Gandhi: The Unfinished Battle for the Soul of India

As India approaches the 78th death anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 2026, we honor not just the architect of independence, but the man whose profound moral journey was anchored by a single, searing conviction: Swaraj (self-rule) was meaningless without the eradication of untouchability.

Hailed as Mahatma, Bapu and Father of the Nation, Gandhi’s lifelong struggle against the deeply entrenched caste system was an agonizing, radical project of personal and national transformation. From a child’s discomfort in Gujarat to his final days in a Delhi slum, his fight for the dignity of the marginalized was the beating heart of India’s freedom movement.

Gandhi’s rebellion against the caste system began not in a political arena, but within the intimate, rigid walls of his childhood home in Porbandar. In his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi recalls Uka, a sweeper boy who came daily to clean the family’s latrine. As a child, Mohandas wished to play with him, perhaps even touch him. But a rigid wall of caste separation governed even this innocent desire. “If I happened to touch Uka, I was told to go and bathe immediately,” Gandhi wrote, detailing the household’s insistence on ritual “purification.”

This early memory was a lasting etching of injustice. Though he complied as a child, the senselessness of treating Uka as inherently ‘untouchable’ planted the first, powerful seed of rebellion—a discomfort that would later become a lifelong crusade.

Kirti Mandir (Gandhi’s Birth place)

If the Uka incident was a personal lesson, South Africa provided a stage for action. Among the many episodes from his two-decade stay, the plight of Balasundaram, a young Tamil indentured laborer, stands out. Reduced to a virtual slave, Balasundaram had been brutally beaten and exploited by his employer.

Appalled by the cruelty, Gandhi intervened to secure the man’s release, effectively “rescuing from the clutches of slavery,” as he recorded in his writings. This act should not be recognized as compassion; it was a recognition of how oppression, whether caste in India or racial/class exploitation abroad, degraded labor and dignity. Gandhi’s nascent Satyagraha was forged in the defense of the most powerless.

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he brought with him the conviction that reform had to begin at the most difficult place: home. 

At Kochrab Ashram, Gandhi enacted his conviction, inviting the family of Duda Bhai, a Dalit, to live within the nascent community. The backlash was immediate and fierce. Many ashramites protested, donors withdrew their support, and the ashram’s funds began to dry up. Even Kasturba Gandhi resisted, worried about ritual purity and social ostracization. Gandhi, however, stood firm. “This ashram is not worth its name if it cannot accommodate Duda Bhai’s family,” he declared. His uncompromising stand revealed his method: social equality demanded sacrifice and courage in daily life, not just abstract political sloganeering. Eventually, Kasturba relented, recognizing the profound moral force of his commitment.

Four years later, Gandhi deepened his personal commitment with a truly radical gesture for a conservative society: he adopted Laxmi, a young Dalit girl, into his own household at Sevagram. She was raised alongside his own children, educated and treated as family.

Gandhi viewed the adoption not as charity, but as justice. If untouchability was to end, he argued, families like his had to erase the line of exclusion within their own homes. The adoption of Laxmi was a moral lesson for the entire nation: equality begins at the hearth.

Laxmi (Gandhi’s adopted daughter)

Gandhi institutionalized his personal efforts through national platforms, declaring that untouchability was the moral litmus test of Indian civilization were profound. In one of his most powerful declarations, Gandhi wrote in Young India (1921) “I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and affronts leveled at them, in order that I may endeavor to free them and myself from that miserable condition.” By expressing a wish to be reborn as a bhangi, one who handles sanitation work, traditionally deemed the ‘lowest’, Gandhi delivered a devastating challenge to the caste system. He didn’t want mere sympathy; he wanted the raw experience of humiliation. This wish was a continuation of his lived practice: cleaning latrines himself, sweeping streets, and consistently arguing in his journals, Young India and Harijan, for the inherent dignity of all labor since it was through the divisions of labor deemed dignified/undignified, pure/impure that the caste system tried to draw justifications for its oppression.

Following the Poona Pact of 1932 with Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi established the Harijan Sevak Sangh. This body organized sanitation drives, schools and welfare programs, keeping the issue central to the independence movement. He used his weekly journal, Harijan, as a moral pulpit, thundering: “Untouchability is the greatest blot on Hinduism… Swaraj without its removal would be a sham.” He even campaigned for Temple Entry for Dalits, forcing Hindu institutions to confront their own hypocrisy. As independence neared in 1946, Gandhi chose to live in the Bhangi Basti (Valmiki Colony) in Delhi. There, he taught Dalit children, cleaned the neighborhood and lived amidst those whom society despised. His simple presence and the multifaith evening prayers held there, was a daily, powerful rebuke to caste prejudice.

As Vivek Shukla notes in Gandhi’s Delhi, this was “a deliberate act of solidarity with the most marginalized.” Though persuaded to leave for the security of Birla House on September 9, 1947, a “grave miscalculation,” according to his secretary Pyarelal Nayyar, who believed he was safer among the poor, Gandhi’s final period of public life was spent in the heart of the marginalized community. Perhaps Gandhi’s most remarkable acknowledgment of Dalit capability came during the formation of the Drafting Committee for the Indian Constitution. When suggested that a foreign expert like Sir Ivor Jennings be entrusted with the task, Gandhi intervened.

As recorded in Gandhi’s Delhi, he advised: “Why look for a foreigner when we have in our midst an outstanding legal and constitutional expert in Dr. Ambedkar, who ought to be entrusted with the role which he so richly and rightly deserves?” This act of profound trust, recommending a man who was his strongest critic on the issue of caste, was Gandhi’s ultimate demonstration. It showed his faith in education as the great leveler and his belief that a free India required the brilliance of its most oppressed citizens at its foundation.

Gandhi and Ambedkar

Gandhi’s battle against untouchability was never uncontested. Resistance came from orthodox society, ashramites and even family members. By defending Dalit dignity in public and private life, and by elevating Dr. Ambedkar, he laid the moral foundation of equality in India’s democracy. The India that emerged after 1947 bore witness to a partial realization of this dream. Dalits rose to the highest offices Gandhi could only have imagined. K.R. Narayanan, once denied temple entry, became President of India in 1997. Decades later, Ram Nath Kovind, also from a Dalit background, held the same office. In education, professions and politics, historic barriers have been broken.

Yet, the shadows remain. Caste-based violence, untouchability in practice and systemic exclusion persist in many parts of the country. Gandhi’s warning still echoes: “Swaraj is a meaningless word so long as we continue to deny the rights of the most oppressed.” His legacy is both fulfilled and unfulfilled. The political victories are clear, but social justice remains an unfinished project. As India marks his birth anniversary, the challenge Gandhi set, to secure a Swaraj that is not only political but profoundly social, continues to demand a national cleansing of conscience. The dignity of every Uka, Laxmi and Balasundaram remains the true measure of our freedom.