Gandhi picked urban scavengers for reform while ignoring rural Untouchables.

Evidence

Gandhi narrowed it even further to the issue of ‘Bhangis’—scavengers, a mostly urban and therefore somewhat politicised community. … Rural Untouchables—ploughmen, potters, tanners and their families—lived in scattered, small communities, in hutments on the edges of villages (beyond polluting distance). Urban Untouchables—Bhangis, Chuhras and Mehtars—scavengers, as Gandhi liked to call them, lived together in numbers and actually formed a political constituency. … Gandhi seized upon the Balmikis and made them his show window for untouchability. Upon them he performed his missionary acts of goodness and charity. He preached to them how to love and hold on to their heritage, and how to never aspire towards anything more than the joys of their hereditary occupation. All through his life, Gandhi wrote a great deal about the importance of ‘scavenging’ as a religious duty. It did not seem to matter that people in the rest of the world were dealing with their shit without making such a fuss about it. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 306

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘It did not seem to matter that people in the rest of the world were dealing with their shit without making such a fuss about it’ — dry, quotable jab worth sharing.
• XREF: connects to: Gandhi erased cities from Indian history to posit a classless idyllic village past — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1065