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ICONS
The Patron Saint
Mahatama Gandhi
By
Anil Seal
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1869:
Born in Porbandar.
1881: Marries Kasturba.
The couple have four sons.
1891:
Returns from England with a law degree, sets up his
own practice.
1893:
Is called to Natal, South Africa, by a merchant, Seth
Abdullah.
1894-1914:
The impressionable years in South Africa. A victim of
racial discrimination after being thrown out of a train
compartment, he fights for the rights of Asian immigrants
through public meetings and through the Indian Opinion.
1915:
Sets up Satyagraha Ashram at Ahmedabad.
1920:
The Non-Cooperation Movement is launched. But is suspended
after the outbreak of Bardoli violence.
1924-29: Is elected president
of the Congress.
1930:
Congress declares Independence as its political objective.
The Civil Disobedience Movement is launched. First object
of defiance: Salt Law.
1933:
Undertakes
a fast for the Harijan cause.
1934:
Cuts off ties with Congress, settles in Sevagram near
Ahmedabad to pursue his constructive programme.
1938-39:
Dispute with S.C. Bose has Gandhi opposing the leftist's
appointment as leader of the Congress.
1942:
Starts the Quit India Movement, a final bid for Independence
after the Cripps Mission's failure.
1945-47:
Opposes Partition.
1948:
Is assassinated by Nathuram Godse |
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Naming the makers of India, one of the world's largest and
most complex societies, is an exercise both daunting and
futile: many will be called, and a hundred will be chosen.
But
Mahatma Gandhi must head any such list, not out of meaningless
piety for the Father of the Nation, but to assess his contribution
to India today. Charismatic saint or astute politician,
social reformer and, in Edwin Montagu's words, "pure
visionary" or the greatest force for conservatism,
as G.D. Birla described him: these remain questions not
for recondite research but of vast contemporary importance.
In January
1915, Gandhi, the son of a petty functionary in Gujarat,
returned to India after 21 years in South Africa. Before
going there, Gandhi had failed to find direction, whether
at home where he married early, in London where, after an
improbable and short-lived metamorphosis into a young man
about town, he scraped through the Bar examinations, or
back in Bombay where he did not do well as a lawyer.
It was
in South Africa that Gandhi grew in stature. There, he built
up a lucrative legal practice only to renounce it; became
the unquestioned leader of a heterogeneous Indian community
of despised traders and indentured labourers; displayed
his genius for organisation in the protest against its disabilities;
and evolved his doctrine of non-violence or Ahimsa, his
tactic of passive resistance or Satyagraha and a philosophy
which rejected the industrial and material civilisation
of the West and envisaged a moral regeneration of the Indian
peoples. In Hind Swaraj (1908) Gandhi wrote revealingly:
"India's salvation consists in unlearning what she
has learnt during the last 50 years, the railways, telegraphs,
hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go
-- and the so-called upper classes have to learn consciously,
religiously and deliberately the simple peasant life By
patriotism, I mean the welfare of the whole people."
Swaraj
for Gandhi meant self-rule, as much a moral and personal
ethic, the self-rule of an individual over his own impulses
and weaknesses, as the political objective of a people struggling
rightfully to be free -- an ambiguity which Gandhi was repeatedly
to exploit during his Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience
Movements.
However
unformed his political tactics, by the time Gandhi returned
to India his strategy was clear. As he candidly admitted,
"At my time of life and with views firmly formed on
several matters, I could only join an organisation to affect
its policy and not be affected by it." From the moment
he returned, Gandhi planned to win leadership of those organisations
which fitted his grand purpose, the achievement of Swaraj.
This meant capturing the Indian National Congress.
Founded
in 1885, initially a three-day wonder dominated by the old
Presidency capitals, mendicant and peripatetic, the Congress'
moderation had only recently been tinged with extremism.
In September 1920 the Congress was taken over at its Calcutta
session by Gandhi. This he achieved by steering clear of
the old leadership, creating local networks of support in
regions outside the ken of all-India politics and among
groups as yet untouched by them -- whether in Champaran
where he championed an "abjectively helpless tenantry",
in Kaira where he campaigned for peasants hit by poor harvests,
high prices and plague, or in Ahmedabad where he backed
striking mill workers while forging friendly links with
rich mill-owners who rewarded him to the end of his life
with their support.
In these
ways, Gandhi, who aimed to penetrate "all strata of
Indian life", took the educated into the village and
the workplace where previously they had never been.
Two
years after asserting that "the easiest way of winning
Swaraj is to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Britishers
in defence of the Empire" and claiming that his bent
was "not political but religious", Gandhi, with
supreme tactical opportunism, deployed three well-chosen
issues to prepare for his takeover of the Congress.
These
were the Rowlatt Bills (by which the government wanted to
keep in peace its draconian war-time powers), the "Punjab
Wrong"after General Dyer and his rifles shot dead 379
people peacefully attending a meeting in Jallianwala Bagh
and injured a thousand more, and the Khilafat Movement of
Muslim pilgrims, alims and politicians alike, excited by
the fate of the holy places in the post-war settlement.
But,
significantly, Gandhi waited until June 1920 when the precise
rules under the new reforms were published, and the Uttar
Pradesh and Punjab Congress leaders had calculated that
they could not win the elections, before successfully launching
an assault upon the old guard. At the Calcutta session in
September, the Congress committed itself to the triple boycott
of councils, courts and schools and declared its goal to
be Swaraj within one year.
But
Gandhi's rise to power did not bring about a transformation
in India's politics. The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921-22
was in many respects a debacle. Such successes as it had
depended less upon Khilafat Muslims, fanatical Moplahs,
Akali Sikhs, Assam coolies, Uttar Pradesh kisans, Guntur
village officers, or southern liquor barons and cattle drivers
and their localised agitations, and more upon the political
bosses who deployed them as canon fodder in their own interests.
In
November 1920, before the ratification in December of non-cooperation
by the Nagpur Congress, the elections had come and gone.
In all the main provinces Indian ministers went about their
dyarchical business and the boycott of courts and schools
and the bonfires of Lancashire cotton never added up to
much. Those who gave licence to these movements were primarily
concerned with consolidating their capacity to win elections.
This can be seen by the rise of the Swarajya Party within
the Congress; despite the rearguard efforts of the Gandhian
no-changers, it voted at Cocanada in 1923 to contest the
next round of elections.
However
much it may have given the Congress a compulsive ideology
under a charismatic leader and raised vague millennial hopes,
non-cooperation's main achievement was to put a little more
substance into the Congress organisation.
Significantly
non-cooperation had shown itself incapable of being brought
under effective central control. Calling off the movement
after Chauri Chaura, Gandhi remained on the margins until
the Congress, too weak, too disorganised and too divided
to speak with one voice in the next round of constitutional
negotiations, sought to paper over the cracks by getting
Gandhi to launch civil disobedience.
But
by the same token the Congress was ill-prepared to control
a mass campaign in India without the violence that had marred
non-cooperation. Civil disobedience, the salt march to Dandi
(an astute move by Gandhi to play for time and to test opinion),
his programme tailored to achieve the widest appeal (whether
temperance, khadi, enlisting women or social uplift, especially
of the Harijans) and the 60,000 or more who went to jail
notwithstanding, failed to mobilise India's millions.
Except
here and there in Gujarat and the Godavari delta and in
a part of Midnapore, civil disobedience was not a mass movement.
Deploying full-time political workers, it enlisted more
of the literate in the towns and cities and more of the
prosperous in the countryside than before. But industrial
workers, poor peasants and the untouchables whose cause
Gandhi championed (to Ambedkar's lasting dismay), remained
outside the effective zone of politics. Their time had not
come. It has yet to come. Perhaps it will never come.
So
what was the real importance of Gandhi's civil disobedience
movements? They had merely scratched the surface of Indian
society. They had not shaken the British raj; and by 1933
they had in reality been defeated. Indeed, the second Civil
Disobedience Movement (just as the Quit India Movement of
1942) was less a dress rehearsal for Independence than the
curtain call for techniques which had had their day. The
bitter conclusion must be that Gandhi's love affair with
the India of his dreams had left him jilted.
The
true significance of the agitations which Gandhi led was
to fortify the hands of the constitutionalists, in particular
of the high command and of the turncoat politicians who
now flocked under the Congress banner to battle for the
votes of a much larger, but still uncommitted, electorate.
The
new constitution adopted by the Congress in 1934 gave it
a structure of control from the top to the base, and was
of critical utility in the Congress' electoral strategy
of putting its imprimatur only upon those candidates who
accepted its whip. So too was Gandhi's help, behind the
scenes, in disciplining the Congress' more radical wing
when the high command expelled Subhas Chandra Bose and effectively
neutered Jawaharlal Nehru by making him president of the
Congress, an ornament, not one of the inner group which
took charge, a strategy which paid off when the Congress
swept the polls in the Hindu-majority provinces in 1937.
Without
Gandhi's unique capacity to keep the lid on the pressure
cooker of India's aspirations, his charismatic appeal, his
determination, even by the threat to fast to death, to keep
untouchables within the Hindu fold, India's politicians
representing its urban bigwigs and rural notables might
well have been overwhelmed by the myriad grievances and
stirrings within Indian society.
After
World War II, the Congress unquestionably called the shots
and the British, bankrupted by war and anxious to quit,
could see that Jinnah, the Muslim League and its demand
for Pakistan, conveniences while they wished to hold on
to India, were now huge obstacles to the speedy transfer
of power to their only plausible successors, the Congress.
So
it was the high command, reluctantly recognising that Mother
India's seamless unity would have to be torn asunder, which
called for Partition and accepted Pakistan, albeit a "truncated
and moth-eaten" version. This was the price they had
to pay for a strong unitary centre capable of controlling
their followers in provinces which might otherwise have
gone their own particularist way.
In the
high politics of the end game, Partition and the transfer
of power, Gandhi, sidelined by his erstwhile lieutenants,
wandered about the country to Calcutta and Noakhali, like
some latter-day Lear, deploying the remnants of his moral
authority in a vain attempt to quell the communal furies
which Partition had unleashed.
The
uncovenanted legatees of Gandhi's agitational movements,
and of his life's work, were the politicians who have benefited
from India's Independence. Perhaps the supreme irony is
that those who have professed to lead a free India have
turned their backs on the Gandhian vision of promoting "the
welfare of the whole people".
Gandhi's
own brand of social conservatism, which sought change through
personal reformation rather than popular revolution, his
project to uplift the Harijans while keeping them within
the Hindu straight-jacket, the very cause of their degradation,
his desire to take India back to its traditional, non-industrial
and rural roots, with support from many captains of industry,
his commitment to harmony between Hindus and Muslims while
stressing Hinduism as a distinctive force, and his hopes,
through Satyagraha, of curbing the violence which lies just
under the fragile crust of order in Indian society, all
suggest that Gandhi's contribution has been as ambiguous
as India's chequered past and its uncertain future.
Professor
Anil Seal is Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
and a historian of modern India.
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