India against Gandhi: Gandhi is now a
major hate figure in Modi's India by Ramachandra Guha
https://www.ft.com/content/a0b17ed9-092d-4e83-90fe-2a6cea952518
Gandhi is
the major hate figure (in Modi's India).
He is
blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing
the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more
authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan;
blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the
rights of equal citizenship.
BJP
members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot);
praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to
erect statues to him and temples in his memory.
YouTube
videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of
views.
Seventy-five
years after his assassination, the ‘father of the nation’ is a problem for
Narendra Modi — but the country still needs his ideas
Born in 1958,
a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards
the Mahatma.
One of my
great-uncles helped to edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a
pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial
influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time.
Gandhi
was the father of the nation, the leader of the struggle for freedom against
British rule, whose techniques of non-violent resistance had won admirers and
imitators across the world. It was largely because of him that we were free and
proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike
neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the religious and
linguistic diversity of our land.
In our school assembly we sang a 17th-century
hymn that Gandhi was particularly fond of, which he had rewritten to reflect
his vision of the India he wished to leave behind. Hindus
saw God as Ishwar; Gandhi’s adaptation asked us to see him as Allah too.
And it
was to these lines that our teachers drew our particular attention. The first
criticisms of Gandhi that I remember encountering were in a book I read as a
student at Delhi University.
This was
the autobiography of Verrier Elwin, an Oxford scholar who became a leading
ethnographer of the tribes of central India. Elwin knew Gandhi well, and at
one time considered himself a disciple.
In later
years, while he retained his admiration for the Mahatma’s moral courage and
religious pluralism, Elwin became sharply critical of Gandhi’s advocacy of
prohibition, which he thought damaging to tribal culture (where home-brewed
alcohol was both a source of nutrition and an aid to dance and music), and of
his exaltation of celibacy, which Elwin thought damaging to everyone
. In
Amritsar in 2006, members of the Congress party place garlands on a statue of
Gandhi to mark the anniversary of his birth © Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty
Images Elwin’s strictures were mild, even timid, when compared with those of
the Marxist intellectuals of Kolkata, whom I encountered in the 1980s when
beginning my academic career.
These
scholars identified with the Naxalites, a band of insurgents who were inspired
by Mao Zedong and who vandalised and destroyed Gandhi statues wherever they
found them.
Books
were written arguing that Gandhi was an agent simultaneously of the British
colonial state and of the Indian capitalist class; non-violence was presented
as a cunning device to wean the masses away from the revolutionary path. I had
many arguments with my Marxist friends about Gandhi.
I sought
to persuade them that his adherence to non-violence arose out of a
disinclination to take human life. I asked them to give Gandhi at least the
qualified praise that Mao himself had bestowed on Sun Yat-sen, the first
president of the Chinese republic, as creating a rudimentary national
consciousness on which was built a superior socialist consciousness.
On these subjects my interlocutors at least
talked back, but our relations came to breaking point when I chose to focus my
own research on a forest protection movement led by Gandhians, which the
Marxists dismissed as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.
Those
debates with Marxists shaped me profoundly, personally as well as
intellectually. Yet recalling them here perhaps conveys a whiff of
antiquarianism. For now, in the 2020s, the main attacks on Gandhi in India come from the other end of the
ideological spectrum.
For the
past eight and a half years, the Hindu right has been in power in India, and Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence
and his commitment to interfaith harmony are anathema to it.
While he is still officially the “father of
the nation”, with his birthday a national holiday and his face on the currency
notes, the public mood has turned hostile to Gandhi.
To
understand why Gandhi is increasingly unpopular in his homeland, one must go
back to the circumstances of his death 75 years ago.
Gandhi was murdered on January
30 1948
by Nathuram Godse, a member of a secretive paramilitary organisation called the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Founded in 1925, the RSS believed — and still
believes — in the construction of a Hindu theocratic state in India. Its leaders and cadres insist
that demographic superiority and the Indic origin of their faith makes Hindus
natural and permanent rulers of the land.
They have
a particular suspicion of Muslims and Christians, on account of the fact that
their religions originated outside India and their sacred shrines are
outside India too.
Mahatma Gandhi c1947 © Mirrorpix ‘It was
largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was
largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the
religious and linguistic diversity of our land’ Gandhi, on the other hand, held
the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their
religious affiliation.
After the
subcontinent was partitioned in August 1947, separating Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, he worked strenuously to stop
violence against those Muslims who remained in India, going on a fast in Kolkata and
later in Delhi. Gandhi’s fast in Delhi was conducted in a home opposite
the office of the British High Commission. Having watched events unfold, the
deputy high commissioner wrote in a report to London that “day in and day out,
Muslims
of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements
in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his [Gandhi’s] help.
Normally too fearful even to leave their
homes, they came to him because they had learned and believed that he had their
interests at heart and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of
preserving them from destruction.” Gandhi’s efforts to maintain religious
harmony enraged the head of the RSS, an intense bearded man named MS Golwalkar.
A police
report of an RSS meeting in Delhi in December 1947 tells us that, “referring
to Muslims”, Golwalkar remarked that “no power on earth could keep them in Hindustan.
They
would have to quit the country. Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit
by their votes at the time of election. But, by that time, not a single Muslim
will be left in India . . .
Mahatma Gandhi could not mislead them any
longer. We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it
is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus.
If we are
compelled, we will have to resort to that course too.” A few weeks later,
Gandhi was murdered in Delhi by the RSS’s Godse. The
organisation was immediately banned, and Golwalkar himself put in prison. After
it agreed to abide by the Indian constitution, the RSS was unbanned.
In the
decades that followed, it steadily built up its following across India. In deference to the status that
Gandhi then enjoyed, its members even occasionally praised him, albeit merely
as one patriot among many.
The gulf
between his ideals and their ideology remained vast. A rally for the Hindu
nationalist RSS in the 1970s, with (right) a portrait of MS Golwalkar © Sondeep
Shankar/Getty Images Narendra Modi at an RSS event in Ahmedabad in 2006, when
he was chief minister of Gujarat © Shailesh Raval/The India Today Group via
Getty Images
The RSS
is the mother organisation of the Bharatiya Janata party, which has been in
power in India since May 2014. The prime
minister, Narendra Modi, joined the RSS as a young man, as did many of his
ministers.
In control of the state, of education and
propaganda, and with a very efficient social media machine, the BJP and the RSS
have assiduously attempted to rewrite the historical narrative. Past Muslim
rulers of India are portrayed as cruel marauders,
and Muslims today made to answer for their (mis)deeds.
The
leadership of Gandhi and his Congress party in the freedom struggle is denied,
and those who advocated armed revolution against the British extolled as the
true patriots.
The
formative role of the progressive and secular constitution of 1950 in shaping
the democratic republic is ignored. Instead, Indians are told that they have
been a Hindu nation from time immemorial. Professional historians derisively
refer to these claims as “WhatsApp history”, but the tragic truth is that they
are gaining ever wider currency.
In this
new narrative, Gandhi is the major hate figure.
He is
blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing
the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more
authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan;
blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights
of equal citizenship. BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as
a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30;
there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.
YouTube
videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of
views. Gandhi with Nehru in 1942 © Photo12/Universal Images Group ‘In the new
narrative, Gandhi is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence;
blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir
instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure’
This
decertification of Gandhi has been aided by the hypocrisy and misconduct of the
Congress party. In its many decades in power, the Congress invoked Gandhi
often, while in practice moving ever further from his ideals.
Congress
politicians ostentatiously wore homespun cotton while promoting cronyism and
corruption. They centralised power in the state and harassed human rights
activists. The political rise of the Hindu right has been accompanied by the
construction of a colossal personality cult around Modi.
While his
followers revile Gandhi, Modi himself has adopted a position of strategic
ambivalence.
On the one hand, he professes veneration for
VD Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist who detested Gandhi and Muslims with equal
vehemence, and whom Godse regarded as his ideological mentor. On the other
hand, recognising that Gandhi is the best-known Indian globally, Modi has
instrumentally used him to advance his own profile by taking visiting
presidents and prime ministers on tours of Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Narendra
Modi pays tribute to VD Savarkar at Parliament House in New Delhi in 2014 . . .
© Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images . . . and at a statue of Gandhi
in Washington the same year © Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images On October 2 2019,
the 150th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth, the New York Times published an
article in praise of Gandhi, written by Modi.
The piece
was artfully constructed; it began by speaking of the admiration for Gandhi
expressed by one great American, Martin Luther King Jr, and ended by speaking
of the admiration for him expressed by another great American, Albert Einstein.
Modi proclaimed: “In Gandhi, we have the best teacher to guide us.
From
uniting those who believe in humanity to furthering sustainable development and
ensuring economic self-reliance, Gandhi offers solutions to every problem.” What
was most striking about the article, however, was what it did not say.
There was
not a word about the cause for which Gandhi lived his life, indeed for which he
gave his life — that of inter-religious harmony. The omission was not
accidental.
For the
idea that India is a land that belongs equally to
people of all faiths is not something that Modi shares with Gandhi. Modi sees
himself as a Hindu first and foremost; indeed, even as a redeemer sent to
avenge the insults and injustices, real and imagined, heaped on his co-religionists
down the centuries.
Gandhi
visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to leave for Pakistan © ACME/AFP/Getty Images ‘Gandhi
held the view that India belonged equally to all its
citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.
After the
subcontinent was partitioned, Gandhi worked strenuously to stop violence
against Muslims’
Such is the broader context for the now
widespread animosity towards Gandhi in the land of his birth. It has
principally to do with his commitment to religious pluralism.
While Modi stays silent, BJP leaders taunt and
intimidate the 200mn-strong community of Indian Muslims, asking them without
reason and provocation to prove their “loyalty” to the motherland. (Notably,
among the 300 or so BJP members of parliament elected in May 2019, there was
not a single Muslim.)
While
Modi praises Gandhi — selectively — many of those who support and vote for him
believe Godse was right in murdering Gandhi; indeed, that he should have
murdered him earlier, before the Mahatma’s last fast in support of equal rights
for those Muslims who chose to express their own patriotism by staying in our
country, which was also theirs.
There are
other ways in which the India of today bears little resemblance
to the India that Gandhi had struggled to
build. He would have been appalled, for instance, by the rapacious pillaging of
the natural environment encouraged by successive governments since independence.
He had precociously warned against emulating
the resource- and energy-intensive model of industrialisation favoured by the
west, writing in 1926 that to “make India like England and America is to find some other races and
places of the earth for exploitation”.
Hindu nationalists place garlands on a statue
of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, in Meerut in 2020 . . . © Smita Sharma/New
York Times/Redux/eyevine . . . and activists from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul
Muslimeen gather near a Gandhi mural in New Delhi last year © Prakash Singh/AFP
via Getty Images Without the access to resources and markets enjoyed by those
two nations when they began to industrialise, India has had to rely on the
exploitation of its own people and environment.
Under both Congress and BJP regimes, the most
brutal assault has been by large mining companies, to whom successive
governments have given free licence to destroy forests, displace villagers and
foul air, water and soil in search of massive monetary gains.
Many of the
most polluted cities in the world are in India; our great and supposedly sacred
rivers are biologically dead through untreated industrial and domestic waste;
our aquifers are rapidly declining.
Writing
for an international audience, our prime minister might laud Gandhian
prescriptions for “sustainable development”, even as these prescriptions are
being violated most thoroughly in his — and Gandhi’s — homeland.
Even
without the threat of climate change, India is an environmental basket case. Consider
next the perilous state of press freedom in India, which, as an independent-minded
editor himself, Gandhi would surely have found distressing. The British Raj
jailed Gandhi (and many other writers) for inciting “disaffection” merely
through their words in print.
Gandhi
hoped that the clause allowing such arbitrary arrest would be repealed when India became free. It remains on the
statute book, increasingly used to imprison journalists, student leaders and
social activists.
Leading 1930’s
‘Salt March’, a nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly © United
Archives/Getty Images ‘The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of
Indian independence may have been extreme.
Yet what
we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide’ Gandhi, were he
around today, would also have been dismayed by the deceit and dissembling of
the political class, saddened by the growing gulf between rich and poor, and
distressed by the continuing attacks on low castes and women.
His
country has turned its back on its greatest modern figure in many respects.
The lives
and legacies of major historical figures are always subject to
reinterpretation, and that is how it should be. Consider thus the revaluation
of American icons such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of
their complicity with slavery; or of the pre-eminent British war hero Winston
Churchill, because of his imperialism and indifference to the deaths of Indians
through famine.
Revisionism and iconoclasm are infinitely
preferable to idolatry. The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years
of Indian independence may have been extreme.
Yet what
we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide, the outright
repudiation of the person who perhaps did more than anyone else to nurture this
nation into being. India surely needs Gandhi’s ideas
still, to check the slide of the republic into a Hindu Pakistan, to stall the
destruction of the environment and the economic and social costs it imposes, to
restore a semblance of civility in public discourse, to renew the institutions
of civil society currently being crushed by an overbearing state.
Many years ago, when the demonisation of
Gandhi was first becoming apparent, I was speaking with my friend Gopalkrishna
Gandhi, a diplomat and scholar and also, incidentally, a grandson of the
Mahatma.
Gopal
said that Gandhi’s posthumous fate might increasingly come to resemble that of
the Buddha, scorned by the land where he forged his moral and social
philosophy, yet with followers and admirers in distant parts of the globe that
he had never visited and possibly did not even know about.
As that
prediction comes starkly true, I find it simultaneously depressing and
comforting. We Indians seem to have rejected Gandhi, as we once rejected the
Buddha; no matter, humans elsewhere will take up and nobly affirm the ideals of
those we have so cruelly and carelessly discarded. Ramachandra Guha’s books
include ‘Gandhi:
