Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  I have written elsewhere about the ‘further joint efforts’ by Nehru and Patel to unite India. In the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, his two lieutenants submerged their differences, and held the ship of state together. Between 1948 and 1950, Nehru and Patel, and their colleagues in government and administration, tamed a communist insurgency and brought the princely states into the Union, promulgated a Constitution assuring equal rights to minorities and women, and mandating a multiparty system based on adult franchise. While Patel died in December 1950, the first General Election, held in the first months of 1952, further consolidated the nation.59

  While Malcolm Darling’s presumption that the British would have to go back betrayed an unconscious racism, he did raise one pertinent question: what would be the fate of the millions of Muslims in India now that they had lost their ‘chief protector’? That, in those first, fraught months after Partition, Gandhi spoke out most bravely for the rights of minorities was reassuring for them. When, in the winter of 1947–48, Gandhi stayed at Birla House, a diplomat whose office was across the street noted that every day ‘people of all communities rich and poor came to visit him for guidance, assistance or consolation’.

  Among those seeking succour and consolation from Gandhi, one community was especially evident. Thus, wrote the diplomat, ‘day in and day out, too, Muslims of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his 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.’60

  What would happen to the Muslims of India after Gandhi was assassinated? The fears for their safety were genuine. However, it was not the case that he was their only protector, the only politician who had ‘their interests at heart’. So did Jawaharlal Nehru. No sooner had he heard the news, and confirmed the identity of the assassin, Nehru was quick-witted enough to say on the radio that it was a Hindu who had murdered Gandhi. Later, in public speeches and letters to chief ministers, he repeatedly emphasized the need to treat Muslims (and Christians) as equal citizens of the land. Meanwhile, the government quickly banned the RSS, whose cadres had actively spread hatred against Muslims before, during and after Partition.

  Another associate of Gandhi who was resolute on this question was C. Rajagopalachari. In an address to the Calcutta University not long after his master’s death, Rajaji said: ‘May the blood that flowed from Gandhiji’s wounds and the tears that flowed from the eyes of Indian women everywhere when they learnt of his death serve to lay the curse of 1947, and may the grisly tragedy of that year sleep in history and not colour present passions.’61

  Rajaji’s hope was realized. The lead came from the top, but the ordinary Hindu was himself appalled at this act of parricide. The passions unleashed during Partition were quickly tamed, from without and from within. For more than a decade after Gandhi’s death, there were no serious communal riots in India.

  Some thirty-nine years before the event, Gandhi himself had anticipated the manner of his death—and what purpose it might serve. Writing to his nephew Maganlal on 29 January 1909, he had remarked: ‘I may have to meet death in South Africa at the hands of my countrymen. If that happens you should rejoice. It will unite the Hindus and Mussalmans….The enemies of the community are constantly making efforts against such a unity. In such a great endeavour, someone will have to sacrifice his life. If I make that sacrifice, I shall regard myself, as well as you, my colleagues, fortunate.’62

  EPILOGUE

  Gandhi in Our Time

  I

  In September 1924, Gandhi went on a fast in Delhi in response to Hindu–Muslim riots in northern India. ‘I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities,’ he said. ‘My longing is to be able to cement the two with my blood, if necessary. But, before I can do so, I must prove to the Mussalmans that I love them as well as I love the Hindus. My religion teaches me to love all equally.’1

  This credo, of loving all religions as his own, Gandhi practised throughout his life, with erratic results on those around him. From 1915 to 1948, periods of relative religious peace were followed by bouts of often savage violence. But before and through his death, he did radically reduce tensions between Hindus and Muslims, allowing the new nation state to craft institutions that could hold it together, and, through the practice of multiparty democracy, give the majority of its citizens some sort of stake in its functioning.

  The first major religious riots in independent India took place in 1963–64. The 1970s were punctuated by episodes of Hindu–Muslim conflict. The temperature then escalated alarmingly in the late 1980s, because of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, which sought to demolish a Mughal mosque in the town of Ayodhya that many Hindus believed was built on the spot where Lord Ram had been born. The campaign led to a wave of rioting across northern and western India, in which tens of thousands of people perished, a majority of them Muslims.2

  In 1990, when the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign was at its height, the veteran Gandhian Dr Sushila Nayar went on a peace mission to Ayodhya. She held a prayer meeting outside the disputed site, where—as was done in Gandhi’s time—texts from different scriptures were read and hymns sung. A small crowd had gathered to witness the event. One of the songs was an old melody in praise of Lord Ram, whose lyrics Gandhi had tweaked to suit his own inclusive and ecumenical purposes. When Dr Nayar and her colleagues came to the line ‘Ishwar Allah Téré Naam’ (God is named both Ishwar and Allah), there were catcalls and boos. The elderly Gandhian, confused by the reception, called the protesters to her side. We have come representing (the spirit and memory of) Gandhi, she told them (Hum Gandhiji ki taraf sé aayé hain). And we have come representing Godse (aur hum Godse ki taraf sé) was the devastating reply.3

  There remains a small cult of Nathuram Godse active today, which seeks to perpetuate the memory of Gandhi’s assassin by building statues and observing his birth and death anniversaries.4 More worryingly, there is a wider disenchantment with Gandhi’s ideas of religious pluralism. In recent years, his own Congress Party has very inconsistently followed his beliefs and his practice, and in any case the Congress’s political significance has steadily declined.

  The force that now dominates Indian politics is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which stands for a muscular Hindu assertiveness. The BJP’s ideological arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, distrusted Gandhi while he was alive, partly for his philosophy of non-violence but mostly for his belief that in independent India, Muslims and Christians must have the same rights as Hindus. Now, in the context of Gandhi’s formal standing as the ‘Father of the Nation’, the BJP and the RSS profess respect for him in public. At the same time, they seek to diminish his stature by elevating their own heroes. In 2003, during the BJP’s first spell in power at the Centre, the portrait of V.D. Savarkar was installed in the Central Hall of Parliament.5 Meanwhile, state governments run by the BJP have rewritten school textbooks to accord Savarkar a larger role in the Indian freedom struggle than Gandhi.6

  Since 2014, the BJP has once more been in power in New Delhi. Its prime minister, Narendra Modi, quotes and praises Gandhi from time to time. However, on social media, Gandhi is regularly abused by individuals who simultaneously declare themselves to be admirers of Modi. Echoing Savarkar’s dismissal of ‘Ahimsa/Charkha politics’, radical Hindu preachers deliver sermons claiming that Gandhi’s role in winning independence for India was vastly exaggerated. If Gandhi’s ideas retain their influence, they warn, then India will fall prey to Islamic fundamentalists and Christian missionaries. In pursuit of their virile and strong Hindu nation, they ask that the nineteenth-century Arya Samaj ideologue Dayanand Saraswati be anointed ‘Father of the Nation’ instead.7

  Religious pluralism in India was, and will always be, hard won. Although the almost continuous bloodletting
of the period 1989–93 has not been repeated, the country is never far away from a riot. Most often Muslims are the main sufferers, as in Gujarat in 2002, and in Kokrajhar and Muzaffarnagar in 2013. At other times it is Christians, as in Kandhamal in 2008; or Sikhs, as in New Delhi in 1984. Hindus have not escaped either, being purged from the valley of Kashmir by the Islamic radicals who now hold sway there.

  With the rise of Islamic fundamentalism around the world, and in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh as well, and with the political ascendancy of Hindu fundamentalist forces within the country, Gandhi’s commitment to interfaith harmony is more relevant than ever before.

  II

  Not long after Sushila Nayar’s failed peace mission to Ayodhya, I came across an interview with Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, the leader of a group of Maoist revolutionaries then active in eastern India. The Indian Maoists are known as Naxalites, after the village of Naxalbari in north Bengal, where their movement began in 1967. Two years later, in 1969, the world celebrated the centenary of Gandhi’s birth. In that year, the Naxalites brought down statues of Gandhi in towns and villages across the country. Occasionally, by way of variation, they entered a government office to vandalize his portrait.

  The Naxalites were suppressed and defeated by the Bengal Police in the 1970s. But they later revived, and by the early 1990s, were particularly active in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Their rise owed much to the work of Seetharamaiah, a former schoolteacher whose People’s War Group 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 the Maoist leader. A journalist later asked KS what he had done when on the run. He replied that he went from the hospital in Hyderabad to Gandhi’s birthplace in Gujarat, 600 miles away. Here the revolutionary got off the train and took a rickshaw to Gandhi’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 that are placed outside many Indian shrines. This Maoist’s hatred of Gandhi was so intense that he travelled incognito across the country merely to spit on the doorstep of the home in which Gandhi was born.8

  The movement led by KS was eventually crushed by the police. The Maoist cadres then crossed from Andhra Pradesh into Madhya Pradesh, where they dug strong roots, especially among the tribal people whose lands and forests (and the rich mineral ores that lay under them) were coveted by outsiders. Those districts now form part of the state of Chhattisgarh. Visiting the strife-torn region in 2006, I met some Maoist revolutionaries, whose dislike of Gandhi was as extreme as that of their predecessors. But I also saw that the violence unleashed by rebels had provoked savage reprisals by the state.

  The Maoist hostility to Gandhi has many sources. They oppose his political method, seeing non-violence as a diversionary tactic designed to suppress the revolutionary instincts of the masses and keep the ruling classes in power. Gandhi and his Congress Party claimed to have freed the country from British rule in 1947; the Maoists, however, still see India as a ‘semi-colony’ in thrall to Western capitalism and Western imperialism. Gandhi may have been a theological pluralist; but the fact that he so often used a religious idiom in his speeches and writings is antithetical to these self-proclaimed ‘scientific socialists’. Finally, there is also a regional tinge to the hatred: the Maoist movement began in Bengal and many of its leaders have been Bengalis, from a province where Gandhi faced the greatest opposition during his political career.

  Although they name themselves after a Chinese leader, the Indian Maoists may also be seen as ideological descendants of the HSRA of the 1920s. However, their main adversary, the Indian State, has not acted as Gandhi might have. Politicians and administrators have not sought to understand the roots of tribal discontent, or to begin (as Gandhi would have) a conversation with the angry young men who direct discontent through channels of blood. Instead, the police and paramilitary have burnt villages, harassed and violated women, and further escalated the violence. In between revolution and repression stand the unhappy tribals, squeezed by both sides.9

  III

  In arguments with religious extremists and proponents of armed struggle, the imperatives of pluralism and democracy compel one to stand on Gandhi’s side. More complex are the afterlives of another long-running battle that Gandhi had in his lifetime: with B.R. Ambedkar, on the question of the abolition of untouchability.

  Ambedkar and Gandhi were political adversaries in the 1930s and 1940s. They were partially reconciled in 1947, when Ambedkar joined the first Cabinet of free India, as law minister, working alongside Gandhi’s protégés, Nehru, Patel, Amrit Kaur and others. Between 1947 and 1951, Ambedkar played a key role in the Union government, overseeing the drafting of the Constitution, and promoting the reform of personal laws in the direction of gender equality.

  In 1951, Ambedkar left the Cabinet, and restarted his party, the Scheduled Caste Federation. He fought the 1952 elections in opposition to Nehru’s Congress. His party fared disastrously, and he himself lost the seat he contested. Ambedkar was now back to where he had been before, a bitter opponent of the Congress Party. In 1955, he gave an interview to the BBC where he denounced Gandhi in terms as polemical as in his writings of the 1930s and 1940s.10

  A Bombay writer who knew him well remarked that Ambedkar ‘never recognized the chapter in the life of the Mahatma exclusively devoted to the cause of the untouchables. The Doctor at no time peeped into the Mahatma’s Ashram where the touchable and the untouchable lived in peace and harmony and the former smilingly performed all the menial tasks the latter did in the world of caste-ridden Brahmins. To him the name of the Mahatma was saturated with evil. It was calamity for his community to have such a benefactor! The learned Doctor set his face to obliterate the collective record of all caste Hindu social reformers and thus eclipse them all, especially Gandhi.’11

  Others read Ambedkar’s situation more sympathetically. In early 1944, Horace Alexander, then doing relief work for the victims of the Bengal famine, had lunch with Ambedkar. He found him ‘a tragically lonely man’. Ambedkar seems to have recognized that sitting on the viceroy’s executive council at a time the heroes of Quit India were in jail would cost him politically. But did he have any other option? ‘I wonder what might have happened,’ remarked Horace Alexander, ‘if some of the Congress leaders had shown him warm and generous friendship when he was young. Perhaps they tried. I do not know. But today he is lonely and embittered, fighting a forlorn battle on all fronts at once, nursing an impossible political ambition.’12

  Their personal rivalry apart, there were, of course, major philosophical differences between the two men. Ambedkar had great faith in the reformist powers of the State, which he saw as the chief instrument for ending untouchability. Gandhi was suspicious of State power, instead emphasizing moral transformation through individual and social self-correction. While Gandhi hoped to save Hinduism by ending untouchability, Ambedkar concluded that the only way for the ‘untouchables’ to emancipate themselves was by converting to another faith. He pondered long about which religion to join, considering and rejecting Sikhism, Islam and Christianity before becoming a Buddhist in October 1956. Tragically, he died six weeks later, at the age of sixty-four.

  In recent years, the Gandhian term ‘Harijan’ has been replaced by the term ‘Dalit’ to denote the erstwhile ‘untouchables’. As one activist told an anthropologist in the 1980s: ‘Harijan means what we can never be allowed to become by the caste Hindu, and what we may not want to be anyway. It was a superficial way for Gandhi to resolve his guilt.’13 Although ‘Dalit’, meaning ‘the oppressed’, was used in parts of northern India from the late nineteenth century, it only gained wider currency in the 1970s, following its adoption by a group of radical activists in Maharashtra wh
o called themselves the Dalit Panthers. Now it is ubiquitously used across India, by Dalits and non-Dalits alike, whereas ‘Harijan’ has deservedly fallen out of favour.14

  Meanwhile, since his death, the political significance of B.R. Ambedkar and his ideas have steadily grown. In his lifetime, Ambedkar had a popular following in his native Maharashtra, yet in other parts of India he was known only to educated Dalits. Now, however, he is revered by Dalits across the land. Photographs and statues of Ambedkar adorn homes, schools, factories, shops and offices; his books are read and reread; and stories about him are told and retold as well.

  Dalits venerate Ambedkar for his searing critiques of the caste system; for his work in drafting the Indian Constitution; and for being an exemplar and inspiration in their own continuing struggles for dignity and self-respect. Many Dalit intellectuals who admire Ambedkar simultaneously denigrate Gandhi, whom they see as patronizing their hero, deceiving him in the negotiations during the Poona Pact, and being an apologist for the caste order himself.15