Gandhi could never come to terms with the fact that he took leave from his dying father to have sex with his wife; his father died while he copulated. This episode produced a lifelong obsession with overcoming sexual desire and sanitation (or so Freudians will claim). Unrelatedly, Gandhi had unconventional (even bad, for their time) ideas about some other important matters – he wasn’t a fan of industrialization. All this is well known.
Was Gandhi a hidden, if not manifest, Hindu nationalist with an upper caste agenda? None too careful ideological hobbyist historians like Arundhati Roy will have you believe that. Do they have a point? No.
There are a great many similarities between how Jinnah and Ambedkar argued their cases with Gandhi. Not much distinguishes how Gandhi responded to each, often refusing to agree to the ‘facts’ that motivated their arguments, and always disagreeing with the claim that there was just one solution (the solution they proposed) to the problem they had identified. Gandhi saw both these leaders as too infatuated with their solutions (Gandhi was a touch too infatuated with his own solutions). He thought their solutions were irresponsible, if not illogical. Gandhi saw both Jinnah and Ambedkar eye to eye on the problems (we have good evidence on that), but never on the solutions. Does it make him opposed to their aims? No. His aims were the same as theirs, if not more ambitious.
(Upper caste) Hindus are never going to change. Replace ‘upper caste Hindus’ with any other group and you have a fair gist of the dominant understanding of people of ‘other groups.’ No easier caricature of humanity than this. If you believe that, the solution is obvious. Kill or split. Order restored. Except often enough order isn’t. The legacy of hatred lives on. The oppressed mutate into oppressors of their ‘own’ kind. (Who is your own is something we don’t think about enough about, relying often on simple heuristics. Is Lalu Prasad Yadav a well-wisher of all Yadavs? I think not. The same goes for enemies.)
You need more courage to see the greater truth – that people so thoughtlessly cruel can just as easily become defenders of enlightened ‘common sense’, that certain truths can be understood by people and that many will (and do) happily sacrifice their material advantage once they understand those facts. You also need courage to work from this greater truth. Creating change in people isn’t easy. Quite the opposite. But over the long run, it is perhaps the only solution.
But then, a lot of change (both positive and negative) has come incidentally, not as a result of conscious programs. Demographics along with particular democratic institutions in India have increased the political power of the lower castes (though like everybody, they haven’t always used it wisely). And economic liberalization, brought upon for different reasons, may have done more to erase caste boundaries than many other conscious attempts.