Monday 7 June 2010

Forgetting Gandhi


I’m going to have to ask my Indian friends to forgive me for what I’m about to write. I have no admiration at all for Mohandas Gandhi, a man whose influence on India was often more negative than positive, a man who by his politics and outlook did as much as any other to guarantee the tragic partition of 1947, a man even less relevant to modern India than he was to India of the past.

Yes, I know this is a dangerous step; I know it’s likely to make people angry with me because Gandhi is such a sainted figure, the father of a nation, the inspiration of the planet. Criticising him is almost as dangerous as criticising George Washington! Still, so far as I am concerned, the most perceptive comment ever made about the great Indian – I offer no challenge at all to his greatness –was that made by an Oxford academic when the Mahatma came to England in 1931 to attend the Second Round Table Conference. He compared him to Socrates “for absolute control and self-composure”, then added that for the first time in his life he understood why the Greeks made Socrates drink hemlock.

We all know about the saintliness, the generosity of spirit the admirable commitment to non-violence, which paradoxically was often the cause of more violence. His eccentricities are, perhaps, a lot less well known. He was a food faddist, the father of a thousand cults, and a man who’s much vaunted sexual abstinence led to some bizarre and eccentric behaviour. To make certain personal demands, to have the self-discipline to adhere to a particularly arduous and puritanical path, is one thing; it’s quite another when other people are drawn in. When one of his sons got involved in a fast he said that “if he dies in the process it will not be a matter of regret.”

In his own fasting there was, like so much of his political life, always an element of the theatrical, of showmanship, of the bogus and insincere gesture. His ascetic diet was extended to full-scale hunger strikes ‘to the death’, seventeen times in all, though as British observers wryly noted they never actually were to the death.

It’s perhaps no great surprise that Gandhi’s grasp of international politics in the 1930s was less than perceptive, given his close involvement in domestic affairs. Still some of his comments retain the power to unsettle. He made no distinction whatsoever between the benevolent imperialism of the British and the rapacious imperialism of the Germans and Japanese. He once said that he did not think that Hitler was as bad as depicted, and that the Jews rather than enduring Nazi persecution should commit mass suicide, which would rather have made the Holocaust an altogether less expensive affair. Worst of all was his demand in 1942 that the British leave India to ‘God or to anarchy’, when the Japanese were poised on the threshold. He seems to have been quite blind to the suffering that Japan had inflicted on China from 1937 onwards.

And then there is much-trumpeted personal poverty, his modesty and loin-cloth asceticism transmitted to all around. He always insisted on travelling third class when going by railway. This might have been admirable but for the fact that the Congress Party was obliged to dig into party funds to hire a whole third-class coach.

Of course the worse thing of all is that his politics, and therefore the politics of the Congress Party, drew heavily on Hindu tradition and religion. This would not have been bad if India had been a Hindu nation, but it was not. Gandhi unravelled a political style that made the substantial Muslim minority feel that a British raj was destined to be replaced by a Hindu raj. What India needed at that time in its history was a strictly secular party, one that did not allow religion to intrude in politics. Nehru had a far better understanding of that simple truth than Gandhi. But Nehru was only a politician; Gandhi was the Mahatma.

India is now one of the most dynamic and progressive nations in the world, one with a vibrant economy. It’s moved well beyond Gandhi’s spinning wheel ideal, which would have kept it locked forever in a semi-feudal past. Gandhi may be a great saint but it’s as well to leave such people locked forever in some irrelevant paradise.

24 comments:

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  2. That one is too well known. :-))

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  5. They seek her here, they seek her there... :-)

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  7. Have you read Paul Scott's Raj Quartet? If not I think you would love it.

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  9. Speaking as a British born Indian whose loyalities lay with Pakistan in 1947 but whose grandfather had already moved to the UK and chose not to go back to the newly partitioned country, I think this is a very brave blog. Revealing things about Gandhi (it is spelt thus, Ana) most western academic would cover up. The Attenborough film paints such a portrait. Turning him into something of a prophet. Professor Akbar S Ahmed has criticised the film in his book Jinnah, Pakistan & Islamic Identity: the search for Saladin. This si the book that accompanied the 1998 film biopic of Jinnah starring Christopher Lee. A true tribute to your erudite knowledge of notice of such things!

    Did you catch Mishal Hussain's (the BBC presenter whose own family story led her to make a very sober and constructive portrait in her) recent documentary series on Gandhi?

    Jinnah is more my kind of man!

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  10. A big HUG here Anna! This guy was a hypocrite! I happen to be one who disliked his appearance from the beginning. Later I read a book "legends lies & cherished myths of world history" by Richard shenkman, it confirmed my impression (I am still not saying what the book told are all truth, who knows)
    According to the book, this guy (Gandhi) violently against western medicine, to protect his belief, he let his wife (whom he did care at all at the time) died without a simple treatment. But 2 months later, he got problem his own and he miraculously opened his mind to embrace western medicine to let himself live (into a saint!)
    Another suspicious/hypocritical figure is Da Lai Lama (sorry I might spell wrong but I don't care).

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  12. Rehan, oops - correction made. :-)

    Yes I did see that series. I also saw Attenborough's movie a few years ago. I thought Ben Kingsly was excellent as Gandhi but disliked the depiction of Jinnah as a snobbish and somewhat sinister character.

    Thanks, Yunyi. I'm going to get a copy of that book.

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  13. I am so glad that truth has been told (I didn't read whole article before I wrote my previous comment. I just could not wait to input some gossips about his miserable wife.lol). You are brave and truthful!

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  14. sorry, a little correction: "... he let his wife (whom he did care at all at the time) died without a simple treatment." --> "..(whom he didn't care at all...)..."

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  15. OC, oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear. I’m so sorry if I pointed out that that Gandhi was a human being and a politician, with all sorts of fallacies. You have every right to disagree with me but what I will not tolerate is the suggestion that this is not my own work. This is an adaptation of a piece I originally wrote for Wikipedia as Clio the Muse. You have had your say. I’m not going to publish any more of your responses I’m sorry to say. If you had come in a calm and rational fashion asking for an amplification of any of these points I would have obliged. But you did not, you came like a bristling fool and I am minded to treat you like a fool. I do thank you, though, for your past contributions.

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  17. As a matter of fact, Gandhi ji's life was an open book and unlike other political leaders of his time or even till date, he never denied his experiments with opposite sex.

    well written. Its unfair to judge a person based on his not very reasonable comments on international politics, especially 80-90 years later. But as you rightly pointed out that, he and most of the India for that matter was much busy that time fighting the battle for freedom, while the rest of the free west was and far east was busy in killing and conquering each other, on grounds of person egos of handful of politicians despite huge recession, poverty, loss of lives and enormous wastage of public on both the winning and losing sides.

    The simplicity and courage required to walk on feet most at the age of 50+ most of the times, wearing modestly and traveling in third class railway apartment was not a mere show-off, because he had the courage to go in rural areas, work with people, teach them how to earn their livelihood and self respect by merely spinning wheel or making salt for self or lending hand to clean the scum in insanely divided society.

    Barring couple of instances, I am not sure which paradoxical violence you are referring to here, which were caused by non-violent movement led by Gandhi.

    A long legacy of British empire made sure that less than 25% of the people in India are literate and less than 5% were reasonably educated to understand the idea of capitalism, liberalization and even the concept of free nation. You have to visit the current India to imagine who the situation would have been under 80-90 years ago under Brit empire. It is not far too stretched to believe how free the press would have been those days and its a fact that after independence no attempts were made to clarify, correct and address all the issues raised by Brit controlled press, because there were other things to do.

    East India Company and later on the British empire never returned whatever they took back from India, but they made sure to pass remarks, so that those remarks can be quoted out of context 100 years later.

    In hindsight its always much easy to say what India needed that time or what Queen Victoria should have done 100 years ago or What Bush could have done to stop all that ever happened.

    I can quote 300 another examples which were never highlighted by western press of those times. Enough said...

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  18. In Lakota tradition, the world is said to be guided by four forces, Strength, Courage, Wisdom and Charity. Ghandi had an unbelievable amount of three of these, and none of the fourth.

    The good thing about Ghandhi is not we he did for India, which you are quite right about and they are only starting to recover from now, but how he showed everything that is beautiful about a society built on law and order, that in point of fact, in a nation guided by law, changes and arguments of the kind that would create great wars can be passed onward peacefully. I sincerely hope that India can recover from Ghandhis mistakes, but I do not with the world to forget his example of civilized conduct in the face of great adversity and people who did not want the law to be as good as it was.

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  19. Nitin, thanks. I honestly did not wish to cause any offence and I do understand just how iconic a figure in the movement for Indian independence Ghandi was. But there are still things that have to be said, things that I have to say. I distrust saints, no matter how sainted and I do believe that Gandhi was as much a hindrance to the development of modern India as an asset. His philosophy was Hindu, his strategy Hindu, but India is not an exclusively Hindu nation. It was his general approach to things that deepened the alienation between the Hindu majority and the – significant – Muslim minority. Mass passions, even passions over non-violence, can have paradoxical and violent results; that’s all I meant. Not all of his campaigns here had benign results.

    Yes, I agree, preoccupation over domestic politics, over the struggle for independence, led to a certain ignorance over international affairs, though I’m not sure to what extent Ghandi can be excused here, as he had spent more time abroad than many others in the Congress leadership. What can not be excused, at least so far as I am concerned, is the Quit India movement of 1942, the exhortation to leave the country to ‘God or to anarchy’. There can have been few illusions by that time over the rapacity of Japanese imperialism, far worse than the British version in a benign stage of decline.

    But the essential point, surely, is that Ghandi and his spinning wheel are an irrelevance for modern India, an example that the nation has left well behind. I do stress that this was a critical essay, a compensation for so much of the adulatory tone set by others, set by Attenborough in his movie, which hides as much as it reveals.

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  20. Jeremy, that's tremendously well said.

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  21. Spinning wheel was an symbol, a tool used by him to entrust confidence in people of those times in themselves that, we need not rely on the rich, the high and mighty British empire. Whatever the people (of those times) needed to survive, he encouraged them to arrange those things, become self reliant. I think there's no point in stressing too much about the relevance of spinning wheel because the message of becoming self reliance which he intended to convey is still very much relevant.

    Regarding Gandhi ji on Islam, well all I can say is that he has devoted significant time in reading, interacting with and understanding Islam, which is an open secret. Like his several other experiments, he did some experiments to develop harmony between Hinduism and Islam at the deepest level, unlike modern day politicians or then leaders of Congress. Some experiments were not as successful as others while some failed. But a sweeping statement that he has no understanding/tolerance for other religion are irrelevant beyond trying to romanticize with words.

    Attenborugh tried to cover 50 out of 100 aspects, principles, practices of Gandhi and made a film and you tried to cover couple of aspects of Gandhi and came up with sensational title and sweeping statements. Everybody is free to have his biased opinions about anybody and everybody and not everybody will make an attempt to understand and go beyond biases. Ironically it reminds me a famous Dylan song...

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  22. Nitin, I respect you and I respect your defence of a man you so obviously admire. I merely offer an alternative view. There are always different ways of looking at people, good and bad. Gandhi was a man, not a saint, something that he himself would have been at pains to stress.

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