Seven decades of agitations and Sanatana way of conflict resolution

The history of “independent” India is the history of a cruel melancholy culminating in an ongoing national waste. This history can be encapsulated in just four words: no decade of peace. In practical terms, it is the seven-decade history of agitations, to put it politely.

Seventy-five years have passed since we attained political independence from almost a millennium of foreign rule. And yet, till date, as a nation, we seem unable to sit in Padmasana, our spine upright and our vision clear, piercing, and confident. Instead, we seem to be stuck in that worst form of Shavasana: Tamas. While Shavasana in its purest form is deep relaxation in which there is no fear or sorrow. But Tamas is the deadly slumber of insecurity, darkness, ignorance, and sloth which consumes the body by first corroding the soul.

The verifiable truth of these seven decades is this: in no decade do we find even a semblance of peace, which is the only guarantor of stability leading to all-round prosperity leading to strength. But the bigger tragedy is the fact that this continuing deficit of peace was deliberately engineered by a variety of forces. And we wonder why none of the grand five-year plans and ambitious schemes for economic development have repeatedly failed. They failed because they were not allowed to succeed. But economics is just one of the countless aspects of this tragedy.

A brief detour into history is relevant at this point.

History of Mass Movements

The phenomenon of mass movements and street-level agitations is very recent in the timeless civilizational history of India. Its current form is a virulent outgrowth of the agitations for freedom from British colonial rule. However, the full credit for transforming mass agitations into a full-fledged nationwide movement goes to Mohandas Gandhi who initially coined what is known as civil disobedience, in which the term “disobedience” was imbued with a moral and righteous character.

Notable among the mass agitations that predated Gandhi include the inspirational Sanyasi Movement and the profound public awakening that Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak began. The two were fundamentally different and even divergent from the Gandhian model. While the Sanyasi Movement, as the name indicates, directly, unapologetically tapped into the spiritual and Dharmic sensibilities of Indians, Tilak’s movement did the same but in a different fashion. Both were constructive agitations: the Sanyasi Movement galvanised giants like Bankim and Swami Vivekananda. Tilak’s awakening birthed an entirely fresh tradition of celebrating Ganesha festivals on a mass scale, which quickly spread from Maharashtra to its neighbouring states. In a way, he birthed a pan-Indian cultural tradition by transforming simple devotion into a powerful weapon for social unification.

However, Gandhi who essentially hijacked the mass base that Tilak had built, metastasised it into an ill-informed political formulation that was premised on individual morality, not realism and Dharma. Thus, for the first time in its long history, Bharatavarsha witnessed a self-proclaimed moral leader who let the proverbial evil genie out of the bottle by clothing it in unilateral non-violence and disobedience. Obviously, it was a genie he had no power to control. Indeed, only someone like Gandhi could sincerely believe that the nefarious Ali brothers sincerely believed in the vision-clouding fumes of his non-violence.

That genie is the mistaken creed of regarding agitation and activism as ends in themselves. However, on a deeper plane, agitation and activism unleash and give vent to the grossest of human passions: selfishness, anger, unreason, impatience and intolerance, all of which lead to violence. And invariably cause deaths of fellow-citizens for no constructive reason. This is the engine of the sorry train that Mohandas Gandhi revved up. And, as we witness even today, it continues to move on a destructive track having no final destination because Gandhi hadn’t bothered to define the destination in the first place.

It can be argued that India’s independence was the goal of Gandhi’s agitation but we have RC Majumdar’s powerful contrarian view that explodes this myth: “Gandhi placed the cult of non-violence above everything else — even above the independence of India. During the Second [World> War he grew uneasy at the possibility that the British might grant independence to India, for that would mean India’s participation in violent warfare… To Gandhi, not only was independence of India a minor issue as compared with the principle of non-violence, but… he was even prepared to postpone Swaraj… He had very little share in the Congress negotiations with Cripps and practically none in those… momentous decisions which finally led to the freedom of India.”

Enlightened scholars like Majumdar were eyewitnesses to Gandhi’s ongoing folly in the name of agitations and saw through the dangerous experiment he had foisted on India. Likewise, the iconic DV Gundappa also saw through the inherent evil of agitational politics in its infancy. He repeatedly wrote that agitation and activism were alien to the Sanatana conception and way of life. In a touching story in his Jnapakachitrashale volumes, he narrates how a bunch of poor schoolteachers in his hometown Mulabagal repeatedly petitioned the Government for a slight increment in their salary. The increment finally arrived after ten or twelve years, a princely sum of two rupees. He narrates how these teachers were overjoyed and organized a feast in a temple and invited all villagers to share their joy. DVG’s conclusion is remarkable: “These were simple people used to simple joys and pleasures. The notion that a salary increment was their right and that they should agitate and inflict violence upon their fellowmen and the Government in order to forcibly wrest it was unknown to the profound impulses that informed their lives.”

Which leads us to the next logical question: if the Gandhian method of agitations is accepted as valid, we must accept EV Ramaswami Naicker’s methods too, as equally valid. After all, every agitator and rabble-rouser has some real or imaginary social or political defect to exploit and such people use these defects to justify their agitation. Arundhati Roy is a classic case that I’ve selected randomly. Ostensibly fighting against…err…_everything…_tribal rights, evil corporations, oil companies, nuclear powers, her demonstrated lifestyle shows that she executes her activism using the very products and luxuries that corporations have created.

The Sanatana method is not agitation but truth-seeking, patience, deliberation and forbearance all premised on sound philosophical reasoning. This is the surest method leading to integration and harmony. This is the reason why philosophical debate grew into an independent tradition only in India. When problems are solved on the plane of philosophy, they blunt the fierce edge of these problems…else the problems will manifest themselves as violence in society and politics.

[To be concluded in the next part>

The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed are personal

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