In the last few years, there has been a constant, and perhaps unprecedented, attack on one of the greatest political and cultural heroes of the 20th-century — some would argue even in the history of mankind — Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi.
Gandhi’s greatest legacy of challenging, without violence, the British Empire has been quoted as inspiration by everyone from Nelson Mandela to Barack Obama. Such has been his fame that he has become one of those borderless constants in the culture references of our world — you may know or have heard of Gandhi even if you know nothing else about India. He pops up in logos, t-shirts, even as inspiration to luxury pens. His words — there are more than 90 volumes of his collected writings — are so ubiquitous that they are constantly used as advertising copy.
So why are we constantly being told these days to hate him? Why is it that the Booker award winning writer Arundhati Roy, a fierce critic of India, is now also a ferocious critic of Gandhi, so much so that when she was recently asked at a reading of her latest essay, a sharp criticism of Gandhi, why Gandhi is still revered in India and around the world, she chose to say with a sneer, ‘God knows’? Why is it that we hear so much these days that supposedly Gandhi was a racist, casteist, capitalist-loving sly foxy politician — far away from the saintly Father of the Nation?
To understand this, you have to understand a few things. First, you have to understand who are the most vehement critics of Gandhi. Almost all of them, or at least almost all the most vocal ones, respond (and correspond) quite easily, and proudly, to the label ‘Marxist’. This means their ideology is towards the political Left. Almost every bitter critique of Gandhi usually comes from this genre of writers and intellectuals.
But why does the Left hate Gandhi? As a non-violent critic of weaponisation, and a fervent champion of race equality, Gandhi has for a long time been an icon even among many of the Left dispensation. No more. The new emerging hard Left — a response to the largely Western excesses of neo-liberalism and late stage capitalism — especially after the 2008 economic downturn, and especially in India, today portrays Gandhi as a devious, sex-mad deal maker.
There are a few primary reasons for this. First, Gandhi’s own indisputably history of having a life devoted to race equality. No one did more to build bridges between Hindus and Muslims as Gandhi did. Gandhians would argue that the same is true for Gandhi’s efforts to bridge the gap between lower castes in India and the upper caste — but critics, including in Gandhi’s time, the brilliant B. R. Ambedkar argued that Gandhi’s ways meant too little too late for the marginalised castes. Gandhi believed in the reform of Hindu society as far as caste is concerned — while Ambedkar wanted seperate electorates for the lower castes. Gandhi believed in arousing the goodness in Hindus and Muslims so that they can continue to coexist as they had for centuries — M. A. Jinnah, the architect of Partition of India and Pakistan, and Gandhi’s own protege Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, believed that if a settlement could not be reached, it was better to give each side what they wanted, a separate country.
There has been little doubt that Gandhi’s intentions were good, if the means were sometimes too optimistic. Until now.
In the new hard Left reading of Gandhi, it is his intentions that are bad, that must be demolished, to prove that he never really stood for harmony, peace and non-violence but instead wanted a vicious Hindu dominated society which would be anti-Muslim and other minorities, anti-lower castes which favouring upper castes, and against workers to side with capitalists especially since the giant Birla business family was Gandhi’s life long supporters.
In each case, in each accusation, any careful reading shows that overwhemlingly it is Gandhi’s humanity and greatness that shines through in every part of his life. Did he have personal demons and struggles? Of course. Gandhi himself consistently admitted his struggles and that his opinion on subjects changed as his journey expanded — in fact it is this confessional, open-mindedness that is one of the most admirable traits in the Mahatma. Was he wrong sometimes? Of course but any wholistic and unprejudiced view of his life would see how overpowering the goodness and generosity is compared to the flaws.
Yes, he took support from business families but also gave an elaborate theory trusteeship which could easily be the precursor or founding text of the new ideas of sustainable and conscious capitalism where no enterprise can exists unless it is in harmony with its ecosystem including its workers. As the writer and Gandhi Peace Fellow at the Gateway House Rajni Bakshi has written, ‘He [Gandhi] argued that all efforts to improve the human condition are bound to fail unless they put ‘dharma’, or a moral framework and a sense of higher purpose, above the pursuit of ‘arth’ (wealth) and ‘kama’ (pleasure)’.
Yes, he experimented once by sleeping naked with two young women to test his own commitment to celibacy which he equated with moral purity but as his biographer and the eminent Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has explained, ‘… against this one-off abuse of women’s rights one must set the Mahatma’s lifelong work for women’s emancipation. Gandhi campaigned against sati and child marriage. He urged women to shed the purdah and take to education. He encouraged women to participate in political movements in South Africa and India. In the 1940s and 1950s, there were few (if any) women active in public life in the United Kingdom, the United States, France or Germany. By contrast, in the first few years of Independence, India had women governors of states, women cabinet ministers, women vice-chancellors, women ambassadors. Women like Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Anasuya and Mridula Sarabhai, Anis Kidwai and Hansa Mehta contributed substantially to the freedom movement and to nation-building. All, without exception, were inspired by Gandhi. Gandhi did more to bring women into public life than any other 20th century politician — more than Mao, Lenin, Churchill or De Gaulle.’
The trouble that the Left has with Gandhi comes not so much from politics but from culture. Gandhi was a devout Hindu and was able to revive a till-his-arrival tepid Congress Party into a national movement by infusing Hindu culture into it. Taking from the best (and core) of Hindu culture, this also meant unshakeable emphasis and commitment to plurality and outreach to Muslims and other minorities. Such was his efforts in this direction that he was murdered by a Hindu bigot.
Now this poses a great problem for the Left. Here is a man whose life disproves Left ideology which denounces all religion and culture as ‘opium of the masses’. Here is a man who cannot be torn down easily as a ‘majoritarian’ because he paid for his plurality and secularism with his life — and till his death credited Hindu culture and spirituality for this secularism.
The Left in India has the same problem today as proselytising missonaries and zealot sultans once did — Hindu culture has proved impossible to break or conquer or convert (though many Hindus have converted from time to time but never in any significant number to make a real difference to the conquest). It is this (at its best) plural, secular, unique culture that holds India together in many ways — as Gandhi instinctively understood. It is this culture, inherent to this land, that makes Islam and Christianity of the subcontinent often different and unique in India. Does this culture not have problems? Of course it does. Does it not need reform? Of course it does. But this is exactly what Gandhi’s dream was — reform but not destruction. The Left would want destruction because — as has been proved in society after society in the world, including in the murderous Cultural Revolution of Mao which destroyed all that was good in Chinese culture and history — without the destruction of cultural values, without the murder of piety, hard Left ideologies cannot survive or even take root. The reason the Communists have never succeeded in India is because for the ideology of the book to take root, the word of god has to be replaced by the words of Marx and the idol/s by the Party. This has never happened.
But the attempt is severe today because a hard Left rebellion often described as Maoist is tearing apart the heart of India with hundreds and hundreds dead. Is there no reason for this rebellion? Of course not. Decades of exploitation by the state — and then ruthless companies — has turned India’s tribal population away from the union and into violence. Deprived of even the slightest amount of development, many have now taken arms against the state.
The attempt ought to be to immediately address these issues — and there have been attempts to resolve the crisis. But the leaders of the rebellion — hard Left guerillas often with deep international connections with rival nations and global terror networks — don’t want a solution. They want secession. And openly declare their dream of tearing apart the union of India. These leaders must be differentiated from the ordinary tribals who are often caught in crossfire or coerced into taking sides, sometimes at gunpoint.
The only way for this ideology to gain acceptance is through the destruction of the culture that acts as a glue for most Indians. Since 80% of Indians are Hindus, this is Hinduism. The destruction of this culture and its icons also means that every fissure in Indian society — whether it is Hindu/Muslim or upper/lower caste — can be exploited (never treated and cured) and made into violent wounds that tears up the country.
Therefore this hard Left never ever champions the fabulous work that for instance is being done on entrepreneurship and the Dalit movement, never quotes scholars like Chandra Bhan Prasad, whose globally renowned research champions the cause of enterprise and job creation as a solution with mottos like, ‘Only in capitalism can a Dalit buy a Mercedes and hire a Brahmin as a driver, never in socialism’ and ‘Pizza delivery has no caste’.
In women’s rights, this hard Left has propagated a violent reading of epics like the Mahabharat and Ramayana where they see none of the ethical discourse, the moral lessons, the spiritual ideas but selectively pick portions to demolish the texts as ‘patriarchal’, ‘abusive towards women’ and ‘upper caste’. In this reading, gods become villains and the nuanced, evolved moral lessons of the epics are seen through singular, neo-psychological lenses which distorts completely their original meaning and intent. This is not to say that there should not be a critique of the epics. Of course there should. But to argue that there is nothing but venality in ancient Indian texts — as the Left does — is a staggering lie. Even in this, there is only a negative discourse about women’s rights in India by the hard Left but no celebration that there is today an unprecedented challenge to patriarchy that’s happening every single day in this country in millions of ways.
The trouble with their reading is that it is a pure black analysis. There is no nuance. No appreciation of the complexity of this vast nation. No applause for the diverse, different journey that India is on, and the successes it has notched up.
In this all-black reading, Gandhi is the ultimate prize. He is the embodiment of everything that this hard Left hates. It is almost as if — as his assassin Nathuram Godse felt — that India cannot live (in the case of the Left, their ‘revolution’ cannot survive) as long as the idea of Gandhi does. So Gandhi, dead so many years, must now be further stabbed and shot at, hung, drawn and quartered through relentless character assassination.
By living, it is the idea of Gandhi that prevents India from breaking up — and that is why the apostles of a different prophet urge us to hate the Mahatma.
