An interview with P. Sainath

An interesting interview with Sainath via Kuffir. Excerpt:
"I have a problem with always looking back only to what was said in the 1920s and what was said during the civil disobedience movement or during the Quit India movement. I do not believe Gandhi was the only leader of the freedom struggle. If you’re looking at statues and reverence, you would find there are far more statues of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, a PhD from Columbia University who emerged from the untouchable classes of Indian society.

In fact, the difference between Ambedkar and any other Indian leader is that the statues of Ambedkar are put up by public subscription, not by government fatwa. The freedom struggle of India gave us many leaders and luminaries of enormous standing. However, I think that on many issues I would rather look at Gandhi and Ambedkar in terms of what would their stance or their understanding of the present situation be? How would they act now? On some of the central issues of our time—oppression of the poorer castes and the so-called untouchables—I think history has proven Ambedkar to be right. Ambedkar’s prognosis of the role that caste would play in democracy, of how a lack of economic democracy would damage political democracy, has been borne out by history. What would Gandhi say about the obscene inequality that you’re looking at in the world? A man who said that for those who die of hunger the only form in which God may dare appear is food. That’s the interesting thing for me."
Interestingly, from Mark Lindley's Life and Times of Gora, chapter 5:
"Gandhi wanted to be certain, however, that Manorama was acting freely. Early in 1946, when he had occasion to visit Madras, he asked Gora and Manorama (as well as Mythri) to meet him there, and he asked an orthodox caste-Hindu colleague who was fluent in Telugu to interview Manorama and see if she was under duress. But she was unequivocal: “We are working for social equality and the eradication of Untouchability.” So Gandhi declared, “Now they are my children. Let them wait for two years and in the meantime let us announce their engagement.” Arjun Rao, the groom whom Gora and Sara swa thi had chosen, was sent for and came to Madras. Gandhi found him presentable and fairly fluent in Hindi, which was the one language common to every one at Sevagram, so he invited him to spend the next two years there, while Manorama, who did not speak Hindi, would study at a nurses’ and midwives’ training center in Andhra. At Sevagram Gandhi told Arjun,

“You should become like Ambedkar. You should work for the re moval of Untouchability and caste. Untouchability must go at any cost.” "
P.S. Sainath says "Palagummi is the name of a now-nonexistent village in Andhra Pradesh. ... My granddad used to tell me that Palagummi was a village in the Godavari area," According to Wikipedia, there is still a village Palagummi in Razole Mandal of East Godavari District.