Gandhi Jayanti: Why Mahatma Gandhi deserves our admiration only in parts and not for India's freedom

A hundred and fifty-four years after his birth, the people of India are still unsure about the exact legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. This dilemma substantially owes to the substantial propaganda which has obfuscated vital truths that would have provided us a clear picture about the activist, the leader, the politician, the demagogue, the man, the unlikely saint and the mythology woven around these themes. In that order. Thus, any honest attempt in this direction of Gandhian un-obfuscation will prove rewarding if it proceeds to examine the said legacy based on the aforementioned parameters. On the realistic plane, this examination will involve delving into both documented and undocumented facts about Mohandas Gandhi, the committed freedom fighter, the shrewd mass leader, the crafty politician, and the Christian moralist. After all, Gandhi himself famously declared, “my life is my message.”  Let’s take him at face value and see what emerges. Manufacturing the Mahatma myth One of the most durable myths that has lasted for nearly a century is single word: Mahatma. But for this myth, it is doubtful whether a single dynasty would have been able to rule over such a vast nation and mar the destiny of the Hindu civilisational state, uninterruptedly for almost 40 years. And another 15 years in spurts. And pawn off this civilisation to a foreign-born Super Prime Minister for another decade. For more than half a century, countless careers were ruined and innumerable lives were snuffed out for daring to critically scrutinise this myth. This is in itself proof that like all myths, the Mahatma myth too, stood on sandy foundations and required opacity and obfuscation to keep it in perpetual circulation. Mohandas Gandhi was a patriot, a tireless freedom fighter and a leader who for the first time, used a unique political technique — non-violence and Satyagraha — to mobilise the masses of India. He led the freedom struggle from the front but never let the Congress party and the people forget who was really in charge. What is also indisputable is the fact that it wasn’t Gandhi alone that delivered India her freedom. This plot point in the freedom struggle saga is both the foundation and the crux of the Mahatma Myth, which is arguably the most successful and pioneering PR exercises in recent Indian history. In many ways, Mohandas Gandhi himself germinated this myth. Addressing a meeting in Bengal in early 1920, Gandhi thundered, “so long as you choose to keep me as your leader…you must accept my conditions, you must accept dictatorship and the discipline of martial law,” to a stunned audience of nationalists and freedom fighters hailing from Bengal and Punjab, the original homes of the independence movement. An incensed Bipin Chandra Pal wrote a furious letter to Motilal Nehru correctly cautioning that “blind reverence for Gandhiji’s leadership would kill people’s freedom of thought and would paralyse by the deadweight of unreasoning reverence their individual conscience.” More than a decade after this speech, the iconic journalist, editor, litterateur, philosopher and Gandhi’s junior contemporary, DV Gundappa, wrote the following in a deeply insightful essay in his biweekly, Karnataka: “Before Gandhi’s advent, there was an open atmosphere in public discourse….debates, discussions and arguments on various subjects…went on unhindered. Every point of debate had two, three, even four differing perspectives. The public…had accepted this as healthy, and welcomed and examined such differing perspectives without any bias. Gokhale travelled on his own path. Tilak on his. Lajpat Rai on his. Surendranath Banerjee on his. People welcomed all of their views and pondered over the relative merits…of each. This was not limited merely to political matters but extended to economics, social reform and so on. [These] leaders…contemplated on such matters independently and voiced them openly…it was an age of discussing…disagreements in a climate of free exchange. “After Gandhiji took the stage, this culture of free and open disagreement and debates vanished. It was said that the political stand of the entire country should be one, and that Gandhiji’s frontal leadership should be unhindered. It was said that if Gandhiji spoke, the nation spoke. The reasoning offered was as follows: unless the nation adopted this unquestioning mentality, we would not get freedom from the British. “Therefore, from then onwards, no public meeting would begin without the chant of “Gandhiji ki jai!” People were prohibited from taking his name without the mandatory honorific of “Mahatma.” Gandhiji’s thought became the nation’s thought.” Bipin Chandra Pal’s letter to Motilal Nehru had little impact. Shortly thereafter, Lokmanya Tilak died and with it, Mohandas Gandhi’s rise to political superstardom was unstoppable. The holy trinity Motilal Nehru, the slick lawyer and farsighted politician spotted long-term potential for his own son Jawaharlal’s future in cultivating Mohandas Gandhi. It also helped that Motilal was fabulously wealthy and donated fabulously to the Congress party. He bided his time and swerved with the blowing wind. In 1923, Jawaharlal Nehru was elected chairman of the Allahabad Municipality and Motilal himself, the Leader of Opposition to the Central Legislative Assembly. Mohandas Gandhi did the backseat manoeuvring — this is a recorded fact of history carefully omitted in popular narratives. Observing this phenomenon, a foreign journalist remarked that “Indian nationalism now had its Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” A game of monopoly But it was with the Dandi March that Gandhi really consolidated his position as the Saint of the Masses. The sainthood was also accompanied by his unchallenged suzerainty over not just the Congress party but the freedom movement itself. A non-Congress (synonymous with non-Gandhian) freedom fighter had little prestige or voice — Mohandas Gandhi had transformed the freedom movement into a game of monopoly. The road to Gandhi’s absolute and unquestionable consolidation of the Congress leadership was strewn with his own innovation: the much-extolled Satyagraha and the Ahimsa methods of protesting against the British colonial rule. This was a true stroke of original genius. With it, Mohandas Gandhi severed the past of the Indian National Congress, which till then, had been largely an organisation led by powerful provincial freedom fighters, and was in every sense a healthy melting pot of scholars, cultural doyens, artists, businesspeople… in general, there was space for everybody to have their voice heard and respected. As DV Gundappa observed, this culture of frank dissent and disagreement underscored by a genuine commitment for India’s freedom was smothered at the altar of a bizarre sainthood. The sainthood was defined by an inexplicable “inner voice”, and a curious “spiritual power” in politics whose sole custodian was Mohandas Gandhi. You could only become his blind follower. It didn’t matter if your sense of ethics, scholarship, integrity, morality, and even common sense were superior to his. In its fundamental nature and tenor, the politics and leadership of Gandhi resembled that of an Abrahamic Prophet. What became of the Indian National Congress thereafter is best narrated by RC Majumdar, one of the greatest historians of the world and himself a freedom fighter of a distinctive sort. “Gandhi combined in himself the dual role of a saint and an active politician…unfortunately, Gandhi’s followers did not make this distinction and gave unto the political leader what was really due to a saint. This confusion pervading all ranks of Congressmen from the highest to the lowest has…distorted public view of Indian politics since 1920 that it has now…become…impossible to make a rational historical survey of the course of events…This is best illustrated by the unquestioning obedience to Gandhi…shown by even very highly eminent persons [who]…belonged to two categories. The first comprised those who willingly surrendered their conscience and judgement to the safekeeping of the political Guru…the second consisted of those who fell a victim to the magic charm of Gandhi even though they fumed at…his irrational dogmas… “The inevitable effect of such sentiments was that great political leaders of the Congress…[regarded] Gandhi as a superman, who was infallible and acted by instinct, not logic or reason, and therefore should not be judged by ordinary standards which we apply to other leaders.” [Emphasis added] Thus, in this new monarchy of political sainthood, no more Lokmanya Tilaks, Lala Lajpat Rais or Bipin Chandra Pals would be born; those that still existed were not tolerated. Subhas Bose learned this bitter reality through personal experience. Gandhi’s dogged and petty backroom manipulation to expel Bose as the democratically-elected president of the INC left him with such disgust towards this saint that he quit India itself. Here is how Michael Edwardes characterises the spiteful tactics of the saint: “For any aspiring rebel, the treatment of Subhas Bose was a lesson in practicalities, a brutal reminder of the authoritarian, Gandhian truth: do not fight the Mahatma.” [Emphasis added] Essential to Mohandas Gandhi’s Mahatma-hood were his tactics of frequent demonstrations, public marches, and flooding prisons — all without any apparent purpose. Or at any rate, these were short-term and short-lived methods which had no clear, overarching goal and timeline in sight. There is a logical case to be made for the sheer purposeless nature of Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian freedom struggle. Apart from the Dandi March, not one best-laid plan or agitation of Mohandas Gandhi succeeded for the same reason: there was no precise definition of purpose or outcome. The British had clearly seen through Gandhi’s tactics very early. And so, they devised perhaps the most effective counter to him: at every turn after the Dandi March, they began to humour him. But in their outward stance, they pretended to take him seriously: Gandhi was a nuisance value to be contained. But when this nuisance value tested their patience in August 1933, they decided to call Gandhi’s bluff when he announced a 21-day fast from the Yeravada prison heeding another call of his “Inner Voice.” The British simply released him unconditionally. Gandhi hadn’t anticipated it. Thus, his pretext for going to prison and announcing his fast had failed: in other words, the civil disobedience movement, which is hailed as one of his greatest victories against the British had flopped. We turn to Michael Edwardes again. “No one was more shocked [by this] than Gandhi. Prison was an almost essential backdrop for his personal drama…the drama now became a farce…the trivialisation of the technique was now complete and even Gandhi was aware of it.” Yet, Gandhi’s self-awareness of his serial failures only made him more determined to continue on the same trajectory. The failure of the Quit India Movement is another eminent case but constraints of space prohibit me from examining it in more detail. An even worse episode reveals Mohandas Gandhi’s self-righteous disdain for disagreement and dissent in a pronounced fashion. In 1945, when the Subash Bose-led INA launched its successful offensive against the British, the event was celebrated with great patriotic fervour by the whole country. George Orwell who was then working in the war-propaganda arm of the BBC noted how the spooked British Government throttled the radio airwaves broadcasting news of the INA victory. However, the Congress and Gandhi’s attitude towards Bose and the INA was lukewarm to put it mildly. It took great care not to publicise the heroism and sacrifice and victories of the INA. In a brazen exhibition of its shamelessness, the AICC in September 1945, passed a resolution declaring that “it would be a tragedy if these [INA] officers were punished for the offence of having laboured, however mistakenly for the freedom of India.”  [Emphasis added] The freedom struggle of a Christian moralist From a cultural perspective, the Congress party’s clean break from its past under Gandhi’s leadership is tied to a fundamental factor: Gandhi’s twofold misunderstanding. The first was his misunderstanding of the precise nature of imperial Britain’s global colonialism. The second is his confusion in understanding the roots of Indian philosophy, spirituality and culture. Mohandas Gandhi’s predecessors and his contemporaries like Balgangadhar Tilak, Bipan Chandra Pal, Sri Aurobindo, et al., had correctly grasped the fact that British colonialism was an unqualified evil at its core and had to be dismantled root and branch. Even a White American like Will Durant — a trained Christian theologian — who visited India at the height of British colonial exploitation had grasped the reality of the diabolism that underpinned this rule: that Englishmen were in India for temporary purposes, for the continuing opportunity that it provided them for ceaseless loot and exploitation, and once the opportunity dried up, they would pack up and leave. None of the Englishmen who were in India ever intended to make it their home. Like Will Durant and Michael Edwardes, in later years, William F Buckley Jr and Christopher Hitchens working independently, arrived at the same conclusion. Writes Edwardes: “Only British-ruled Hindu India could have produced such a figure as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi…one effect of his western education was…the conviction that the British were a moral people believing in justice. If they could be persuaded to recognise the unrighteousness of their rule in India, they would willingly abdicate power.” [Emphasis added] This characteristic Gandhian naiveté is actually inexplicable especially when in his pre-Mahatma days, Mohandas Gandhi had personally experienced the same British colonial horrors during his stay in South Africa. He had heard the arch-racist and White supremacist Cecil Rhodes openly applauding the “virtues” of the British despotism that was “so successfully practised in India”. Yet, after his return to India and after plunging headlong into the freedom struggle, Gandhi genuinely thought that he could appeal to the ”innate goodness in the British heart” and nonviolently persuade them to leave. A contrast will help clarify this. Aurobindo Ghosh had the benefit of a wholly English education. He had stayed in England and had lived the lifestyle of Englishmen for a brief period and had a penetrating intellect to see through their true nature. Gandhi had also lived in England but after a few months, became guilt-stricken to enjoy even the proverbial pleasures of life. In many ways, guilt was the Aadhara Shruti (or base note, in musical parlance) of Gandhi’s endless experiments with truth — something he confesses in his autobiography. Guilt is also one of the base notes of Christian theology — the notion that all of us are born in sin and therefore permanently condemned. Its practical operation is seen in the debasing institution known as the Confessional — designed to reinforce guilt in the psyche of the Faithful. In this sense, Mohandas Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth is a textual version of his Confessional sans a Padre. No one better grasped this basic character trait of Mohandas Gandhi than Sri Aurobindo. In a reply to a disciple, he wrote: “Gandhi is a European – truly, a Russian Christian in an Indian body… When the Europeans say that he is more Christian than many Christians…they are perfectly right. All his preaching is derived from Christianity, and though the garb is Indian the essential spirit is Christian… He is largely influenced by Tolstoy, the Bible…in his teachings; at any rate more than by the Indian scriptures – the Upanishads or the Gita… “Many educated Indians consider him a spiritual man…because the Europeans call him spiritual. But what he preaches is not Indian spirituality but something derived from Russian Christianity, non-violence, suffering, etc.” [Emphasis added] In his expositions on the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu Dharma, it is clear that Mohandas Gandhi was aware of the fundamental Hindu concept of the “eternal” (or Sanatana) but to him, the Hindu notion of Time itself was of no significance. This is best reflected in his understanding of the conception of Dharma. In the Hindu conception, Eternity operates in the realm of Rta (the Cosmic Order). In the realm of human life, Dharma is what upholds and sustains Rta. Thus, Dharma is the verb form of Rta. This lack of philosophical clarity is what led Mohandas Gandhi to chase, all his life, one of his pet causes: Hindu-Muslim unity at the cost of Hindu lives, and his naïveté about the benevolence of the British colonial rule. History shows us that he miserably failed at both. The Muslim community carved out a new country for itself. The British hurriedly dumped India because the Empire had become unsustainable. The political independence of India was the victory of the Muslim League and the final triumph of British skulduggery. Mohandas Gandhi had directly and indirectly facilitated both. Closing notes Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would live to lament the fate of the same Indian National Congress that he had steered and monopolised by the force of his saintly spiritual power. By the mid-1940s, when it became evident that freedom was near in sight, the same Congressmen who had fawned over him and had been subservient throughout, simply abandoned him. Here is the indubitable R C Majumdar describing the situation, as an eyewitness. ”[prominent Congressmen] under Gandhi’s leadership…made no secret of the fact that they adopted Non-violent Non-cooperation as a politically expedient but not like, Gandhi, as a creed…Gandhi himself admitted…late in life…that none of his followers believed in Satyagraha as a creed…and admitted, “even 14 years of trial have failed to yield the anticipated result.” […] “[Gandhi] placed the cult of non-violence above everything else—even above the independence of India…to him the Congress was a humanitarian association…for the moral and spiritual regeneration of the world…but his followers looked upon the Congress as a purely political body… […] “The tragedy of Gandhi’s life was that [the] members of his inner council, who followed him for more than twenty years with unquestioned obedience, took the fatal steps leading to the partition of India without his knowledge, not to speak of his consent.” [Emphasis added] In fact, the tragic fate of RC Majumdar’s scholarly career after India attained independence in itself is eminent testimony to the spectacular failure and the logical conclusion of Gandhi’s misplaced espousal of Satya (Truth), Ahimsa (Non-violence) and Satyagraha (passive resistance of injustice). Majumdar, the towering scholar of history, respected across the world, was banished from academia by Gandhi’s favourite disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. Majumdar’s crime? Showing the courage to write an objective and unbiased history of the Indian freedom struggle of which he was both a participant and a contributor. But how else would it turn out? Mohandas Gandhi had himself shown the way by equating the Congress party with his own personality cult. He had defined Indian nationalism by holding up “his own life and commitment as the only example to be followed.” His disciple, Nehru, had merely followed the Mahatma’s path. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long before this infamous slogan was invented: Indira is India. Precedents matter. In the final assessment, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi evokes our admiration only in parts, but getting India her freedom singlehandedly is definitely not one of them. The writer is the founder and chief editor The Dharma Dispatch_._

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._ Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.