On January 30, we again mourned, as we have for seventy-six years, the assassination in 1948 of the Father of the Nation. At the present time, Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of India—the very idea of Gandhi, one might say—is in danger of being swept aside by prevailing ideological currents. Today, when the standing of his historic detractors is at an all-time high, Gandhiji has been criticised for weakness, for having bent over too far to accommodate Muslim interests, and for his pacifism, which is seen by the jingoistic Hindutva movement as unmanly.
The Mahatma was killed, with the name of Ram on his lips, for being too pro-Muslim; indeed, he had just come out of a fast he had conducted to coerce his own followers, the ministers of the new Indian government, to transfer a larger share than they had intended of the assets of undivided India to the new state of Pakistan. Gandhiji had also announced his intention to spurn the country he had failed to keep united, and to spend the rest of his years in Pakistan.
But that was the enigma of Gandhiji in a nutshell: idealistic, quirky, quixotic, and determined, a man who answered to the beat of no other drummer, but got everyone else to march to his tune. Someone once called him a cross between a saint and a Tammany Hall politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distil all the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions.
In his immortal ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech to the nation on the midnight of 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the Mahatma as ‘embodying the old spirit of India’ whose message would be remembered by ‘succeeding generations’.
What was that message? The Mahatma was the extraordinary leader of the world’s first successful non-violent movement for independence from colonial rule. At the same time, he was a philosopher who was constantly seeking to live out his own ideas, whether they applied to individual self-improvement or social change: his autobiography was typically subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
No dictionary imbues ‘truth’ with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and, therefore, right. Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’ or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. To describe his method, Gandhi coined the expression satyagraha—literally, ‘holding on to truth’ or, as he variously described it, truth-force, love-force or soul-force. He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance; because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in the truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive: you had to be prepared actively to suffer for the truth.
So non-violence, like many later concepts labelled with a negation, from non-cooperation to non-alignment, meant much more than the denial of an opposite; it did not merely imply the absence of violence. Non-violence was the way to vindicate the truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.
This was the approach Gandhi brought to the movement for India’s independence—and it worked. Where sporadic terrorism and moderate constitutionalism had both proved ineffective, Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a technique to which the British had no response. By abstaining from violence, Gandhi wrested the moral advantage. By breaking the law non-violently, he showed up the injustice of the law. By accepting the punishments imposed on him, he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes, he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defence of what he considered to be right. In the end, he made the perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.
What lessons does Gandhi offer to us in today, beyond their historical resonance? One thing must be faced: Gandhiji’s approach could only work against opponents vulnerable to a loss of moral authority—a government responsive to domestic and international public opinion, capable of being shamed into conceding defeat. Equally, that approach required freedom fighters to possess moral authority, too. The power of Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience rested in being able to say, ‘to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself’. Gandhism, without moral authority on both sides, is like Marxism without a proletariat. Yet that is what we are confronted with in the Modi era—a ruler incapable of shame seeking to drape himself in the moral authority of he who once evoked it.
None of this dilutes Gandhi’s greatness, or the extraordinary resonance of his life and his message. While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence and war, the Mahatma taught the virtues of truth, non-violence and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And, he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage which few will ever match. He was that rare kind of leader who was not confined by the inadequacies of his followers.
Yet Gandhi’s truth was essentially his own. He formulated its unique content, and determined its application in a specific historical context. Inevitably, few in today’s world can measure up to his greatness or aspire to his credo. The originality of his thought, and the example of his life, inspires people around the world today, but we still have a lot to learn from Gandhiji. One wonders if, beyond lip service, we really have.
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On January 30, we again mourned, as we have for seventy-six years, the assassination in 1948 of the Father of the Nation. At the present time, Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of India—the very idea of Gandhi, one might say—is in danger of being swept aside by prevailing ideological currents. Today, when the standing of his historic detractors is at an all-time high, Gandhiji has been criticised for weakness, for having bent over too far to accommodate Muslim interests, and for his pacifism, which is seen by the jingoistic Hindutva movement as unmanly.
The Mahatma was killed, with the name of Ram on his lips, for being too pro-Muslim; indeed, he had just come out of a fast he had conducted to coerce his own followers, the ministers of the new Indian government, to transfer a larger share than they had intended of the assets of undivided India to the new state of Pakistan. Gandhiji had also announced his intention to spurn the country he had failed to keep united, and to spend the rest of his years in Pakistan.
But that was the enigma of Gandhiji in a nutshell: idealistic, quirky, quixotic, and determined, a man who answered to the beat of no other drummer, but got everyone else to march to his tune. Someone once called him a cross between a saint and a Tammany Hall politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distil all the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions.
In his immortal ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech to the nation on the midnight of........
© Mathrubhumi English
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