I never thought I would be writing in defence of Gandhi. For a long time in college I viewed him as Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark – we were shown a great story and he was the main character, but the end result would have been exactly the same without him. India would have gained independence as the Empire divested itself.
Except of course, he decided who was in charge, set the tone for independent India, inspired various other freedom/rights struggles and maybe the British would not have released the rest of the empire without India going first. They didn’t let go of Malaysia till 57, Rhodesia till 64, HK until the lease was up, and they still cling on to the Falkland islands. Not forgetting the resulting apartheid regimes in Zimbabwe & SA.
The Hindu right wing has always been upset with Gandhi, this is unsurprising and the political drift has worsened over time with the Congress squatting squarely on Gandhi’s legacy. Yet, happily, no harsh moves have been made over the BJP decade to degrade his stature, or any public space erasure.
Instead what is new, is the attacks from the liberal left. Cancel culture loves skewering cultural heroes out of time and context. They are constantly rewarded on social media for it.
A Precedent Post on Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Authority to Speak
Kabir is right to push back on the deliberately provocative, “pure evil.” It misses what QeA & Nehru were and what Gandhi & Ambedkar were.
This post sets four Precedents.
One. QeA and Nehru were men of state. Neither evil, neither saint. To be evaluated by the standards appropriate to men who build and run states.
Two. Gandhi was a man of Dharma. He is a saint. Comparing him with QeA and Nehru on their terms is a category error.
Three. Ambedkar is the fourth figure. Not a man of state in the QeA or Nehru sense; not a man of Dharma in the Gandhian sense. He is a constitutional saint, in the Mahatma’s register.
Nehru and QeA may be criticised. They may not be disrespected. Gandhi and Ambedkar are a different order. Discussion of them on this blog proceeds from profound respect for their achievement: the redemption of the soul of India after a thousand years of slavery.
*Thousand years of slavery is not Precedent but rhetorical flourish. It is worth noting that all of the Pakistani commentators on BP would be subordinated “Hindustani Muslims” in the hierarchical world of the Mughals, who explicitly favoured foreign-born Turani and Irani nobles over the converted Indian majority.
Four. SD is not to be quoted on this blog. Initials only where strictly necessary. Reasons at section XII.
Part I. The Distinction
I. The Man of State
The modern state is a Westphalian inheritance: territory, a monopoly of violence, legal personality. A man of state operates inside that frame. He does not step outside it.
QeA was a man of state. He was perhaps the finest constitutional negotiator the subcontinent produced in the twentieth century. He read the Government of India Act the way a master reads a score. In his Fourteen Points of 1929, drafted in response to the Nehru Report’s dismissal of the Muslim minority, he foresaw with brutal clarity that a Westminster majority in a plural society could become a permanent tyranny once the demographic count was fixed.
According to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “The Committee has adopted a narrow minded policy to ruin the political future of the Muslims. I regret to declare that the report is extremely ambiguous and does not deserve to be implemented.”
There is a reason Pakistanis venerate him to the extent they do. Without QeA, the Muslims of the subcontinent would have remained a set of regional identities & class interests: Punjabi, United Provinces aristocrats, Bengali. He forged a single Islamicate identity out of them and politicised it into a state. In the history of the Ummah, and indeed the world, this is almost unique.
The Two Nation Theory was not his starting point. In 1916, at Lucknow, Sarojini Naidu called him the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity, and the phrase was earned. He reached for the Two Nation Theory two decades later, when the softer constitutional instruments had been closed off by Congress intransigence and Viceregal haste.
The tragedy of QeA is that the state he called into being never settled its founding question. A secular Muslim who ate pork and drank whisky summoned an Islamic state and then, on 11 August 1947, tried to unsummon it in a speech that Pakistan has spent the rest of its history editing out of its school curriculum. The confusion was structural from day one. It is structural still.
II. The Architect and the Scaffold
Nehru was a man of state of a different temperament. Harrow, Cambridge, Inner Temple. Fabian socialist. Scientific temper. Where QeA built a state around a community, Nehru built one around an idea: that a civilisation as old as India could be poured into a parliamentary republic and would accept the mould. It largely did. We owe him this.
BB has made a comment calling Pakistanis “strayed Muslim Indians“; which does not quite make sense, because Pakistanis are both Indic & Islamic, uniquely so. One cannot deny the highly syncretic and distinct Muslim subculture that has come about from a very long and deep history in India. It cannot be subsumed into an Indian identity in any meaningful way without acknowledging that distinctiveness.
I recently read a piece I’d like to share: about the life of Bacha Khan and how he initiated an anticolonial school, the Azad School in Utmanzai, in 1921. It was a Pashto-medium institution where Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India, also studied. Nehru and Gandhi visited the school as well — Nehru in 1937 and Gandhi in 1938 — delivering speeches and spending time there. Due to his dissent against the British, he had to spend about 37 years in jail out of his 93-year life.
“Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous. For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian. For CLR James, we can list “The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group he co-led, known as the Johnson-Forest tendency. For Selma James and many other women of the 1970s Marxist Feminist movement, it was about recognizing the economic contributions of housework and children and establishing organizations that advocated for fair compensation for caring and reproductive labor. Their slogan, ‘invest in caring, not war’, remains the blueprint. For Spivak, it has been to chart a path for activism while working beyond Eurocentric Logocentrism.
The list is long, but I never thought that a tall, six-foot-three, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken Khan from Utmanzai, Hashnagar, a mere graduate of King Edward’s School, Peshawar, would, before he turned 30, have three works of genius to his name. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, honorifically known as Badshah Khan (King of the Khans) and also Bacha Khan, a title bestowed upon him at the mere age of 27, created three masterpieces. In order of creation, they were: Anjuman-i-Islahul Afaghina (The Society for the Reform of the Afghan), Pakhtun magazine, and the greatest non-violent organization the world has yet known, the Khudai Khidmatgar. Here I want to write only of the first, Anjuman-i-Islahul Afaghina. “
On this tragic day 34 years ago, Rajiv Gandhi was brutally assassinated in Chennai. It would be timely and worthwhile to respectfully reflect on his legacy — the good, the controversial, and the unresolved.
One writer who caused an evolution of my thought is the fiery Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His brash yet precise style, swashbuckling smashing of intellectuals, and ancestral Mediterranean insights provided an alternative thought diet in a world that force-feeds the same message to me on television, social media, and amongst my friends here in a buffet of American coastal elites. From the jest of randomness, the beauty of black swans, the advancement of antifragility, and piercing skin in the game, Taleb created a dancing sequence of jabs and hooks to create a battle-hardened mentality to approach the world and knowledge.
One of the biggest yet most nuanced lessons I learned from Taleb was that of scale – how inputs yield outputs differently, depending on size and magnitude. An easy example of this common-sense concept is the difficulty in enforcing an exercise and diet regimen for oneself versus one’s entire family versus one’s entire community and so on. Trying to do good things is easier and possibly more effective in the long run when done on a smaller scale.
It’s one thing to change oneself on an individual level, another to create a visible shift in societies, and another to execute proper governance accounting for different groups along with the externalities and the headaches that come along with policies.
The Search for Truth
Satyagraha or the holding of truth paved the road in Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for India’s independence. Inspired by the ahimsa of Hinduism and Jainism, Gandhi brought his own interpretation taking an ancient concept to new frontiers.
Economic strategy such as boycott of imported goods (swadeshi)
Admirable qualities that built the legend of the Mahatma, the great soul. Selflessness at its apex captured the hearts of Indians across the subcontinent in a mass non-violent movement at such a scale that it has no parallels in world history before or since. While an individual taking on satyagraha is highly laudable, expanding it to society proved a double-edged sword.
With the British reeled from a cataclysmic World War at home and a cracking crown jewel in the Raj, their leaders eventually acquiesced to the rightful demands of an independent India. Truth had met victory in the eyes of the Mahatma’s disciples, but this satyagraha would now face a much older foe that had made its home in the subcontinent over centuries.
Jinnah and Gandhi Prior To Their Falling Out Early On In The Indian Independence Movement
Naiveté crept into a population until it was maimed by the madness of a maniac with Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s call of “Direct Action” severing the dreams of Gandhi and millions of other Indians for a united India. What Gandhi and his ideological descendants, Gandhians, got wrong is how values apply at scale. Stunningly noble principles for individuals could not be forced upon a people who were facing a polar opposite ideology filled with aggressive malice and cultivated by despicable men to match.
“Hindus should never be angry against the Muslims even if the latter might make up their minds to undo even their existence.” —Mahatma Gandhi, Birla Mandir, New Delhi, on April 6, 1947; Partition Would Occur 4 Months Later
The beauty of satyagraha was smeared with the ugliness of Islamism and this duality incarnated by way of a bloody partition. An assassin would cite the suicidal idealism of Gandhi as the gunpowder to his fatal and fateful bullet that transformed a man into a martyr and Gandhi into a god. The last breath of Gandhi permeated throughout Indian politics since.
Forsaking looking at others’ faults and focusing on your own to improve are great actions on an individual level. Trying to apply this mentality at a large scale is impossible and can be disastrous. Gandhi’s goal to apply the kindness and tolerance that he practiced throughout his life at a larger level provides a testament to the dangers of this ruinously beautiful ideal.
Primus Inter Pares
While I may have been harsh on Gandhi, his satyagraha was a very inspirational movement that achieved its primary aim (with the help of several violently resisting Indians of course, too) and would echo in the minds of different generations and geographies. Its failures would only truly come to fore when reciprocity broke down as scale increased and satyagraha faced the sinister.
A communal concoction that had been boiling for centuries spilled over once again just as Gandhi tried to ease the concerns of an ambitious Jinnah and company who were decided in their choice to break India. What went so wrong here?
Good behavior scales badly. Bad behavior scales goodly.
An essential lesson to impart here is that the kindness that we should all so admire shouldn’t be extended frivolously in the world at large scales. Strive to be exceedingly kind to all the individuals in your life, but expect less of a return as familiarity decreases and quantity increases. The world of geopolitics and governance is witness to how might towers over magnanimity as scale maximizes. And it is here where we need to examine a powerful chapter across world history for the past several decades – social justice.
Inspired By Gandhi’s Non-Violent Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. Marched For Civil Rights and To End Segregation
Social justice has yielded some of the greatest moments in politics as policies such as apartheid and segregation were thrown into the abyss, while reservations in India helped lower castes climb out of the abyss. Tangible benefits were born through simple and actionable policies and goals.
Today, however, social justice movements have been plagued by vague goals and a lack of dynamic leadership. Faceless protests descend into rioting at an alarming rate with politicians taking advantage of the chaos and righteous movements thwarted by themselves. No Gandhi’s, no Dr. King’s, no Mandela’s lead the wave of change today. The absence of these emissaries who create a dialogue between the masses and politicians means that when social justice is applied at scale, it descends into disarray with vultures disguised as politicians picking and prodding at a soon to be carcass of a movement. Justice has inherent danger when applied at scale and needs the right leaders and values to guide it properly.
On the flip side, there are also the potential horrors of hyper-local justice such as in the panchayat system of rural India, where a clan of elders decides the fate of the accused, sometimes with cruel and Hammurabi style punishments. We are seeing this hyper-local eye for an eye type justice now extrapolate to larger scales amongst many intelligentsia and political leaders, a notion that would lead to disastrous strife if the scale continues to ramp up.
Virtualism
Bruno Maçães, a prominent political analyst and now part-time philosopher, proposes that America is entering a period where fantasy supersedes reality. The digital world at your fingertips is shaped by the hand of technology. What you see and consume on your timeline is a lens with a distorted scale of the world. What is anecdote becomes amplified into annals as the speed of the extreme races past the mundane on the information superhighway.
THE SPREAD OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY HAVE BLURRED THE LINE BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY
Outrage oscillates the Overton Window wildly as technology’s reality distortion field melds our perception. This pendulum pushes our politics in an increasingly divisive direction as upstart politicians wield clout and clicks on social media steering agendas into fantastical territories that are disconnected from realities and history. Technology and social media have brought notions of the past closer to us than ever as rabid battles over who oppressed who pan out in the digital theatre of war.
Elite consensus is upended by guerrilla historians, sometimes erroneously but many times rightfully. These intellectual insurgents zoom out and in on specific instances to promote their perspective, occasionally out-of-context but every so often right on the money. The thin selection of stories published by establishments has given way to an explosion of untold chapters bypassing traditional media and academia, all with the help of technology.
Protests Have Quickly Descended Into Riots Across The US As No Leader Stands On The Same Platform As The Giants of the Past
However, this has directly lead to an exacerbation of the application of justice. Crimes of the past are scaled out to include those in the present. Justice morphs into its fraternal twin, revenge. Now, I don’t believe it’s right to silence the discussion of the horrors of the past as that is essential to reconciliation. However, this discussion must be joined with efforts to bring real justice – opportunity and truth – to those who have been oppressed and not extend the hatred of the past to the descendants of oppressors in the present. Funny enough, the answer to opportunity may lie in economics (whether welfare reform, access to capital, ease of business, tackling inequalities, etc…) rather than culture wars.
Today’s society values performatives over pragmatism. In the quest to fight historical injustices, we can’t ask for revenge that spirals into a wheel of fire. We should remember the great effort to organize mass non-violent movements such as satyagraha and civil rights in an era today where the embers of violence quickly follow the gasoline rhetoric of many of our politicians and “activists.” For only great men, great women, and great movements transcend the limits of scale and sculpt our tomorrow.
I have seen the entire “Mi Nathuram Godse Boltoy” play and read the entire speech by Nathuram Godse. Till my late teens, I was impressed by parts of Godse’s arguments but today I find them misguided and half baked and his actions hasty and counterproductive (From Hindutva POV). On further reading – especially Gandhi’s own writings and other commentaries my views have changed almost 180Degrees wrt Gandhi. A lot of hatred of Gandhi in MH brahmin circles is due to the 1948 Anti Brahmin riots.
He would be best classified as a BravePacifist Extremist. He combined both Tilak’s and Gokhale’s tactics. He was not a moderate like Gokhale, nor did he condone violence like Tilak – yet he tried to encapsulate both streams in Congress before him.
Prima facie a lot of his pacifism seems excessive and inefficient, but when you read Gandhi’s own writings on Violence as a tool against oppression the pragmatism of his position comes through.
Non-violence was the path of least resistance and hence extremely helpful in building national movement while instilling democratic values in the populous.
His pacifism was more rooted in Jain/Jesus’ influences on him than Hindu Ahimsa.
His Ahimsa probably won’t have worked against other colonial powers.
Gandhi deserves the most credit for increasing the involvement of the Indian populous into the freedom struggle.
He said and did a lot of stupid things that cannot be defended no matter what. His moral grandstanding can be seen as extremely patronizing.
His campaign against untouchability had a significantly more impact than he gets credit for.
His fasts which can be seen as moral blackmail did a lot of good for the country too. The 1932 Poona pact being a primary example. I also see his controversial 1948 fast for money transfer to Pakistan (for which he finally died) as not without merit.
His solution for most Hindu-Muslim conflicts was naive. He can be rightfully accused of being very soft on Muslim extremists. Khilafat movement was arguably a great blunder.
Blaming Gandhi for Partition is extremely unfair. If anything the blame must reside with Nehru/Patel for their greed for power.
His ideas about bottom-up Swarajya and sustainability appear naive and stupid in the 21st century.
Some moments in Gandhi’s life are extremely extraordinary – eg: His Satyagrahas, his reception by Manchester mill workers, his conflict resolution in Naokhali.
Why he favored Nehru (over Patel) who was very unlike Gandhi is a mystery to me. Guha and others have tried but I am not convinced.
He understood the country much more than his peers.
Influence Gandhi has had on foreign movements is extraordinary – MLK, Mandela. He is along with Yoga the two strongest candidates for Indian soft power.
Liberal criticism of Gandhi (South African racism, Casteism, Sexism) miss the point of Gandhi. Seldom have public figures changed their views on issues with changing times so drastically and so transparently. IMO that’s the quality that keeps Gandhi apart from other famous politicians.
I guess distant future history will remember Gandhi as a flawed yet great human being – in league with Jesus and Mohammad.
He is undoubtedly the most consequential (hence Greatest ?) Indian from the 20th century.
In the long run, as already seen by the RSS/BJP embrace of Gandhi, his legacy is safer than others (Like Nehru)
(In 2017-18, an Indian friend wanted to collect essays from Pakistanis on how they view MK Gandhi across the border. I wrote this short letter to Mr. Gandhi that I recently saw in my collection. Sharing it with the BP community. )
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Birla House,
New Delhi.
Dear Mr. Gandhi,
My name is Abdul Majeed and I am writing to you from the city of Lahore, Pakistan. I have been asked to write about you by an Indian friend of mine and I accepted his proposition. I feel ambivalent writing about you since I have thought about you in myriad ways over the course of my life. I grew up in a conservative Muslim household in a small Punjabi town called Sialkot and first learned about you in the ‘Social Studies’ textbooks taught to schoolchildren. My first impression of you as a person was quite negative since the role assigned to you by virtue of ‘Two Nation Theory’ (or TNT, as I now call it) was that of a Hindu politician who opposed the formation of Pakistan and probably hated Muslims. Like many schoolboys of my age, I idolized Mr. Jinnah, your arch-nemesis and a founding father of Pakistan. For us, Jinnah was the David to your Goliath, a defender of minority rights against all odds, an impeccably dressed man who stood up to the might of Hindus and saved Muslims of India from a cultural annihilation. In our imagination, he was everything you were not. We used to make fun of your attire and your persona. I grew up in a society where violence was the channel through which you expressed your masculinity and thus we thought your non-violent methods were signs of cowardice. I learned that All India Congress, a party you led for many years, did not support the idea of an Independent Pakistan (or a divided India, depending on whom you ask) and refused to believe in Partition even after two separate countries had been established.
My outlook towards history and towards your personality changed when I went to boarding schools in the northern part of the country. While the basic ideological framework remained in place, facts added up through the years. At one point in time, I could recite the whole ‘Pakistan Studies’ book by heart in two hours, including names of the books written by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a Muslim educationist and reformer in Nineteenth-century, charter of demands presented by the Shimla deputation to Viceroy of India in 1905, consequences of Bengal’s partition in 1905, Minto-Marley reforms of 1909, Fourteen points of Mr. Jinnah (a proposal for constitutional reform in British India) and the Islamic clauses in Pakistan’s three constitutions. You might be astonished to know that history books in our schools start the story from the Nineteenth century as if nothing happened in this land before. The boarding schools I went to, were located near Mansehra (containing artifacts from two thousand years ago) and Taxila (where the oldest University in the world was once present) respectively, sites containing artifacts from a past I never had. I knew you as a wily politician who duped Muslims during the Khilafat Movement. The word ‘Mahatma’ was used as a prejudicial slur towards anyone ‘Indian’. I often got called by this name because I was a vegetarian.
Years later, I ended up seeing you in a different light. I was roaming the streets of New York City in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy when I chanced upon a statue of you in Greenwich village. A week after that, I saw another one of your statues at the MLK memorial in Atlanta. I learned about your influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and the strategy of non-violence resistance. It was around this time that I read Arundhati Roy’s foreword to ‘Annihilation of Caste’ and ‘The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-bearer of Empire’. As I grew up, I came around to the idea that human beings contain multitudes and having contradictions is partly what makes us human. On one hand, you paid lip service to the idea of caste in Indian society, on the other, you made public displays of spending time with the untouchable community. You accelerated the fusion of religion and politics in India during the late 1910s and the Khilafat movement and you also held fast when Pakistan was not paid money it was due after partition. You used elements of Hinduism in your political and social message and were eventually gunned down by a Hindu nationalist. You didn’t subscribe to the Two nation theory but the last century proved you wrong. India and Pakistan have grown and keep growing apart as a Sunni state and a Hindu state. Some of your ideas were as controversial then as they are now. You were in favor of treating Nazis with peace and non-violence and you lived to see how that turned out. In Pakistan during the 2000s, some people wanted to talk to the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and that didn’t go as planned either. The question then is, how does one deal with groups whose founding ideology is based on violence? With this, I’ll leave you in peace in your forever abode.
