Guha arguing with Gandhi

In my book on Gandhi & Ambedkar, I was willing to 'repair' the views both expressed in the light of subsequent developments in the disciplines they were familiar with. In Ambedkar's case, this can be productive but nobody wants a sensible Ambedkar. They want a paranoid cretin & by God, they are welcome to him. Gandhi's importance was a tactician. He built esprit de corps within Congress & reconciled the 'naram' & 'garam' dal. It is not his fault he couldn't tackle the land question- i.e. the only thing which mattered. But that would take hard work at the local level involving cadastral surveys & the creation of an efficient Land Registration system. This could have been done by elected governments any time after 1937 but the incentive to do so was lacking. 

Ram Guha's 'Argments with Gandhi' does not attempt to 'repair' the views of either Gandhi or anyone he disagreed with. It accepts myths as facts and creates new myths on that basis.

His first chapter gives a flavour of the whole-

Articulating Non-Violence 

The British had established the rule of Law, justiciable property and civil rights, and created a peaceful country where non-violent methods- i.e. buying and selling or going to court to settle disputes- had prevailed over 'matysanyaya' (the big fish eating the little fish).

Gandhi was a barrister. He had been taught to articulate non-violence using a protocol bound legal vocabulary. As a vegetarian- like A.O Hume, the founder of the INC- he naturally associated non killing or eating animals with non-violence. This was where he differed from most British (or, indeed, Indian) people. One other point. Gandhi was influenced by both Tolstoy and the British Quakers. The Cadbury & Rowntree families bought newspapers at the behest of the Liberal party. They tended to be critical of the Boer War in which Gandhi participated as the head of an Indian ambulance corps. 

Guha quotes Gandhi as saying 'The acid test of non-violence is that one thinks, speaks and acts non-violently, even when there is the gravest provocation to be violent.'

Clearly this is false. A weak person may be very obsequious even while he is being beaten & buggered. The acid test of non-violence is solving problems peacefully even if you have overwhelming physical superiority. 

One may say that there is a spiritual benefit in avoiding sexy or violent thoughts. But a hired assassin may do so. He isn't non-violent at all. 

To understand an argument, you need to be smart enough to evaluate statements in a rational manner. If you can't do so, you have no business writing a book about arguments. Why? You have no way to separate what is doxastic from what is merely tactical or strategic. 

 In contemporary times, 11 September, or 9/11 for short, is a date remembered for the terrorist attack in 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York. Itself an act of cruel violence, the attack provoked the US government into invading lands far distant, leading to a cycle of death and destruction that has yet to fully run its course. In the long sweep of history, however, it is another 9/11 that may yet prove to be more significant.

No. The war on terror & its aftermath is the single most important event of this century. But for it, Russia wouldn't have made its move on Ukraine. China wouldn't have risen so rapidly in economic might that it is now accepted as an equal by the US. 

On that day in 1906, some three thousand men and women assembled in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa.

They were Indian. Indians don't matter in South Africa.  

They had come to protest a new racial law imposed by the government of the Transvaal, of which province Johannesburg was the capital. The Transvaal government had passed an ordinance seeking to end Asian immigration and place sharp restrictions on Asians already in the colony. Asians were to produce fingerprints, carry an identity card at all times and be confined to living in designated locations so that they would not, so to say, ‘contaminate’ the ruling whites.

The Boers were angry with the Indians who had sided with the British. They would use the issue of 'Asiatic immigration' so as to gain support from the new Liberal government in England. Would they also be able to intimidate the Mine owners by threatening their labour supply? Thanks to Smuts, the Boers lost the war but won the peace. 

Gandhi did go to jail for a few weeks for refusing to carry a Pass. Then he changed his mind. He got out of jail and went around saying that the Pass was a good thing. All Indians should voluntarily carry one. The Boers were wrong to say that Indians were too stupid to see that Passes are freakin' fabulous. But Indians are smarter than Africans. You may have to force Africans to carry a pass, but it is insulting to Indians to say they can't see the great advantage of doing so. 

Naturally, some Indians thought he had been bribed. Some Pathans beat the shit out of Gandhi. He then realised that it is safer to stay in jail if some stupid shit you pulled backfires.  

The resistance to the ordinance was led by the thirty-six-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi. A lawyer-turned-activist, Gandhi was a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant community. At the time, he had been in South Africa for a little over a decade. This protest meeting on 11 September 1906 was held in a building named the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. It passed a series of resolutions, drafted by Gandhi, of which the most significant was the fourth, that stated: ‘This mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.’1

In other words, Gandhi- like the Tory MP Bhownagree- was an Imperialist. He wanted the Milner 'kindergarden' rather than the rule of the native Boers (forget about Africans!). Sadly, multi-ethnic Empires were obsolete. Nationalism would triumph everywhere.  

The threat to court arrest was, for Indians in South Africa, a considerable departure from past practice. In the previous decade they had asked patiently, and extremely politely, in writing for greater rights or fairer treatment from the white rulers.

The problem was that the Brits, who had put Transvaal back under British control in 1902, were negotiating with Smuts & Botha to give self-rule back to it. This came to pass in December of 1906. Gandhi was arrested in Transvaal in January 1908 even though Royal Assent to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act was only given in May 1908. Gandhi had compromised with Smuts & released after 20 days. With hindsight, this was a ghastly mistake. 

Since his arrival in the colony in 1893, as a young lawyer in his early twenties, Gandhi had dispatched a series of respectfully worded petitions, requesting that educated Indians be allowed to vote;

Transvaal had passed a Pass law for Indians and Africans since 1885. In 1891, citizenship & grant of crown land to Indian labourers in Natal was withdrawn. Prior to 1894, some Indians had the vote in Natal. This was cancelled despite Gndhi's petition. Some Cape Province Indians retained the vote even after joining the South African Union but this was chipped away over subsequent decades.  

Gandhi may have hoped that there would be British direct rule after the Boer War but the British hd no stomach for another expensive war. If the Boers wanted to be beastly to darkies- let them get on with it. 

that Indian traders be allowed to sell goods and open stores wherever they pleased; that Indians of all classes be allowed to travel freely between the coastal colony of Natal, controlled by the British, and the inland province of Transvaal, which was controlled by Afrikaners of largely Dutch origin. The meeting of 11 September rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition writers.

It failed utterly and completely. 

But it also rejected the violent methods then fashionable among revolutionaries.

Hilarious! The Boers were doughty fighters. If the Indians had rebelled, they would have been slaughtered within a couple of days.  

In Europe, anarchists and socialists hoped to bring about political change by assassinating kings,

Indian revolutionaries were doing the same thing.  

generals and Prime Ministers. These methods were being emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into leaving the country.

Indians thought the assassination attempts on two Viceroys (Minto & Hardinge) did pave the way for reforms.  

When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes—or burnt them—defied nighttime curfews and hawked goods without a licence. Between 1907 and 1914, several thousand Indians were put in jail by the South African authorities. Gandhi himself served several terms in prison. The methods of protest mandated by that first 9/11 were given a particular name by Gandhi. He called them satyagraha, or truth force.

The truth was that they failed completely and utterly. Why did Smuts concede the 1914 Indian Relief Act? The answer is three-fold

1) Poorer Indians couldn't pay the £3 tax. If they were deported, the British Government would have to pay for their resettlement. Smuts had already got rid of the Chinese. Getting rid of Indians (who were British subjects) would harm the economy

2) refusal to recognize non-Christian marriages was simply malicious. Wealthy Indians (like the Tatas) were pouring money into Gandhi's agitation. 

3) the danger was that the Indians would ally with the Coloureds & White Trade Unionists. Sooner or later the African majority would take leadership of this. 

Some believe that Smuts had foreseen the German threat from 1913 onward.  But the Maritz rebellion was easily crushed. The real danger was that the Germans would arm Africans who knew the land even better than the Boers. In other words, the Whites in South Africa needed the British Navy which meant they couldn't be too horrible to His Brittanic Majesty's Indian subjects.  

After he returned to his homeland from South Africa

from London 

in 1915, he applied them with even greater effect to mobilize public opinion in favour of political freedom from colonial rule.

He tried to raise troops for the King Emperor.  

In India, Gandhi led four countrywide campaigns of civil disobedience against the British Raj: in 1919, 1920–22, 1930–32 and 1942 respectively.

They failed. Still, he and his people were only jailed for sedition. They weren't hanged or transported to the Andamans for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.  

 Where did Gandhi’s technique of non-violent resistance come from?

In 1902, the Tories passed an Education bill which resulted in 'Dissenters' having to pay for Anglican schools through their rates (property taxes). They created a 'Passive Resistance Committee'.The idea was to fill up the jail with people who refused to pay their rates. Interestingly, an 'Anti-Martydom League' was formed to pay the outstanding taxes of such people! Still, the Liberals gained greatly from this campaign. 

I may mention the Sufragettes who used hunger strikes to great effect around this time. However, they were prepared to actually die when they fasted to death. The solution was to shove a tube doen their throat and forcibly feed them.  

Some commentators have seen the heavy, if not determining, influence of Henry David Thoreau’s tract of 1848, Civil Disobedience.

Gandhi read Thoreau in 1907. However, he may have heard of him through his friend, the vegetarian, Henry Salt.

Gandhi was a disciple of Gokhale & opposed the revolutionaries championed by Bal, Pal & Lal. His friendship with Pranjivan Mehta- whose brother-in-law was the great Jain avadhanam Raichandbhai- probably reinforced his attachment to traditional Vaishnav Bania beliefs. 

I may mention, prior to the establishment of Pax Brittanica, Gandhi's ancestors couldn't be Dewans (i.e. occupy the top job) in a Princely State because they lacked martial ability. Thus, his people had risen because non-violence is only viable where there is the Rule of Law backed up with military supremacy. Indeed, one might say universal relgions of an irenic stripe spread most in multi-ethnic empires with well developed commercial networks. 

Gandhi told an Indian friend that ‘the statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong’. Gandhi continued: The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay of Thoreau on Civil Disobedience. But the movement was then known as passive resistance.

which was credited with helping the Liberls win in 1905.

Gandhi was a firm believer in karma. This meant that a Hindu arguing with him could always say to him, 'this nutter wants to get reborn on Vaikuntha or some other paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures and everybody lives for ten billion years. Perhaps doing stupid shit in this life really will get you to such a boring paradise. At any rate, there may be some way in which this fool can be made useful.' 

In Hinduism we differentiate between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (praxis). Gandhi succeeded for a time because his 'vigyan' was a way of exchanging a bit of jail time for political power- or the chance of gaining it. Sadly, only spontaneous demonstrations can bring about political change. That's what happened in Egypt in 1922. Gandhi's satygraha failed in that year because it was planned. The rioters in Chauri Chaura had paid money to get enrolled as Congress members. This meant that the authorities would first want to arrest 'ring-leaders' & roll up their networks so as to strengthen their own hand before sitting down to negotiate. If an uprising was spontaneous, on the other hand, then you had to find popular leaders with whom to do a deal. 

Why was this not obvious to all concerned? The truth, I think, is it was always fucking obvious that the only thing which mattered was the land question. To solve it required doing some actual work not talking bollocks incessantly. 

Barristers are trained to argue. But they need to present actual facts and use valid methods of logical deduction. Sadly, Gandhi & Ambedkar & Jinnah & so forth were 'ultracrepidarian'. They didn't want to confine themselves to the work for which they had been trained. Instead, they turned into religious figure- Gandhi became a Mahatma, Ambedkar became a Boddhisattvas & Jinnah became the founder of a theocratic State.

We may say that Ambedkar supported British rule- as he was perfectly entitled to do- and only went crazy after Independence. Thus, he is a different league from the two Gujjus. 

I should explain, B.R Ambedkar was nominated by the British authorities to sit in the Bombay Legislative Council from 1927 to 1937. He represented the British policy of turning the Hindu majority into an artificial minority. The problem was that Dalits feared the Muslim more than they feared the Brahmins and Banias who dominated Congress. Thus, to win an election, Ambedkar had to do a deal with Congress's supremo- Mahatma Gandhi. The spadework had been done by Rajah & Moonje. Since Dalits were Nationalists, Congress didn't mind having more Dalit MPs provided they were elected by the general population. Ambedkar had to take what he was offered because he was a British nominee. If the Brits believed Churchill's claim that the Dalit hated the caste Hindu, then they could have no objection to Dalits getting more MPs. Indeed, the Tory toffs who passed the 1935 Act firmly believed that Congress wouldn't get a majority in any Province! 

Guha, shithead that he is, takes a different view. In his new book 'Arguments with Gandhi' he writes- 

When meeting Gandhi in jail in 1932, Ambedkar told him: ‘Let there be no repetition of the old method when the reformer claimed to know more of the requirements of his victims than the victims themselves.’

Gandhi had believed Ambedkar was a Brahmin whose foreign education and well-cut suits ensured that he knew nothing about the plight of 'Harijans'.  

Reading this warning now, almost a century later, one can see it as prescient.

Not if we studied a bit of Indian history to pass the competitive exams. We know that Ambedkar beleived that money raised for Harijans was being used to pay high caste lawyers not to practice law. 

Still, we may say Ambedkar's claim was like the slogan 'nothing about us, without us'. But this does not require separate electorates.  

There had to come a time when Dalits would be represented by one of their own,

that had already happened under the nomination system.  

rather than spoken for by a reformer from the upper-castes, however well-meaning he might be.

At the time, Ambedkar appeared intelligent. He had studied Sociology, Anthropology & Economics at Columbia & the LSE. He was a barrister with two PhDs. Sadly, he was a cretin. He converted to Buddhism- the religion which had spread untouchability to Japan.  

Ambedkar’s posthumous emergence as the great icon and exemplar of Dalits is thus entirely understandable.

No. If Jagjivan Ram had become PM in 1977, he would be the icon. Ambedkar's Republican party had factionalised and was clearly useless. One could say Kanshi Ram, Trade Unionising Dalit Government servants, helped spread the fame of Ambedkar to the cow-belt.  

But whether the attacks on Gandhi by Ambedkarites are entirely merited is another matter.

Gandhi was a shithead. Attack him by all means.  

For Gandhi’s own campaign against untouchability was conducted with great courage and resolve.

No. He was a late-comer to the party & remained something of a bigot all his life.  

Had he not been around, the issue may never have acquired the salience and importance that it did.

It was Churchill's 1931 speech which gave Ambedkar salience and importance. Since he was out of office, he could say what he liked. If Tories believed him, they would ask why Dalits were not getting what Muslims had been given. After all, it is that cunning Brahmin, Nehru, who is behind all this mischief.  

None of his important colleagues in the Congress Party — not Jawaharlal Nehru, not Vallabhbhai Patel, not Subhas Chandra Bose — understood how gravely the cause of Indian independence was undermined by the pervasive inequalities of caste.

It made no difference whatsoever. Elsewhere, on this blog,I  have explained Gandhi's 'game of tag' (his Mum told him, if you touch a Dalit, immediately touch a Muslim so the contagion passes to him).

Separate electorates for Muslims probably did make partition inevitable. But there could be no 'Dalitstan' because Dalits were nowhere in the majority. 

Nor did left-wing anti-imperialists such as Bhagat Singh and company.

It is obvious that a poor minority does not matter in the slightest. Virtue signalling merely helps pass the time. It doesn't get you power or wealth.  

Indeed, Indian Marxists completely ignored the caste question. This was because they looked at justice exclusively in economic terms, through the prism of their master category of ‘class’.

No. All parties and all who exercised authority or who sought power, kept in touch with (or threatened) community leaders. As the franchise expanded, every jat panchayat or caste association was courted by different political parties. When the first Communist administration was formed in Kerala, foreign journalists noted that caste, not class, had been used to win the election.  

Derived from Marx’s own focus on European history, this analytical framework had little (and often no) room for the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of caste discrimination in India.

All educated Indians chafed against caste-based legal restrictions. Thus Nehru, in his autobiography, bitterly complained that his sister had to pretend to convert to Brahmoism so as to marry a non-Brahmin. Indians wanted elected representatives to get rid of laws of this sort. Ambedkar could have played a role in this but, silly man that he was, chose to resign in a huff after the first Hindu Code was dropped.  

Among the major Indian nationalists of the day, only Gandhi recognised the hypocrisy inherent in demanding freedom from the British while allowing so many Indians to live and suffer in conditions of unfreedom.

The two were completely unconnected. America had slavery but still kicked out the Brits. Guha truly has shit for brains.  

Moreover, he saw it not just as a political problem, but a moral one.

It was neither. Untouchability arose from a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. As Western medicine grew more and more successful, people gave up these primitive ideas. Sadly, Gandhi (& his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta) didn't believe the germ theory of disease. 

Ignorance is no crime. We can admire a guy who lived long ago and thus who held some stupid ideas which, however, were not known to be utterly false, at that time.  

Untouchables had to be given equal rights so as to make a more persuasive case for India’s political independence.

No. If the Brits really cared about it, they would have tried to do it themselves. They genuinely didn't give a shit about Dalits but Churchill's speech meant that they had to try to see if Dalits, like Muslims, could be turned against the Caste Hindus. 

Incidentally, Gandhi's Rajkot satyagraha failed because the Dewan played the caste card- i.e. brought in Muslim, Rajput & Garasia nominees to tilt the balance in his favour. This is an early example of the KHAM strategy in Gujarat. 

At the same time, upper-castes Hindus had to atone for the ‘sin’ that untouchability represented.

This involved giving Gandhi money. That fucker always need more of that commodity.  

While his fellow Congressmen were, by and large, indifferent to Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, a broad swathe of the general public was implacably opposed to it.

They didn't give a shit about it. The thing simply wasn't important. On the other hand the fight for Lebsian marriage was a defining feature of the French Revolution. Not till Madam Defarge was permited to marry her cat, Mitzi, in the Notre Dame cathedral could Marie Antoinette's head be cut off. 

Indeed, the unreasoning and extreme hostility to Gandhi from orthodox Hindus

he was himself a sanaatani Hindu as were most of his followers.  

helps explain why he adopted an incremental approach in challenging caste prejudice.

He was engaged in a game of tag, running between Muslim & Dalit when he had nothing better to do.  

Between 1915 and 1920, when he was first establishing himself in Indian politics, he attacked untouchability without calling into question the caste system itself.

He initially supported 'varna' and was a bit slow to adopt the neo-Hindu position that birth should not determine occupation or affect validity of marriage. 

One reason for this was that Gandhi was aware that Brahmin leaders- like Tilak- had to appease their own ultra-conservative caste fellows. This meant that there was a non-Brahmin party in Bombay which  attracted what we would call OBC leaders like Phule & S.K Bole. Amedkar took forward Bole's program but Bole himself, after losing his seat in 1937, joined forces with Savarkar. One consequence of reserved seats for Dalits was that many OBC leaders lost their tickets and had to look for new political homes. 

As he grew more certain of his hold over the Indian people, and especially the Hindus among them, he began to encourage inter-mingling, inter-dining, and, eventually, inter-marriage itself.

His son married a Tamil Brahmin girl. Nobody raised an eyebrow. The country had changed. A younger generation was taking over. They older generation liked Gandhi because he broke the 'kala-pani' taboo & married his son out of caste. The younger generation wanted all caste based law to be scrapped. However, what really mattered was the land question. Since nobody wanted to grasp that nettle, everybody ran around talking worthless bollocks. 

Notably, as Gandhi’s challenge to social orthodoxy became more direct, the opposition to him intensified.

He was a stupid shithead. Sadly, it was the stupid shit- stuff like khaddar- which gave him mass appeal. After all, religious rituals often involve doing mindless shite. What could be more mindless than spinning cotton? Maybe it really would get you into Heaven.  

There was an unrelenting barrage of hate mails received by Gandhi for daring to question what his right-wing critics claimed was the divinely ordained hierarchy of caste.

It is safer to direct your hate mail at a cowardly guy. What is illegal is sending him dick pics.  

Adding to the verbal abuse were threats of violence, with at least one assassination attempt provoked by his anti-untouchability campaign.

The Brits thought he had cooked up the bomb attack (1934) himself.  We don't know who was behind it.  

Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer.

He saw him as an hypocritical autocrat with little education or understanding of the modern world.  

Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition.

No. The guy was a bania who didn't know Sanskrit. If he could pull the wool over the eyes of the Muslims- well and good. If not, shoot the fucker.  

This disjuncture in viewpoints brings to mind some comments of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass on his great white contemporary Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had power. Douglass didn't.  

In a speech of 1876,

Which is when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 by which the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes , was awarded the presidency under an agreement to remove remaining federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida

Douglass remarked that ‘viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’

Douglass was pretending the Civil War was about being nice to darkies. It really wasn't. Still, Douglass had to play the hand he had been dealt. 

The two greatest opponents of untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century were Gandhi and Ambedkar.

No wonder it persisted! When the Brits didn't like a thing- e.g. Suttee or Slavery- they got rid of it.  Indian barristers were useless.  

Their differing social locations and political affiliations produced sharp disagreements between the two men.

Their agreement mattered. Their disagreements did not. Why? They had shit for brains. Politics is about solving collective action problems in a sensible manner. It isn't about converting to Buddhism or sleeping naked with young girls.  

In recent decades, as Dalits have grown more self-aware and better organised, they have

lost power. Channi was the last Dalit C.M. He didn't last long. It is difficult now to believe that Mayawati was once considered a future PM. 

The question now is whether reservations will be renewed in 2030.  

turned more, much more, to Ambedkar than to Gandhi, to the activist intellectual who was himself a Dalit rather than to the guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer.

The problem is that Ambedkarites are crazy hatemongers who alienate everybody. Smart Dalits can join the BJP and rise. Better yet, stay clear of politics and focus on building a business.  

This elevation of Ambedkar over Gandhi was inevitable, and appropriate.

It was silly. True, you could repair Ambedkar by turning him into a Law & Econ type maven. But nobody is interested in doing so. Thus one may as well dismiss him a hate-mongering narcissist with a Messiah (or Boddhisattva) complex.  

However, the politics of the present have also led to a wholesale repudiation of Gandhi on the part of those who seek to fight against the injustices of caste.

Nobody is fighting shit. Gandhi was a fool who died long ago. Same goes for Ambedkar. Forget them. All that matters is productivity. Talking bollocks helps nobody.  

A posthumous reconciliation

When, back in the 1990s, this demonisation of Gandhi by Dalit activists was gathering pace,

Back then, Mayawati looked like a contender.  

the social theorist

aka shithead 

D. R. Nagaraj wrote an essay with the telling title ‘Self-Purification versus Self-Respect’, capturing the different paths taken by the two reformers.

Gandhi is important if there is a Gandhi capable of taking the top job. Ambedkar is important if a Dalit party (e.g. BSP) can take the lead in forming a government.  

The self-purification of Gandhi sought to make upper castes abandon their arrogance and contempt for those whom the mere accident of birth had consigned to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Fuck off! All that matters is money. Ambedkar had plenty & thus was able to marry a Brahmin doctor. Raising productivity is how peeps get more money at which point they get plenty of respect from smart people who want to sell them stuff.  

The self-respect of Ambedkar was aimed at his fellow Dalits, urging them, as he famously put it, to ‘educate, agitate, and organise’ to claim rights of full and equal citizenship in the Indian Republic.

He claimed his full and equal right to support the British in India as their nominee. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

With the star of Ambedkar in the ascendance, Nagaraj reminded his readers that it was Gandhi who first made the eradication of untouchability ‘one of the central questions of Indian politics.’

Why didn't he ask the Viceroy to ban it? Interestingly, it was only in 1941 that Mahar recrutiment into the army was resumed.  

Now, ‘from the point of view of the present’, he argued, there was ‘a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis’ of the legacies of Ambedkar and Gandhi.

This is a compelling necessity only for people who enjoy eating their own shit.  

To build a more caring and just society, one

needs to stop teaching or writing worthless shite  

needed both to awaken afresh the upper-caste conscience

The upper castes have come to loathe reservations.  

and to consolidate the efforts for Dalit self-respect. Hence, insisted Nagaraj, ‘Gandhiji and Ambedkar can and should be made complementary to each other.’

Add in Godse, Mao, Hitler & Barbara Streisland and you might be on to something.  

Nagaraj understood that his call for a posthumous reconciliation between two figures whom both history and politics had made implacable adversaries

Ambedkar scratched Gandhi's face after the latter pulled his hair.  

might not meet with approval. As he presciently wrote, ‘surely such efforts will be met with stiff opposition from hardened ideologues and researchers, and they are bound to unearth fresh evidence to fuel the fire between the two’.

Ambedkar was educated and smart. Gandhi wasn't. But, since Dalits aren't interested in anything smart Ambedkar said, we have to condemn both as worthless shitheads.  

D. R. Nagaraj died a few years after writing these words. His call to bring these apparently opposed legacies in productive conversation has been continued by his friend, the Dalit novelist and activist Devanuru Mahadeva.

The question is whether Priyank Kharge can get the job his father was denied in Karnataka. On the other hand, he may prefer a seat in the Union Cabinet if a Congress led alliance wins the National Election.  

Speaking to the journalist Amrita Dutta on the eve of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Mahadeva urged democrats not to view Ambedkar and Gandhi as rivals and adversaries. In the journey towards true equality, he said, they should rather be seen as colleagues and co-workers. Thus, as Mahadeva remarked, ‘Ambedkar had to awaken the sleeping Dalits and then make the journey. Gandhi had to make the immense effort of uplifting, correcting, changing those who were drowned in Hindu caste religion, in caste wells, to take a step forward. When you see all this, maybe Gandhi would not have traversed far without the presence of Ambedkar. Similarly, I feel that without the liberal tolerant atmosphere created by Gandhi in the wells of Hindu caste religion, then this cruel Savarna [upper caste] society may not have tolerated Ambedkar as much as it did then.’

Ambedkar could have joined 'the Lal, Bal, Pal' militant section of Congress. He preferred to rise under British patronage. Gandhi too had ingratiated himself with the Brits. By unilaterally surrendering in 1922, he did the Brits a favour. Sadly, the end of British rule meant that both would lose salience. Nehru, it must be said, had a international, rather than parochial, perspective. It was his vision for India which prevailed. 

Mahadeva continued: ‘If it is our understanding that it is the Savarnas who need to change if India has to liberate itself from caste,

the Japanese had gotten rid of caste. They also burnt down Temples & beat Buddhist monks and forced them to get married. Ambedkar knew this well enough, yet converted to that highly casteist religion. 

then Gandhi is necessary. In the fight for Dalit civil rights, Ambedkar is absolutely necessary. Hence, I say that both should be brought together.’ This is a sentiment which I whole-heartedly endorse.

Because you have yet another worthless book to sell. 

Why actually 'argued with Gandhi'?  

Raghu Karnad on Gandhi

Raghu Karnad writes inthe LRB 

Mother Father


Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence
by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee.

The British introduced non-violent politics to India. Instead of Kings or Princes fighting wars to determine who controlled territory, elections were held. The party with a majority in the Legislature formed the administration. By 1937, all the British Indian states had elected Premiers. 

Gandhi could neither advance or retard this process which, by and large, was wholly determined by Tory grandees. However, once Atlee became PM in 1945, a pro-Congress Cabinet was in power in Westminster.  

Gandhi’s​ adversaries seem to have prevailed.

Jinnah was his adversary. He prevailed. The Justice Party was Gandhi's adversary. One may say that the Dravidian parties in TN are its lineal descendants. They have prevailed. Ambedkar too was an adversary. It might appear that he has prevailed but his followers have overplayed their hand. It may be that Reservations won't get renewed in 2030.  

The last generation of his disciples is dying off, and his pedestal can now be dismantled.

Congress, which still requires its embersto swear they are habitual spiners of cotton,  is in the doldrums because Rahul is useless. 

In the LRB in 2012, Perry Anderson could still describe a reverent consensus around the Mahatma,

because people thought Rahul would become PM & lead his party to victory in 2014 

which he then assailed with a catalogue of Gandhi’s missteps and obdurate follies. In 2014, Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to Annihilation of Caste (1936) by B.R. Ambedkar, a leader of the untouchables, explaining his contempt for Gandhi, who in 1932 had begun a ‘fast unto death’ to end a plan that would have given untouchables separate electoral representation.

The Rajah-Moonje pact had already been done. The Brits were propping up Ambedkar. That is the only reason he had some bargaining power. 

Also in 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India:

Hindu Nationalists won elections in Hindu majority states in 1937. Nehru, as Premier of India (shorn of Muslim majority Pakistan) presided over massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims.  

power was now held by admirers of Savarkar,

The BJP is descended from the Jan Sangh which was set up in opposition to Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha 

who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who had fired the gun.

Ambedkar spoke for many when he said that it was a lucky thing a great nuisance had been ended.  

The assassins’ point of view – that Gandhi was a misguided pacifist who had appeased Muslims and compromised Hindu interests – had become the establishment’s.

Gandhi had tried to fool Muslims and Dalits. It was in Congress's interests to pretend they believed they had a religious duty not to fuck either up.  

Gandhi’s vast correspondence was combed for its most egregious or dated remarks.

Sadly no sensible remarks could be found. 

It is true that he was too hostile to modern industry

He took money from mill-owners but pretended to be on the side of the weavers. Maybe he was simply stupid rather than hypocritical.  

and too cold towards militant labour; he was too cautious in 1922, when he called off the Non-Co-operation Movement against British rule,

He could have been transported to the Andamans on a charge of conspiracy to wage war against the King Emperor. That is why he cooperated witht he Prosecution and pleaded guilty to sedition. He expressed gratitude that a clause re. disloyalty to the King was removed because he considered himself a loyalist. He was given six years but released quite soon. However, he remained politically inert for the entire length of his sentence. In other words he was the opposite of Sa'ad Zaghloul which is why Egypt got Independene (as did Ireland & Afghanistan) while India got nothing. 

By 1926, the new Viceroy's big problem was not Indians trying to kill Whites, but Hindus & Muslims slaughtering each other. 

but too reckless in 1942, when he launched the Quit India campaign;

to be fair, he thought the Brits would lose. Few appreciated how quickly American military might could grow. 

he was effete but a bully, a pious Hindu crank, a Muslim-lover.

He did force his wife to cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad. To be fair, he had also enjoyed beating her. 

Then there’s the weird sexual stuff – his trials of chastity – intensely criticised by his followers during his stay in Noakhali, a district in Bengal, near the end of his life.

He thought he gained superpowers by sleeping naked with his great-niece.  

By the 2020s, it seemed to be harder to recite the events of his life than the faults and failures that attended them.

No. It's just that internet had made all sorts of archival material available almost instantaneously. Thus the events of his life were

1) burning passes in South Africa. Sadly, after a few weeks in jail, Gandhi decided that carrying a pass was a good thing. Indians should do it voluntarily. Government should not make it compulsory. This was an incredibly stupid theory. If not carrying a pass is bad, the Government should punish the action. Some Pathans beat the fuck out of Gandhi because they believed he had been bought off. Gandhi then understood that he needed to spend at least a year in prison otherwise his own people would fuck him up something fierce.

2) Gandhi betrayed his Chinese allies & did a disadvantageous deal with Smuts when the latter was at his weakest. Gokhale knew it was a bad deal & that Gandhi was a shit negotiator, still if Indians believed it was a 'win' for the Naram Dal, why not play along? 

3) Champaran. Hindus had been attacking Muslims across the length and breadth of Bihar with the result that cow slaughter ceased. Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from this and thus preserve the Congress-League alliance engineered by Jinnah. Later, Muslims would offer 'cow protection' for 'Khilafat'. 

4) Gandhi tried to raise troops for the Brits in Gujarat. His own people chased him away with vim and vigour.

5) Gandhi's two Himalayan blunders- viz. launching mass agitations but withdrawing them once violence broke out. In Egypt, spontaneous uprisings had forced General Allenby to back UDI. Gandhi's Satyagraha were meticulously organised to fail utterly and completely. 

As Nehru noted, after 1922, there was only one political question- viz. that of land ownership. That was the only thing which mattered. Having the British around was a good excuse for doing nothing about this even after the 1935 Act put the matter in the hands of the Provincial Legislature. 

‘And now, the more terrible and darker the picture you draw of Noakhali, the more is my mind steeled to stay,’ Manu Gandhi, not yet twenty years old, wrote to her great-uncle Mohandas – ‘Bapu’ – before joining him in December 1946

this was after Direct Action Day in Calcutta where the Hindus had prevailed.  

on Bengal’s eastern coast. He had warned her that, as well as physical danger and hardship, their mission in Noakhali would involve intense trials of the spirit.

He didn't add that it would be wholly useless.  

The local situation was ‘an altar for self-sacrifice’. Since October, it had been a preview of Partition: hamlets had been burned down, women and girls abducted; thousands were dead and tens of thousands had fled. There had been rioting in Bengal for years. In Noakhali, however, a district in what would soon be Pakistan (and is now in Bangladesh), the object was unprecedented: to push out the minority Hindu population and shut the door behind them.

This poor schmuck didn't get that ethnic cleansing was a two way street.  

Manu, who was one of those closest to Gandhi after the death of his wife, Kasturba, in 1944, was happy to reach Noakhali. ‘The journey was trying,’ her diary says, but ‘that day is written in letters of gold in the book of my life.’ Manu marched beside the 77-year-old Mahatma as he went from village to village. She cooked and cleaned, treated the cuts on his feet, attended his sermons, took dictation of his letters. It was a strange place to find the beacon of the national movement as India careened towards self-government.

No. Viceroy Wavell, an army man, warned that Indian politicians would have to work together to avoid a blood-bath. Gandhi said 'If India wants a blood-bath, it will have it.' Wavell had thought he would need to evacuate the White population. But, if Indians were too busy killing each other, the Whites would be perfectly safe.  

Noakhali was a swampy, mofussil district midway between Dhaka and Chittagong, where Gandhi did not speak the language. He wanted not only to halt the flight of the area’s Hindu residents but to summon them back, even to their deaths.

He assured them that. in his native Kathiawar,  Princes lived to rape. Why go to the trouble and expense of moving to a Hindu majority area if you could get raped and slaughtered in the comfort of your own homes.

Would Indian politicians have been able to arrange a peaceful transfer of people? Yes. There was a huge army presence. Sadly, Indian politicians simply didn't care about saving human lives. A Parsi war-reporter summoned to Punjab by British officers noted that, in Bombay, even a White High Court Judge who used a walking stick because he was lame in one leg, had to have a licence for that stick. In Punjab everybody was armed to the teeth in public. 

He was there, as Manu was, to offer the same sacrifice.

What was needed was an evacuation plan. What was not needed was a shithead saying 'stay here & get raped. Why have you slit your own throats you lazy cunts?' 

Anyway, the Muslims decided the Mahacrackpot was a nuisance. They chased him away. Still, for three or four months, the cunt was out of the hair of the Viceroy.  

By that example of ahimsa, he hoped to reverse the tide of violence that was carrying India towards Partition.

He failed. So did the Maharishi. Yogic levitation doesn't really spread 'peace rays' which prevent wars from happening.  

As late as 1946, the British position was still that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution to the communal problem.’

Had Churchill been in power, the Brits would have wanted 'Pakistan & Princestan'- i.e. a Balkanised Hindu India.  

This was the conclusion of the cabinet mission dispatched by the prime minister, Clement Attlee, to Delhi and Shimla to thrash out the terms of independence. Carving through the middle of the Punjab and Bengal, it said, would be ‘contrary to the wishes and interests of a very large proportion of the inhabitants’, sharing as they did the ties of language, history and tradition. Still, it was clear that the increasing bloodshed and unravelling trust between India’s Muslims and Hindus required a constitutional remedy before any transfer of power.

There is no 'constitutional remedy' for Islamic militancy. Kaffirs should fuck off from Muslim majority areas. They may make room for themselves by expelling Muslims from areas where people of their own faith are the majority. At any rate, that is what happened in Punjab.  

The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was by now the sole representative of Indian Muslims.

Because Gandhi had been foolish enough to treat him as such. Still, it must be said, the 1946 election reflected a reality- Muslims had not enjoyed living under Congress Ministries. They wanted Pakistan & they got Pakistan. 

Gandhi was intent on a single national destiny;

Not really. Still, he could be useful. Mountbatten could say 'Gandhi is a one-man boundary force' which is like saying 'we don't have to save up money for Christmas pressies. Santa Claus will provide'.  

Jinnah was adamant there must be separation. The weary cabinet mission arrived at a baroque compromise to end the deadlock. It proposed a single federal entity: India’s provinces would be grouped along religious lines, with separate constitutions.

in other words, Muslims would get more than their fair share.  

Nehru, leader of the Congress, consented to the plan but then backtracked.

Which is why he remained in power & founded a dynasty. When the tough decision had to be made, he made it.  

Jinnah complained of sabotage. It was time, he said, for Muslims to ‘bid goodbye to constitutional methods’. He promised a general strike and a day of ‘direct action’ on 16 August. ‘If you want peace, we do not want war,’ he declared at a rally in Bombay. ‘If you want war, we accept your offer unhesitatingly.’

To be frank, non-Muslims would always be vulnerable in Muslim majority areas unless a powerful King or Dictator protected them. Sadly, if kaffirs become refugees, they may try to chuck out Muslims so as to make space for themselves. 

The competitive identities of Hindu and Muslim had hardened in Bengal earlier than in the rest of India.

This was irrelevant. Wherever there were Muslims, the end of a multi-Ethnic empire- or a Communist tyranny- led to a clash with kaffirs.  

In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton,

a member of the INC 

was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there.

by enabling East Bengali Muslims to rise. As Tagore pointed out, this would inevitably result in Hindu zamindars losing their estates in the East. 

The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to agitators, that the partition was reversed in 1911. (George V made the announcement himself, at the Delhi Durbar, a huge gathering to mark his accession.)

Why? The answer is that it had resonances with the problem of Ulster. When Ireland was partitioned, it became inevitable that India too would be partitioned.  

More than a century later, there are still efforts to identify and disenfranchise Bengali-speaking migrants from Bangladesh.

Not if they are non-Muslim in which case there is a constitutional assumption that they have fled to avoid persecution. 

Every country- including Pakistan and Iran - deports illegal Muslim immigrants. 

The contention is that Bengali-speaking Muslims are ‘infiltrating’ India, demographically transforming and ‘Islam-ising’ eastern states.

Not anymore. The BJP has won Assam and now West Bengal precisely because they claim to be tough on this issue.  

India’s most inflamed arguments about national identity revolve around the figure of the ghuspetia, a Bengali Muslim ‘infiltrator’.

The argument is over. Can a political party rely on 'infiltrator' votes to stay in power? Not in Assam or West Bengal. There is Hindu consolidation. The big question now has to do with UP. Will Yogi win a third term in February? If so, he becomes Modi's natural successor. Maybe Akhilesh will ally with Owaisi- whose party did well in Bihar.  

In the days following the general strike on 16 August, hearing reports of the ‘direct action’ taking place in Bengal, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White flew to Calcutta. The Muslim League had taken power in the province after elections earlier that year. In Calcutta, a tea-shop owner called Nanda Lal gave her a vivid account of his street’s descent into havoc. It had begun with lorries arriving on Harrison Road and unloading a rabble who began to attack non-Muslim shops and houses. College students and rival party cadres were drawn into street fighting. Soon, Bourke-White wrote, ‘through the entire city the terror and arson spread, through the crowded bazaars, the teeming chawls and tenements.’ One night, Nanda Lal was approached by a neighbour, the owner of the Gulzar Shawl Repair Company, and asked to help rescue nine Hindu college girls (they were smuggled home through his courtyard). He was taken aback. ‘He had completely forgotten ... that Mussulmans could be benevolent human beings.’ On the third day, the army arrived and began to use machine guns. On the fifth day there was silence. To Bourke-White, who had been in Germany the year before, Calcutta’s streets ‘looked like Buchenwald’. Thousands were dead (the majority Muslims) and ‘vast areas were dark with ruin.’ But ‘Calcutta was only the beginning of a chain reaction of riot, counter-riot and reprisal’; the next link in the chain was Noakhali.

Suhrawardy had gambled & lost. Hindu gangsters had preserved Calcutta for India.  

A Hindu minority of about 20 per cent, many of them landowners, had prospered in Noakhali under the Raj. An organised local movement of peasants and sharecroppers was co-opted in the 1940s by the Muslim League, whose utopian promises about a new state easily outshone more pragmatic demands for tenancy reform and interest-free loans. In the same years, the Bengal coast was battered by cyclones, tidal waves and crop failures. In 1942, after the fall of Burma, the British implemented a ‘Policy of Denial’ in Noakhali,

Since this was a Defence matter, the provincial government was bypassed. The question is how White Civil Servants could get this done. The answer is they offered money. To the extent that the thing was done, it was done because Bengalis were paid to get it done. The Ispahanis, big financial backers of the Muslim League, were the primary purchasing agent buying up rice under the 'denial' policy. 

in an attempt to impede the anticipated arrival of the Japanese army in Assam and Bengal. Boats and vehicles were confiscated or scuttled and huge amounts of rice disposed of.

They were bought and paid for. Were they diverted to the black market so as to make a big profit for the League's backers? Yes.  

Bengali villages were more isolated than ever when famine set in the following year.

Their Bengali rulers were making a lot of money out of the famine which, to be fair, resulted from exogenous supply shocks.  

By 1945, in an attempt to feed their families, women in Noakhali were forced to ‘sell themselves ... in hordes’ to the troops moving down to Chittagong and the Burma front, according to a local communist leader.

Communists noticed that Viceroy was sucking off billions of starving Indians so as to cruelly deprive them of their precious bodily essence.  

The famine sharpened the peasantry’s anger at landowners,

unless they were Muslim 

and by August 1946 the mutation from class struggle to communal paranoia was complete.

There was no 'class struggle'. The Left was wiped out in the 1946 election. Religion mattered. Class did not.  

Pamphlets called for ‘a revenge of Calcutta’, and for Muslims in Noakhali to save themselves from a similar fate. One pamphlet, circulated by a subdivisional office of the Muslim League, warned of the ‘secret and evil plan’ of the ‘fascist, bourgeois caste-Hindu Congress in alliance with the bourgeois imperialist British’. It went on: ‘Not just in India, all Muslims all over the world are now living in imminent danger.’ On 10 October, Gulam Sarwar

who had been offered a Congress seat 

gave an incendiary speech in the district’s main bazaar. Sarwar, until recently a leader of the peasants’ party, had lost his seat in the election earlier that year to the League and gone over to its cause. His militia blocked the roads and docks, cut telegraph lines and stopped trains from entering the district, as the purge of Hindu households began.

Did Gandhi's arrival help anybody? No. He was useless. Still, the Viceroy could pretend he was using his super-powers to prevent bloodshed.  

‘The situation in Bengal is so desperate,’ Horace Alexander, a Quaker,

 a useless tosser.  

wrote to Gandhi in late October, ‘it can only be cured by a heroic remedy.’

It could be cured by the Army supervising an exchange of populations. But Indian politicians couldn't be arsed to supervise this.  

Gandhi was still occupied with the independence negotiations in Delhi. He was old and unwell, but he foresaw that Noakhali would serve as a final trial of his beliefs and the last chance to defeat the logic of Partition.

He failed completely. Similarly, the Maharishi's yogic levitation didn't cause the world to become peaceful.  

With a company of disciples – and a party of Sikh army veterans – he left for Calcutta. On 6 November, a boat was arranged to take him to Noakhali. The countryside was described in the gazetteer as ‘a vast rice plain ... where rich groves of areca nut and coconut palms rising out from the dense undergrowth of Mandar [coral] trees ... make every village look like a forest’ – but now it was strewn with looted property and grisly evidence of violence. In one place, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee writes, an anxious dog attracted Gandhi’s attention. It led the group to a spot in the bushes where they found the remains of its human family. On another occasion, a traumatised woman approached Gandhi at a prayer meeting to present him with her husband’s thigh bone. Women in Hindu neighbourhoods told of being abducted, raped and sent home at daylight, just to be taken away again at sundown.

Gandhi was as happy as a pig in shit. Nothing got his juices flowing so much as the spectable of utter abjectness.  

In 1930, when Gandhi embarked on his Salt March to Dandi

he was under the impression that poor people were paying ten percent, rather than less than one percent, of their income on Salt. Still, the real reason he took up the issue was because Motilal & CR Das had tried to make it an issue some five or six years previously. Could Gandhi succeed where they failed? No. It was Liaquat, a Muslim Leaguer, who abolished it. But, under Nehru, it was brought back. Why? The price of salt actually went up. India still has a Salt Service.  

(an act of civil disobedience aimed at ending the colonial monopoly on the production and sale of salt),

Princely states could break it by making salt from seawater- as Gandhi did- but it was uneconomic to do so.  

a similar procession set out to collect salt on the beach at Noakhali. At that time, nobody had yet heard the word ‘Pakistan’. It was the high-water mark of satyagraha, or ‘truth force’, the term Gandhi coined for his practice of non-violent resistance.

It was useless. Still, the fact is, nobody was prepared, as yet, to tackle the real problem- viz. the land question.  

It was the high point, more generally, of Gandhi’s charismatic sway over the national movement and of Hindu-Muslim amity within it.

No. Hindu-Muslim amity had vanished at least six years ago. In June 1930, big communal riots broke out in Vellore. However, it was the big Kanpur communal riot in 1931 (occassioned by the Congress hartal re. Bhagat Singh's execution) which was the final nail in the coffin.

But Noakhali was now a symbol of the undoing of all three. V.S. Naipaul, reviewing Gandhi’s autobiography in 1976, invented a poignant image: ‘Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the roads he is to walk. Seventeen years before, on the Salt March, at the other end of India, the poor had sometimes strewn his path with cool green leaves.’

But, a dozen years previously, Gujaratis had chased Gandhi away when he tried to recruit soldiers for the King.  

In fact, huge crowds turned out at every stop to hail Gandhi. His party met relief workers and refugees, who were crowded into school buildings, warehouses and any structure promising safety. Muslim Leaguers visited him to pledge peace. They blamed the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha for spreading panic through rumour and exaggeration, and asked sarcastically if Gandhi would go to Bihar, where the counter-riot against Muslims was underway. ‘I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘I am unable to discover the truth.’ In Noakhali, even ‘truth and ahimsa ... seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’

Sadly, they had always failed to have attributes nutters ascribe to them.  

To Gandhi, Bhattacharjee writes, satyagraha was a ‘science in the making’,

it was a magical belief in the potency of stored semen. Did you know that if you have sex, you lose the ability to have sex and thus become no better than an eunuch? Thus, to maintain virility, you must never have sex.  

subject to experiment and revision. Having failed to validate it at the level of the nation or district, he attempted the smallest scale of praxis: go to a village, stay there. On 20 November he instructed his followers, including the women, to disperse into the countryside. There they would offer themselves up in an exemplary performance of non-violence, becoming martyrs if need be.

Oddly, Bertrand Russell had offered similar advise to the Brits.  "If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister. Such behaviour would completely baffle them'. He did not add that Winston Churchill should part the butt cheeks of the King Emperor just in case Herr Hitler wanted to sodomize his Brittanic majesty. Oddly, Wittgenstein did not criticize Russell for this omission. 

He went to Srirampur, a village from which all but one of the Hindu families had fled. Here, Gandhi hoped, he could be like a gardener, tending to his patch in order to learn ‘the exact conditions under which the plant will thrive’. With him went only an interpreter, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, and a stenographer, R.P. Parasuram.

It was important that stupid Gandhians understand that Gandhian methods had failed completely. 

On his first evening there, the Hindu’s correspondent found him ‘in his new abode ... sitting calmly in a half-burned house amid ruins’. Of course, Gandhi in 1946 was never alone; visitors were numerous, journalists hovered. He held interfaith prayer sessions and sat with both Hindu and Muslim households. He kept up his daily quota of spinning cloth, sometimes getting back at 11 p.m. to sit at the charkha for an hour before he slept. He woke every day at three. He stayed in Srirampur for 43 nights, which, as his biographer Ramachandra Guha notes, was the longest he spent anywhere apart from his ashrams – or in prison – in more than thirty years of public life.

The good news was that he wasn't in Delhi making mischief. Nehru realised that the only way to deal with Gandhian nutters was to send them off to the villages where they could pretend to have achieved great things- e.g. bhoodan (which culminated in the whole state of Bihar being given away without any land actually changing hands.  

Still, he knew he was failing. ‘In spite of all my efforts exodus continues and very few persons have returned,’ he confessed on 3 December. ‘Why does the spell not work?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘May it not be because I have temporised in the question of brahmacharya?’ Manu’s arrival, on 19 December, gave him hope – and brought a strange turn to the Noakhali experiment, one that still confounds his believers and delights his critics. Forty years earlier, in South Africa, he had taken a vow of sexual abstinence. Now he felt it urgent to test his discipline, and his disciple. He asked Manu (who had taken similar vows) to share his bed at night, possibly unclothed. Among his party and his colleagues elsewhere there was muffled uproar. Parasuram – ‘the whole thing is considered wrong by the world’ – left in protest.

He started this practice after his wife died in 1944.  

Gandhi, making little effort at secrecy, engaged in earnest correspondence on the question. Vallabhbhai Patel growled about the political risk, the danger of their opponents finding out. Vinoba Bhave observed that, to a true brahmachari, lying with a woman would be no different from lying with a man. Nehru pressed Gandhi to return to Delhi, where his advice and authority were needed. India was on the brink of freedom but no closer to agreement on what that would mean. In his replies, Gandhi was as gently obstinate about continuing his nightly experiment as he was about staying in Noakhali. Manu, to judge by her diary, was distressed only by the intrusive fuss. But her diary wasn’t private: her great-uncle discussed every entry with her. She describes his attentions as tender, maternal care. On 21 December, when he first asked whether she was willing to share a bed with him, she replied: ‘Why did you even ask? I have made you my mother and a child sleeping by her mother’s side sleeps naturally.’ Gandhi, typically forthright, replied: ‘I am like a mother to you. But I am a man, and you are a woman. You are young.’ He likened their trial to a yagna, a ritual fire sacrifice.

So- the nutter was coo-coo for cocopops. My theory is that getting hit on the head in South Africa had left him with a screw loose.  

Manu’s mother had died when she was young, and she was raised by Gandhi and his wife at their ashram. After the Quit India uprising of 1942, Gandhi was imprisoned for the remainder of the war in the comfort of the Aga Khan’s mansion in Poona. Both Manu and Kasturba went there with him, and Manu remained after Kasturba died. In Noakhali, the maternal metaphor persisted, though in a euphoric register that hardly calls to mind a more usual mother-daughter relationship. When Gandhi warned Manu not to carry a heavy bucket of water, she wrote: ‘What male shows motherly care and love as he does? ... Oh, joy! I am actually having that experience! It is I who am that beloved child of Mother Bapu!’ As ‘Mother Bapu’ – literally ‘Mother Father’, as Guha points out – Gandhi embodied a chimeric ideal of authority and care, in opposition to the sexual violence, revenge and honour-killing that was taking place across India.

To be fair, there was an old belief that 'sperm retention' gave one super-powers. But sticking pins in wax dolls works just as well.  

Bhattacharjee’s book, which describes Gandhi’s final months, interpolates with a free hand snatches of literature and moral philosophy. He relates Gandhi’s ‘division of labour ... between the satyagrahi (by day) and the brahmachari (at night)’ to Foucault’s view of the chaste struggle of the Christian ascetic Cassian, ‘to stay awake night and day – at night for the day, and in the day thinking of the night to come’.

Foucault was a fool. Celibacy for priests had become mandatory in 304 AD (Council of Elvira). Cassian was born 60 yers later.  India had celibate monastic orders a thousand years previously. 

In Noakhali, Gandhi’s hope was for the pure, sublimated powers of the brahmachari to effect a worldly victory for ahimsa.

There were plenty of actual monks milling around the place. Why not ask one of them to use his 'siddhas' (supernatural powers)? The answer is that neither Congress nor the League wanted power to pass to the priests.  

‘The common element,’ Bhattacharjee writes, ‘was intensification: if violence provokes, meet it with a disarmed body. If sexuality distracts, expose yourself to a bare body. Truth is not metaphysics. It had to be confronted daily in the body.’

Bhattacharjee is totes batty.  Indians knew how to stop communal violence. This had to do with preventive detention or 'externment' of known touble-makers & one or two lathi charges or police firing. What was important was to give caravans a military export & do 'bundobust' for food & water along the route. 

Many have accused Gandhi of doing too much of that.

He was a useless tosser which is why he was useful to the useless tossers who wanted to move into the big bungalows of the British.  

Perry Anderson observed that Gandhi’s metaphysics treated the person and the world as fungible. He noted the dual connotations of swaraj, or ‘self-rule’, which was ‘far from simply political. It was mastery of the passions and of the senses in the ascent of the soul’ – something Gandhi demanded of his followers as much as of himself.

The truth is, Indians objected to the slogan 'no taxation without representation'. They wanted 'no taxation' & plenty of paid representation. Gandhi said 'you don't need schools or hospitals or sewers and other such Satanic Western shite. That also means you won't have to pay taxes.' My point is that Gandhianism is cheap. True, it is also utterly useless but cheap is cheap.  

Naipaul said of Gandhi’s younger years in England that ‘the inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete.’

Naipaul was wrong. It wasn't till he got hit on the head that he became a crackpot.. 

Even at the end of his life, the pattern held. But when Gandhi’s distress over the killings and abductions took him to Noakhali, and his febrile obsession with chastity returned, he did not falter in his march. Naipaul: ‘At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.’

Naipaul had shit for brains. Gandhi was a manifest failure. Suppose he had succeeded in appealing to Bengali Muslims. Then, he would have regained 'obligatory passage point status'. Why didn't this happen? The answer is obvious. It was the land question. 

Gandhi left Srirampur on 2 January 1947, going ‘on foot, when possible and necessary, from village to village [to] induce the evacuees to return’.

Come back & get killed. Do it for me. I really really want to you die horribly.  

He walked barefoot and his party sang hymns as they marched; after sunrise, a crowd would swell around them. In due course, he would relent and go to Bihar,

where he took no action against Congress men who had been busy killing Muslims.  

then to Delhi –

where the Muslim population fell from 33 percent to 5 percent when Nehru became PM. Nehru put in a law to prevent refugees who had crossed the border in panic from returning to reclaim their property.  

opposing Partition to the last – before returning to Calcutta in August. He was there when the two states formalised independence, fasting in a half-ruined house to demand an end to the riots in the city.

There is no need to riot, it property owners are running away.  

They ended, and the peace held, in Noakhali too. Six months later Gandhi was killed, by an assassin who believed – as do others, legion in India today – that he emboldened Muslims, betrayed his homeland and consented carelessly to its partition.;

He was killed by a nutter who greatly helped Congress by ridding it of a nuisance. Interestingly, three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed with salutary effects. Autocracy gets tempered by assassination which is why Rahul is gun-shy. 

Why Gandhi supported Khilafat

Why would a Hindu support the demand of the Indian 'Khilafat' aitation? Only non-Arab Hanafi Sunnis wanted the Turkish Sultan to retain Arab lands and claim leadership of all Muslims. 

Gandhi explained his position to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, in the following letter sent on June 24, 1920

"Your Excellency,-As one who has enjoyed a certain measure of Your Excellency's confidence and as one who claims to be a devoted well wisher of the British Empire, I owe it to Your Excellency and through Your Excellency to His Majesty's ministers to explain my connection with and my conduct in the Khilafat question.

So, Gandhi was a loyal subject of the King Emperor who felt he had a duty to explain his conduct to the British Government. But the whole world knew that the British Government was allied to the Turkish Caliph and bitterly opposed to Kemal Ataturk & the Nationalists.  On 16 March 1920, British troops had entered the Turkish parts of Istanbul and began to round up known nationalists. The Sheikh-ul-Islam, Dürrezadé Abdullah Effendi, issued a fatwa, on the invitation of the Grand Vezir Damad Ferid Pasha, declaring that killing of the nationalists, like Kemal Pasha, was a religious duty of Muslims. 

Since the Brits were supporting the Turkish Caliph against the Nationalists, it was they who paid for an Indian 'Khilafat' delegation to visit London at the end of January 1920. 

At the very earliest stage of the War, even while I was in London organising the Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps, I began to interest myself in the Khilafat question.

Back then Turkey was seeking to enter the War on the side of the Allies.  

I perceived how deeply moved the Mussalman world in London was when Turkey decided to throw in her lot with Germany.

London had few Muslims at that time. Those who were there tended to be loyalists like Yusuf Ali, an ICS officer, who did a lot of propaganda work for the Government.  

On my arrival in January of 1915 I found the same anxiousness and earnestness among the Mussalmans with whom I came in contact. Their anxiety became intense when the information about the secret treaties leaked out.

Plenty of Indian soldiers were fighting Turkish soldiers in Iraq etc. There was a small mutiny in Singapore, but otherwise, there was little impedance to the war effort.  

Distrust of British intentions filled their minds and despair took possession of them. Even at that moment I advised my Mussalman friends not to give way to despair but to express their fears and their hopes in a disciplined manner. It will be admitted that the whole of the Mussalman India has behaved in a singularly restrained manner during the past five years and that the leaders have been able to keep the turbulent sections of their community under complete control.

The Brits had taught Indians a lesson after 1857 which they would not soon forget. The question was why the Brits should pay any attention to Muslim sentiment in India. After all, if they got riled up, it would be local 'kaffirs' (non-Muslims) not the British who would suffer.  

The peace terms and Your Excellency's defence of them have given the Mussalmans of India a shock from which it will be difficult for them to recover.

The Turks had received a bigger shock. They had been defeated and shorn of a lot of territory.  On the other hand, they had committed genocide on the Christian Armenians so the thing hadn't been a complete waste. 

The terms violate the ministerial pledges and utterly disregard Mussalman's sentiments. I consider that, as a staunch Hindu wishing to live on terms of the closest friendship with my Mussalman countrymen, I should be an unworthy son of India if I did not stand by them in their hour of trial.

What trial? A far away country had been defeated. Indian Muslims or Indonesian Muslims or Chinese Muslims could do nothing about it.  

In my humble opinion their cause is just. They claim that Turkey must not be punished if their sentiment is to be respected.

They weren't respected- much less their sentiments- because they, like other Indians, were a conquered people ruled by an alien King.  

Muslim soldier did not fight to inflict punishment on their own Khalifa or to deprive him of his territories.

They got paid to fight whoever they were told to fight.  

The Mussalman attitude has been consistent throughout these five years.

Those paid to fight did so. The rest paid their taxes which is how come the soldiers got paid.  

My duty to the Empire, to which I owe my loyalty, requires me to resist the cruel violence that has been done to the Mussalman sentiment so far as I am aware.

This is where Gandhi's chain of logic comes unstuck. His duty to the Emperor may indeed have involved trying to live peacefully with his Muslim neighbours. But it didn't require him to encourage them to resent something over which they had no power and from which they themselves suffered no material harm.  

Mussalmans and Hindus have, as a whole lost faith in British justice and honour.

Yet, Gandhi remains a loyal 'servant' of the King Emperor.  

The report of the majority of the Hunter Committee,

into the Jallianwallah massacre which did not involve Muslims 

Your Excellency's despatch thereon and Mr. Montagu's reply have only aggravated the distrust. In these circumstances, the only course open to one like me is either in despair to sever all connections with British rule or, if I still retained faith in the inherent superiority of the British constitution to all others at present in vogue, to adopt such means as will rectify the wrong done and thus restore confidence.

 Those 'means' might extend to writing a letter. Nothing more. However, if Gandhi really was a loyalist, he would also have a duty to help implement the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms- i.e. he should have been a co-operator, not a non co-operator. 

I have not lost faith in such superiority and I am not without hope that somehow or other justice will yet be rendered if we show the requisite capacity for  suffering.

In other words, Gandhi has a childish mentality. The children really want the grown-ups to do some stupid shit. Gandhi, a loyal and obedient child, thinks that if the kiddies cry and cry, the grown-ups will take pity on them and do 'justice' (i.e. give in) to them.  

Indeed, my conception of that constitution is that it helps only those who are ready to help themselves.

Constitutions help those able to rule themselves- i.e. solve collective action problems involving defence, law & order, fiscal policy, etc.  

I do not believe that it protects the weak. It gives free scope to the strong to maintain their strength and develop it. The weak under it go to the wall. It is then because I believe in the British constitution that I have advised my Mussalman friends to withdraw their support from Your Excellency's Government and the Hindus to join them should the peace terms not be revised in accordance with the solemn pledges of ministers and the Muslim sentiment.

Gandhi is saying 'I have advised my people to show strength and defy the Government unless the 'Khilafat' demands were conceded'. 

Two years later, he unilaterally surrendered. He went to prison.  

Three courses were open to the Mohammeoans ... 

1. To resort to violence.

In which case they would meet the same fate as the Turks.  

2. To advise emigration on a wholesale scale.

In which case they would starve to death in Afghanistan 

3. Not to be a party to the injustice by ceasing to co·operate with the Government.

In which case, they would go to jail. Gandhi would surrender and join them there.  

Your Excellency must be aware that there was a time when the boldest, though also the most thoughtless among the Mussalmans favoured violence and that Hijrat (emigration) has not yet ceased to be a battle-cry. I venture to claim that I have succeeded by patient reasoning in weaning the party of violence from its ways.

Chelmsford didn't believe Gandhi. He had a good intelligence service and knew very well that the Government had gained an upper hand over revolutionaries of all types.  

I confess that I did not- I did not attempt to-succeed in weaning them from violence on moral grounds but purely on utilitarian grounds.

In which case there was no weaning. If baby is ordering Pizza for himself, Mummy needs to make no special effort to wean him away from breast-milk.  

The result for the time being at any rate has, however, been to stop violence.

The Brits used a lot of violence. That's why they still ruled India. The revolutionaries might shoot one or two people here and there but then they were caught and killed. Their networks were penetrated. Under cover of Khilafat, the British sent an Indian Muslim to kill Ataturk. He was not amused. He got rid of the Caliphate though he was perfectly happy for some Arab dude to take that title.  

 I hold that no repression could have prevented a violent eruption ... if such direct action was largely taken up by the public.

The Brits were actually machine-gunning mobs from aeroplanes. They had the upper hand. True, if there had been a spontaneous uprising- of the Egyptian sort- they may have granted some cosmetic form of Independence (which is what Allenby insisted on for Egypt in 1922). But the Brits still held all the cards. They could sell war-surplus weapons to Princes or Zamindars or any other regional force determined to establish hegemony within a particular territory. India would have become like War-Lord ridden China.  

Non-co-operation was the only dignified and constitutional form of such direct action, for it is the right recognised from times immemorial of the subject to refuse to assist a ruler who misrules. At the same time I admit the non-co-operation practised by the mass of people is attended with grave risks. But in a crisis such as has overtaken the Mussalmans of India no step that is unattended with large risks can possibly bring about the desired change.

The risk was taken. It failed miserably. Why? Nobody, apart from some Islamist hotheads, cared about Khilafat.  

Not to run some risks will be to court much greater risks if not virtual destruction of law and order.

Brigadier Dyer had shown how the Brits could keep their own people safe. If 'law & order' broke down, it would be people like Gandhi who would suffer. There is little point practicing non-violence if there is no Pax Britannica.  

But there is yet an escape from non-co-operation.

You can surrender. Give Turkey back all the territory it lost.  

The Mussalman representation has requested Your Excellency to lead the agitation yourself as did your distinguished predecessor at the time of the South African trouble.

In 1922, it turned out that the Viceroy had indeed made representations to the Cabinet on behalf of the Indian Muslims.  

But if you cannot see your way to do so, non-co-operation becomes a dire necessity.

It failed. What helped Gandhi's financiers was the boycott of foreign cloth.  

I hope Your Excellency will give those who have accepted my advice and myself the credit for being actuated by nothing less than a stern sense of duty. I have the honour to remain, Your Excellency's obdt. servant. (Sd.) M. K. GANDHI

Letters like this were preserved in the files. The new Viceroy would read over them and decide that Gandhi was a hypocritical cretin. Also, he was as verbose as fuck. Get him talking and he will himself provide sufficient rope to hang his whole coalition.  

Akeel Bilgrami on Gandhi's Philosophy.

Two decades ago Akeel Bilgrami wrote an essay titled

Gandhi, the Philosopher

Gandhi’s thought and his ideas about specific political strategies in specific contexts flowed from ideas that were very remote from politics; instead they flowed from and were integrated to the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments.

Only in the sense that the purring of a cat flows from and is integrated into the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments. 

The plain fact is, Gandhi was a Hindu. He was given the title 'Mahatma' by another Mahatma who was being promoted to the status of 'Swamy'. As a Mahatma, Gandhi could be taken as an exemplar for 'vyavahara'- behaviour. This is because a Mahatma has a special relationship to Parmatma that is God that is 'Sattva' or Truth. The Vyavaharika-sattva or 'relative reality' of the Mahatma may be the one we should internalize for soteriological reasons. That's it. That's the whole story. Hindu epistemology, ontology and soteriology fully explains everything in Gandhi. Why? Because he was a Hindu- not an Analytical philosopher of a Left wing orientation. 

The quality of his thought has sometimes been lost because of the other images Gandhi evolves – a shrewd politician and a deeply spiritual figure.

All 'Mahatmas' and 'Swamys' are spiritual figures just as all Popes and Bishops are religious figures. But the correct way to judge their thought must rely on the spiritual or religious tradition to which they belong. There may be exceptions. A particular Pope may have formerly been a distinguished Theologian and Philosopher. But such was not the case with Gandhi.  

Gandhi’s view of moral sense, his denial of the assumed connection between moral sense and moral judgment, is of considerable philosophical interest and in his writings, take on a fascinating theoretical consolidation.

What if Gandhi's views were 'strategic'- i.e. simulated for a specific purpose? Would they still have philosophical interest?  The answer is no. However, they would have utilitarian value for political or socio-economic reform movements- e.g. Bhave's 'bhoodan' or Anna Hazare's 'Lok Pal' agitation. I think most people recognize both were failures. There is an element of magical-thinking or pure mummery in such exercises. 

In Gandhi’s highly ‘integrating’ suggestion, as this paper suggests, there is no true non-violence until criticism is removed from the scope of morality-

This is certainly the Christian view. Judge not lest ye be judged. However, 'parrhesia' may involve testifying to what you believe is the true state of affairs even if you are martyred for it. Thus if I say 'Bilgrami eats his own shit', it may be that I am not criticising Bilgrami or seeking to defame him. I am merely stating what I believe to be the truth.  

the ideal of non-violence is thus part of a moral position in which moral principles, which lead us to criticise others, are eschewed.

Gandhi was constantly criticising others. However true non-violence eschews the eschewal of not eating your own shit every other Saturday. Oddly, true true non-violence is precisely the other way around. 

The strategy of non-violent resistance

Passive resistance by Dissenters to the 1902 Education Act, which forced them to pay for Catholic or Anglican Schools through their local authority rates, was a factor in bringing down the Tory Government in the 1906 election. The question it raised was how many people would the Government be prepared to jail before they yielded and withdrew a law to which a vocal minority objected to. This tactic appealed to Gandhi because the method of 'boycott' appeared to have succeeded in Bengal where Curzon's partition was reversed. 

was first introduced by him so as to bring into the nationalist efforts against the British,

Gandhi adopted these tactics in South Africa against the Boer leaders who had taken power.  

an element beyond making only constitutional demands.

Passive resistance or Civil Disobedience can be used for all sorts of things. But so can being a nuisance. 

On the face of it, for those reared on western political ideas, this seemed very odd.

In Britain, Gandhi's antics looked similar to those of the Passive Resisters and then the Suffragettes- who also used hunger strikes. Gandhi could not prevail against the Boers in South Africa- who were determined to be masters in their own house. But he could prevail in India- provided his nerve held. Sadly, his nerve didn't hold. He surrendered unilaterally in 1922. In Egypt a spontaneous uprising caused Allenby to demand that unilateral independence be conceded and thus Saad Zaghloul returned from exile. 

Constitutional demands, as they are understood in liberal political theory, are the essence of non-violent politics;

Violence can be used in furtherance of constitutional demands. The essence of non-violent politics is money. Gandhi was very good at getting hold of it. Indian industrialists wanted tariff protection, or the boycott of foreign cloth, and were happy to finance Gandhi's antics.  

as is well known the great early propounders of liberal democratic thought conceived and still conceive of constitutions and their constraints on human public action as a constraint against tendencies toward violence in the form of coercion of individuals by states and other collectivities, not to mention by other individuals.

That ended with the Great War. It turned out that conscription might be necessary as might the suspension of civil liberties under a Defence of the Realm Act or state of Emergency.  

So why did Gandhi, the prophet of non-violence, think that the Indian people, in their demands for greater self-determination, needed more than constitutional demands?

All politicians thought people needed higher income and better public goods as well as increased political and legal rights. In India, peasants wanted lower rents or land revenue demands. Every caste or community wanted a larger share of government jobs. There also had various religious demands- e.g. a ban on cow slaughter- and redressal or reparation for what they perceived as historical injustices. 

And why did he think that this is best called ‘non-violent’ action?

He seems to have got it into his head that 'passive resistance' was legal under British law provided you really really believed you had a moral obligation to persist in it. He was wrong.  

The obvious answer is the instrumental and strategic one: he knew that making demands for constitutional change had not been particularly effective or swift in the first two decades of this century, and that since the conventionally conceived alternative was violent revolutionary action – which found advocates on the fringes of nationalist sentiment in India – he instead introduced his own strategy of civil disobedience, at once a non-violent and yet a non- or extra-constitutional strategy.

He didn't introduce anything. There were boycotts and hartals and other types of peaceful agitations before he returned to India.  

But, of course, he had more in mind than this obvious motive. First, Gandhi wanted all of India to be involved in the movement, in particular the vast mass of its peasant population.

All Indian politicians sought to mobilize the masses.  

He did not want the nationalist achievement to be the effort of a group of elite, legally and constitutionally trained, upper-middle class Indian men (‘Macaulay’s bastards’), who argued in assemblies and round-table conferences.

Yet that is what he got. Nehru wasn't exactly a picaninny.  

He almost single-handedly transformed a movement conceived and promoted along those lines by the Congress Party into a mass movement of enormous scale, and he did so within a few years of arriving from South Africa on Indian soil.

Congress had achieved 'mass contact' through the cow-protection movement in the 1890s. Its first big success was the Swadeshi movement which led to the reversal of the partition of Bengal. Gandhi met Shukla- a usurer whom he described as a simple Bihari agriculturist- through the INC. That's how he became involved with Champaran. But his job was to distract attention from the on-going cow protection riots in Bihar.  

Non-violent action was the central idea of this vast mobilisation.

No. It was 'Swaraj'- self-rule.  

Second, he knew that violent revolutionary action could not possibly carry the mass of people with it.

Sure it could. But the peasants would take the land for themselves and then refuse to pay a penny to the Government. The parasitic urban middle class would be fucked.  

Revolutionary action was mostly conceived hugger-mugger in underground cells and took the form of isolated subversive terrorist action against key focal points of government power and interest, it was not conceived as a mass movement.

It could be part and parcel of such a movement.  

He was not unaware that there existed in the west ideologies of revolutionary violence which were geared to mass movements, but he was not unaware either, that these were conceived in terms of middle class leadership vanguards that were the fonts of authority.

Gandhian leaders were upper caste, urban and middle class. True, some were wealthy barristocrats and had attended foreign Universities.  

Peasant consciousness mattered very little to them.

It didn't matter at all to Gandhi. He had nothing particular to say to peasants. It was weavers he was claiming to help. 

In Gandhi there was not a trace of this vanguard mentality of a Lenin.

No. Gandhi considered his Ashramites- trained in Satyagraha- to be the vanguard of his revolution.  

He did indeed think that his ‘satyagrahis’ – the nonviolent activists whom he described, with that term, as ‘seekers of truth’ – would provide leadership which the masses would follow, but it was absolutely crucial to him that these were not to be the vanguard of a revolutionary party along Leninist lines.

They were Congress members and were selected to offer passive resistance and to court arrest.  

They were to be thought of along entirely different lines, they were to be moral exemplars, not ideologues who claimed to know history and its forward movement better than the peasants to whom they were giving the lead.

Moral exemplars can be ideologues and vice versa. Gandhians had their own stupid version of history.  

Third, Gandhi chose his version of non-violent civil disobedience instead of the constitutional demands of the Congress leadership

No. He explicitly said that he had accepted leadership of the Congress/Khilafat combine for the express purpose of gaining Constitutional remedies. He was not seeking to fulfil the crazy program he had outlined in 'Hind Swaraj'.  

because he thought that the Indian people should not merely ask the British to leave their soil.

Which he did in 1942. This was the 'Quit India' movement. 

It was important that they should do so by means that were not dependent and derivative of ideas and institutions that the British had imposed on them.

The INC was created by an Scottish ICS officer. The Legislative Assemblies and Secretariats too were created by the Brits. Gandhi, when directing the INC, accepted that its goal was to take over the Legislature and the Administration. 

Otherwise, even if the British left, the Indian populations would remain a subject people.

Gandhi, in 1939, said that if the Brits left without handing over the army to the INC then the Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of sect) would take over the country from the non-violent Hindu Congress-wallah. In 1942, he seems to have hoped that the Japanese would sweep over the country without setting up an administration of the cruel type they had instituted in other conquered territory. 

This went very deep in Gandhi and his book Hind Swaraj, is full of a detailed anxiety about the cognitive enslavement even of the nationalist and anti-colonial Indian mind, which might, even after independence, never recover from that enslavement.

Indians weren't enslaved. They could not recover from a condition they had not experienced. Gandhi's 'epistemological commitment' was to tell stupid lies. 

Gandhi ... linked ahimsa (non-violence) with satyagraha (literally, ‘truth-force’, or more liberally, a tenacity in the pursuit of truth).

Gandhi was a habitual and incorrigible liar. There is no relationship or other link between truth and non-violence. There is a link between being a charlatan and pretending that you are very truthful. In this way, your own testimony is accepted as proof that you possess some marvellous quality. I might pretend to be an ex-SAS operative who can beat up men twice my size. You accuse me of being a liar. I say 'it's a funny thing, but I've never been able to tell a lie. Ask any of the Super-Models who have dated me.'

There is a standard and entrenched reading of Gandhi which

is a bunch of stupid lies 

understands the link as follows (and I am quoting from what is perhaps the most widely read textbook of modern Indian history, Sumit Sarkar’s, Modern India):

Indians only read English authors on Indian history. Leftist Academics, however, have to pretend to have read each other's dreck.  To be fair, Sarkar's book is well researched. But, ideologically speaking, it was a cul de sac. 'Subaltern' communities were gaining political dominance and had their own historiography which was unconcerned with Marxist ideology. 

“Non-violence or ahimsa and satyagraha to Gandhi personally constituted a deeply-felt and worked-out philosophy owing something to Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy but also revealing considerable originality.

There is a problem of circularity here. Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy were influenced by Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Tolstoy read Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Equally, Hindus had been influenced by a mystical type of Christianity which had itself contributed to the Reformation.  

The search for truth was the goal of human life,

No. Gandhi was a Hindu and believed in reincarnation. The goal of our succession of births is 'Moksha' or liberation from the circle of birth and death. Truth is God. Theists believe that 'Moksha' involves absorption in the Godhead.  

and as no one could ever be sure of having attained the truth,

Everybody can be sure of anything at all.  Sadly, they are likely to be wrong. 

use of violence to enforce one’s own view of it was sinful.”

Sin only arises if there is wrong-doing. The use of violence may be righteous. Stringing together a series of obvious lies does not constitute a philosophy more particularly if the thing is self-serving.  

I have no doubt that Gandhi says things that could lead to such a reading, and for years, I assumed that it was more or less uncontroversially, what he had in mind.

Given that he was a Hindu spending most of his time with other Hindus, it is likely that what was in his mind was the type of reformed Hinduism common at that time. 

After scrutiny of his writings however, especially his many dispatches to Young India, it seems to me now a spectacular misreading.

Because Bilgrami had left a mainly Hindu country long ago. He could no longer read a Hindu writer, writing for Hindus, in a Hindu manner. I may make the same mistake when reading Maulana Azad. But what I can do is to consult an erudite Indian Muslim who is aware of the Arabic literature of that period. Thus Azad's 'Hezbollah' had little in common with contemporary movements with that name.  

It fails to cohere with his most fundamental thinking.

which was that of a Gujarati Hindu Bania. 

Notice that according to this reading, or misreading, his view is no different from one of the most celebrated liberal arguments for tolerance – the meta-inductive argument of Mill’s On Liberty.

Which fails immediately. Useful discoveries and inventions can burgeon more in a Society which is intolerant of stupidity or superstition.  

Mill contends that since much that we have thought to be true in the past has turned out to be wrong,

Mill's ideas are likely to be wrong 

this in itself suggests that what we presently think true might also be wrong.

As is this thought. Perhaps 'wrongness' does not matter. What matters is utility here and now.  

We should therefore tolerate not repress dissent from our present convictions just in case they are not true.

We should do stuff that is useful to us. This does not involve tolerating or repressing anything save in return for some tangible benefit. Mill was too stupid to understand his own Utilitarian creed. 

According to Mill, and according to Gandhi on this widespread misreading of him, truth is never something we are sure we have attained. #

Utility is. We compare what we are doing with its 'opportunity cost'- i.e. the next best alternative- and seek to update our knowledge base so as to discern higher and higher opportunity costs. This is what drives productivity growth which in turn is what permits better provision of Public and Merit goods.  

We must therefore be made modest in the way we hold our present opinions,

No. Modestly doesn't matter. We should be on qui vive for changes in opportunity-cost ratios brought about by advances in knowledge or changes in resource endowment. 

and we must not impose our own conceptions of the truth on others.

Only in the sense that you must eat your own shit. Some smart people get paid for their more useful conceptions of the truth. 

To do so would be a form of violence,

just as refusing to eat your own shit is a form of violence as well as a form of dissent and a form of repressing the tolerance of dissent.  

especially if it was enforced by the apparatus of the state.

The State should not force us to pay for Schools. It should not force kids to go to such schools. This is a terrible form of violence. Such, at any rate, was the creed of the Passive Resister in Edwardian England. It was deeply silly.  

Bilgrami thinks Gandhi was non-judgmental. This wasn't true. Still, we may ask if moral considerations can be de-linked from moral principles. If there are no principles, perhaps no judgment can be made.

In the philosophical tradition Gandhi is opposing, others are potential objects of criticism in the sense that one’s particular choices, one’s acts of moral conscience, generate moral principles or imperatives which others can potentially disobey.

In other words, even if you don't reproach such people, nevertheless your conduct is a 'standing reproach' to them.  

For him, conscience and its deliverances, though relevant to others, are not the well-spring of principles.

How can you stop a person from deducing or otherwise affirming a principle which guides actions dictated by another person's conscience? Even if such a person does not exist, there may be the feeling that an 'impartial spectator' would deduce those principles and judge others in accordance with it.  

Morals is only about conscience, not at all about principles.

But the conscience- for all we know- may be structured according to principles. It is essentially epistemic and anything knowable may have a structure.  

There is an amusing story about two Oxford philosophers which makes this distinction vivid. In a seminar, the formidable J L Austin having become exasperated with Richard Hare’s huffing on about how moral choices reveal principles, decided to set him up with a question. ‘Hare’, he asked, “if a student came to you after an examination and offered you five pounds in return for the mark alpha, what would you say?”

Hare should mention which rule of the College the student was violating. He may himself be obliged to report the matter. This is informative. It is not necessarily 'ethical' nor does it involve the conscience or one's morality. I may be an immoral man, but I may find it safer and more sensible to stick by the rules.  

Predictably, Hare replied, “I would tell him that I do not take bribes, on principle!”

If the College has no rules about taking bribes, I suppose Hare might make this reply. He may say that his principles forbid the acceptance of money bribes but permit favouritism based on the receipt of sexual services or the chance to mingle with people of a higher class.  

Austin’s acid response was, “Really? I think I would myself say, ‘No thanks’.

The student may well conclude that Austin is acting on principle.  

” Austin was being merely deflationary in denying that an act of conscience had to have a principle underlying it.

Such a principle could always be construed.  

Gandhi erects the denial into a radical alternative to a (western) tradition of moral thinking. An honoured slogan of that tradition says, “When one chooses for oneself, one chooses for everyone”.

There is no such slogan. Sartre said ' “when we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men.' Thus if I choose to be a plumber rather than a philosopher, other men will find in me a plumber not a philosopher

The first half of the slogan describes a particular person’s act of conscience.

It may be an act of conscience. It may be 'utilitarian' or represent 'discovery'. It may be wholly strategic or perverse.  

The second half of the slogan transforms the act of conscience to a universalised principle, an imperative which others must follow or be criticised.

No. That would only be the case if the slogan ran as follows 'in choosing to act in accordance with a categorical imperative, a person chooses the same thing which all other people of equal moral worth would choose.' Alternatively, a person may feel that power has been delegated to them to choose on behalf of all men. In this case, we may well ascribe an underlying categorical imperative which motivates the choice.  

Gandhi embraces the slogan too,

No. What the Satyagrahi chooses is not what everybody should choose. That is why he said only those whom he designated should court arrest. The notion was that there was some special training or inherent quality in the Satyagrahi which meant they could safely make a choice which others should abstain from.  

but he understands the second half of it differently. He too wants one’s acts of conscience to have a universal relevance, so he too thinks one chooses for everyone, but he does not see that as meaning that one generates a principle or imperative for everyone.

Gandhi believed in karma. His doctrine is easily understood in his own cultural context. In this birth you can't be a satyagrahi, but you can give money to Gandhi. That way, maybe, in your next birth, you will be fit to be a satyagrahi. This will involve giving up sex and eating nice food and doing sensible things. The pay-off is that you get reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.  

What other interpretation can be given to the words ‘One chooses for everyone’ in the slogan, except the principled one?

A consequentialist interpretation based on the doctrine of transmigration of the soul can be given. In this case, we may say that a 'Mahatma' or 'Tirthankar' or 'Boddhisattva' makes a choice which creates a blissful terminus for metempsychosis- e.g. Kevalya,  Nirvana, Vaikunta, or the Heaven of the Christians or the Muslims etc. 

In Gandhi’s writing there is an implicit but bold proposal: “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.”

That is obvious. We see people make different choices with the result that some are successful and others are abject failures. We say 'don't follow the bad example of the boy who chose to stab his teacher. He is now in jail.' Follow the good example of the boy who learnt mathematics from his teacher and who is now a well paid actuarial scientist.'  

That is the role of the satyagrahi. To lead exemplary lives, to set examples to everyone by their actions. And the concept of the exemplar is intended to provide a wholesale alternative to the concept of principle in moral philosophy.

One can always find a set of principles which 'fit' with the behaviour of the exemplar.  Consider the principles of Economics. The exemplar from which they are deduced, using mathematical techniques, is a particular market or Institution- e.g. the New York Stock Exchange or the Soviet GOSPLAN. 

It retains what is right in Mill

there is nothing right in Mill 

(the importance of being modest in one’s moral opinions)

this has no importance unless you yourself are an important man. But, in that case, it is not your opinions, but your powers and abilities which matter. If countervailing power over you can be gained, your opinions- obnoxious or otherwise- will be irrelevant. 

while rejecting what is unsatisfactory (any compromise in our conviction in them).

What was unsatisfactory in Mill is that he didn't have the right mathematical theory of 'regret minimization' under Knightian Uncertainty.  

There is no Millian diffidence conveyed by the idea that one is only setting an example by one’s choices, as opposed to laying down principles.

Though they can be deduced unless choice is known to be made in a random manner- e.g. by flipping coins.  

One is fully confident in the choices one wants to set up as exemplars, and in the moral values they exemplify. On the other hand, because no principle is generated, the conviction and confidence in one’s opinions does not arrogate, it puts us in no position to be critical of others because there is no generality in their truth, of which others may fall afoul.

We can be critical of ugly or stupid people or those who got the last piece of cake. Putting yourself in a position to say really mean things about other people is easy. What is foolish is to be critical of others unless one is paid to do so or gains some other benefit.

But resistance is not the same as criticism. It can be done with a ‘pure heart’.

Anything at all can be done with a pure or impure or smelly or snuggly heart.  

Criticism reflects an impurity of heart, and is easily corrupted to breed hostility and, eventually, violence.

Nonsense. Some people are paid to do criticism of various types. This can be very useful.  

With an impure heart

or a pure heart or a smelly one or a silly one 

you could still indulge in non-violent political activism, but that activism would be strategic, merely a means to a political end.

This is also true of a pure heart.  Incidentally, politics isn't about pure hearts or sweet hearts or hearts filled with song. 

In the long run it would, just as surely as violence, land you in a midden.

In the long run everybody dies. Violence or non-violence is irrelevant.  

Even the following sensible sounding argument for his own conclusion, often given by many of his political colleagues who found his moral attitudes obscure, did not satisfy Gandhi: “Let us adopt non-violent and passive resistance instead of criticising the British colonial government. Because to assert a criticism of one’s oppressor would usually have the effect of getting his back up, or of making him defensive, it would end up making things harder for oneself.”

The British were nice. You could criticize their policies or even their senior personnel with a fair degree of impunity. There were other regimes which it would have been suicidal to appear disaffected in the slightest degree. Passive resistance there might take the shape of pretending to be ultra loyal but very stupid. Good soldier Svejk is an example.  

Gandhi himself did occasionally say things of that sort, but he thought that colleagues who wanted to rest with such arguments as the foundation of non-violence were viewing it too much as an instrument and they were not going deep enough into the spiritual nature of the moral sense required of the satyagrahi.

i.e. stuff like sleeping naked with your great niece. But that was a privilege Gandhi reserved for himself alone. 

One did not go deep enough until one severed the assumed theoretical connection between moral judgment and moral criticism,

there is no connection between the two. A critic is not a judge though both may use the same criteria of assessment. But so may a consumer or a bystander.  

the connection which, in our analytical terms, we would describe by saying that if one judges that ‘x is good’, then we are obliged to find morally wrong those who in relevant circumstances, judge otherwise or fail to act on x.

This is nonsense. I may say 'this song is good.' I don't say a deaf person is evil because he can't affirm the same thing.  

For Gandhi this does not follow.

The thing is a non sequitur for everybody. 

The right moral sense, the morally pure-hearted satyagrahi, sees no such connection between moral judgment and moral criticism.

Pure hearted people are non-judgmental. If you ask them for criticism they will do their best to oblige or else frankly confess that they have no great interest in the matter. 

Of course, we cannot and must not cease to be moral subjects; we cannot stop judging morally about what is and is not worthy, cannot fail to have moral values.

No. If we are engaged in work of great importance we stop judging 'morally' and act and speak as though we have no moral values. It is only if we are doing something stupid or useless that we gas on about morality or coolness or our five biggest turn-ons or turn-offs.  

But none of that requires us to be critical of others who disagree with our values or who fail to act in accord with them.

If we have nothing better to do, we might gang up on the girl who denies that Beyonce is cool or who says abortion is wrong or whatever.  

That is the relevant modesty which Mill sought to justify by a different argument.

He failed.  

This view of the moral sense might well seem frustratingly namby-pamby now as it certainly did to those around him at the time.

It is foolish. I suppose you need to tell your students that they really ought to have a moral sense rather than simply try to set fire to the pussy cat.   

Can’t it be argued then that Gandhi is shrewdly placing a screen of piety around the highly creative political instrument he is creating, both to confuse his colonial masters and to tap the religious emotions of the Indian masses?

No. Don't be silly. Viceroys found it easy to confuse him because he was as stupid as shit. But they weren't his 'masters'. Gandhi was born a British protected subject but chose to become a British subject no different from Atlee or Churchill. Indeed, the King Emperor had more power to compel his White British subjects than he did to compel dark skinned Indian subjects. The former were conscripted during the two world wars. The latter served in the Army on a voluntary basis. 

Gandhi's political instrument was the INC. He did not create it. As a politician, he was merely doing what the Irish and the Trade Unions and the Suffragettes had already done. Still, it was useful to bang on about Non-Violence because the Quakers owned some newspapers back in Blighty. Also, the Brits remembered the Mutiny when 6000 Whites were killed. 

This is the oscillating interpretation I have been inveighing against, which, finding his religiosity too remote from politics,

Khilafat & cow protection weren't 'remote from politics'. Indians were religious and Maulana Azad & Mahatma Gandhi gained by being seen as religious figures.  

then fails to take his philosophical ideas as being intended seriously and views him only as a crafty and effective nationalist politician.

He was stupid. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, India needed British protection and so his stupidity served a purpose.  

It sells short both his moral philosophy and his politics. The fact is that his view of moral sense is of considerable philosophical interest,

No. Ex falso quodlibet just means that from a lie any other stupid lie can be logically deduced.  

and is intended entirely earnestly by its author. It is given a fascinating theoretical consolidation in his writing which may be lost on his readers because it is buried in a porridge of saintly rhetoric, of ‘purity of heart’.

Gandhi was as ugly as fuck. That is why he said 'true beauty is purity of heart'. True truth, on the other hand, is any shite he happened to talk. 

 What this means is that truth for Gandhi is not a cognitive notion at all.

No. He was a lawyer and often spoke and wrote to his interlocutors as a lawyer would do. In particular he emphasized the rules of evidence and 'simple rules of construction'- e.g. contra proferentem- which are to be used to find the truth regarding what has been agreed or what interpretation is correct. This is 'cognitivist' under the rubric of 'Construction Grammar'. On the other hand, as a Hindu, Gandhi subscribed to an ontological theory of Truth as Being. Hindu theologians might disagree as to whether Gandhi was 'mayavadi' or 'dualist'. Most would agree that the latter view is more compelling. 

It is an experiential notion.

It is ontological. It may be that a 'Mahatma' or Maharishi or Yogic Parmanhans is capable of experiencing it. 

It is not propositions purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated, it is only our own moral experience which is capable of being true.

This was not Gandhi's view. He was a Hindu and believed in karma. Sat is Truth is God and, after our cycle of re-birth is completed we are absorbed into the Godhead and become unanimous with Truth which is Being which is the taste of Bliss.  

This was of the utmost importance for him.

He was a Hindu. God was important to him. Without God, there would be no eternal life and thus 'moral experiences' would be as transitory as any other sort of experiences.  

It is what in the end underlies his opposition to the Enlightenment,

He was a Theist, not a Deist.  

despite the undeniably Enlightenment elements in his thought including his humanism and the concern that our moral judgments be relevant to all people.

Gandhi wanted humans to give up sex so the human race would die out. We'd be reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.  

Those who have seen him as an anti-Enlightenment thinker usually point to the fact that he

was a crackpot

is opposed to the political and technological developments which, he insists, issue inevitably from the very conception of Reason as it is understood in scientific terms.

Sadly, Science had progressed to a level where its conception of Reason became more and more detached from the 'common sense' view.  

So understood, some time in the 17th century, with the rise of the scientific method in Europe,

what rose was productivity which in turn meant more resources could be devoted to STEM subject research. However, there was an older magical or mystical aspect to Scientific thinking in the Seventeenth Century. It tended to fade because useful discoveries were being made without the mystagogy of the Alchemists or the doctrine of signatures of Dioscorides and Galen.

all the predispositions to modern government and technology came into place.

Just as they had in ancient Sumer and Egypt and Greece and China and India and so forth.

All that was needed for those predispositions to be triggered in our sustained efforts to organise and control our physical and social environment, was for the Enlightenment to articulate the idea of Reason as it affects social life and the polity.

No. What was needed was expanded markets which created incentives for productivity enhancing innovations of various types. Warfare was another driver for innovation. 

The idea of Reason doesn't need articulation. Either there is a more efficient way to do things or bollocks is being talked.  

But this familiar understanding of his view of the Enlightenment does not take in what I have called his ‘final and audacious integrating’ philosophical move.

Sleeping naked with little girls? That was very audacious.  

This conception which set in sometime in the 17th century itself owes much to a more abstract element in our thinking, which is that truth is a cognitive notion, not a moral one.

It can be both but it can also be an aesthetic or psychological or legal or paranoid notion. When it comes to collective action problems, it is the solution to either a coordination or a discoordination game.  

Only if truth is so conceived can science become the paradigmatic pursuit of our culture, without it the scientific outlook lacks its deepest theoretical source.

Nonsense! Science burgeons when it can 'pay for itself' by raising efficiency and thus productivity.  

And it is a mark of his intellectual ambition that by making it an exclusively and exhaustively moral and experiential notion instead, Gandhi was attempting to repudiate the paradigm at the deepest possible conceptual level.

Gandhi did no such thing. He was interested in ways of making the spinning wheel more efficient. He did care about how much more poor people were paying as a proportion of their income because of the increase in the salt tax. Sadly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, he got his sums wrong. He thought people might be paying ten or even twenty percent of their income for salt. The figure was more like one percent for even the poorest.   

What I mean by truth as a cognitive notion is that it is a property of sentences or propositions that describe the world.

Which is like the notion that beauty is a property of the proposition- 'This sentence is lovelier than lilacs' or that people would really enjoy eating the sentence 'This sentence is tastier than truffles'. 

Thus when we have reason to think that the sentences to which we give assent exhibit this property,

that reason may be aesthetic or strategic or our being hypnotized. 

then we have knowledge of the world,

We may gain information about the world from propositions but having a reason to think something is true (e.g. my vanity gives me a reason to believe I am as beautiful as Beyonce) does not by itself produce knowledge of the world.  

a knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put to use through continuing inquiry building on past knowledge.

Inquiry does not matter. Doing stuff which makes money- i.e. for which there is effective demand- may, under certain conditions, lead to knowledge accumulation.  

His recoil from such a notion of truth,

Gandhi does not recoil from it at all. Hinduism has a doctrine of onomatodoxy such that the Name or the Mantra- e.g. 'He Ram!' or 'Hare Krishna!' is highest truth or Reality.  

which intellectualises our relations to the world,

Nope. This 'cognitivism' is stupid shite. It isn't intellectual at all because it involves the intensional fallacy.  

is that it views the world as the object of study, study that makes it alien to our moral experience of it, to our most everyday practical relations to it.

The world as the object of our pissing upon it is alien to our moral, spiritual, aesthetic and drunk off our head experience of it. Indeed, everything material is alien to everything which isn't material- e.g. experience or memory or reverie. 

He symbolically conveyed this by his own daily act of spinning cotton.

No. He genuinely believed he was helping the weavers by spinning yarn for them to use.  On the other hand, his donning of a loin-cloth was symbolic. It was his way of showing that he identified with the starving peasants of India who were being subjected to fellatio and cunnilingus by evil Viceroys. 

This idea of truth, unlike our quotidian practical relations to nature,

e.g. answering its call by pissing and shitting 

makes nature out to be the sort of distant thing to be studied by scientific methods.

No. Nature remains a fit subject for poetic effusions. Physics and Chemistry and Biology are scientific subjects.  

Reality will then not be the reality of moral experience.

It never has been. Another thing it isn't is stuff you experience when you drop acid.  

It will become something alien to that experience, wholly external and objectified.

Bilgrami thinks there was a time, or there were people, who experienced trees and clouds as virtuous or vicious or basically decent but a trifle untrustworthy.  

It is no surprise then that we will look upon reality as something to be mastered and conquered,

Fuck has Bilgrami 'mastered' or 'conquered'?  

an attitude that leads directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern societies

Politicians govern society. Technologists are employed by enterprises to produce goods and services more efficiently. Production is not Governance. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit. 

and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities

the Islamic qasbah?  

where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish.

Oh. Definitely not the Islamic qasbah.  Where do we find the 'communal localities' of Bilgrami's description? The answer is, in fantasies about Merrie England or the idyllic Indian village of the time of good King Rama. 

It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures such as nations and eventually global economies.

Nations which are peaceful and prosperous and where liberty flourishes, are exemplars. There are good global economic practices and there are bad ones. 

In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold,

Yes there is. Countries or International organizations which do good things set a good example.  

and no basis possible for a moral vision in which value is not linked to ‘imperative’ and ‘principle’,

There are many possible bases for values which are not imperative or which can't be encoded in a principle. Mysticism is one. Aesthetics is another. But so is the desire for novelty or FOMO (fear of missing out).  

and then, inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations.

Moral psychology does not underlie violence. The thing is utilitarian. It imposes a cost but the benefit may outweigh that cost. Also, violence is a learned skill. You may do it just to get better at doing it. 

To find a basis for tolerance and non-violence under circumstances such as these, we

act in a utilitarian manner and form a coalition of a economic type. This may involve something like a 'Social Contract'.  

are compelled to turn to arguments of the sort Mill tried to provide

he didn't understand that 'disutility' converges to 'opportunity cost'. But modern economics has no difficulty explaining what sort of 'mechanisms' promote non-violent, non-coercive, outcomes.  

in which modesty and tolerance are supposed to derive from a notion of truth (cognitively understood)

No. Mill gave a foolish argument for tolerance- viz. maybe the nutters are right and we are wrong- but there is an obvious utilitarian argument for not knifing every second bloke you meet.  

which is always elusive,

the notion of truth is not elusive. The thing itself may be.  

never something which we can be confident of having achieved because it is not given in our moral experience, but is predicated of propositions that purport to describe a reality which is distant from our own practical and moral experience of it.

Not if we are smart and are doing actual Science.  

All these various elements of his opposition to Mill and his own alternative conception of tolerance and non-violence were laid open by Gandhi and systematically integrated by these arguments implicit in his many scattered writings.

Nonsense! Gandhi was a Hindu and his ideas are easily captured in simple Hindi- a language he actually used. Bilgrami is stupider than Gandhi. The 'integrated' shite he attributes to Gandhi reflects only his own mental pathology.  

The only other philosopher who came close to such a sustained integration of political, moral, and epistemological themes was

Hitler? My neighbour's cat? 

Heidegger, whatever the fundamental differences between them,

Heidegger wasn't Hindu. He didn't believe in karma or paradisal planets where everybody lives for ten billion years and there is no sex or dirty pictures.  

not least of which is that Gandhi presents his ideas in clear, civil and bracing prose.

in Gujarati and Hindi.  

There remains the question whether such an integrated position is at all plausible.

Karma provides an 'integrated' theory which is also a theodicy. But Bilgrami refuses to accept that Gandhi was a Hindu who firmly believed that no Hindu could deny karma.  

It should be a matter of some intellectual urgency

especially for NASA- not to mention starving refugees in South Sudan 

to ask whether our interests in politics, moral philosophy, and notions of truth and epistemology, are not more fragmented or more miscellaneous than his integrations propose.

They may be, they may not. Nobody cares. Notions don't matter. Bowel motions do.  

Is it not a wiser and more illuminating methodological stance sometimes to recognise that there is often a lack of connection in our ideas and our interests and that to register that lack is sometimes more important and revealing than to seek a strained connection?

This is a methodical stance most people achieve by the age of five. I noticed there was a lack of connection between my idea that I was Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, and my great interest in getting Daddy to buy me an ice-cream. 

I will resist answering these questions, except to say that Gandhi’s idea – the idea that it is a matter of great moment, both for epistemology and for society and politics and morals, that truth is not a cognitive notion – is impeached by the worst aspects of our intellectual culture.

Bilgrami thinks that 'worst aspect' involves making our lives better through discoveries made by Physicists and Chemists and Biologists.  

If Gandhi is right

If Bilgrami is right about what Gandhi believed 

and if truth is an exclusively moral notion, then

I didn't just fart. Farting is naughty. I am nice. Indeed, I don't even have an asshole.  You are lying through your teeth if you suggest otherwise. 

when we seek truth, we are pursuing only a moral value.

That may be true of Bilgrami. It isn't true of smart peeps doing useful stuff.  

(Actually Gandhi’s writings leave it a little unclear whether he is making the steepest claim that truth is not a cognitive notion at all,

His claim was the standard Hindu one that Truth is God and beyond what can be cognized save by God's grace. Thus Arjuna gains 'visvarupa' theophany after Krishna grants him divine eyes.  

or the more cautious one that even if there is such a notion, it yields no special value of its own for us,

it does if you are a lawyer or politician. Gandhi started off as the former and became the latter.  He was making claims that he believed were or would be verified objectively- i.e. there was a 'correspondence theory' of truth here. More importantly, rebirth was a real thing. In a future life, you might become sufficiently spiritually advanced to remember all your previous births. 

a specifically cognitive value. The texts don’t decide this matter, but it is obviously more sympathetic to

a cretin like Bilgrami 

read him as making the latter claim, and in the rest of this discussion, I will assume that that is so.)

Why not also assume that Gandhi was actually a Philosophy Professor at Cambridge who was secretly married to G.E Moore?

This leaves a great deal out of our normative interest in truth,

It is normative for lawyers to be concerned with certain types of truth. Politicians may lie their heads off but they need to know who truly will support them.  

which, as we have seen, Gandhi is perfectly willing to do. He is quite happy to discard as illusory our tendency to think that apart from the moral virtues involving truth (such as that of telling the truth, and living by and exemplifying our moral values) there is also in some sense a value or virtue in getting things right about the world and discovering the general principles that explain its varied phenomena.

In other words, Gandhi was a lawyer/politician of a common enough type in India. That was why he had such a big following.  

This latter is not a moral virtue, it is a cognitive virtue,

we may consider anything at all to be a moral virtue, even if it is a cognitive vice. 

and for Gandhi, cognitive virtues are a chimera.

No. He believed that, by the Grace of God, we can have cognizance of that virtue which is Truth which is God which is the Bliss of Moksha.  

For him truth’s relationship to virtue cannot consist at all in the supposed virtue of acquiring truths of this kind;

No. Gandhi did not reject 'darshan gyan'- more particularly of the Vaishnav or Jain kind. Though the 'matam' (metaphysical doctrine) of different sects is different, the 'vigyan' (the word literally means science) is the same. 

it is instead entirely to be understood in how truth surfaces in our practical and moral relations.

No. God does not surface in our practical or moral relations. We may pray that He does so in practical, moral, or sexual relations. Sadly, my wife never uttered the name of God in the throes of passion though she often inquired if it was in yet.  

That is why truth itself will have no value for us other than the value of such things as truth-telling, which does involve our practical and moral relations.

This is a non sequitur. What we value, if determined by anything at all, has to do with coevolved processes on an uncertain fitness landscape.  

To tell the truth is among other things (such as, say, generosity or kindness or considerateness) a way of being moral,

by 'ipse dixit'- i.e. by making this arbitrary stipulation. But I could equally say ' telling the truth is my way of being my neighbour's cat.'  

and it was an aspect of morals that Gandhi himself was keen to stress.

Many lawyers, politicians, activists, writers etc. are keen to be seen as truthful and trustworthy 

But the point is that truth being only a moral notion,

it is a protocol bound notion though it could also be game theoretic- e.g. as a focal solution to a co-ordiation game 

there is no other value to truth than the value of such things as telling the truth, no more abstract value that it has.

Nonsense!  Telling the truth may have comic value but it also may have a very abstract type of mathematical value. 

Was Bilgrami utterly stupid or is this a parody of some sort? 

There is a palpable mistake in collapsing the cognitive value of truth into the moral value of truth-telling,

But nobody has ever done so. We say there is a cognitive value in telling truths of a relevant and useful sort. You are a morally good person in so far as you do so. But there is no moral or cognitive value in giving utterance to everything which is true.  

a mistake evident in the fact that somebody who fails to tell the truth can, in doing so, still value truth.

No. They don't value Truth or Beauty or the American Way when they are lying their heads off. They may, on the other hand, be valuing their own skill in mendacity.  

That is to say, the liar often values truth and often values it greatly, and precisely because he does so, he wants to conceal it or invent it.

No. He values certain types of information. He conceals or invents it because of something else that he values- e.g. money.  

The liar indeed has a moral failing in that he disvalues truth-telling,

No. Lying is a failing. Disvaluing shite does not matter. Nor does disvaluing disvaluing or disvaluing disvaluing disvaluing etc.  

but he still values truth,

No. He values accurate information which enables him to get what he wants.  

and what he values in doing so therefore cannot be a moral value.

Sure it can. Anything at all can be a moral value for some person.  

It cannot be what Gandhi (and more recently Richard Rorty) insist is the only value that attaches to truth.

Rorty did not say that Truth is God. But that's what Hindus like Gandhi affirm.  

To put it very schematically and crudely, truth has to be a more abstract value

it is a protocol bound value in a law court.  It is not abstract at all for lawyers. Gandhi was a lawyer. But it is also a value for politicians. Gandhi thought Smuts lied to him. This had a big political effect. British Viceroys learned that they must be very circumspect in their language when talking to Gandhi. He would get it into his head that a promise had been made- e.g. that there was a Gandhi-Irwin pact such that Civil Disobedience had ceased to be illegal. Successive Viceroys had to clarify that there was no such pact. Nobody had tricked Gandhi. He simply had an erroneous belief. Thus, the fact that he was sent to jail soon after the supposed pact showed that Civil Disobedience was as illegal as fuck. Indeed, the entire Congress Party was banned till it unilaterally surrendered. 

than a moral value because both the (moral) truth-teller and the (immoral) liar share it.

In which case shit has an abstract value because both the shitter and the constipated person share it.  

So what is this more abstract value of truth, which even the liar shares?

It is the same abstract value as shit possesses according to Bilgrami's crazy reasoning.  

If there is this abstract value to truth, and if even the liar values it, someone must surely in principle be able to fail to value it, else how can it be a value?

Gold is valuable even if some people don't want it. It is easy for a thing to be valuable to some but not to others.  

How can there be a value if no one can fail to value it?

In the same way that a cat can be a cat even if nobody fails to think it is a cat.  

This is indeed a good question

No. It is stupid. 

and only by answering it can we come close to grasping the value of truth that is not a moral value. The answer is: yes, someone does indeed fail to value truth in this more abstract sense. But it is not the liar.

Yes it is. Sooner or later, the liar will realize that having a reputation as a truthful person is very valuable indeed.  

It is the equally common sort of person in our midst: the bullshitter. This is the person who merely sounds off on public occasions or who gets published in some academic journals simply because he is prepared to speak or write in the requisite jargon, without any goal of getting things right nor even (like the liar) concealing the right things which he thinks he knows.

I suppose Bilgrami is talking of himself. The dude is Indian. He knows Gandhi was a Hindu. But he pretends Gandhi did not think that God is Truth because that is what Hindu Scripture declares. Satyagrahis might not achieve anything politically in this world. But they will have a terrific next life.  

The so-called Sokal hoax on which so much has been written, allows this lesson to be sharply drawn.

Sokal wrote nonsense which was supposed to be 'scientific'. Bilgrami writes nonsense and tries to palm it off on some brown dude about whom Richard Attenborough made a film.  

I don’t want to get into a long discussion about this incident both because it is remote from Gandhi’s interests but also because I think that it has become a mildly distasteful site for people making careers out of its propagandist and polemical potential.

Nobody made a career out of denouncing the careerists who published 'Social Text'. 

Everything that I have read on the subject of this hoax, including Sokal’s own contribution, takes up the issue of how Sokal exposed the rampant and uncritical relativism of postmodern literary disciplines.

He exposed its paranoid stupidity and scientific illiteracy.  

I don’t doubt that literary people in the academy have recently shown a relativist tendency, and yet I wonder if that is really what is at stake.

What was at stake was the value of a particular credential. It was good enough for shitty academics teaching shite to cretins. But that was also true of anal-tickle philosophy.  

The point is analogous to the one I just made about the liar. The relativist also does value truth in the abstract sense

only in the sense that the relativist is also my neighbour's cat 

I have in mind, even if he has a somewhat different gloss on it from his opponents.

This is the case even if he has somewhat different whiskers from his opponents. 

In fact it is because he does value truth

is my neighbour's cat 

in this sense that he wishes to urgently

twitch his whiskers  

put this different gloss on it. I believe it quite likely that the journal in which Sokal propagated his hoax would have been happy (at least before the controversy began) to publish a similarly dissimulating hoax reply to his paper in which all kinds of utterly ridiculous arguments were given, this time for an anti-relativist and objective notion of truth, so long as these arguments were presented in the glamorous jargon and with the familiar dialectical moves that command currency in the discipline.

No. They'd have liked someone like Karen Barad to come up with some sciencey shite to justify the supposed argument Sokal made.  

If so, the lesson to be learnt from the hoax is not that relativism is rampant in those disciplines but that

Leftist Academics will publish any old Leftist shite.  

very often bullshit is quite acceptable, if presented in the requisite way.

partisan bullshit is acceptable to partisans.  It would be fair to say Gandhi was partisan and allowances should be made given that he had a particular political role a particular period. What is unfair- or bad faith- is to ignore the fact that Gandhi was a pious Hindu. He wasn't a left-leaning, atheistic, analytical philosopher.

I must conclude by saying that I don’t think that Gandhi should have denied this cognitive value of truth.

He never did. The guy kept saying he had a 'lawyer's mind'. The law has a cognitivist conception of truth upon which it places high value.  

He should in fact have allowed that it defines the very possibility of his own philosophical undertakings

he had none. Lala Hardayal did- but the Punjabi didn't get that the vow of celibacy precludes incessantly marrying Swiss or Swedish belles.  

and that it underlies his own yearning to find for his philosophical ideas the highest levels of what I have called ‘integrity’. 

Religious ideas. He was religious. He had zero interest in philosophy.  

These undertakings and yearnings are all signs of a commitment to the very notion of truth which he wishes to repudiate.

Bilgrami yearns for a Gandhi who would say 'Fuck Hinduism. It is shit. Henceforth, I will be an atheistic cross between Karl Marx and A.J. Ayer.' Also, Gandhi will be as gay as fuck. He and Jinnah will become an item. Nehru will be totes jelly.  

Whether allowing it will in the end have unravelled that integrity must remain a question for another occasion. But I will end by saying that what that question will turn on is really the underlying question of this essay: How much integrity can these themes tolerate?

None. Bilgrami has no integrity and no intelligence. Since he teaches shite to shitheads, this doesn't matter in the slightest.  

It is Gandhi’s essentially religious temperament that motivates the extraordinary ambitions of his integrations of these themes.

No. His religious temperament motivated his embrace of a 'Sanatan Dharma' which could slowly, but steadily, embrace Social reform.  

What I mean here is that for all his romanticism about the power of exemplary actions to generate a moral community, Gandhi, like many religious people, is deeply pessimistic in one sense.

This world is shit. This life is shit. Satyagrahis will get reborn on a paradisal planet like Vaikunta.  

He is convinced of the inherent corruptibility of our moral psyches. This surfaces at two crucial places, which are the well-springs of his integrity. It is what lies behind his fear that criticism will descend inevitably into violence,

Fuck off! He criticised lots of people. He wasn't afraid that he would suddenly start biting and scratching them.  

and it is also what underlies his fear that the intellectualisation of the notion of truth to include a cognitive value, will descend inevitably into an elevation of science into the paradigmatic intellectual pursuit of our culture,

his culture was Hindu. Hindus were as poor as shit and only slightly smarter than the average cow. The paradigmatic intellectual pursuit of his culture involved passing an exam to get clerical employment.  

and thus descend further in turn to our alienation from nature with the wish to conquer and control it without forgiveness and with the most destructive technologies.

This is a bee in Bilgrami's own bonnet. Gandhi had the luxury of living in a country which was as poor as shit and twice as stupid.  

The modern secular habits of thinking on these themes simply do not share this pessimism. Neither descent is inevitable, we will say. We can block the rise of bad technologies by good politics.

No. If we don't do it, our rivals will and thus steal a march on us.  

There is no reason to see it as inevitable once we think of truth in cognitive terms, not even inevitable if we value scientific inquiry.

We can always find a reason to see anything we like as inevitable or impossible or totes into anal sex.  

So also we can block violence with good constitutional politics

No. Look at Lebanon. Constitutions have no magic power. Bilgrami may have heard of a little thing called the American Civil War.  

and the rule of law,

which didn't prevent my being mugged 

and there is no reason to think it inevitable just because we think of values as entailing the exercise of our critical capacities towards one another.

Bilgrami may think in those Moorean terms. But he has no fucking critical capacity. Nor did Moore though, it must be admitted, he told Russell he didn't like him. This was probably because Russell had terrible halitosis.  

This modernist faith in politics to control and via this control to instil cognitive and moral habits in us which distract us from what might otherwise be seen as our corruptible nature is the real achievement, if that is what it is, of the Enlightenment.

This is not a 'modernist' faith. Politics has always been about 'homonoia' i.e. social concord and unity of mind.  

It is only this faith that convinces us that the integrations which Gandhi’s pessimism force on him are not compulsory.

They don't exist.  

It needs a large and elaborate stock-taking of modernity to figure out whether the faith is justified, one in which philosophy and moral psychology will play as large a part as history and political economy.

No. We don't need to stock-take. We can simply 'mark to market'. Economics is valuable because it can actually improve outcomes. History need not be paranoid shite. But 'Philosophy' and 'Moral Psychology' shat the bed long ago. They have no value.  

I have only raised the issue at stake at the highest level of generality.

by telling a stupid lie.  

It is in the details, however, that it will be decided,

by my neighbour's cat 

and those really must await another occasion.

When my neighbour's cat has completed its dissertation on 'Rahul Gandhi, the philosopher'.