Eiuro Hazama's strange take on late Gandhian thought

Eiuro Hazama, a Japanese Professor- and thus not necessarily a virtue signaling imbecile- has a paper titled 'The paradox of Gandhian Secularism' in which he seeks to

examine the relationship between Gandhi’s two major intellectual developments in his last years: his insistence on political secularism (‘individualization of religion’) and his controversial religious experiments with brahmacarya (sleeping naked with his 17-year-old grandniece, Manubahen).

This seems strange. 'Intellectual development' means some reasoned advance on a previous position itself of a reasoned type. Gandhi, like others of his class and generation, had changed his views on caste and race and how the world works but this was because of Socio-economic and political developments. There was nothing 'intellectual' about a change that almost all Gandhi's contemporaries experienced. 

It is similarly strange to see Gandhi's little peccadillo- like the aged King David, he liked sleeping naked with young girls- being referred to as a 'controversial religious experiment'. 

Hazama is pretending that Gandhi was an intellectual who for some abstruse intellectual reason started talking the same sort of worthless shite as everybody else while doing what a lot of old men in poor health would like to do- viz. sleep with comely teenage Abishags to warm their decaying carcases. 

What is it about Gandhi which causes smart people who write about him to immediately start telling the stupidest lie possible? 

 Contrary to the prevalent interpretations, I will argue that Gandhi’s political principle of secularism during the last years of his life entailed implicitly his radical religious belief, which he thought worth risking his life to present before the public. There was an intimate relationship between the concepts of brahmacarya, individuality (vyaktitva), and religion (dharm) that constituted his principle of secularism—these concepts were integrated by Gandhi in his distinct Hindu metaphysics of atma.

What a load of shit! Hindu metaphysics is either 'mayavadi'- in which case metaphysics is shit- or else involves the gaining of 'siddhis'- supernatural abilities. Gandhi, like others in his line of work thought that pretending to be a bit 'Tantric' might fool people into thinking he had gained magical powers- a bit like Mahesh Yogi, who groped Mia Farrow, and then made billions by teaching 'yogic levitation which helped broadcast 'peace rays-' but, in Gandhi's case, the ploy was transparent and frankly a bit sad. The world had moved on. Pax Brittanica had ended. Thus non-violence was simply silly. 

Although Gandhi’s ideas on  atma were initially influenced by ´ Srımad Rajcandra’s Jainism, 

Rubbish! Substance can't act directly on substance- i.e. there is no Grace- in Jainism. Thus, by showing kindness to the hard-hearted worker who demands money in return for his labor, it is not possible to crack open his ego so God's Grace can flood in thus causing the fellow to repent his greed and reconcile him to working for you for free- or even paying you for the privilege. 

 'Aashrav'- the influx of karma binding particles- in Jainism is mechanical. Even Raichandbhai Mehta would have to be reborn as a monk at a period when a Tirthankara was preaching so as to gain kevalya which, btw, Vaishnavs are supposed to reject. 

It is foolish to say that Gandhi, who was assimilating the Christ of the synoptic Gospels to Vaishnavism, held a Jain view of 'adhyatmic gyan'. 

he later repudiated the latter’s views and revised them by incorporating some ideas from Western Orientalists, including Sir John Woodroffe’s tantric thought.

This is highly tendentious. There were plenty of Sakta and Kaula and other Tantric lineages amongst Gandhi's class. There was nothing special about Arthur Avalon- a High Court Judge who published translations of Sakta texts by working closely with Sakta scholars. This rehabilitated Tantra. At an earlier period, Europeans savants- or charlatans- like Malfatti seem to have got hold of some Tantric texts and this had been a factor in creating a European sex-magic tradition well known to Yeats and Crowley and so forth. 

Gandhi is known for his idea of ‘religious politics’. In the preface of
Satyan¯a Prayogo athv¯a ¯Atmakath¯a (1925–29; hereafter, Autobiography), he
illustrated this explicitly:
What I want to do, what I have been eagerly doing for the last 30 years, is
self-realization , to see God face to face and]
the liberation of the self . My every activity is practiced just from this
perspective. My every writing is undertaken just from this perspective, and
my jumping into the political sphere is also subject to this
thing [perspective].

There is nothing Jain here. The self is a substance. You can't realize it till kevalya is attained. The best you can do is stop aashrav of bad karma and hope to get reborn as a monk etc. Towards this end there is a process of analysis termed 'samyak darshan'.

In kevalya, all perfected souls are equal. There is no God to see face to face. Umaswati says that all beings reach kevalya. This takes a long time- but is merely a blink of the eye compared to the eternity of everybody being a kevalyin. 

Gandhi's 'jumping into the political field' was exactly similar to Pacifists and Christian Socialists and so forth entering the political fray. However, Khilafat was retrograde and is still with us in the shape of ISIS. However, 'manuvadi' politics- i.e trying to reestablish a rigid caste hierarchy- has disappeared though no doubt dynastic parties- e.g. Congress- are loath to part with the loathsome thing. It should be remembered that Gandhi was initially closely associated with the Hindu Mahasabha, as was Motilal- both were present at it founding- though it was Gandhi who created the Congress-Khilafat combine and after his ignominious surrender it was Motilal, considered a Muslim appeaser, who headed the Swaraj-Khilafat combine in the Legislature. But both these initiatives were miserable failures because neither Hindus nor Shias nor Ismailis gave a toss about some Hanafi Caliph. 

Later, in the concluding chapter, Gandhi remarked:
‘One who says religion is not related to politics 
does not know religion.’

Lord Krishna says dharma is difficult to grasp. God knows what it is. You don't. How it relates to politics too is beyond mortal ken. Still Gandhi & Co thought a Religion based politics would unite Indians against the Raj but the thing failed the moment Gandhi unilaterally surrendered and thus the path was paved to Partition. Obviously, if the Hindus had stipulated for control over only the Hindu majority areas, then they could have got their own Independence. The Muslim majority areas may cunningly have retained British help to develop faster. An India run by a nutter like Gandhi or a fool like Motilal would soon have been on its knees.  

Anthony Parel pertinently argues in this
connection that Gandhi’s Autobiography represents ‘the dynamic
nature of the relationship of politics to moksha’.

Fuck does that mean? Nothing at all. Hindus understood that if you do something good in politics then you gain merit and have a better rebirth. But rebirth aint moksha. Nobody was saying if you are martyred in Freedom's cause, you go straight to union with the Godhead. Why? The fact is, we'd rather spend a few billion years as demigods in Paradise feasting with all our friends and relatives.  

This dynamism in Gandhi’s philosophy is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of his
religio-political conception of satyagraha (literally meaning ‘holding
onto/insisting on the truth’).

No it isn't. Satyagraha means creating a nuisance.  If the Government locks you up, you hope this will make it unpopular. When this does not happen you beg to be released for health reasons or coz your Mummy is sick and you really want to see her or something of that sort. 

In contrast to this established view, however, some recent works
highlight that, towards the end of his life, Gandhi began to put
forward his ideas on ‘secularism’, in which he reiterated that, while
religion was bound to be ‘individual’ or ‘personal’, the state should be
wholly ‘secular’.

i.e. should have a Police to beat people and an Army to kill invaders and so on and so forth. Religion needs to be insulated from Politics unless you have a class of Ayatollahs who are itching to hang people. 

Although Gandhi at no time in his life espoused the
top-down religious compulsion of theocracy, it was not until the 1940s
that he desperately called for the individualization of religion along
with the creation of the secular state.

What is this shit? The British Raj was secular. Provincial autonomy had been gained. The next step was a Federal Government which must be either secular or permit Partition. The problem with Partition is that it might extend to linguistic areas. The country might be Balkanized. 

He became particularly vocal in support of the dissemination of this principle during the period after the partition.

Nehru was Prime Minister. Gandhi's financiers were dealing directly with those in office. Nobody was listening to the old crackpot. He got this revenge by fasting to force the Government to hand money to the Pakistanis with whom the nation was at war. But the Government had the last laugh when the old fool was shot.  

There are two major interpretations of this secularism of Gandhi’s
last years. The first is the argument proposed by Bipan Chandra
and K. Sangari.7 According to these works, Gandhi came to realize
that a religion could no longer ‘be a binding force in a multireligious
society’, since the unrelenting communal violence during the 1940s
had ‘destroyed or transformed the “inside” of all religions’.8 This embryonic
recognition ultimately led Gandhi to advocate the principle of
secularism, pushing ‘against his own earlier insistence on the fusion of
(the spirit of) religion and politics’.

The truth is Gandhi had failed to deliver the bigger 'Akhand Bharat' and the Hindu Mahasabha wanted the fellow dead. So did everybody else. The nuisance had to be curbed. Thankfully a Chitpavan nutter did the deed so Chitpavans were joyously massacred. Nobody really liked them though they are useful and so the thing was stopped. 

To put it more concretely, during this period, Gandhi urgently developed a new linguistic formulation to refer to the principle of secularism, moving away from reference to
a ‘fundamental religion’ underlying all religions and toward a ‘fundamental
ethics’ common to all religions.

That fundamental ethics consisted of ethnic cleansing. Linguistic formulations are just empty words. 

This new linguistic formulation was able to emerge because Gandhi’s

habit was to repeat in a more cockeyed fashion whatever other people were babbling 

conception of religion was basically constructed upon an ‘ethics/morality’ that would eventually prioritize ‘reason’ as ‘the final arbiter’ with respect to both secular and
religious matters.

Reason said Gandhi should be locked up because he was a nuisance. But Independent India didn't want to lock him up. Let some nutter kill the crackpot. That's a win win.  

Chandra argues that Gandhi’s secularism in his
last years represented a similar effort at secularization to that which
occurred in nineteenth-century Europe.

Which shows Chandra was a cretin. Nineteenth century Europe was about the curbing of corruption and the improvement of State supplied Education and Public Health and Social Services and so forth. The end of the British Raj was about a scramble for offices of profit and the cornering of rents.  

Gandhi’s idea of secularism is also interpreted by Sangari as ‘Nehruvian’,13 in the sense that it was derived ‘partly from Protestantism and a bourgeois notion of individual
freedom’,where it guaranteed ‘the right of individuals to freely
profess and practice any values subject to public order and morality’.

Fuck off! India did ethnic cleansing same as Pakistan. What mattered was whether refugees were spirited enough to displace the minority. If it wasn't, nobody would lift a finger to help them. Why? If these guys ran away from their homes then they are cowards. They will run away from here as well. Let them rot. This is what happened to the East Bengali Hindus. It didn't happen to Punjabis because Punjabis will fight.  

Another interpretation is propounded by Ajay Skaria. In contrast
to Chandra and Sangari’s arguments, Skaria argues that Gandhi’s
secularism in his last years was substantially ‘consistent’ with his
previous ideas on religious politics.

It was magical thinking- nothing more.  

Skaria, primarily examining Gandhi’s Hind Svar¯aj (1909), asserts that the latter’s concept of religion was not premised upon any otherworldly, transcendent
God or on any Enlightenment reason, but instead that it was
originally inspired by Jain ascetic

the guy was married. He was an in-law of Dr. Pranjivan Mehta- who financed Gandhi and whose opposition to vaccinations and quarantines marked him as equally shitheaded. Mehta helped undermine the position of Indians in Burma which separated from India in 1937. This turned out to be bad for the people of that country. Still, once holier than thou Gujju cretins start dabbling in politics, everything is bound to turn to shit. 

 ideas on dayadharm (religion of compassion), which were intimately concerned with
secular ‘everyday transactions’.

This was common to Vaishnavism and other mercantile creeds. It is good for such communities if they get a reputation for empathy rather than sharp practice.  

Moreover, the word duniya used in Hind Svaraj was not equivalent to the ‘secular’ of classical Western secularism,

but is equivalent to the Church's use of the term. The Inquisition does not kill the heretic. It 'sorrowfully' hands the fellow over to 'the Secular arm' for a nice auto da fe.  

in particular in that it was by no means separable from religious matters.

Nonsense! It is sufficient to have different systems of law for religious and secular matters for such a separation to exist.  

Skaria concludes that Gandhi’s political commitment to secularism during the last years of his life should be understood in terms of his ‘distinctive secularism that was internal
to the concept of religion’.

So, Skaria says commitment to x should be understood in terms of x. What a great discovery! You can say this about anybody! Stalin's political commitment to killing priests should be understood in terms of his distinctive secularism that was internal to the concept of religion as the opium of the masses. 

In this article, I will propose a different interpretation from either
of the above. In order to do so, I will stress the necessity of attention
to the following two points. First, looking carefully into Gandhi’s
deliberative expressions of secularism in his last years, we find that
what he reiterated to be secular was unexceptionally the ‘state/politics’
; never did he propound, despite the assertion by Chandra, the secularization of religion.

This is nonsense. Gandhi, like everybody else, accepted that Hindu religion must be secularized- i.e. brought under the purview of the Ruler. Indians knew what the Japs had done to the Buddhists so as to curb the nuisance they might pose.  In India there was no need to actually set fire to temples or kill monks or force them to get married because Hindu temples had not been used by the regime to fulfil an administrative function. However, there were various obnoxious aspects to priestcraft which everybody wanted to see eliminated. The temple priests themselves were begging elected Ministries to pass laws so that they could get rid of restrictions on Temple entry or get rid of corrupt shebaits or mahants or whatever. Gandhi himself was from a Pushtimarga lineage. Throwing syphilitic leaders of such sects in jail if they start fucking the wives of their disciples- which is what may have happened to one of Gandhi's father's wives- was something every Hindu was in favor off. 

Congress was a Hindu organization which delivered the reform of Religious law. Sadly it then became corrupt and 'Socialist' and as stupid and dynastic as shit. Thankfully, the BJP stepped up to the plate. With Modi we at last have a Gujju who does not babble bollocks incessantly. We can now put Gandhi in context. The guy was a crackpot who, being Gujju, was marginally useful. But that's about all that can be said about him. 

Hazama, being Japanese, has put a little effort into this paper. But he is ignorant of Indian religion. He thinks Arthur Avalon was introducing Western ideas into Sakta philosophy whereas the good Judge was merely contributing elegant prose to a neo-orthodox revival of a Vedantic type. This had zero influence on Gandhi who did not know Sanskrit. However, he did have a couple of Tantrics in his Ashram. Raihana Tyabji is still remembered but there was no lack of the hereditary sort. The fact is the Hindu revival had been spearheaded by Swamis and Yogis of various types. So everything in Hinduism was always available to everybody in Hindu nationalist circles. Thanks to Theosophy, the thing gained international currency and merged with older 'sex-magic' traditions which had their roots in Romantic Naturphilosophie or its various regional analogues.

Gandhi once briefly lived in West Kensington a short walk from what was to become the premises of the 'Golden Dawn' in Hammersmith. Thankfully Gandhi went on to do something useful in South Africa. Had he remained in West London he'd have soon seen all sorts of crazy folk- Aleister Crowley, W.B. Yeats- etc learnedly quoting Sanskrit while threatening each other with black magic. Hinduism needed to rid itself of such nonsense. The country was too poor and the 'low hanging fruits' of economic development too easy to grab to make it worthwhile to talk too much bollocks about Religion- more particularly after Pax Brittanica had ended and brown folk had to take up the White Man's burden for themselves.