Patriots and Partisans: From Nehru to Hindutva and Beyond

by Ramachandra Guha

  His timidity in not contesting a Lok Sabha seat. Dr Singh was, by my count, the fifth person to be sworn in as prime minister while in the Rajya Sabha. The other four sought election to the Lower House at an early date. Surely in the 2009 elections at least, he should have asked for a Lok Sabha seat, from a safe constituency if need be? This was a major source of the prime minister’s weakness, of his inability to assert his authority over the Cabinet, or garner respect from the Congress party, from its coalition partners, and, perhaps above all, from the Opposition.

  His lack of judgement when it came to choosing key advisers. The two principal secretaries in the prime minister’s office were a notorious intriguer and a Gandhi family loyalist respectively. Unlike their predecessors, neither commanded respect within the civil service at large. His two media advisers were PhDs turned editorial writers, with little experience of on-the-ground reporting, and scant understanding of the power of television to make and unmake images. A less intellectual media manager might have insisted that the prime minister go out often into the countryside, to meet and mingle with the aam admi.

  His keenness to win good chits from western leaders. Dr Singh was reluctant to travel to most states of the Indian Union, but always happy to fly between continents for G-20 meetings and the like. As is well known, the one time he asserted himself was when canvassing for the Indo-US nuclear agreement. This treaty shall do little to meet our energy needs in an efficient or sustainable manner. And Indo-US relations were on an even keel anyway. But, as when he told George W. Bush that ‘the people of India love you’, his campaign for the nuclear deal suggested that when it came to his standing in the North Atlantic world, Dr Singh could act quickly and decisively.

  In his first term as prime minister, Dr Singh did not notably enhance his reputation; nor, however, did he seriously diminish it. After the riots in Gujarat in 2002, and their tacit endorsement by the Union government as well as sections of the intelligentsia, the first UPA government had succeeded in calming communal tempers. The second term of the UPA, on the other hand, has been truly disastrous. It will be remembered, if at all, for the never-ending wave of corruption scandals; the slowing down of economic growth and the wider mismanagement of the economy (resulting in double-digit inflation and a precipitous fall in the rupee); the steady degradation of public institutions; the sense of drift and hopelessness—all under the watch of a prime minister who is a professional economist, and has decades of experience behind him in working in government.

  Had Dr Singh retired from office in 2009, history would have judged him more kindly. He would have been remembered as one of the two main architects (the other being Narasimha Rao) of the liberalization of the Indian economy, and even as a moderately successful prime minister, whose government had stemmed the rise of Hindutva and initiated some progressive social policies.

  If, however, Dr Singh thought himself able to carry on, then he should have sought election to the Lok Sabha. He did neither; to find his credibility steadily eroding. It was still possible, in the winter of 2010–11, for Dr Singh to have retrieved some lost ground: by sacking Suresh Kalmadi and A. Raja as soon as the scale of the scandals they oversaw became evident, and by insisting that the Congress break its ties with the DMK in Tamil Nadu, even if that meant the fall of the UPA government in New Delhi.

  In the popular imagination, the prime minister was now seen as indecisive and self-serving; his fellow septuagenarian Anna Hazare, as courageous and self-sacrificing. It is a mark of how disappointing Manmohan Singh’s second term has been that it allowed an authoritarian village reformer with little understanding of what Mohandas K. Gandhi said, did, or meant, to claim the mantle of the Mahatma.

  VI

  In the year 2011, aided on the one side by a frenzied media and on the other side by an incompetent (and occasionally malign) government, Anna Hazare brought the matter of state corruption to countrywide attention. However, to convert attention to action, one must radically depart from this particular activist’s preachings. For instance, at the height of the movement of which he was the symbol and rallying point, Hazare claimed that the last sixty-four years of political freedom have been utterly wasted (‘chausutt saal mein humko sahi azaadi nahin mili hai’). The fact is that had it not been for the groundwork laid by the first generation of nation-builders—Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, etc.—Dalits and women would not have equal rights under the law, nor would elections based on universal franchise be regularly and freely held.

  Dalits and women were less-than-equal citizens in the Raj of the British, and in the Raj of Anna Hazare’s much-admired Shivaji Maharaj as well. Nor did those other regimes have constitutional guarantees for the freedom of movement, combination and expression. To be sure, there remains a large slippage between precept and practice. I have elsewhere called India a ‘fifty-fifty democracy’. The jurist Nani Palkhivala once said the same thing somewhat differently: India, he suggested, is a second-class democracy with a first-class Constitution.

  In the years since Palkhivala first made this remark, India may have become a third-class democracy. But the ideal remains, to match which one needs patience and hard work on a variety of fronts. Anna Hazare once claimed that the creation of a single Lokpal will end 60 to 65 per cent of corruption. That remark confused a village with a nation. A benign (and occasionally brutal) patriarch can bring about improvements in a small community. But a nation’s problems cannot be solved by a Super-Cop or Super-Sarpanch, even (or perhaps especially) if he is assisted (as the legislation Hazare’s team envisaged) by thousands of busybodies and themselves corruptible inspectors.

  Improving the quality and functioning of democratic institutions shall require far more than a Lokpal, whether Jan or Sarkari. Democratically minded Indians have to work for, among other things, changes in the law to make funding of elections more transparent, and to completely debar criminals from contesting elections; the reform of political parties to make them less dependent on family and kin; the use of technology to make the delivery of social (and civic) services less arbitrary and more efficient; the insulation of the bureaucracy and the police from political interference; the lateral entry of professionals into public service; and more. In striving for these changes one must draw upon the experience, and expertise, of the very many Indians who share Anna Hazare’s idealism without being limited by his parochialism.

  Chapter Six

  Gandhi’s Faith and Ours

  ~

  I

  In or about the year 1980—when I was a young doctoral student in sociology—I had an argument with the philosopher Ramchandra (Ramu) Gandhi about his grandfather’s faith. I had always admired the Mahatma, but my secular–socialist self sought to rid him of the spiritual baggage which seemed unnecessary to his broader message. Could we not follow Gandhi in his empathy for the poor and his insistence on non-violence while rejecting the religious idiom in which his ideas were cloaked? Ramu Gandhi argued that the attempt to secularize Gandhi was mistaken. If you take the Mahatma’s faith out of him, he told me, then Gandhi would not be the Mahatma. His religious beliefs were crucial to his political philosophy—in this respect, the man was the message.

  Gandhi was born a decade after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This was a time of widespread scepticism among the educated classes in England and Europe, a sentiment captured in the title of Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘God’s Funeral’. But outside the continent, this was also a time of heightened missionary activity. In their new colonies in Africa and Asia, European priests sought to claim the heathen and the pagan for Christianity. In reaction, Hindus in India started missionary societies of their own, as in the Arya Samaj, which sought to make Hindus more unified in facing the challenges of Islam and Christianity.

  The distinctiveness of Gandhi’s faith was that it simultaneously rejected the atheism of the intellectuals as well as the proselytizing of the missionaries. The home he grew up in was devout without being
dogmatic. His mother, who was a profound early influence on him, was a Pranami, a member of a syncretic sect whose Hindu founder admired the Koran and is said to have visited Mecca. As a young adult, Gandhi learned the virtues of austerity and non-violence from his Jain preceptor Raychandbhai. His upbringing was ecumenical; so, too, was his personal orientation. He had close Muslim friends in school, and even closer Jewish and Parsi friends while working in South Africa. For most of his adult life his best friend was a practising Christian priest, Charles Freer Andrews.

  Through the 1980s, as I read more by Gandhi and more about Gandhi, I became persuaded that religion was central to the Mahatma’s personal life and to his political practice. My change in orientation was not unconnected to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had knocked a hole in my socialist beliefs (or pretensions); and to the rise of the Ayodhya movement, which had made more urgent the relevance of a Hinduism such as Gandhi’s, that was not intolerant of other faiths.

  My conversion—if you could call it that—was hastened by my reading, c. 1996, of a book manuscript by an Australian scholar called J.T.F. Jordens. It was the product of prodigious scholarship, worn lightly. The author’s approach was biographical as well as analytical. He knew the vast secondary material on Gandhi and Indian nationalism; and he had read, more than once, the ninety and more volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

  Through his erudition (and industry), Jordens had located the evolution of Gandhi’s religious thought in the context of the changing contours of his life as a whole. Reading his marvellous book put an end to my youthful project of de-spiritualizing Gandhi by making him into a Karl Marx sans a belief in violence as the midwife of social change.

  II

  Joseph Teresa Florent Jordens, the author of Gandhi’s Religion: A Home-Spun Shawl, was born in Belgium in 1925. He joined the Jesuit order after finishing high school. Later, he studied Sanskrit at the University of Louvain, writing a doctoral thesis on ‘The idea of the Divine in the Bhagavadgita’. In 1953, his doctorate in hand, he took a boat from Rotterdam to India. He spent several years in the subcontinent, studying Hindi and Sanskrit in Calcutta and Ranchi. He also played a great deal of football with his Indian friends; because of his tall frame, he was usually placed in the goal.

  Befriending Hindus and Muslims led Jordens to rethink the idea of spending a lifetime as a Jesuit priest. He left the Order, and, recognizing that English—and scholarship in English—was the wave of the future, moved to Australia, taking up a job at Melbourne University, where he established a Department of Indian Studies in collaboration with Sibnarayan Ray, a writer and scholar known for his work on the Bengali revolutionary, M.N. Roy. Jordens later moved to the Australian National University in Canberra, where he came under the influence of the great historian of ancient India, A.L. Basham.

  In the 1970s, Jordens returned to India, to research and write the first rigorous, scholarly, Life of the founder of the Arya Samaj, Dayananda Saraswati. His book drew on a wide range of source material in Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati. Combining biography and social history, Jordens traced the arc of Dayananda’s life, from his early years in Kathiawar through his time studying with teachers in the Doab, to his subsequent founding of the Arya Samaj and his proselytizing work in Bombay, the United Provinces, Rajputana, and, not least, the Punjab. The interplay between man and environment was fascinatingly sketched, the narrative exploring what Dayananda learned from the various places he lived in, and what he gave them in return. Dayananda’s studies, teachings, writings and speeches were analyzed in depth, the work of the reformer set against the background of the rapidly changing world of late nineteenth-century India.

  Dayananda Saraswati: His Life and Ideas was published by Oxford University Press in 1978. Three years later the same publisher brought out Jordens’s next book, entitled Swami Shraddhananda: His Life and Causes. This explored the complicated career of one of Dayananda Saraswati’s most influential followers. Born Munshiram, this man overcame a youth spent in indolence and hedonism to emerge as a major leader of the Arya Samaj in north India. Munshiram founded a famous seminary, Gurukul Kangri, that turned out a stream of students who took the Samaj’s message to the farthest corners of the land.

  In 1917, at the age of sixty, Munshiram took sanyas and assumed the name Shraddhananda. He renounced his family, his office, and his possessions, but remained active in the workaday world. He joined the national movement and came into close touch with Gandhi, whom he admired, with reservations. Shraddhananda was also deeply committed to the abolition of Untouchability, if somewhat less so to the Mahatma’s platform of Hindu–Muslim unity. In the event, it was a Muslim fanatic who assassinated the Arya Samaj leader in 1926.

  Jordens’s career mirrors that of his close contemporary W.H. (Hew) McLeod, a New Zealander who came to the Punjab in the 1950s as a Christian missionary, but was instead converted to the study of Sikhism. His books on Sikh history and scripture are classics. Jordens and McLeod were both anticipated by Verrier Elwin, an Anglican priest who, after meeting Mahatma Gandhi, left the Church and became the foremost scholar of adivasi culture and religion. Coming to India as convinced Christians, these three men soon immersed themselves in the scholarly study of faiths rooted in India instead.

  Through the research for his first two books, Jordens acquired a profound knowledge of the sacred texts of Hinduism, and of how they had been reshaped by their modern interpreters. Writing about the travels and struggles of Dayananda and Shraddhananda deepened his understanding of the geography and social structure of India. Notably, Dayananda, like Gandhi, was born and raised in Kathiawar. And, as Jordens remarked in an autobiographical essay, his book on Shraddhananda drew his research ‘into the twentieth century, particularly the period in which the Indian National Congress developed. Overshadowing all was the giant figure of Mahatma Gandhi.’

  Dayananda and Shraddhananda were both substantial figures; exploring their lives and causes was excellent training for the study of a Hindu social reformer who was even more radical and important than they.

  III

  As he narrates in his autobiography, Gandhi was not especially attracted to rituals and idol worship in his youth. In his native Kathiawar, he befriended very many non-Hindus, before proceeding to London, where his encounters with Christians and especially Theosophists ‘had sown in his mind the idea that various religions have very fundamental things in common’.

  Jordens identifies Gandhi’s early years in South Africa as key to the evolution of his religious thought. Gandhi was greatly shaped by his correspondence with the Jain poet and thinker Raychandbhai, whom he had first met in Bombay in 1891. In June 1894 Gandhi posted Raychand a letter with as many as twenty-seven queries regarding religion. Raychand, in reply, counselled Gandhi against the idea of seeing God either as a personal Saviour or as an impersonal Absolute. Moksha, or liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth, was not hastened by worship of mythological figures like Krishna or Vishnu either. Rather, argued the Jain thinker, the path to spiritual liberation lay through greater knowledge and ethical action.

  Raychand’s teachings were reinforced by two books by heterodox Christians that Gandhi read in 1894 and 1895—Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, from which the young lawyer got the idea that service was the major obligation of a religious person; and The Perfect Way by Anna Bonus Kingford and Edward Maitland, which rejected the idea of Christ the Saviour and instead stressed self-improvement and self-purification (including the practice of asceticism).

  The faith towards which Gandhi was moving during his South African years was, as Jordens shows, not dissimilar to Advaita. God did not take the shape of avatars whose idols or biographies should be worshipped, and who would distribute rewards or punishments according to the devotion (or lack thereof) of the worshipper. Rather, God was nirakar, nirgun, without form, without qualities. He dwelt everywhere, including within the individual human being. By the same token, Gandhi did not ascribe much import
ance to what was said (or not said) in the Hindu scriptures. Liberation depended not so much on knowledge of these texts as on living a truthful and compassion-filled life.

  In South Africa, Gandhi was part of a tiny community of diasporic Indians. He returned to his homeland for good, in 1915, with some clear if unorthodox views on religion in general, and on one religion in particular. As Jordens remarks, he was immediately confronted with ‘people who claimed to be experts in Hinduism, to know its holy books and its sacred language, and to have a right to give authoritative statements on matters of ethics, doctrine, and scriptural interpretation’. A lesser being would have been intimidated by these experts and their (professed) expertise. Not Gandhi. Although he was a Bania rather than a Brahmin, knew little Sanskrit, and had only a cursory acquaintance with the Vedas and the Upanishads, Gandhi was yet willing—and able—to defend his distinctive interpretation of the Hindu tradition.

  Over the next thirty years, Gandhi clarified and refined his religious faith, while keeping in mind the social (and political) challenges facing Hindus and India. Jordens justly pays close attention to Gandhi’s long, heroic campaign against Untouchability. ‘I believe that all men are born equal,’ said Gandhi in a speech in Tanjore in 1927. Five years later, he persuaded his fellow Congressmen to adopt a resolution stating that