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By
Ramachandra Guha
Livemint - Delhi, India
Why 61 years after
his death, both left- and right-wing extremists feel the need to
vilify him. Why answers to the world’s most pressing crises lie in
his teachings
Since independence and Partition, no event has so divided the Indian
people as the demolition of a mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya
in December 1992. Hindu radicals claimed that the mosque, known as
the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a temple, and that the
site itself was the birthplace of god Ram. Through the late 1980s
and early 1990s, bands of volunteers tried to storm the mosque, in
the process provoking a series of bloody riots across northern
India.
Shortly before the Babri Masjid was destroyed, a group of Gandhians
visited Ayodhya. They were led by a woman named Sushila Nayar, an
80-year-old physician who had worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi. A
prayer meeting conducted by Nayar ended in the singing of Raghupati
Raghava Raja Ram, a favourite hymn of the Mahatma. When they came to
the line Ishwar Allah Tero Naam (God is named both Ishwar and
Allah), the meeting was disrupted by shouts and slogans. A section
of the crowd surged towards the stage. Nayar came down to explain to
the protesters that the singers had come “on behalf” of Gandhi (“hum
Gandhijiki taraf se aye hain”). “Aur hum Godse ki taraf se,” the
disruptionists are said to have replied: we have come on behalf of
(Gandhi’s assassin) Nathuram Godse, and like him, we think you
Gandhians are too soft on the Muslims.
In contemporary India, it is not just the Hindu right that detests
Gandhi. So does the Maoist left, which has recently been described
by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the “greatest internal security
threat” facing the nation. As readers of this newspaper know, the
Indian Maoists are known as Naxalites, after a village in north
Bengal where their movement began in 1967. Two years after the birth
of naxalism, the world celebrated the centenary of Gandhi’s birth.
Through that year, 1969, the Naxalites brought down statues of the
Mahatma in towns and villages across West Bengal. Occasionally, by
way of variation, they entered a government office to vandalize his
portrait.
The Maoists were vanquished in the 1970s by a combination of police
action and killings by cadres of rival Communist groupings. But they
later revived, and are especially powerful now in the states of
central and eastern India. Now they have once more made their
presence felt in West Bengal. They were blamed, probably accurately,
for a recent attempt on the life of chief minister Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee.
The rise of the Maoists in the 1980s and beyond owes much to the
work of a former schoolteacher named Kondapalli Seetaramaiah. He was
the head of the Peoples War Group which, especially in Andhra
Pradesh, mounted a series of daring attacks on railway stations and
police camps. The police finally arrested KS (as he was known); but
then he feigned illness and was admitted to hospital, from where he
escaped.
It took the police two years to recapture Seetaramaiah. A journalist
later asked him what he had done when on the run. KS replied that he
went from the hospital in Hyderabad to Gandhi’s birthplace in
Gujarat, some 900 miles (about 1448km) away. Here the revolutionary
got off the train and took a rickshaw to the Mahatma’s parental
home, now a museum dedicated to his memory. “I went there and spat
on the maggu,” KS told the reporter, maggu being the Telugu word for
the painted decorations placed outside most Indian shrines. Thus did
this Maoist show his contempt for a man acknowledged to be the
Father of the Indian Nation.
Extremists despise Gandhi—what, however, of the vital centre? For
much of the time that India has been an independent nation, the
government in New Delhi has been run by the Congress party, to which
Gandhi himself belonged. On the day of independence, 15 August 1947,
the Mahatma was striving for communal peace in Kolkata. When the new
ministers of the Bengal government went to seek his blessings,
Gandhi told them that they had been tested during the British
regime: “But in a way it has been no test at all. But now there will
be no end to your being tested. Do not fall prey to the lure of
wealth. May God help you! You are there to serve the villages and
the poor.”
To say that Indian politicians have since dishonoured Gandhi’s
advice would be a colossal understatement. The first betrayal,
perhaps, was the abandonment of the villages and the poor. Through
the 1950s and the 1960s, the economic policy of the state focused on
the urban-industrial sector. Agriculture and crafts were neglected;
so, even more grievously, was primary education.
There still remained something “Gandhian” about the men in power;
they were, on the whole, not personally corrupt. However, from the
1970s, politicians began abusing their position to enrich themselves
and their families. A global survey carried out by Gallup in 2004
found that the lack of confidence in politicians was highest in
India. As many as 91% of those polled felt that their elected
representatives were not honest.
What remains of Gandhi and Gandhism in India today? Before answering
this question, let me note that like the Buddha, Gandhi was born in
the Indian subcontinent but does not belong to this land alone. Just
as the Buddha found his most devoted adherents elsewhere, the legacy
of Gandhi has been admirably taken over by Martin Luther King,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. It is
a matter of shame that Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize; the shame is also felt by those who decide on the prize in
Oslo, who have since made amends by awarding it to the four
“Gandhians” mentioned above.
Within India, meanwhile, a Gandhian tradition exists outside
politics. There is a vigorous environmental movement, which has
campaigned against the excesses of industrial development and worked
to promote renewable energy and small-scale irrigation systems.
These Greens often begin or end their programmes on 2nd
October, Gandhi’s birthday. The Gandhian influence is also present
in the feminist and human rights movements, where it co-exists with
tendencies drawing inspiration from other, more conventionally
left-wing political traditions. Doctors and teachers inspired by
Gandhi leave their city homes to run clinics and schools in the
countryside. And at least a handful of India’s many millionaires are
influenced by Gandhi. Where the majority hoard their wealth or spend
it on jewellery and foreign holidays, there are some titans who have
given away vast amounts of money to promote primary education and
transparency in governance.
What should remain of Gandhi and Gandhism in the world today?
Sixty-one years after his death, some of his teachings are plainly
irrelevant. For example, his ideas on food (his diet consisted
chiefly of nuts and fruits and boiled vegetables) and sex (he
imposed a strict celibacy on his followers) can hardly find favour
with the majority of humans. That said, there are at least four
areas in which Gandhi’s ideas remain of interest and importance.
The first is the environment. The economic rise of China and India
has brought a long suppressed, and quintessentially Gandhian,
question to the fore: How much should a person consume? So long as
the West had a monopoly on modern lifestyles, the question simply
did not arise. But if most Chinese and most Indians come, like most
Americans and most Englishmen, to own and drive a car, this will
place unbearable burdens on the earth. Back in 1928, Gandhi had
warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale, of Western
patterns of production and consumption. “God forbid that India
should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West,”
he said. “The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom
(England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation
of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip
the world bare like locusts.”
The second area is faith. Gandhi was at odds both with secularists
who confidently looked forward to God’s funeral, and with
monotheists who insisted that theirs was the one and true God.
Gandhi believed that no religion had a monopoly on the truth. He
argued that one should accept the faith into which one was born
(hence his opposition to conversion), but seek always to interpret
it in the most broad-minded and nonviolent way. And he actively
encouraged friendships across religions. His own best friend was a
Christian priest, C.F. Andrews. In his ashram he held a daily prayer
meeting at which texts from different religions were read or sung.
At the time, his position appeared eccentric; in retrospect, it
seems to be precocious. In a world driven by religious
misunderstanding, it can help cultivate mutual respect and
recognition.
The third (and perhaps most obvious) area is nonviolent resistance.
That social change is both less harmful and more sustainable when
achieved by nonviolent means is now widely recognized. A study of
some 60 transitions to democratic rule since World War II, by the
think tank Freedom House, found that “far more often than is
generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, nonviolent
civic resistance—which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass
protests, blockades, strikes and civil disobedience to de-legitimate
authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including
the loyalty of their armed defenders.” These, of course, were all
methods of protest pioneered by Gandhi.
The fourth area is public life. In his Reflections on Gandhi, George
Orwell wrote that “regarded simply as a politician, and compared
with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a
smell he has managed to leave behind!” In an age of terror,
politicians may not be able to live as open a life as Gandhi. There
were no security-men posted outside his ashram; visitors of any
creed and nationality would walk in when they chose. Still, the
politicians (and activists) of today might at least emulate his lack
of dissembling and his utter lack of reliance on “spin”. His
campaigns of civil disobedience were always announced in advance.
His social experiments were minutely dissected in the pages of his
newspapers, the comments of his critics placed alongside his own.
Gandhi was a Hindu; but his Hinduism was altogether less dogmatic
than that of the fundamentalists of today. Gandhi fought against
injustice; but without recourse to the gun and without demonizing
his adversary. That, six decades after his death, the extremists of
left and right still need to vilify him is in itself a considerable
tribute to the relevance of his thought. So, in a somewhat different
way, is the need for mainstream politicians to garland portraits of
Gandhi even as their practice is at odds with the man they profess
to honour.
Gandhi was a prophet of sorts, but by no means a joyless one. On a
visit to London in 1931 he met a British monarch for the first and
last time. When he came out of Buckingham Palace after speaking with
George VI, a reporter asked whether he had not felt cold in his
loin-cloth. Gandhi answered, “The King had enough on for both of
us.” Another version has Gandhi saying, “The King wears plus-fours;
I wear minus-fours.” In those self-deprecatory jokes lies a good
deal of (still enduring) wisdom. |
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