Gandhi, Gandhism and Terrorism |
Antony Copley
HELEN STEVEN CONCLUDED her recent Gandhi
Foundation Annual lecture1 by raising the question. How would have Gandhi
dealt with today’s terrorism? She raised the question too late to formulate
any kind of sustained answer, given the strong emphasis in her lecture on
the need for dialogue. She suggested that Gandhi would certainly ave wanted
to enter into some kind of conversion with the terrorists. The appalling
case of Ken Bigley was then in everyone’s mind. It occurred to me later that
Gandhi, in such circumstances, would have had an idea where the kidnappers
would be hiding him. (Later we learnt that Scotland Yard and MI6 had some
ideas, but chose to act through an intermediary and it was his attempt to
spring him that triggered his beheading).2 At the time of the lecture I felt
that a response from the floor would be that a likely strategy of Gandhi
would be to have entered into a fast. But of course beyond these gruesome
particulars the question is very close to Gandhi’s life’s work. Arguably
satyagraha and the strategy of nonviolence were targeting as much any other
phenomenon as an alternative to violent tactics of terrorism.
This paper has two parts. The first deals with
the known aspects of Gandhi’s own life and attitudes in relation to terror
while the second raises the far more speculative question as to how he might
have responded to the terrorist threat of today. The first part begins by
setting the context within which Gandhi was forced to address the issue of
terrorism. We have to discuss both state terrorism as well as private.
Definitions of state terrorism are bound to be controversial. At the outset
of his career there was at least one terrorist movement, that in Tsarist
Russia, which attracted mixed responses and indeed for many these Russian
revolutionaries were heroes and heroines. Was there not a real risk that a
like-minded movement in India would attract an equal cult following? It was
a risk that Gandhi had always to face and tragically he was himself to die
at the hands of a terrorist. The paper then goes on to discuss the character
of Gandhi’s response to the threat of a terrorist movement in India.
The second part entails stepping back and
trying to make sense of Islamic terrorism. Is it rooted in traditional
Islam? Alternatively, does fundamentalism not paradoxically emerge from
modern European thought; or as John Gray has interpreted it, Islamic
terrorism is in fact a product of western influences on Islam. It clearly is
important to establish whether the current terrorist threat is driven by the
traditional cultural values of Islam or of the west for this will leave us
in a better position to judge how Gandhi might have responded. After all,
whatever his own mixed response to the west, his own private quarrel lay
with the violent tendencies in western imperialist culture.
To elucidate Gandhi’s response to terrorism is
one possibility. To suggest that Gandhism has an answer to terrorism is
another. Maybe here we are running up against the limits of satyagraha.
State Terrorism
A definition of state terrorism by the Shorter
Oxford Dictionary begins with a reference to the reign of terror in France
during March 1793 to July 1794 and describes it as ‘a state of things in
which the general community lives in dread of death or outrage.’ Any
subsequent example of the coerciveness of extreme sate power has been
branded as terrorism. Possibly radical governments are more likely to
acquire this label than reactionary. The most obvious recent example would
be the terror as practiced by Stalin’s Russia. If Nazism is rightly likewise
branded terrorist it maybe because of it’s rightly likewise programme. Maybe
regimes with overt millenarian aims teed more horrifically towards terror.
But course attribution of terror
has been used in far more generalized ways. Just about any authoritarian
state can be accused of terror. For the anarchist the state is by definition
an instrument of terrorism. And state terror breeds private terror. Here is
John Pilger:’ only by recognising the terrorism of states is it possible to
understand, and deal with, acts of terror by groups and individuals which,
however horrific, are tiny by comparison.’ Israel, for example, he brands as
a perpetrator of ‘its own, unrelenting planned terrorism for which there is
no media language.’ Another contemporary example he cited is Russian state
terrorism in Chechnya.3 States which exercise undue force reap the whirlwind
of terrorist reprisal. But, of course, we could almost indefinitely extend
the list of states practicing terror against their subjects.
The way Gandhi challenged state
authority is at heart of satyagraha. First he had to meet the repression of
colonial authority in South Africa and the proto-apartheid state governments
of Natal and Transvaal. Here was experience he could turn to advantage in
the struggle for national independence from the Raj. Just how far this
encounter suggests the appropriateness of a Gandhian response to the more
repressive and totalitarian terrorist regimes of the recent times is open to
question, for the Gandhi was indisputably helped by having in Smuts an
opponent open to the spiritual dimensions of Satyagraha and in the raj a
regime rhetorically committed to the rule of law together with an official
class conditioned by public school values of fair-play. It took the horror
of the Amritsar massacre to open Gandhi’s eyes to the readily available
state violence behind that legal facade. The massacre released in Gandhi a
readiness to move beyond constitutionalism and dialogue to non-cooperation
and nonviolent civil disobedience. In response to colonial repression Gandhi
worked out a strategy of political resistance which could equally be
deployed to meet the challenge of other evils of his time as he saw them,
such as industrial capitalist exploitation of labour, landowner oppression
of the peasantry and communalism. How did this political agenda relate to
terrorism?
Terrorist Movement in Gandhi’s Lifetime
The histories of modern Russia and India have
much in common and the struggle of the Russian intelligentsia to liberate
Russia from serfdom and autocracy was an obvious role model for India’s own
emergent radical intelligentsia. It began with the Decembist movement and
from the beginning here was a radical protest movement divided between a
constitutional liberal approach and recourse to Jacobin style terrorism. The
same tension appeared in its successor, populism, with the alternative of a
‘going to he people,’ a nonviolent propaganda assassination of official back
on acts of extreme terror, with the assassination of officials and
landowners and in 1881 the murder of Tsar Alexander 11. A section of the
intelligentsia turned nihilist. In the mind of the leading exponent of
anarchism, Bakunin, a positive cult of the cleansing power of revolutionary,
millenarian violence took hold. In the final phase that led to 1917 the same
tension prevailed between a Marxist social democratic movement and a social
revolutionary one which remained wedded to the practice of violence by a
revolutionary elite.
Maybe what would have alarmed
Gandhi the most about Russian terrorism was the extent public opinion was on
its side. Take, for example, the support for Spridovna, the 20 years old
assassin of General Luzhenovsky, when in 1906 public opinion forced a
commutation of her death sentence to life imprisonment with crowds returning
again and again outside her detention quarters in Moscow. ‘Comrades, we
shall meet again in a free Russia’ were her words as she was put on the
train to her prison in Siberia.
But what should have been a prison
journey became a triumphal progress. Mysteriously, at each stop, cheering
crowds had assembled. At Omsk and Krasnoyarsk the frenzy mounted. The engine
driver was stoned, the Marseillaise was sung and red flags waved; the
prisoner addressed the crowds from behind her bars as offerings rained
through them, kopecks, five-rouble gold pieces, flowers and fruits. At each
halt it seemed more likely she would be rescued and the guards were trebled.
But they too seemed infected by the extraordinary circumstances and soon
Spridrovna was holding receptions, regally, from the steps of her wagon. Yet
she did not try to escape nor did the feared rescue take place.4
A parallel could be drawn with
Irish nationalism, another movement split between a parliamentarist and a
terrorist approach, and one which exercised an almost an almost equal spell
over Indian nationalists. Might a terrorist movement become just as
attractive in India?
It is sobering to discover just
how far sections of the nationalist leadership and India’s radical youth
were by the rhetoric of terrorist violence at the very time Gandhi was
working out his own theory and praxis of nonviolence. Whilst still in touch
with events in India and making periodic returns to South Africa, Gandhi’s
main concern were terrorists outside India. Through his visits to London to
petition the Colonial office on behalf of the Indian minority he became
aware of them. Their ideas drove him to write Hind Swaraj. But terrorism
within and without India was all part of the same terrorist conspiracy and
both have to be considered if we are to set Gandhi’s philosophy in context.5
Terrorism as centered in
Maharashtra, Punjab and Bengal. Two nationalists coming to prominence as the
leading extremists- Tilak from Maharashtra and Aurobindo Ghose, a Bengali by
Origin-were to be closely associated with terrorism. Had he lived beyond
1920 Tilak would have posed probably and insuperable barrier to Gandhi’s
taking over the leadership of the nationalist movement and Aurobindo was, by
all account, the most brilliant Prime Minister India was not to have. The
continually teasing question of this terrorist movement is whether it was
driven by a revivalist nationalism or merely adopted the outer trappings of
a traditional culture whilst in fact being inspired by a wholly modern
nationalist and terrorist agenda.
In Maharashtra the initial lead
came from a rural Chitpavin Brahmin, Waredeo Balwant Phadke, who dreamt of a
rising of Hindusim against foreign rule but he got no further than a series
of wild west gangland robberies prior to his flight to Hyderabad and capture
in July 1879, followed by transportation to Aden and death in 1883. A more
conspicuous act terror came with the murder in Poona of the intolerably
heavy-handed Plague Commissioner, W.C. Rand, by two Chitpavin Brahmins,
Damodar and Balkrishna Chapekar, on 22 June 1897, Their grudge had been as
much against Hindu social reformer as foreigners. They were certainly known
to Tilak and he helped both at the time of their trail. There is no
evidence, however, of his collusion with them for Rand’s murder and it was
because of tendentious newspaper articles that he was sentenced to a year’s
imprisonment on charges of sedition. Jail was already becoming the pathway
to political reputation.
Bengal became the centre of the
terrorist movement. It is a highly dramatic story, worthy of opera, with the
deeply mysterious Aurobindo as the as the figurehead. Its membership is
almost a roll-call of the nationalist elite. In the nature of any
underground movement its narrative has to be uncertain. Within Bengal the
intelligentsia, in sense no more than undergraduate societies revolutionary
cells, inspired by the Carbonari and Mazzinni, began to coalesce. One
Jatindra Nath Banerjea, a bit of a loner and by character a martinet, had
contacted Aurobindo in Baroda in his search for military training. This had
become and obsession with the terrorists and various countries including
Japan were tried till Switzerland came up with an offer. Jatindra joined the
Anushilan Samiti (Cultural Association) in Calcutta which was to become the
most prominent revolutionary cell, formally launched on 24 March 1902.
Meanwhile, a leading acolyte of the late Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, and
an Irish woman, Margaret Noble, met Aurobindo in Baroda and became actively
involved in the movement. Vivekananda’s brother, Bhupenesh Dutt, also joined
the Anushilan Samiti.Links were made with Tilak in Bombay. Aurobindo met him
for the first time at the Ahmedabad Congress meeting in 1902. Tilak appeared
to him as “the one possible leader of a revolutionary party.’6 Maharashtra,
later, was to give way to Bengal as the centre of terrorism. There was also
Thakur Saheb’s secret society, aimed at subverting loyalty in the Army.
Jatindra was later to turn to sanyassi but his preaching in the North-west
Frontier was in time to recruit Har Dayal, a Punjabi Hindu, to the terrorist
movement and he, in his turn, won over Bhagat Singh, the most impressive
among the later generation of the movement.
The terrorist movement was
momentarily eclipsed by the populist Swadeshi movement, Bengal’s outraged
response to its division in 1905, but as that protest waned it once again
took centre stage. Meanwhile Aurobindo’s brother, Baring Ghose, had usurped
Jatindra’s role as leader and set up a kind of ashram in the garden of a
suburban house in Maniktola. The most outstanding new recruit to the cell
was the explosive experts, Hem Das who had returned recently from Europe.
Now began a series of attempts to assassinate prominent officials, first
choice being the highly unpopular Lt. Governor of East Bengal, Sir Banfylde
Fuller-‘the unsuccessful attempt to commit to kill Fuller was probably the
first serious attempt to commit a political murder in Bengal’s modern
history.’7 Next choice, likewise abortive, was his successor, Sir Andrew
Fraser, through the blowing up of his train. District Magistate D.C. Allen
was shot by the Dacca branch of the Anushilan Samiti in December 1907. Then
the Chandernagore cell failed in the assassination of the French mayor of
the city, M.Tarnivel-he’d effectively cut off the arms traffic between
French and British India. Finally the Calcutta cell got its victim if not
its chosen target (Douglas Kingsford, Calcutta’s Chief Presidency Magistrate
recently transferred as judge to Muzaffarpur in Bihar) in March 1908, the
terrorist murdering, instead, a Mrs Pringle Kennedy and her daughter, the
assassins being Khudiram bose and Prafulla Chaki. The hand held bomb,
christened ‘the bomb of Mother Kali,’ had become the symbol of violent
revolution.
All these events became the focus
of the Alipore Conspiracy trial held in 24 Parganas, Calcutta. The
government’s main aim was to incriminate Aurobindo. If he had become
increasingly absorbed in his journalism, editing the Bande Mataram, he had
never lost contact with the terrorists and was yet to renounce violence. In
large part through the brilliant advocacy C.R.Das-how any one as clever as
Aurobindo could have become associated with such a crackpot amateur outfit
as the Anushilan Samiti - he was acquitted. As Peter Heehs puts it, ‘he had
just escaped imprisonment for an offence that was the unquestionably had
committed. Not only was he a conspirator, he was the originator and the
first organiser of a conspiracy whose declared aim was to drive the British
from India.’8 His brother and Hem Das were not to be so fortunate. Barin was
condemned to death, through on appeal this was commuted to a life sentence,
and he along with Hem Das and others, was deporated to the Andaman Islands.
They were not freed till February 1920.
Aurobindo took up the cudgels
again, editing another radical newspaper Karmajogin, but it was obvious that
the authorities were determined to get him was to enter on a lifetime’s
internal exile, fleeing via Chandernagore to Pondicherry. But Aurobindo had
undergone a sea change, renouncing the Russian and Irish path of terror as
unsuitable for India, and embarked on his yogic quest for the supermind.
Tilak, likewise heavily compromised by these events, was charged with
sedition for an article in Kesari, which allegedly justified the terrorism
of Muzaffarpur murders, and was sentenced to six years imprisonment and
deported to Mandalay. He was only released in Poona on 17 June 1914.
But violence had not yet had its
day. The CID officer involved in the trial, Inspector Shamsul Alam, was
murdered. There was another attempt on the life of Fraser. A new terrorist
group, Jugantar, took up the running, climaxing with the attempted
assassination by Rash Behari Bose of Viceroy Hardings on his entry into the
Raj’s new Capital on 23 December 1912. The terrorist had almost matched the
Russian assassination of Alexander 11 in 1881.
Gandhi had been more immediately
concerned by the terrorists in London. On 2 July 1909 Sir Curzon Wyllie,
Secretary of State for India, had been shot at the Imperial Institute in
Kensingtone by Madanlal had been shot at the Imperial Institute in
Kensington by Madanlal Dhingra, ‘ a tall, gangling Mahratta with thick curly
hair and a square revolutionary terrorist movement which goes back to one
Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857-1930), a rich Inner Temple trained barrister,
Dewan of several Indian princely states, who used his wealth to finance the
cause of Indian nationalism, with who lectureships and scholarships, and
also founded India House in Highgate in 1905, a home for Indian students,
which all but became a cell for terrorist. He edited a journal much
influenced by the ideas of Herbert Spencer, The Indian Sociologist, whose
reading Gandhi oddly encouraged in his own Indian Opinion. Paynes states
that ‘Gandhi genuinely liked and admired him.’ He took himself and his
journal off to Paris in 1907.
If, as Anthony parel writes,
Krishnavarma was ‘the organizing genius of the Indian expatriates,
‘V.D.Savarkar (1883-1966) was ‘the brain of the group.’10 He had briefly
resided in Highgate House. Savarkar proved to be a major force in Indian
political life, inspiration for Hindu nationalism, that communally divisive
hindutva movement. At this stage Savarkar encouraged terror, took Dhingra
under his wing, grooming him for political martyrdom. Intially the target
was the former Viceroy Curzon, but an opportunity was botched. On the day
Dhingra was to murder Sir Curzon Wyllie, Savarkar allegedly gave Dhingra a
nickel- plated revolver and said, “ Don’t show your face if you fail this
time.”11 Gandhi was surely right to see Dhingra as acting under the
influence of others. He was sentenced to death and hung on Augest17. Rather
strangely, Gandhi, on Dusshera day (24 October), then engaged with Savarkar,
Gandhi Taking up the Theme of the exemplary role of Rama, emphasising his
peaceful courage and devotion to duty, Savarkar dwelling on the goddess
Durga, ‘the bringer of sudden death,’ Astonishingly, Savarkar remained free,
only to be involved with Planning terrorist acts in the presidency of
Bombay and providing the murder weapon that killed the District Magistrate
of Nasik, A.M.T.Jackson on 29 December 1909. He was staying with
Krishnavarma in Paris at the of his arrest warrant on 22 February 1910. He
inexplicably surrendered himself to the authorities and was sent for trail
to Bombay, briefly escaping in Marseilles en route. Savarkar was the
arch-conspirator of the Nasik Conspiracy trail. There was a Chance that
Hague Tribunal might decide Savarkar had been illegally arrested in France
and hence acquitted. But the Hague Tribunal had no sympathy for terrorist,
turned down the appeal, and on 23 December Savarkar was sentenced to life
imprisonment in the Andaman Island. In 1924 the Labour government released
him: at forty one he looked sixty and resembled a lean and hungry hawk, with
bitter mouth and eyes that seemed hooded.’12 He was to inspire Ghodse,
Gandhi’s assassin, and lived on till 83, dying on 26 February 1966.
Gandhi’s Response
At the time Gandhi had embarked on a programme
of nonviolent civil disobedience the murder of Sir Clifford Wyllie was a
disturbing reminder that he was up against a potentially hugely influential
alternative strategy of terrorist violence. Indeed, Gandhi’s entire
political life was to be overshadowed by this alternative. Admittedly, in
some ways it advantaged him in the sub-continental freedom struggle, for, to
quote Heehs, Gandhi realised ‘that much of his strength came from being
regarded by the British as a lesser evil.’13 But it was a challenge he had
to confront and on his return to South Africa on board Kildonan Castle, in
an almost inspired way between 13 to 22 November he wrote the Gujarati
version of Hind Swaraj. Anthony Parel has persuasively shown how Gandhiji’s
critique of so-called ‘modern civilisation’ was in large part driven by what
he saw as its violent pursuit of power. Madan Lal Dhingra’s crime, to quite
Parel’s interpretation of Gandhi’s response, ‘was a modern political act
par excellence- Terrorism legitimized by nationalism.’14 Gandhi admittedly
separated out from western civilisation which had a modern and Christian
Dimension. Not all had been corrupted. But in Industrialism and imperialism
there was clear evidence of violence within this modernity. Gandhi was
profoundly committed to a view that ends did not justify means that violent
means could only have outcome, and it was vital for an ancient civilisation
such as India not to allow these western values to take hold. Taking a
stance the violence of terror became part of larger defense of Indian
values, through Gandhi was all too aware there had to be a transformation
from within, a revitalization of dharma, if India was to advance. It is in
this continuing tension between tradition and a kind of vulgar modernity
that we will find best the answer to how Gandhi would have reacted to
today’s Islamic terrorism.
There is, however, another way of
critiquing terrorism. It can read as a form of political immaturity. The way
forward for the nationalist movement lay in reaching out for greater popular
involvement and indeed in that very democratization of the struggle that
Gandhi was to introduce. Tilak and Aurobindo are faulted by the JNU
historians for their failure to direct the young revolutionaries of
Maharashtra and Bengal in this direction. Only when Tilak came to see the
need for a broader based democracy did he come of age as a politician.
Exactly the same debate had of course gone on within the Russian
revolutionary movement. Turning away from the democratic route to have had a
fatal attraction. This was to have a baleful long-term appeal.
But the terrorist movement
continued within and without India to surface as an option. Abroad its
centre passed to Canada and the American west coast in the Ghadar (Revolt)
movement. Here was a Punjabi and Sikh involvement in terror, Lala Har Dayal
its inspiration. It spread back into India, but in 1915, with the CID on its
trail, a planned rebellion under the leadership of Rash Behari Bose, was
stifled at birth: ‘an entire generation of the nationalist leadership of
Punjab was thus politically beheaded.’15 Still, in terms of the secularism
of the movement, ‘The Ghadarites certainly,’ the JNU historians believe,
‘contributed their share to the struggle for India’s freedom,’ In its
aftermath the lesson of democracy was seemingly learnt but only in the short
–run and many former terrorists played their part in the non-cooperation
movement only to revert to terror after its withdrawal. Most famously, there
was Bhagat Singh, seen as ‘a giant of an intellectual,’ active in the
Hindustan Socialist republican Association (Army). He was one of the
terrorists who murdered a police official, Saunders, as a national hero with
Lal Lajpat Rai in a lathi charge, and then became a national hero with his
lobbing a bomb into the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929.
Admittedly his intention had been to attract publicity through a trial,
little damage had been done, and subsequent Bhagat Singh renounced terror in
favour of mass action. He was hung in March 1931.
Within Bengal terror flared up
again at much the same time as the salt satyagraha. The Yugantar and
Anushilan groups merged. A Chittagong group, on 18 April 1930, a day chosen
to coincide with the date of the Dublin Easter uprising,16 seized the police
armory and embarked on a rebellion with a full scale military encounter on
the neighboring Jalalabad hill. Its leader Surya Sen was not to be captured
till 16 February 1933.
Through, as the JNU historian
claim, revolutionary terrorism gave way to the radical leftist parties in
the 1930’s; Gandhi could never relax his grip. There was always the fear of
its resurgence. He tried to wean such activities as Jayaprakash Narayan off
terror by absorbing them within the ashram movement. He desperately, through
not unsuccessfully, tried to contain the appeal of subhash Bose still locked
in the terrorist tradition in Bengal. The risk was to become all too
apparent in usurge of violence in the Quit India satyagraha- the prevailing
of Narayan who was Highly active in terror against properly tradition in
upsurge of violence in the Quit India Satyagraha- the Prevailing of Narayan
who was highly active against property rather than persons, and, Subhas
Bose’s far more sinister fascist-style Indian National Army. It seemed all
too horribly appropriate that Gandhi was in the end to lose his to a
terrorist.
The Origins of Muslim Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism does not inevitably lead to
terror. But they are closely associated and it is here we have to begin the
exploration of terror and Islam. Given Gandhi’s sympathy for traditional
culture and antipathy for the modernizing West it makes sense to try to
establish whether fundamentalism is rooted in the past of Islam or is a
relatively recent and modern phenomenon.
Not that such generalization about
Islam is without difficulty. Samuel Huntingdon’s theory of a clash of
civilizations,17 with its over simplification about Islam, may have served
the need for the West to have an alternative ‘other’ to demonise with the
collapse of the Soviet threat, but quite this has been seen to be’ sloppy
and dangerous language.’18 Jason Burke states: ‘It is facile and dangerous
to talk of “a clash of civilisation.” The West and the Islamic world are not
monolithic blocs where identity is based around religion or secularism,
tyranny or democracy, human rights or repression, as or secularism, tyranny
or democracy, human rights or repression, as all who have traveled in the
Middle East know. Even the most devout do not define themselves by Islam
alone.’19 In other words, we all have multiple identities. Islam clearly is
a chameleon faith and expresses itself differently according to historical,
social-economic, political and cultural circumstances. Maybe what is so
distinctive about the present wave of fundamentalism is just its attempt to
take on more monolithic character.
There are two paradigms for
situating contemporary both Islamic fundamentalism and terror, one that
interprets it as a consequence of a wounded civilisation and sees at work
here a revivalist movement, and those who view it as an entirely modern
phenomenon, perversely drawing on modern western concepts to attack the West
.To make sense of the first approach we have to undertake a kind of survey
without the detail of the story of Islam itself.20
Source: Gandhi Marg, Issue: January – March
2005, Vol. 26, No. 4 |