Ram Guha, in the pages of Scroll.in, offers ten weighty reasons why Gandhi, his life, and his ideas still matter in the third decade of the 21st century.
India has a celibate Prime Minister while the biggest State in India- Uttar Pradesh- has the head of a monastic sect as its Chief Minister. Mahatma Gandhi had appealed to all 'thinking Indians' to be celibate- even if they were already married. It seems Gandhi shared an ideal of selfless service to the Nation with the Hindu Revolutionaries- e.g. Bhai Parmanand of the Arya Samaj who had visited Gandhi just before his conversion to celibacy- and that ideal continues to appeal to Indian voters.
However, nowhere- save India- do we see politicians gaining power because they are 'brahmacharees'. Thus, though Gandhi's stress on celibacy for political success does still carry a lot of weight, this is only true of India- a Hindu polity.
Guha, being ignorant of history, takes a different view.
The first reason Gandhi matters is that he gave India, and the world, a means of resisting unjust authority without using force oneself.
No he didn't. He took over civil disobedience techniques which had already been used to greater effect. In Britain, opposition by Dissenters ( a minority who opposed the Established Church) to the 1902 Education Act, which forced many of them to pay for Anglican Schools through their local taxes, had triggered a massive passive resistance campaign spearheaded by a Baptist Minister, John Clifford, who formed the National Passive Resistance Committee, which hoped to convince more Nonconformists to resist the Act and stop paying their rates until it was repealed. By 1904 over 37,000 summonses for unpaid school taxes were issued, with thousands having their property seized and 80 protesters going to prison. This was a big factor in the defeat of the Tories in the 1906 election. Sadly, as Nehru notes in 'Discovery of India', the threat of confiscation put an end Gandhian resistance to the 1935 Act. Congress ended its policy of non-cooperation and stood for elections like other parties.
Another Gandhian technique, the hunger strike, had been used much more effectively by the Suffragettes. But they were prepared to die in that cause and the Government had to resort to forced feeding and the 'Cat and Mouse Act'.
Interestingly, the idea of satyagraha was born in a meeting held in Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre on September 11, 1906,
No. That is where the thing was announced. The February defeat of the Tories in 1906 had led commentators to speak of the efficacy of Passive Resistance- in particular, the impression made on voters by the spirit of sacrifice shown by those who went to jail for their beliefs. However satyagraha was even more closely linked to the Swadeshi movement.
when Indians under Gandhi’s leadership resolved to court arrest in protest against racially discriminatory laws.
After a few weeks in jail, Gandhi backed down. He decided having to carry a Pass was a good and salutary thing. Indians would voluntarily register and carry passes. What was unkind was the Government making the thing compulsory as though Indians were as stupid as Africans and were not aware that having to give your finger prints and carry a Pass was a great privilege and a boon beyond price.
Ninety-five years later to the day, the World Trade Center was blown up by terrorists.
Planes crashed into it. It burnt down.
Two 9/11s: one seeking justice through non-violent struggle and personal sacrifice; the other seeking to intimidate the enemy through terror and force.
We now know that the War on Terror ended in America's enemies prevailing. We can also see that Ukraine is regaining territory by fighting, not sulking, or going on hunger strike. War and Violence matter. European Imperialism came to an end only because of two world wars.
As history has demonstrated, as a form of protest against injustice, satyagraha is more moral, as well as arguably more efficacious, than the alternatives.
South Africa became more racist after Gandhi's intervention than before. Apartheid only ended because of military intervention by Soviet backed Cubans in that part of the world. Once Moscow and Washington had done a deal, the rug was pulled from under the Apartheid regime. Mandela explicitly said that Nehru was a bigger influence on him than Gandhi.
After its first iterations under British rule in South Africa and India, Gandhi’s method has had many remarkable emulators, most notably perhaps the civil rights struggle in the United States of America.
The Federal Government was prepared to use troops to enforce Court ordered de-segregation. The Cold War was heating up and Jim Crow was a handicap for the West. Thus, it had to go. Sadly, 'white flight' and the Republican 'Southern Strategy' undid some of the expected gains. Gandhian methods had only had salience in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Afterwards, attention shifted to people like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. As in South Africa, so too in African American politics, Gandhian methods were a mere phase. But this was also true of India.
The second reason Gandhi matters is that he loved his country and culture while recognising its disfiguring qualities and seeking to remedy them.
Which politician said he hated his country and wanted its qualities to be uglier yet?
As the historian, Sunil Khilnani, once remarked, Gandhi was not just fighting the British, he was also fighting India.
and fighting sex and the desire to eat nice things and wear nice clothes and have good quality Schools, Hospitals, Livelihoods etc, etc. The man was a crackpot.
He knew his society, our society, to be characterised by a deep and pervasive inequality.
His solution was for everybody to give up sex and trade and the division of labor. If everybody starves and the human race dies out, equality will have been achieved.
His struggle against untouchability came out of this desire to make Indians more fit for true freedom.
But, in 1922, his unilateral surrender made the prospect of freedom much more distant. This may have been a good thing. As the die-hard Tories said, perhaps Indians were incapable of feeding and defending themselves. But this was only because Indian businessmen found it beneficial to finance crackpots like Gandhi and impractical dreamers like Nehru.
As for untouchability, his approach has been wholly rejected by actual Dalits. Ambedkar complaint was that he took money in the name of helping 'Harijans' but spent it on his own crackpot schemes.
And while by no means a thoroughgoing feminist, he did an enormous amount to bring women into public life.
Guha forgets that Annie Beasant had been head of Congress before Gandhi formally entered Indian politics. He should have left Beasant- a feminist and Trade Unionist- as the figurehead because this reassured Whites that their women would not be raped in a repeat of the 1857 anarchy.
The third reason Gandhi matters is that while a practicing Hindu, he refused to define citizenship on the basis of faith.
Because the British hadn't done so. However, in 1939 he wrote an article saying that Congress was a Hindu party. The Brits must hand over control of the Army to Congress otherwise Muslims and Punjabis would take over the country and subjugate the non-violent Hindu. Incidentally, Pakistan and Burma and Sri Lanka too did not define citizenship on the basis of faith though all did plentiful ethnic cleansing on that basis. However, India stripped citizenship of Muslims who had crossed the border in panic. Non-Muslim refugees were granted citizenship.
If caste divided Hindus vertically, religion divided India horizontally.
No. Language and ethnicity divided India horizontally. Religion bound together contiguous communities despite differences in language, customary law, economic mode of production etc.
Gandhi struggled to build bridges between these vertical, and often historically opposed, blocs.
He failed. Still, he provided good value for money for some of his financiers and supporters.
The pursuit of Hindu-Muslim harmony was an abiding concern; he lived for it and, in the end, was prepared to die for it too.
No. He conceded Pakistan. He could have died defending Hindus in areas where they were being ethnically cleansed. He chose not to. He was killed by a Hindu even though he had failed to prevent ethnic cleansing in Delhi. The Muslim population of that city went from a third to about 5 percent while Gandhi and Nehru and Ambedkar and so on were squatting in the seats of power vacated by the Brits.
The fourth reason Gandhi matters is that while steeped in Gujarati culture, and an acknowledged master of Gujarati prose, he was not a narrow-minded regionalist.
Guha, fool that he is, forgets that this is also a description of Narendra Modi.
Just as he had space and love for religions other than his own, he had space and love for languages other than his own.
Except English. He kept telling people to stop speaking or writing in that language.
His understanding of the religious and linguistic diversity of India was deepened by his years in the diaspora, when his closest comrades were as often Muslim or Parsi as they were Hindu, and Tamil speakers as often as they were Gujaratis.
No. His closest comrades were people of his own family and caste. In South Africa, Muslims appealed to Muhammad Ali Jinnah to come and protect them from Gandhi's crazy policies which favoured the small Hindu trader and harmed the bigger, established, Muslim enterprises. Gandhi was beaten on the head, after he did a deal to get out of prison, by a Pathan. Tamils born in South Africa soon took an independent line from Gandhi. They saw that the Indian origin people must make common cause with the 'Cape Coloureds'- whose leader was a Muslim doctor- as well as with the indigenous people and the White working class. Gandhi maintained that the Indian struggle should be kept separate from that of indigenous people. He did ally with the Chinese- who went to jail in large numbers- but didn't lift a finger to prevent their mass deportation. Since the Indians were British subjects, Britain would have to resettle them if they were deported. This also meant that if they went on strike because the poll tax was too high, they were bound to prevail- which is exactly what happened.
The fifth reason Gandhi matters is that he was both a patriot and an internationalist.
He was neither. He tried to recruit Indians to serve in the British Army during the Great War. Internationalists opposed that War of Emperors. Russell and Palme Dutt could be said to be Internationalists. They went to jail for their opposition to the War. Gandhi received the 'Kaiser-e-Hind' medal for acting as a recruiting serjeant.
He appreciated the richness and heritage of Indian civilisation,
he was ignorant of it because he never learnt Sanskrit.
yet knew that in the 20th century no country could be a frog in the well.
His idea was that India should turn into a vast collection of autarkic villages. He thought wheeled transport was evil. A frog in a well may be drawn up by a bucket and go hopping off where it pleases. Gandhi's idea was that every Indian should immure himself in some self sufficient village cut off from transportation and trade.
It helped if one saw oneself in the mirror of another.
No. I just came from a swim. Suppose I had 'seen myself in the mirror of another' who was fully clothed, I'd have neglected to dress myself and would have been arrested for public nudity.
His own influences were as much Western as Indian.
They were shit.
His philosophical and political outlook owed as much to Tolstoy and Ruskin
both of whom were mad
as it did to Gokhale
Nonsense! Gokhale was a Professor of Mathematics who gained influence because of his superb command of facts and figures and empirically verifiable socio-economic trends. Gandhi was a crackpot. Gokhale warned that he was shit at negotiation. He hadn't actually done anything very wonderful in South Africa.
and Raychandbhai.
a proper Jain savant. But Gandhi wasn't Jain. He didn't get that Jain merchants could finance, and Jain warriors could fight, in patriotic wars.
He cultivated deep friendships across the racial divide
Sadly, he did no form deep friendships with the indigenous people. To be fair, racism was supposed to be 'scientific' back then.
with, among others, Henry and Millie Polak, Hermann Kallenbach,
who were Jewish
and CF Andrews,
who was pals with every Indian who met him
all of whom played critical roles in his personal and his public life.
If they were useful to him- sure. Gandhi told Kallenbach to fuck off when the latter asked for Gandhi's moral support for the beleaguered Jews of Europe.
I am now going to pause, and explain how, without these five aspects of Gandhi’s legacy, independent India might have chosen an altogether different path than it in fact did.
The British chose which path India would follow. Since Brits like A.O Hume knew a lot about India and were very very smart, India was able to follow the path they had begun sketching out in the 1880's when the first elections to local bodies were held. The 'last Englishman to rule India' (as Nehru described himself) may not have entirely succeeded in sticking to the British road map because he ended up laying the foundation of a despotic Dynasty of increasing incompetence.
Because Gandhi eschewed violence in favour of dialogue,
like Jinnah and Liaquat and Shurawardy. These guys were barristers not war-lords
this helped us emerge as a multi-party democracy,
like Pakistan and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
not a single-party totalitarian State (which was the fate of most Asian and African countries which chose the violent path to self-determination).
Only if the Army could subjugate the country. But this has only been possible in Myanmar which however was a multi-party democracy in the Fifties.
Because people like Gandhi and BR Ambedkar emphasised gender and caste equality, these principles were encoded in our Constitution.
As they are in the Pakistani and Sri Lankan and every other fucking constitution.
Because
the Brits in India emphasized religious and linguistic freedoms, British trained barristers and other
people like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru emphasised religious and linguistic freedoms, India — unlike many other countries — did not define citizenship on the basis of a single superior religion and a single superior language.
Pakistan does not define citizenship in religious terms. It did however alter its Constitution to declare itself an Islamic Republic. But then India too altered its Constitution to declare itself a Secular, Socialist, Republic.
Article 343(1) of the Indian constitution specifically mentions that "The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. " This was Godse's, not Gandhi's demand.As the invocation of Ambedkar and Nehru suggests, I would not for a moment claim that Gandhi alone contributed to the creation of an independent India with a democratic and inclusive political ethos.
This is crazy shit. It is obvious that Britain and Britain alone fostered a 'democratic and inclusive political ethos' in their Indian territory. The Hindus were prone to Dynasty worship while the Muslims and Burmese Buddhists tended to end up under Military Dictatorship.
However, he played a critical role, through his leadership and his repeated emphasis on democracy, cultural pluralism, and social equality.
These are core British values. London has a Muslim Mayor. The UK has a Hindu Prime Minister. Why? British people- though as White and as Christian as fuck- have, sui generis, evolved democratic and egalitarian and pluralistic values and institutions fit for a modern, scientific, age.
India merely engaged in 'money see, monkey do' till its gaze shifted from Westminster to the Kremlin. But India couldn't do Communism because no Army could take land from 'kulaks'. Indeed, the Indian Army is recruited from the sons of kulaks.
The sixth reason Gandhi matters is that he was a precocious environmentalist, who anticipated that unbridled growth and consumerism could bring planetary disaster.
Fuck off. Gandhi's solution was everybody giving up sex. That's the only way to prevent anthropogenic climate change.
As he wrote in December 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West.
Stupidity and ignorance had forbidden India from taking to technological industrialization with the result that it kept getting poorer and weaker till could, at best, only be seen as a mere source of raw materials and forced labor for, by 1928, only Japan. Seriously, Whites no longer wanted any large part of it. Only the Japs could have raised productivity albeit in a cruel manner.
Come to think of it, there was a Japanese spy- a Buddhist monk- who had attached himself to Gandhi. He'd keep getting himself beaten up to show his adherence to non-violence. My point is India has no monopoly on Crazy. Lazy- maybe. India pherry hot.
The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains.
Soon it would become apparent that it was only the Royal Navy of that tiny kingdom which was keeping South East Asia and perhaps even the Eastern portion of India from Japanese chains.
If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
No it wouldn't. Still, it's good to know that Gandhi hated brown people and thought of them as little better than locusts. Niggers mustn't have nice things- right? God fucking hates them.
This was extraordinarily prescient,
Stalin was committing the Soviet Union to capital intensive industrialization at precisely this time. American Corporations were helping. Nobody had the prescience to see that this would ultimately shift the geopolitical balance of power such that Germany would be crushed and European hegemony or White Supremacy would ultimately disappear for all time.
To be fair, Christianity is anti-Racist as is the Socialism it inspires. Europe would have shaken off that stupid shite sooner or later. Guys my age are astonished it happened so much sooner than our parents expected.
for in emulating the capital-intensive, resource-intensive, and energy-intensive path of industrialisation pioneered by the West, China and India
imitated the Soviet Union- but the thing stalled. It wasn't till China and India imitated the 'Tigers' who had imitated Japan that material living standards rose in China and India such that racist cunts like Guha could complain that world was being stripped bare by locusts
are indeed threatening to strip the world bare like locusts. In his life and his work, Gandhi advocated an ethic of restraint and responsibility
and never having sex with anybody ever
on whose wider acceptance the future of our planet may depend.
Guha had sex. Thus Guha is not, in Gandhi's estimation, a 'thinking Indian'.
The seventh reason Gandhi matters was his ability to grow and evolve as he had fresh encounters and new experiences.
No. Gandhi matters because he showed that 'virtue signaling' in politics is dependent entirely on money from speculators intent on turning into monopolistic industrialists, on the one hand, and rent-seeking proto-dynastic political 'moral entrepreneurs'.
A famous quote probably mistakenly attributed to the economist, John Maynard Keynes, runs: “When the facts change, I change my mind. And how about you, sir?”
Why change your mind when the facts change? There is a pay off from having a robust strategy. There is a penalty for having fragile convictions or unreliable behavior.
A quote actually made by Gandhi, in 1934, is this: “I make no hobgoblin of consistency. If I am true to myself from moment to moment, I do not mind all the inconsistencies that may be flung in my face.”
This is paraphrase of a passage from an essay by Emerson written a hundred years previously. The thing had been a set text for matriculation exams for many decades.
Why is Guha parading the shallowness of his own Literary Paideia in a manner so damaging to the prestige of Tambrams like me? Guha and I had grandparents and great grandparents who could quote the whole passage.
Over the course of his life, Gandhi changed his mind
No. His paymasters changed their mind. You can't have globally competitive textile factories if you cling to casteist shite.
on three critical issues in particular. These were race, caste, and gender, on all of which he shed his youthful prejudices in favour of more progressive positions.
Fuck off. Britain changed its views and Black British trained barristers followed suit for fear of looking shittier than their masters.
From being an unthinking racist,
he was a thinking racist who wanted Indians in South Africa to get a special position. This may have been possible for Muslims because of Ottoman backing and the fact that Cape Malay Muslims were educationally and socially advanced. On the other hand, the fact that Boers called the indigenous people 'Kaffir' was because...urm... fuck me, do I need to mention which religion was biggest in the Slave Trade?
he became a principled anti-racist;
No. Had he been anti-racist and anti-misogyny, he'd have let Annie Beasant continue to lead the Freedom Movement. But in that case, he'd have received little money from Marwaris for his crackpot schemes.
from challenging caste hierarchies timidly and hesitantly, he confronted them directly and unreservedly;
the cunt went on a 'fast-to-death' to fuck over Ambedkar. Had Gandhi died, Dalits would have been massacred because Ambedkar would have been blamed for killing the Mahatma. As a matter of fact, Brahmins in Pune were killed and their houses burnt down when a Chitpavan Brahmin shot the maha-crackpot.
from assigning non-political roles to women,
Gokhale assigned Gandhi a non-political role when the cunt returned to India. Then Gokhale died and Tilak and Jinnah brokered a Hindu Muslim deal. Annie Beasant became President of Congress at the end of 1917. Gandhi's role, in Champaran, was to disguise the fact that the Hindus were successfully using violence to force Muslims to give up cow-slaughter. This was cool, coz Ashraf Indian Muslims didn't eat beef. Lower class Hindus and Muslims did. But then Christians born or raised in UAE, Saudi, etc. have an unconquerable aversion to pork
he came to whole-heartedly encourage their participation in the public sphere and in the freedom struggle.
No. He came to whole-heartedly encourage young females to get naked and sleep with him. I do the same. Sadly, I don't have grand-nieces who can be coerced in this manner.
The eighth reason Gandhi matters is that he had a rare knack of making leaders out of followers.
Nonsense! He had a, not rare at all, knack of making fools out of followers. India abounds in Godmen who do nothing else. On the other hand, he helped Motilal Nehru get rid of his Muslim son-in-law and find a Brahmin husband for Vijaylaxmi. That's why Motilal supported Non-Cooperation.
He identified talent, nurtured and developed it, and then set it free to grow further on its own.
Fuck off. Talent came to him coz he was a great self-publicist but then that talent turned to shit.
Many of the disciples who flocked to him became major makers of history in their own right.
There is not one single example of this happening. A mutual appreciation society doesn't 'make history'. It fabricates a narrative.
These remarkable followers-turned-leaders included Jawaharlal Nehru,
projected by his Daddy, Motilal
Vallabhbhai Patel,
whose elder, non-Gandhian, brother was more important
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay,
a child widow who married into Sarojini Naidu's already influential family. She acted in movies. Gandhi was against that sort of thing.
C. Rajagopalachari, Zakir Husain, J.B. Kripalani, J.C. Kumarappa, Sarala Devi (Catherine Mary Heilmann), and many, many others.
A roll-call of political failure or impotence of the highest order. Why not mention the Franco-Greek Hitlerite 'Savitri Devi'?
Gandhi’s ability to nurture future leaders
he had none. His closest acolyte was Vinobha who was apolitical and ended up endorsing the 'Anushasan Parva' of Indira's Emergency.
is in striking contrast to the inability to do so of the three most influential prime ministers of independent India. Jawaharlal Nehru,
whose Deputy Prime Minister took over after Nehru's daughter refused the top job
Indira Gandhi,
who successfully passed on the job to her only remaining son
and Narendra Modi
who may be able to bequeath his job to Yogiji
have varied greatly amongst themselves in terms of character and political ideology.
Not really. They are all Hindi speaking Nationalists. Indira and Narasimha Rao may have had a greater predilection for Swamys and Babas. Atal and Narendra are celibates in the Vivekananda mode which the Mahatma enjoined upon all 'thinking Indians'.
However, in one respect they are akin — the tendency to identify the party, the government, the State, with themselves.
Fuck off! Nehru could split Congress and Indira did split Congress. Atal and Modi had no such power or potentiality.
On the other hand, what Guha is doing is identifying everything- the Past, the Present, the Future- with himself. Because he keeps writing books about Gandhi, he himself is Gandhi- save in so far as he is that God whom, whatever his faults, Gandhi still sought to serve.
Indira carried this personalisation of power much further than Nehru,
Nonsense! Nehru could centralise power with little opposition from his party. Indira had to split hers to carry on in that direction. But, it turned out, assassination is a great curb on autocracy.
This is the big lesson the Mahacrackpot continues to teach. You can be as big a nuisance as you like but somebody might just fucking shoot you.
Three people surnamed Gandhi were assassinated after 1947 and Congress benefited each time. Sonia and Rahul preferred to get rich without being in the firing line.
and Modi has carried it even further than Indira.
No he hasn't. Only Indira and Sonia turned a political party into a vehicle for the aggrandisement and autocracy of an incompetent son.
Yet all saw themselves as somehow indispensable and irreplaceable.
Because they didn't get that death happens.
They did little to foster the next generation of leaders.
Shit doesn't need to foster the next generation of shit coz shit just happens anyway.
(Outside politics, this trait of personalising authority is also characteristic of many Indian corporate leaders as well as heads of Indian civil society organisations, who likewise encourage an identification of the organisation with themselves.)
Ram Guha identifies Historiography with himself. He hasn't fostered a next generation of historians coz frankly he is the end of the line as far as stupid shite is concerned.
The ninth reason Gandhi matters was his willingness to see the opponent’s point of view,
He was incapable of this because he didn't know shit about economics or geopolitics or military doctrine. He simply took money from semi-literate Hindu speculators and talked bollocks while they cashed in.
coupled with his readiness to reach out to them and seek an honourable compromise.
He never made any fucking 'honorable compromise'. Sulking in jail is not a compromise. It is just being a nuisance till you are incarcerated.
Thus, his patient attempt, over many years, to find common ground with political adversaries such as Jinnah and Ambedkar, and with imperial proconsuls in South Africa and India as well.
There was neither patience nor common ground. Ambedkar, it must be said, was foolish enough to let his political patron, JN Mandal ally with Jinnah who made him his Law Minister just as Nehru made Ambedkar his Law Minister. But Mandal had to run away to India. Ambedkar then lost any chance of remaining in Parliament.
Gandhi had no personal dislikes or hatreds, only intellectual or political differences, and these also he hoped he could resolve. He had an absolute inability to bear grudges.
He also had an absolute inability to do anything sensible- though, no doubt, his financiers made money one way or another.
The tenth reason Gandhi matters is the transparency of his political life.
It was shit. That was transparent.
Anyone could walk into his ashram; anyone could debate with him;
but what they would hear would be stupid shite
indeed, as eventually happened, anyone could walk up to him and murder him.
Because Sardar Patel didn't think it worthwhile to prevent this salutary outcome.
What a contrast this is with the security-obsessed lives of other political leaders, whether in his time or ours!
Guha was too frightened to take up a Professorship in Gujarat. What a contrast this coward presents to the cunt he glorifies- so as to make money.
The lessons from Gandhi’s life that I have outlined here are
stupid lies
not necessarily of relevance to this country alone.
Every country can have a Guha like cretin shitting out lies
However, in a climate of aggressive religious majoritarianism,
& ethnic cleansing, which is what Gandhi and Nehru presided over in 1947-48
a political culture of invective and abuse,
Guha is incapable of anything save invective and self-abuse
the purveying of falsehoods and untruths by
Guha
leaders and governments, the ravaging of the natural environment, and the creation of personality cults, it may be in India that they matter most of all.
No. In India, Governance is all that matters. Gandhi was shit at it and thus governed nothing. Nehru was a little better but still pretty shitty. The good news was that the British legacy of a 'steel frame' and an army with good esprit de corps allowed Congress to keep being shit decade after decade. But even shitty things have to come to an end and that is what has happened to the Dynasty and its durbari intellectuals.
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