in 7 chapters and each chapter does a rather deep dive into their writings with carefully selected verbatim quotations from their books, letters, speeches or other published work. The first and the sixth chapters for me were the best. The book requires a fair foundation on the popular works of both Gandhi & Ambedkar and assumes a fair degree of understanding of their politics. Although initially I thought it might be some kind of an apologia of Gandhi, it was not so. Both are treated fairly in isolation, but the republican, civil libertarian and constitutionalist/state-ist positions of Ambedkar are given thorough treatment as are the theological politics of Gandhi rooted in his particular understanding of Dharma (contrast with detailed explanations of Ambedkar's quest for a religion-grounded politics and his tryst with Buddhism and his departure from a Brahminical/Vedic Hinduism that he was never able to see rid of its foundations anyway). Overall, a decent read but not the easiest one. ## Reading status - Status: Read - My rating: 3 ⭐⭐⭐ - Date started / added: 2023/01/10 - Date finished: 2023/02/12 ##See also - [[Caste]] - [Caravan interview with A Kumar](https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/ambedkar-constitutionalist-only-because-he-is-revolutionary) > "If you read Ambedkar, the motif, the concept, the notion, the idea, the word “force,” haunts his writing, because clearly he is not for the exercise of force. He sees enough of it—our world is saturated by force, whether we call it coercion, whether we call it violence, domination, interference, intervention, lynching—all forms of force. … That entire tradition of thinking about force—force in relation to everything and nothing—that marks Ambedkar's philosophical trajectory between _Annihilation of Caste_ and exactly twenty years later in _The Buddha and His Dhamma_. That twenty-year period we are looking at, add to that another decade—1926-56—when he prepares for the Mahar Satyagraha [Mahad Satyagraha was a satyagraha led by Ambedkar to allow untouchables to use water in a public tank in Mahad, Maharashtra], when he burns a copy of the Manusmriti publicly. We often wondered, should books be burnt? Should any book be burnt? And Ambedkar would say yes. So the notion of force is for him a conceptual intrigue into thinking about those who have nothing and yet are capable of everything, and the greatest example, the most exemplary act of that force is conversion. [He said] “I was born a Hindu but I will not die a Hindu,” “I am not a part of a whole, I am a part apart,” or when he says the “secret of freedom is courage.” A major theoretical claim I make in the book is that in order to read Ambedkar as a thinker is to go with him on a journey of force, is to understand what really force is. Not what power is, not what violence is, not what non-violence is, not what inequality is, not what equality is, but rather what force is and this ability to comprehend equality in terms of force is radical equality. Radical equality is not a liberal measure, it’s not a measure of redemption, not a matter of proceduralism, of deliberation…. It’s a measure of understanding the nature of force, how force saturates our world, and therefore to exit that world and think of another force. That would be radical equality—that everyone would have that force, that irreducible, insoluble force. The example of that if you will, would be conversion." ## Metadata - Author: Aishwary Kumar - Year: 2015.0 - ISBN13: ="9788189059958" - Shelves (Goodreads): india, politics Last updated: 2026-02-27 21:36