Gandhi as Narrated by Mishal Husain

"Gandhi:Life and Legacy" is a 2009 BBC production. I have, however, seen it only this month. It is a three-part three-hour full biography of Mahatma Gandhi, very impressive, informative, and thought-provoking.
The lady presenter Mishal Husain's Pakistan background makes it all the more interesting. She says at the outset, 'They(her grandfather and others in the family, or more broadly the Muslims in India generally) didn't feel that he(Gandhi) was a leader for them or understood the fears they had about an independent India dominated by the Hindus'. So the family fled to the newly-born Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. So did many other Muslims, millions of them. Likewise innumerable Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan to India. Mishal is checking this evaluation of India by her own family throughout her presentation.
It was mostly the deteriorating communal, and predominantly the Hindu-Muslim, relations that worried her family at that time. These relations worsened by the stiff attitude of Gandhi, the presentation says, at the time of the Second Round Table Conference convened by the British Government to discuss the constitutional future of India at London in 1931. The presentation goes further and says that it was Gandhi who wrecked the RTC by his refusal to agree to the demands for separate, as against joint, electorates by others, and made it impossible for it to arrive at a new constitution of India.
Without trying to defend Gandhi in particular, let me raise some reservations on these points.
First, the Hindus and Muslims, the two major communities of India, had already agreed on the separate electorates back in 1916. It is another question whether the system is conducive to a better relations between the two, as it was a system which makes a political dialogue across the communities impossible and unnecessary.
The nature of the system being as above, there had been several attempts to reach an inter-communal agreement to do away with the system, but unfortunately they failed. The most prominent of them was the Nehru(Motilal) Report of 1928 and some amendments put forward by Muslim politicians. Gandhi was out of the picture then.
Third, Mishal, while researching on the RTC, was told that it was Gandhi who brought the Conference to a failure. But was it not a fact that, while the other delegates were all nominees of the British and therefore not likely to say anything embarrassing to them, Gandhi was the only one appointed by a political party(Indian National Congress)?
That was the unique value of Gandhi at the RTC. It was said in the narration that he was unprepared. It seems he was always unprepared for a meeting in the form of papers, and spoke on the spur of the moment. But he had made it clear before leaving India that his only point was to demand India's independence. The others did not do so.
Therefore to pass such a judgment on Gandhi would be rather out of date now. True, Gandhi went home empty-handed, but he was prepared to concede the separate electorate and a more decentralized government, once the Muslims agreed to support the Congress demand for independence, and to ascertain if the separate electorate was supported by the Muslim masses. They were not interested.
The 'untouchables' occupied a large segment in the story. It was very critical of Gandhi. True, many of them look at Ambedkar and not Gandhi as their 'liberator'. Gandhi tried to cope with their problem in his own peculiar way, as with almost every other problem. Still the question remains if they would have been better today if they got separate electorate of their own? They have got something like that since Gandhi's 'fast unto death' in 1932, and also in the new constitution of independent India drafted by Ambedkar. Their problem now is that of poverty which is a part of the problem of overall poverty in India. Gandhi at least showed the way of khadi(hand-spinning and weaving) and other village industries, prohibition, prevention of diseases and so on as the solution. But the ex-untouchables today are divided on the issue.
The British tried to make use of the Muslims and the 'untouchables' to split the independence movement(see my discussions of B.R.Nanda's and T.R.Sareen's books in these blogs). The Indian Princes was the third such element, the most persistent legacy of which is the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir.
Given the conditions at the time of the Partition, Mishal's forefathers would be justified in their fear of the Hindu dominance. But she was doing more justice to Gandhi when she said at the end that she was 'ambivalent and skeptical' toward Gandhi in the beginning, but that has changed and she now thinks he was 'genuine' in his intentions.