'Mahatma' (Saint) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was murdered on January 30, 1948, evoked the name of a Hindu deity just before he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a ruthless right-winger and Hindu fundamentalist.

Gandhi, the patron of non-violence, is synonymous with India – much like yoga and vegetarianism – but while he is quoted extensively by left- and right-wing alike, it is important to debunk the mythology surrounding the man.

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Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, known affectionately as 'Baba Saheb,' was the father of India's Constitution and a champion for the rights of 'Dalits,' the country's most oppressed class. He's also known for his classic text, "Annihilation of Caste": an undelivered speech from 1936 examining Hinduism and the Indian caste system from a historical perspective.

In Annihilation, Ambedkar denounces Hinduism for its casteist stance and proposes conversion as a way for Dalits to escape the religion, which advocates for segregation in its holy script, the Manusmriti, effectively treating Dalits as sub-human. His views on Gandhi were equally scathing.

"I must say at the outset that I feel quite surprised at the interest of the outside world, (the way the) Western world particularly seems to be taking Mr Gandhi; I cannot understand that," Ambedkar told the BBC during a 1955 interview.

"As far as India is concerned, he was an episode in my judgment; never an epoch maker. Gandhi has already vanished from the memory of the people in this country. His memory is kept because the Congress party annually gives a holiday on his birthday." 

Rejecting the popular notion of Gandhi as a saintly figure, Ambedkar said he saw "real fangs" in 'Mahatma.' 

"As I met Mr Gandhi as an opponent, I have a feeling I know him better than other people because he had opened his real fangs to me and I could see the inside of the man, as opposed to others who went there as devotees and saw nothing of him except the external appearance which he had put up as a Mahatma." 

"I saw him in his human capacity, the bare man in him." 

Ambedkar noted that Gandhi was "all the time double-dealing," referring to his mercurial stance on issues such as casteism. 

"When you read the two papers, you'll see how Mr Gandhi was deceiving the people. In the English paper, he posed himself as an opponent of the caste system and that of untouchability and that he was a Democrat, but when you read the Gujarati magazine, you'll see him, he was more an orthodox man, supporting the caste system, the 'varna ashram dharma' (Indian caste system), all the orthodox dogmas that have kept the Indian system down all through ages.

"In fact, someone ought to write Mr Gandhi's biography by making a comparitive study of the statements made by him in 'Harijans' and the statement made by Mr Gandhi in Gujarati papers.

"The Western world only reads the English paper, where Mr Gandhi – in order to keep himself in esteem of the Western people who believe in democracy – was advocating democratic ideals, but you got to see what he actually said in the vernacular paper, no one actually seems to make any reference.

"We want untouchability to be abolished, but we also want that we must be given equal opportunities so that we may rise to the level of the other classes; mere washing off untouchability is off of is no consequence."

Speaking to teleSUR this week in the run-up to the anniversary of Gandhi's assassination, Priyadarshi Telang, convener of the Dalit Adivasi Adhikari Andolan organization, a non-profit working for Dalit rights, said: "In many African countries, people have started removing the statues of Gandhi."

Almost two years ago, one such Gandhi statue was removed from the University of Ghana campus after professors filed a petition saying the revered Indian independence leader was in reality a racist.

Renowned Indian writer and journalist Arundhati Roy said in an interview with British journalist Laura Flanders: "It will be distressing for the Black community, who have been taught to valorize him, and people on the American Left, who keep invoking him.

"We were told that Gandhi's 'political awakening' happened when he was thrown out of this whites-only (train) compartment in South Africa, but Gandhi believed in racial segregation: his first victory in South Africa was to campaign for a third entrance to be opened in the Durban post office so that Indians won't have to use as the same entrance as Kafirs.

"He called them 'savages.' He partnered with the British in the World War to tighten imperialism in South Africa; he partnered with the British in the very brutal (1906) Zulu uprising. 

"(Nearly) 99 percent of his time in South Africa, he didn't even campaign for the indentured Indian labor, which were of the lower castes or the subordinated castes.

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"Of course, the world thinks that he fought against caste, but what he did was he supported caste. He fought against the idea of 'untouchability,' which was the performative end of caste. 

"When Gandhi was developing this idea of 'Satyagraha' or 'soul force' as it is known, when he was shedding his Western suit and putting on the loincloth and eating this goat's cheese, the battles were not for the indentured labor or against colonialism; the battle was to expand Indian business to expand... Indian traders to expand their home range." 

In 1930, Gandhi led the 'Dandi Satyagraha' salt march protesting British laws levied on Indian salt producers which favored the sale of imported English salt in colonial India. Three years earlier, however, Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits in the 'Mahad Satyagraha' to allow so-called untouchables access to water in a communal tank in the town of Mahad. 

As Arundhati Roy explains: "Going militantly to the public water tank where they had been denied all these centuries, they were beaten and scattered by the privileged caste. Gandhi never supported that, and the Brahmins (a privileged caste of Hindus) pured the tank by pouring cow dung into it." 

Gandhi devised a plan to win over Dalits by replacing the term describing them as a depressed class with the term 'Harijans' (Children of God), a term ultimately declared 'abusive' and 'insulting' by India's top court, and banned in March 2017. 

Ramanathan S, an editor with English journal The News Minute, writes: "By using the word 'Harijan,' Gandhi was in effect making Dalits 'more acceptable' to the 'rest of the society.' 

"Instead of dealing with the real problem, which was the mindset of the upper castes, he chose to tinker with the identity of the Dalits to make it more suitable for the upper castes.

"In doing so, Gandhi wanted to make sure that he did not ruffle the feathers of influential Hindus, for he needed their support for his politics."

Sujatha Gidla, a New York subway conductor who has gained prominence for her new book "Ants Among Elephants" examines why the caste-based hierarchy remains so embedded in India.  

"Someone has to work hard, someone has to do the dirty work," she writes. "In the West, workers come from all races, but in India, in order to not to have to pay even the minimum, they are using the caste system.

"It serves two purposes: by making them feel inferior, discriminating against them, they will keep them down so that they won't demand even minimum wages, and in urban areas this system also helps to divide the working class."

Unlike Gandhi, Ambedkar was ahead of his time. As Arundhati Roy has written of Ambedkar: "After being on the drafting committee, despite his quarrels with the Congress party, he became India's first law minister and he tried to draft a Hindu code bill in which women were given the right to inheritance, to divorce, as control of women was the key to perpetuating the caste system, but the parliament was surrounded by Sadhus and the Hindu right. He actually resigned in disgust." 

The conflict between the perceived father of the nation, Gandhi, and the father of the Constitution, Ambedkar, complicates understanding of British imperialism in India. 

While Gandhi was dominating the world stage with his symbolic non-violence movement and his trade war with the British to promote home-grown products for a more robust economy, he failed to address deeper issues. 

Ambedkar was concerned not only about British imperialism but also Indian casteism, which came to the fore with the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the essence of which is promoted by the right-wingers to perpetuate Hindu fundamentalism, now embodied by the ruling right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party. 

"Ambedkar was in a wild panic about the fact that, if the British left, the state would be in the hands of the privileged caste Hindus – there would be no safeguards – so he crossed the line and lobbied hard to become a part of the drafting committee of the Constitution, to put in some safeguards," says Arundhati Roy.