Facile Devji on Gandhi's enemies

Like Aparna Kapadia, Facile Devji is a Professor of History. Does this mean every sentence he writes about Mahatma Gandhi is either false or fatuous? Let us see.

If Gandhi lives today it is because of his enemies, who seem unable to let go of his memory.

This is nonsense. Gandhi lives because his admirers- people who believe he achieved something amazing- spend a little time and money glorifying him and flattering themselves. Gandhi himself doesn't have enemies coz the guy died a long time ago. But people like Devji who gas on about Gandhi are widely ridiculed and reviled. So, yes, Gandhi-giri has enemies.

The Mahatma's followers have turned him into a saint whose teachings can safely be ignored-as the words of a superior being to be admired from afar.

Saints are people you pray to so as to gain some benefit or secure protection against some evil. You can do this quite openly because veneration of Saints is associated with piety and good character. If you are praying to Beelzebub and performing Satanic rituals to gain the favor of Hecate, you should do this in secret because such activities are associated with sociopathic criminality.

Suppose you have strong views on some political issue. You should support an organization which invokes the memory of people like Gandhi or Dr. King, not one which idolizes Hitler or Osama, because you are less likely to end up in Court on charges of abetting terrorism.

Given the ritualistic respect offered to him in India and received with public indifference, it is puzzling why Gandhi remains such a living figure for his critics.

There is no puzzle. Gandhi's critics have an animus against the nuisance created by his admirers.

Perhaps they are the only ones who still feel betrayed by his loss of sainthood.

They feel betrayed because people like Devji continue to publish worthless books and articles about a guy who died long ago.

This betrayal is renewed in every generation, as scholars and activists discover yet another of the Mahatma's failings.

Gandhi's failings were known in his life-time. After he died, he stopped adding to both his failings and his achievements. That's how Death works.

In the wake of second-wave feminism, the Mahatma, during the 1980s, was excoriated for his views about women.

That was 'third-wave' feminism. It was about whining about how White women were totally fascist and only Brown wimmin with shite PhDs should be listened to. It had no effect whatsoever on India because the people who went in for it were struggling for tenure and a Green Card in Amrika.

The criticism was based on anecdotes about Gandhi's treatment of his wife Kasturbai and his experiments with celibacy that entailed sleeping naked with young women.

Arthur Koestler- a very popular writer at that time- had written about this in the Fifties and his book- 'the Lotus and the Robot'- had been banned in India, which is why lots of Indians read it.

But these women's voices are strangely silenced.

How? People like Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, or Sucheta Kripalani, held high political office. They weren't silenced at all. Incidentally, Manu Gandhi refused to keep sleeping with Gandhi which caused him to berate her as having failed to fulfill a mahayajna a few days before his death.

Manubehn, who participated in Gandhi's experiments, has left a diary that no critic has thought to read.

Nonsense! The diaries were translated some years ago and everybody has had a chance to become familiar with their contents.

While he was sometimes harsh to his intimates, it was also from Gandhi's circle that many women entered public life-Anasuya Sarabhai, Mridula Sarabhai, Amrit Kaur, Sarojini Naidu and Sushila Nayyar.

Rubbish! Naidu was already famous as a poet. The Sarabhais and Kaur, because of their inherited position and their own proclivities would have risen up no matter what.  Nayyar was a Doctor and would probably have got some more or less important post in any case. Amtus Salam, however, being Muslim from a family which chose Pakistan, could not be accommodated politically.

In the 1990s, when the Mandal Commission revived caste struggle in India, Gandhi's caste prejudice came into focus.

This is very foolish. The Mandal Commission was about reservations for OBCs. It diluted the advantage given to Dalits. Gandhi was irrelevant. Anyway,  Ambedkar had been denouncing Gandhi since the Thirties. It was in the mid Fifties that condemnation of Gandhi's caste prejudice reached a peak. Partly this was because 'Gandhians' on taking power, had turned the screws on the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in Gandhi's native Gujarat.

The distinguishing feature of the Nineties was India's embrace of Economic Liberalization. Gandhian Socialism (i.e. autarkic policies) lost salience- more particularly after the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. It was apparent that Gandhian methods had no application anywhere across the globe. Some silly people did, it is true, turn up in Baghdad to cuddle with Saddam Hussein. But they only succeeded in provoking ridicule or revulsion.

But this did little more than recover BR Ambedkar's polemics against him.

 But if Facile Devji know's this, why did he pretend otherwise? Does this cretin really believe that anybody cares about the slow-witted shite Professors like him write about Gandhi?

Here, too, critics dwelt on anecdotes about the Poona Pact, when Gandhi fasted to deny separate electorates to lower castes, and his unconcern with any real amelioration of their plight.

But these critics had no constituency anywhere- even on their own campuses. Why? It was because everybody could see that History of Poli Sci Phds decreased, not increased, one's earning power and life-chances. By contrast, Doctorates in STEM subjects could greatly boost earning power- indeed, it could pave the path to becoming a billionaire!

Yet, the Poona Pact was not only a caste issue, but emerged from the Minorities Pact between Muslims, Dalits and others that denied the existence of a nation in India.

Facile Devji thinks these pacts were important. They weren't. Why? Because rioting clarified the situation. It turned out that Dalits kill and are killed by Muslims during such riots. Thus, there really was a Hindu Rashtra while Muslim majority areas, as we now all know, were bound to go in for ethnic cleansing.

Ambedkar, poor fellow, saw with his own eyes that his pal J.N Mandal, who chose Pakistan, had to run away from that country, though he had been made a Minister. His 'Namasudra' caste-fellows too were ethnically cleansed. Thus, a 'Minorities Pact' was always just a chimera.

The Mahatma's critics may agree with Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Ambedkar about the absence of a nation in India, but resist recognising why Gandhi supported caste.

I don't know which critics Facileji has in mind, but no one can deny that India is, under a more or less cosmetic disguise, a Hindu Rashtra. Non Hindu areas want to break away but the Army fucks them over till they give up. We may not like this and most of us won't admit this, but we all know this is a fact.

As an anarchist, the Mahatma was suspicious of the state and its effort to remake society in a fulfilment of colonialism.

Was Gandhi a member of any Anarchist party? No. He was a member of the Indian National Congress which sought to take over the State apparatus from the British.

The Indian Union is not 'the fulfillment of Colonialism'. It represents the eradication of foreign rule. Facileji may not understand this because he is a Professor of History at Oxford- and thus an utter cretin- but everybody else knows this to be true.

He realised that castes, villages and religious communities were crucial if swaraj, or self-rule, was to be produced outside the state, which could not be allowed to dictate a national identity to Indians.

The State does dictate a 'national identity' to Indians. If you try to assert another identity- say that of being a Pakistani- in India, you may find yourself in very hot water. Similarly, if an Indian tries to assert an American identity by going to the US Embassy and demanding an American passport, she finds herself shit out of luck. I recall filling out a visa form to visit Italy. Instead of writing 'Indian' in the Nationality column, I put down 'Citizen of the Celestial Parnassus'. I also put down 'poet' under 'Occupation'. The Visa clerk insisted I change my application form to read 'Indian' and 'Accountant'.

Castes can't produce 'self-rule'. At best they can adjudicate disputes between members of the same caste. However, in transactions with people of other castes some higher authority must set and enforce the rules. The same is true of villages and religious communities. It is a different matter that members of a caste or creed may try to conquer the country and subjugate or expel everyone else. But that would be a type of Imperialism, or Fascism. It is not what is commonly meant by 'Swaraj' or 'Independence'.

The State can only dictate a legal type of identity- e.g. equality before the law- it can't enforce any other type. Thus, though the State may decree that everybody should have a heterosexual identity, some homosexuals would still exist. Facileji, being a Professor of a shite subject, may not know this but everybody else does.

For this, it was necessary to reform rather than reject such institutions, making Gandhi a conservative rather than a revolutionary.

If you believe reform is necessary, then you are a Reformist. A conservative may believe that reform will happen organically, by itself. Thus she may resist Reformists and condemn their activity as a nuisance or as likely to create a greater backlash. Gandhi knew very well that if he went against the tide, he would lose salience. This would also mean that his money-pit Ashrams would lose funding. He'd be forced to embrace actual, as opposed to cosmetic, poverty and insignificance.

Ambedkar started disagreeing with the Mahatma by arguing for the state's absolute power to transform society, which is what allowed him to join hands with Jawaharlal Nehru.

Sheer nonsense! Ambedkar thought the Brits, or even the Muslims, would give the Dalits a better deal. He didn't 'join hands with Nehru' because he knew Nehru had no understanding of, or interest in, the sort of hardships Dalits faced- more particularly in rural areas. It is true that Ambedkar wanted urbanization and industrialization. But he wanted immediate action on issues relating to Dalits. He wasn't content to wait for a 'trickle-down' effect.

But he soon realised the excesses and limitations of such power, resigning from the cabinet to concentrate on promoting social change in religious terms, a move reminiscent of Gandhi's career.

Google 'why Ambedkar resigned' and you find this- 'Ambedkar resigned from the cabinet in 1951, when parliament stalled his draft of the Hindu Code Bill, which sought to enshrine gender equality in the laws of inheritance and marriage.' He had not 'realized the excesses or limitations' of State Power. On the contrary, he was protesting the State's refusal to use such power in a just and socially beneficial way.

Ambedkar came from a deeply religious and spiritually enlightened family. There is no reason to believe that his religious conversion was not just as sincere as that of Acharya Kausambi or Rahul Sankrityayan. Like other Dalits reformists, Ambedkar wanted his own community to get rid of certain repugnant customs and to rise up on the basis of a highly respectable, 'knowledge based', religion which enjoyed the highest prestige.

Indeed, Ambedkar never forsook the Mahatma's arch-concept of satyagraha, despite his clear and abiding hatred of the man who had called his bluff in forcing him to back down during the Poona Pact.

Ambedkar never embraced satyagraha because it was hypocritical and worked only in the interests of the moneyed class. He wanted, and got, legal remedies. He had good reason to oppose Gandhi. Within Bombay Presidency, Maharashtrians like Ambedkar were suspicious of Gujerati dominance- more especially in Bombay. It is noteworthy that even Congress stalwarts like Y.B Chavan did not describe themselves as Gandhians.

If Gandhi's feminist foes silence women's voices,

Why would feminists 'silence women's voices'? Does Facileji read over what he writes?

his caste enemies erase the role of Muslims to make for a purely Hindu debate

What is Facileji getting at? What is the 'role of Muslims'? In Muslim majority areas is it not the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims? What else can be said about Islam in a debate between a Manuvadi and an upholder of Hindutva? If Hinduism is to get rid of Caste and Misogyny, there must be a debate between Hindus. Talking to Taoists or Mormons won't help matters.

-many of Ambedkar's arguments about nationality and representation being versions of Jinnah's.

Ambedkar was a great intellectual. He had studied Sociology and had two Doctorates in Economics- one on Fiscal Policy, the other in Monetary theory- from Columbia and the LSE. Like Jinnah, he was a barrister. However, unlike Jinnah, he did not have wealthy and powerful backers. There was no part of India where Dalits were in the majority. The Muslims didn't trust Congress concessions because they knew that once the Brits were gone, these concessions would be withdrawn. Thus, Jinnah had a genuine 'threat point'- he could partition the country- though this would mean leaving the majority of Muslims in the lurch. Ambedkar had no such thing. But he played his cards as best he could and, because Hindus genuinely need to get rid of Caste and Misogyny- otherwise we will remain militarily weak and economically backward- he prevailed. The reservations he fought for, which he believed would not be renewed ten or twenty years down the line, have become a permanent feature. Just recently, the Bench tried to reduce the scope of the Anti-Dalit Atrocities Act. The Center has rushed through legislation reversing this.

There is a good reason, Prime Minister Modi spends so much time adulating Gandhi and Ambedkar. Both prevailed in the long run- though, no doubt, it was the younger, better educated, man whose thinking has taken institutional form.

His views about 'backward' adivasis and 'fanatical' Muslims, whom he wanted to deny separate representation, would also merit more censure were Ambedkar treated in the same way as Gandhi.

Ambedkar was right about 'fanatical' Muslims gaining ground over the pragmatists and progressives. They could and did whip up an 'Islam is in danger' sentiment which quickly translated into pogroms and widespread ethnic cleansing. Ambedkar was also right that adivasi leaders could be co-opted by a corrupt administration while the rural masses were preyed upon by crazy Naxalites.

No question, there are many things in Ambedkar's writings which don't look good today. But the same could be said of Nehru or Bose or any other politician of the period.

Ambedkar thought his attempt to secure representation for Dalits was undercut by the Muslim League's desire to come to an agreement with the Congress at their expense, as also by the colonial state's promotion of adivasi representation to fragment Indian politics.

These are essentially political questions from a particularly fractious period in Indian politics. Any Government needs to protect the Adivasis because they will fight back if you push them too far. By contrast, if you improve life-chances for Adivasi youth, then the whole Nation benefits.

During his own lifetime, Gandhi's enemies mounted arguments that were political rather than personal.

This was because Gandhi was a politician. But he didn't hold office. So there was little point attacking him for his personal shortcomings.

They saw the Mahatma as anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu in ways that repudiated anecdotal evidence for more complex narratives.

Why bother with 'complex narratives'? The Da Vinci Code is pretty complex. But it is consumed as entertainment not as a contribution to Christian theology.

Even his assassin acknowledged Gandhi's sincerity and attributed his supposed betrayal of Hindus to the attempt at repeating his success in unifying South Africa's Indian community-having misunderstood the different conditions at home.

No. What Godse said was that Gandhi, on returning to India, adopted whimsical policies and that it was the Hindus who paid the price for his foolish experiments. Godse wasn't saying Gandhi misunderstood India. He said Gandhi had come to believe in his own infallibility and thus, if he thought something, India would have to conform to that thought. If it did not do so, so much the worse for India.
Godse said 'Gandhi had done very good in South Africa to uphold the rights and well-being of the Indian community there. But when he finally returned to India he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on his own way.
'Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the Judge of everyone and every thing; he was the master brain guiding the civil disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, it might bring untold disaster and political reverses but that could make no difference to the Mahatma’s infallibility. ‘A Satyagrahi can never fail’ was his formula for declaring his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is. Thus, the Mahatma became the judge and jury in his own cause. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible.
Many people thought that his politics were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, disaster after disaster. Gandhi’s pro-Muslim policy is blatantly in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India . It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India , Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani.. Everybody in India knows that there is no language called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect, it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and cross-breed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma’s sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India . His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and purity of the Hindi language was to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus.

I disagree with Godse about Hindi. But, it must be said, it was Godse's view which prevailed. That is why I had to learn 'shuddh' Hindi at school. But this Sanskritized jargon was met with incomprehension in the streets of Delhi. Thankfully, the usage of ordinary Urdu words is now perfectly acceptable in written Hindi.

The communist view of Gandhi as an agent of capitalism was complex and invoked Marx's theories about the development of class conflict.

The communist view was simple. Gandhi was the Tolstoy of India. Lenin had acknowledged the latter's role in the 1905 uprising. Gandhi's usefulness was that he and his acolytes amply demonstrated the essential uselessness of the National Bourgeoisie. Thus, the Gandhians were digging the graves of their own class hegemony. What nobody suspected at the time was that Indian Communism would turn out to be even more useless. Its 'long march through the Institutions' has ended in utter and outright impotence and imbecility

Colonial officials were the ones who pioneered the anecdotal and personal style of criticism that has come to define Gandhi's enemies.

Godse was Gandhi's enemy. He shot the man dead. There is nothing 'anecdotal and personal' about the style of criticism he displays in his last speech. On the other hand, it is quite true that Colonial police officers would compile scurrilous confidential reports on Indian freedom fighters. My Uncle, who was in RAW, got hold of my grand-father's police file. It claims that he sold my grandmother's jewelry to consort with prostitutes! The real story is that she gave up her jewelry- along with thousands of others- during Gandhi's visit to Madras. My grandfather was involved with a reclamation project for 'fallen women' which was financed by a Jain merchant. But so was my grandmother- whose father was a senior Police officer!

Why did the Colonial Police not try to smear Gandhi in the same way? The answer is that they would have been laughed at.

For they accused the Mahatma not of any particular crime, but of being a consummate hypocrite in all he said and did.

Everybody who met Gandhi- including his own acolytes- made the same charge at one time or another. However, Gandhi- as Godse tells us- wasn't a hypocrite. He genuinely believed he was Infallible.

This focus on hypocrisy discounts an understanding of Gandhi's words and deeds as a form of political thought to search for their meaning in fragmentary quotations and conspiracies.

That is why no one bothers with proving Gandhi was a hypocrite. Instead they explain why his 'political thought' was ignorant and stupid.

It is a way of understanding history characteristic of the far right, and signals the leftist critic's collusion with them.

The far right understands History in terms of one race, or nationality, fucking over another. The more heinously this is done, the better pleased they are. The Leftist understands History in terms of some 'subaltern' class rising up and fucking over its oppressors and creating a shambles. The worse the ensuing the shambles, the better the Leftist is pleased. There is no 'collusion' between the Leftist and the Rightist. There is merely a common imbecility.

These varied and mutually contradictory condemnations tell us more about those who make them than the man who is their subject.

So why bother with them? Everyone knows people who write about Gandhi are stupid tossers teaching a shite subject.

Gandhi has become the origin from which each generation of Indians can trace the consequences of its social and political concerns.

Concerns don't have consequences. Actions do.

In this way, he remains the father of the nation.

No. Gandhi is the father of the Nation because every Prime Minister since Independence has said so. His birthday is a National Holiday. Little kids at school learn about him. Thus, long before any Indian has developed 'social and political concerns', she can answer the question 'who is called the father of the Nation' by answering 'Bapuji'.

It is not surprising, then, that with its worldwide revival, Gandhi is now being accused of racism, of which Indians have now become agents rather than objects.

Who is accusing Gandhi of racism? President Trump? Vladimir Putin? No, its some college kids in Ghana who objected to having their campus disfigured by an eyesore of a statue. What was the Ministry of External Affairs thinking when they sanctioned this gift? Africans are smart. They won't put up with this sort of puerile shite.

(What is) Unprecedented about the condemnations of Gandhi's racism, however, is that they are not limited to India but have become global, with statues of the Mahatma attacked or removed in different parts of Africa as a result.

The only removal occurred in Ghana, because Ghanaian Universities are just as crazy as Universities anywhere else, but the statue will be relocated by the Ghanaian government to some other prominent place. A Gandhi statue in San Francisco has often been vandalized- I must admit I too would steal his glasses and break his staff if I were drunk and seventeen years old- but there is no chance that any Gandhi statue in America or Europe will be removed because Indians in such places have a lot of money power and, economically speaking, India's stature is rising.

Two charges are levelled against Gandhi.
That he never spoke for the liberty of Africans or involved them in his movement. And that he saw Africans as inferior and sought to keep Indians separate from them.

Gandhi did not lift a finger to help the Chinese, though he had worked closely with them. In his autobiography, he hints that the Chinese leader embezzled money and ran away. This was quite false. Incidentally, Gandhi was almost sodomized by a horny Chinese guy while in jail or so his first biographer claimed.

Gandhi made bad choices in South Africa. But the fault lies with his Memon sponsors. They should have put themselves under the banner of the leader of the 'Coloureds' who was Muslim and a Medical Doctor. The fact is all Asians born on South African soil were wholeheartedly devoted to majority rule. If you grow up in Africa, the first thing that strikes you is the superior moral and intellectual quality of African children. This is because their traditional culture inculcates in them a feeling of responsibility to the entire cohort. Thus the smarter kid helps those who are slower in academics. The better sportsman takes time to help those who are weaker. In India, education is a rat-race. Kids are encouraged to engage in cut-throat competition so as to rank 'first'. Gandhi did notice and write appreciatively about the handsome features, noble physique, and sober and industrious habits of the Africans. However, for (misguided) political reasons, he sought to promote Indian interests separately from the interests of other, non-European origin, South Africans.

But unless he was invited to do so, the Mahatma never spoke for any community of which he was not a member.

Gandhi spoke for the Jews of Germany counseling them to adopt a method he himself believed he adhered to. He was not asked to do this. He was asked for comfort and support. This he refused to supply. He said
'If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now.'

The mistake Gandhi is making here is to think that all Jews were of an age where they could have the noble intention Gandhi attributes to himself, in which case being slaughtered would indeed be to wake to Paradise. However, the Jews had kids and disabled dependents. It was up to them to ensure that these kids got out of Germany to somewhere safe- or, somewhat safer- so as to grow up and arrive at a level of spiritual and intellectual maturity sufficient to become self-conscious martyrs.

Gandhi thought his experience of discrimination in South Africa entitled him to speak to the Jews as if he were himself a Jew. Martin Buber responded by showing that there was no comparison whatsoever between what Hitler was doing to the Jews and the insults and injuries the Indians had suffered in Natal. After all, like Gandhi himself, they could always return to their own country. Jews, by contrast, had no similar place of refuge.

Buber wrote- 'He who is unhappy lends a deaf ear when idle tongues discuss his fate among themselves. But when a voice that he has long known and honoured, a great voice and an earnest one, pierces the vain clamour and calls him by name, he is all attention. Here is a voice, he thinks, that can but give good counsel and genuine comfort, for he who speaks knows what suffering is; he knows that the sufferer is more in need of comfort than of counsel; and he has both the wisdom to counsel rightly and that simple union of faith and love which alone is the open sesame to true comforting. But what he hears - containing though it does elements of a noble and most praiseworthy conception, such as he expects from this speaker - is yet barren of all application to his peculiar circumstances. These words are in truth not applicable to him at all. They are inspired by most praiseworthy general principles, but the listener is aware that the speaker has cast not a single glance at the situation of him whom he is addressing, that he neither sees him nor knows him and the straits under which he labours. Moreover, intermingled with the counsel and the comfort, a third voice makes itself heard, drowning both the others, the voice of reproach. It is not that the sufferer disdains to accept reproach in this hour from the man he honours. On the contrary, if only there were mingled with the good counsel and the true comfort a word of just reproach, giving to the former a meaning and a reason, he would recognise in the speaker the bearer of a message. But the accusation voiced is another altogether from that which he hears in the storm of events and in the hard beating of his own heart: it is almost the opposite of this. He weighs it and examines it - no, it is not a just one! And the armour of his silence is pierced. The friendly appeal achieves what the enemy`s storming has failed to do; he must answer. He exclaims, “Let the lords of the ice inferno affix my name to a cunningly constructed scarecrow; this is the logical outcome of their own nature and the nature of their relations to me.” But you, the man of goodwill, do you not know that you must see him whom you address, in his place and circumstance, in the throes of his destiny?'

Buber cuts to the heart of the matter. Gandhi may have good principles. He may even be considered a Philosopher or an Economist. But he never looked into the hearts of others. He did not see those he endlessly sermonized. 

Invoking Gandhi, is to escape engagement with one's alterity. It is to insulate one's ipseity and construct an impregnable fortress of self-righteousness on the basis of an absurd and mischievous solipsism. 

It is no wonder that people like Facileji feel the need to gas on about Gandhi.

For he conceived of non-violence as an exemplary rather than instructive practice, one attracting emulation to maintain an anarchistic social plurality.

An 'anarchistic social plurality' can be maintained by sociopathic behavior. If some process of emulation gets under way, then 'plurality' is reduced; people become more like each other.

Gandhi's South Africa was a society whose racialised populations were treated differently by law.

What is a 'racialised' population? South Africa was multi-racial and racial differences became the basis of 'Apartheid' laws and policies. A homogeneous population can be 'racialised' by inventing a myth of separate origins or the inherent superiority of one particular region or lineage. But this was not what happened in South Africa.

As a lawyer defending Indian privileges, he was unable to challenge the legal system itself.

There were no 'Indian privileges'. There were rights Indian origin people had in common with others which, however, were being withdrawn or whittled away. As a lawyer, Gandhi should have mounted a legal challenge to such proceedings. The case should have gone all the way to the Privy Council. But Gandhi was a crap lawyer. Smuts was an excellent lawyer. Arriving at Cambridge on a scholarship, Smuts got a double first and was offered a Fellowship. Thus, Gandhi was unable to challenge Smuts's laws not because of the legal system but because he just wasn't a very good barrister.

And the law ensured he could only defend these privileges by making sure Indians were not identified with Africans, though he might well have approved of this separation.

This is utterly false. Till 1931, a legal challenge to what Smuts was doing was possible such that the final decision would be made in Britain. However, the legal challenge could not be made on the basis of race. It would have to embrace all people suffering a similar unconstitutional disability.

Yet, he also insisted on treating wounded Zulus in the ambulance corps he led during the Bambatha Rebellion, his political sympathies being with them and not with Britain.

 If his political sympathies were with the Zulus, he should have made common cause with them to mount a legal challenge to Smuts's unconstitutional Acts.

When he was no longer a lawyer, Gandhi's derogatory comments about Africans ceased.

They ceased while he was a lawyer for the simple reason that he had left Africa.

In his book Satyagraha in South Africa, he contrasted Zulus favourably with Indians on every count.

The Zulus were a great military power. The achievements of the Zulu warrior were common knowledge. Gandhi's big shtick was about how Indians were weak, pathetic, greedy, stupid and in thrall to bogus Mahatmas or crazy soi disant 'Spiritual' ideas.

Eventually, he would also see African-Americans as the most hopeful agents of non-violence worldwide.

He said this when he met African Americans who were willing to flatter his vanity for reasons of their own.

But given their legal status, the Mahatma had to fight for his compatriots as Indians.

As he was paid to do.

His demand was an international rather than South African one, and consisted of compelling India to uphold the status of her subjects in other parts of the British Empire.

So his demand was not International, it was Imperial.

Calling the Mahatma's first satyagraha a South African one, as he himself did, is, therefore, something of a misnomer, as its traction depended upon India's and, therefore, London's involvement.

But so did his Indian satyagrahas.

South Africa was only one site of this struggle, with Gandhi interested in the status of Indians all over the British Empire, from Kenya to Mauritius, Guyana, Fiji and Trinidad.

Actually, Dr. Pranjivan Mehta- who was based in Burma- and Rev. C.F Andrews were more active in this regard.

It became a global movement when he sought to and, in fact, succeeded in abolishing indenture, the Indian successor to African slavery which supplied labour for much of the Empire.

So, this was not 'global' but Imperial. Sadly, this was something of an own goal. Indians who entered articles of indenture did far better than those denied any such opportunity.

I recall the mood in our History class when this topic came up. We had a Trinidadian Brahman in our class. He told us how his grand-father had gained 5 acres of land at the end of this indenture. This he expanded into some hundred acres. Petrol was discovered on that land. The family became millionaires. They owned beautiful houses in London and Delhi and were building a palatial 'farm-house' in their native Bihar. Similarly, we felt much discomfited to hear the story of the annexation of French and Portuguese territory but for which some of our number would have had European passports and access to free education in the great Universities of that continent.

Perhaps Gandhi was a racist after all, but we get no sense of this from his enemies, whose personalised, and often conspiratorial, arguments deprive his thought of integrity and ignore the many contexts in which he operated.

Facileji is being silly. Why not say 'perhaps Gandhi was a child molester, but his enemies are still stupid to hate him'?

Even accusing Hitler of racism is a meaningless generality, since we can only understand his violence by taking its intellectual justification and historical context into consideration.

To accuse Hitler of racism is like accusing Jack the Ripper of misogyny. It is foolish to make a milder charge when everybody knows the true enormity of the offence.

Instead of merely turning the saint into a sinner, then, it is time for the Mahatma to become a properly historical figure for his friends as much as enemies.

Gandhi is a properly historical figure. Also the guy is fucking dead. His 'friends' are as foolish as his 'enemies'. So are those who claim to be giving him a blowjob or claim to be reconstructing his Philosophy or his Economic Theory. This is not to say there can't be a Gandhian political praxis. But it will fail- like the recent Lokpal agitation- because it is silly.

Still, Facileji- being a professor of Indian history at Oxford- is obliged to publish ignorant shite or else lose his claim to intellectual affirmative action. I need hardly say that everything I write on this blog is designed to bolster the Iyer claim to be classed as not just Educationally Backward but downright fucking retarded.

Jai Hind! Jai Bhim! Jai Me!