India Without Gandhi

In Spite of official apathy and unofficial antipathy, Gandhi refuses to die, writes Mushtaq Naqvi

There had never been any dearth of denigrators and detractors of Gandhi. In his won life time the closest to him were his greatest vilifiers. The fault lies neither with Gandhi nor his adversaries. The Gandhi Phenomenon was really never fully understood notwithstanding the fact that he painstakingly explained himself all his life. There is no other case known to us in which every fact is known and their sum amounts to an unknown. And to this day he remains an enigma – an enigma we cannot live without.

We acknowledge his greatness and then we shower abuses on him and call him names, but in both these extreme attitudes, we expose our helpless in not forgetting him. Somehow in some mysterious way he always was and still remains our only un-changing point of reference.

Wherever we are plunged in darkness, whenever we seem to be overwhelmed by the evil forces by one kind or the other, when ever the country’s future seems to be in jeopardy, the figure of his frail little man appears before our eyes. We seem to run to him just as a frightened child runs to his mother to seek the shelter of her “Pallu” And once the storm is past, we revert to our old pettiness of mind and body.

Inspite of the official apathy and unofficial antipathy, inspite of the sterile sympathy of the oppressed, inspite of the hopeless empathy among a few kindred souls, Gandhi refuses to die. He still lives among us in the shape of an uneasy conscience.

He will perhaps remain alive as part of ourselves no matter how much we try to forget him. He was one of us – manifestly the best we are capable of, for he represented the unchanging small core of the being of all Indians which silently takes the beating of life and time with remarkable tenacity but comes out unscathed at the end.

He wished all his writings to be buried with him; he wanted to survive only in his deeds. He preached, but he preached by example – his own. By living a life of utter simplicity – a life led by most of his fellow Indians, he exalted them to heights they had never experienced before. The Indian masses saw in the half naked. Mahatma a rishi who had stepped out of the pages of great epic to liberate his country. He spoke in the idiom they readily understood; the battle between good and evil, between the higher and baser ideals made more sense to them the niceties of a constitutional debate could ever have done.

They venerated him for turning his back on worldly ambitions; his call for sacrifice for the mother-land did not seemed himself an epitome of tyaga (renunciation). He represented the unherioc, ordinary, superstitious, sceptical tradition-bound Indian in a way no politician has done since his days. This fanciful dreamer of inconvenient and impossible dreams commanded the loyalty and homage of millions that no emperor could buy. He made humility and simple truths more powerful that empires.

Gandhi was not meant for academicians yet has become a subject of debate – national and anti-national. He was not a theorist yet he is saddled with a creed they in their cultivated ignorance call “Gandhism”. He gave no new idelology for ideology meant dividing for ideology meant dividing the world into two antagonistic camps. His story is written on the imperishable tablet of the manifestation of the soul of this ancient land which is also the spokesman of the conscience of all mankind.

Gandhi never set his eyes on any short- term goals. His aim was not to secure freedom for his country. That was a very insignificant and small matter to occupy his energies and concerns. British rule to him was a just retribution from providence for the degradation we have accepted ourselves. The British were here at our sufferance, and could not rule this country without our cooperation. The moment this cooperation was withdrawn British rule would fall like the proverbial house of cards. It was a bluff – a bluff that worked.

Only the Indians could call this bluff. This did not come about just because the people did not realize the explosive potential of what he was saying in his call for non-cooperation and did not act collectively. But for this the country would have been free by 1921 itself sparing us the trauma and agony of partition. British imperialism escaped liquidation because several sections of our population were tied to them by ties of self-interest. “The councilors wanted their railway fares and extras, the ministers their salaries, lawyers their fees, parents education for their boy, millionaires wanted facilities for multiplying their millions and reset their unmanly peace.”

The middle class was not willing to sacrifice it creature comforts. His man concern was the regeneration of India. His concern was to set in motion a perpetual movement rediscover our true self. This includes political freedom but goes beyond it. He was playing or higher stakes. He was, in a way, not a freedom fighter in the usual sense of the term. He had hitched his wagon to the stars. Few shared this version and this vision and this dream with him and fewer still were willing to make sacrifice for this seemingly intangible ideal.

Gandhi never converted more than a handful into true believers in ahimsa. For the vast majority of political activities even among his closest and most influential political collegues non-violence was desirable and often very useful political strategy in a specific situation rather than a total moral commitment as it was to him. They did not really understand fell his magnetic pull and fall under his spell. He himself was never keen in securing a large following for he believed that one upright man on the side of God constitutes the most powerful majority.

Gandhi once observed that he had purchased his third class ticket all the way to the holy city of Hardware, while most others in his movement his purchased their tickets up to Delhi. Now Delhi had been reached and only Gandhi was left in the train.

At the first sight of land the pilot was dropped. He was even advised to retire to the Himalayas. Overnight he became a “back number”. His presence became a source of irritation for the very from ordinary dust by his magic touch. The loaves of power proved too much too strong a temptation for the aging leadership, tired, haggard and impatient to grab whatever comes their way in shortest, possible time postponing Gandhi’s advise for patience to a more convenient occasion. Mountbatten gleefully described the state the leaders were in at that time willing even to commit suicide at his bidding.

He was used by politicians, followed for his skills and potential and after he head served their purpose tactfully ignored by them. He sensed in the closing months of his life that there would be no place for his ideals of self-denial and service when power was within the politicians grasp, that there would be no place for his ideals of self-denial and service when power was within the politicians grasp, that modes of action once the congress becomes a government. Year in and year out the congress swore by the name of Gandhi, day in and day out its vowed to stands and die for the deals set by him. But ironically these very ideals were jettisoned the moment they acquired the means to translate them into living reality.

He had already anticipated that a time may come when his followers may come when his followers may throw him overboard. And it may be that he would almost be thrown out in the streets almost be thrown out in the streets and have to beg for a piece of bread from door to door.

The assassin’s bullet saved him from this final humiliation. It also saved the Congress from extinction whose liquidation he was to propose in a resolution at his last prayer meeting he could never address. His dream of converting the Indian Congress into the Lok Seva Dal and transform it into a fully functional body of dedicated workers to build a new India never materialized nor did his vision of materialized nor did his vision of a committed body of public servants.

Society often forgives a criminal but it never forgives a dreamer. Gandhi ultimately paid the price of overstepping the limitations of his age.

“The man who pulled the trigger was not Bapu’s murderer. All of us who at any time doubled of words and entertained a feeling of violence and communalism in our hearts are responsible for his murder”.

Men and women did not really grieve for Gandhi. Each man mourned for something in himself left without a friend, a personal sorrow as if fate had seized an intimate treasure that one had always assumed would be there. This small man extended beyond time. There was India and beyond time. There was a mirror in the Mahatma in which everyone could see the best in himself and when the mirror broke it seemed that the thing in one-self might be fled for ever.

“I never saw Gandhi” said, Leon Blum, the French Socialist leader, “I do not know his language, I never set foot in his country and yet I fell as if I had lost someone near and dear.”

A brief –bordered editorial in the Hindustani Standard said it all: “Gandhi was killed by his won people for whose redemption he lived. This second crucifixion in the history of the world has been enacted on a Friday – the same day Jesus was done to death one thousand nine hundred and fifteen years ago. Father forgive us.”

Amir dil ka kisi se ilaj ho na saka

Hum apna daagh dikhate phire zamane ko

(No body could understand or cure my heartache I went round the whole world showing my wound)

It is the lot of all great men to be misunderstood but in the case of Gandhi this misunderstanding went to ridiculous lengths. His decisions and pronouncements baffled and some-times confused. They even appeared strange and funny to people born with blinkers of one kind or the other on their eyes. How this greatest Indian since Gautama the Buddha and the greatest man since Jesus Christ was put to ridicule appears in credible today.

When Gandhi spoke about charkha people used to laugh. They used to say that a small charkha would not be able to take on the mills of Manchester People laughingly said that the charkha would serve to make his funereal pyre.

Then everyone said pinch of salt would do nothing. Motilal Nehru viewed Satyagraha as nothing short of “mid-summer madness”, and said that if ever in power he would promptly arrest Gandhi .Jawaharlal Nehru described the salt satyagraha as a “curious approach to political warfare”.

About the non-cooperation movement. Tagore sounded a note of warning against “obscuring our vision of the wider world with the dust roused by political passion.” He called it a struggle to alienate our heart and mind from the West and an attempt at spiritual suicide. In Gandhi’s call for withdrawal from government service, Tagore discerned a pugnacious spirit of revenge …. a wasteful diversion of the best part of our energy. He termed it as negative and destructive in its nature. Surendranath Banerjee considered it subversive which engendered hatred towards the RajChandavarkar said that it was against the traditions of Indian culture.

At a special session of the Indian National Congress in September 1920, he claimed that India could achieve Swaraj by late 1921 if they carried out his scheme of non-cooperation. Laughter erupted at the very idea. Unfortunately he tried to explain himself the more it became difficult for people to understand him. Reason being that people to understand him. Reason being that people were attracted by ONE facet or the other of his character. They could not realize which cannot be represented by the mere agglomeration of little facts. And the ended up by calling him in turn, a fanatic, a visionary, a consummate tactician, a prophet or a trickster.

It is not surprising that the British Governor of Bengal described him as a neurotic who suffered from a particularly mischievous form of religious mania or Llyod telling Montague that Gandhi is pretty wicked as cunning as a fox and at heart bitterly anti-British The Surprising thing was that Indians – mostly so called enlightened Indians, agreed with their British masters and spoke the same language. Dinshaw Wacha said. “Mr Gandhi Who seems to have developed an extraordinary nimbus for notoriety simply tradition on the passions of the unthinking of the theatre and the marketplace.”

B. N. Basu called Gandhi’s plan a plan of mad men sarcastically said that saints were good people so long as they keep within their sphere. He was accused of doing a deadly mischief, of endangering society which meant bloodshed at home and invasion from abroad. Jinnah who called him the “wily Mahatma” wrote to say: “wily Mahatma” wrote to say: “Your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganization and chaos.”

“Though I believe in soul and God”, wrote Lallubhai Samaldas, I would not like to go to jail. Gandhiji does not mind … he is indifferent to wordly things. You and I are not lucky to have these attributes and must pull on as being of the world in the world.” This is a classic execute mouthed and nauseam during his life and even more today to make his ideals appear otherworldly and therefore impractical and unworkable. Although as Gandhi said what was possible for him was possible even for a child.

Jawaharlal indeed admitted how difficult Gandhi was to understand, how his language was almost incomprehensible to modern Indians and how he and his contemporaries discussed Gandhi’s quirkiness and half- laughing said that his fads should not be encouraged once Swaraj was achieved. When Gandhi wrote to Nehru on October 5, 1945, that he still stood by the system of government envisaged in Hind Swaraj, Nehru curtly replied: It is 38 years since Hind Swaraj was written. The world has completely changed since then.”

“But Gandhi was an incorrigible optimist and had an unshakable faith in the human spirit. He also had the human sprit. He also had the unfailing feel of the shared heritage. He said: “Jawaharlal says the does not understand my language and that he speaks a language foreign to me. This may or may not be true. But the language is no bar to union of hearts. And I know that when I am gone, he will speak my language.”

Years later Nehru had to say: “Gandhiji was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take a deep breath, like a beam of light that pierces the darkness and removes the scales from the eyes, like a whirlwind that upsets many things, by most of all the working of peoples’ mind.” He had conceded that the only way to attain freedom was the way shown by freedom was the way shown by Gandhi. At his death he paid the most eloquent tribute and described him as “the light that represented something more than the immediate present, which represented the living eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error. In his death he has reminded us of big things of life.”

Nehru did speak the language of Gandhi and took his voice to the international community. His foreign policy which refused to foreign policy which refused to divide the world into refused to divide the world into this or that, ganging up against one another was really the extension of the ancient collective wisdom of India which Gandhi worked so hard to articulate.

Nehru told the world: “I am not afraid of the future. I have no fear in my mind and I have no fear even though India, from a military point of view is of no great consequences … I am not afraid of bigness of the Great Powers and their armies, their fleets and their atom bombs. That is the lesson which my master taught me. We stood as an unarmed people against a great country and a great empire… because we decided not to submit to evil.”

Gandhi in his lifetime was attacked from all four sides and attacked furiously -The communists or the leftist forces called him the stooge or the running dog of British imperialism, a retrograde and a reactionary who was trying to take the country who was trying to take the country down the road to hell. To M. N. Roy Gandhi seemed a petty bourgeois leader who, under the pressure of class interest had deliberately decided to restrain the stirrings of the Indian masses.

- Liberals have not found Gandhi to their liking either. Sir Santaran Nair Had said early in this century that Gandhi had gone this century that Gandhi had gone against all the great sons of nineteenth century India.

- Pan Isalamic thinkers like Iqbal saw in Gandhi a rabid caste Hindu out to deny Muslims a dignified life with a separate dignified life with a separate identity. To most Muslim leaders he appeared nothing more or nothing less than a Hindu.

- Hindu communalists branded him anti- Hindu cause and a stinging Muslim appeaser. Savarkar felt it was his duty to remove ruthlessly the web of Gandhism that has choked the political life of Hinduism.

- Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, who wanted to turn overnight the caste reality upside down, regarded Gandhi as a stumbling block in his impatience to emancipate the so called untouchables.

-Economists openly laughed at his ideas in his face and regarded the khadi movement as a throwback to the pre industrial age.

Each one of the groups were to learn their lesson later after inflicting lasting damage on the body and psyche of India and had to admit regretfully their failure to grasp the true meaning and intention of Gandhi. Veteran communist leader S. D. Dange regretted that they could not understand the Gandhi phenomenon and it was a mistake on the part of the communists to let him down.

The Hindu communalists’ greatest grouse was that Gandhi by his very presence and with out taking notice of their ranting and raving, reduced them to the ignoble politics. When they lost the argument they killed him.

Both Jinnah and Ambedkar were untitled in suspecting the Mahatma’s intention The two barristers throught that the third one was playing court tricks with them .Jinnah succeeded in tearing the unity of the subcontinent asunder. Ambedkar led his flock away from a caste-ridden Hindu society to a egalitarian Buddhist followers of Ambedkar had to agitate for getting the same concessions as their Hindu counterparts They realized that unless social realities are transformed, mere change of religion would give them little succour.

People little realized at that time that the salt Satyagraha was a declaration of economic independence and the non-cooperation movement was nothing short of proclamation of political sovereignty.

Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation touched a chord in Indian humanity which had long been neglected. People drove the leaders away and established direct emotional links with Gandhi never before in the experience of living men did a leader so successfully and unfailingly appreciated the genius of his people and feel their pulse as Gandhi had done. Never before a single person had so much influence over the masses of India. Gandhi triggered incipient political consciousness in rural India. Way from the drawing room politics of the western elite.

Kripalani, the veteran Congress leader, candidly admitted that many of them were correct in their little correctness and were small in the process, But the Mahatma was incorrect in many thing s and yet correct in the sum total and big in the very inconsistencies. In the end he seldom or never came out at the wrong place. The Mahatma, he said was more right when he was wrong, than we were when we were right.

Nehru put the whole thing in the right perspective when he said that Gandhi often acted almost by instant; by a long and close associated with the masses he appeared to have developed , as great popular leaders often do, a new sense which tells him how the mass feels, what it does and what it can do. He reacted to this his actions accordingly and later for the benefit of his surprise and resentful colleagues tried to clothe his decisions with reason.

His critics on the economic front have fallen silent today. The large scale irretrievable destruction of nature, the poison which we are eating in the name of food as a result of discriminate use of chemicals and fertilizers, the gap between the rich and the poor on the national and international planes, economics underdeveloped and developing countries being mortgaged controlled by financial institutions controlled by vested interest , blind aping of the West and desperate efforts to achieve Western standards of living which given all the resources, is impossible to achieve, have turned people to Gandhi against His concept of Swadeshi is no more considered the ravings of crackpot but has assumed the dimensions of a practical philosophy – the only philosophy capable of containing the burgeoning poverty and alleviating the sufferings of more than that half the population of the world. The realities of the present day situation and the consequences of not heeding his advice in the mad rush to join the rat race have selected the lips of the great specialists in the economics field who contemptuously love to run down Gandhi and his economic ideas. It is true that Gandhi was no economist but he had the economic vision which most of the economists sadly lack today as they always did. Economics today has become a serious business to be left to the idiosyncrasies and whims of the economists.

Source: The Tribune, October 2, 1994