Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy

B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi are two figures who have had the most enduring impact on India.Their well-documented divergence and combativeness is met with either facile attempts at synthesis,or the forbidding of any attempt to study them in proximity. Resisting both these positions, Aishwary Kumar's Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy offers an archeology of the interminable tension between two visions of democracy, two ways of grasping at sovereignty, in the colonial world. With close readings of texts, statements and political stances, Kumar identifies the sites where the two thinkers come closest to each other, while also revealing their irreconcilable distance in thought. Their shared grammar of struggle becomes the ground of their absolute incommensurability. Radical Equality challenges us to think afresh the ideas of equality, justice,freedom and dissent.