Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  This sympathy did not blind Gandhi to the requirements of justice for the Palestinians. If the Jews needed a national home, why should the Arabs pay for it? He was not supportive of the rising wave of migration from Eastern Europe to the Holy Land, promoted by energetic Zionists. He was distressed that Jews from Europe had sought to enter Palestine ‘under the shadow of the British gun’. A ‘religious act’, he insisted, ‘cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb’. If the Jews wanted to settle in Palestine, they should do so ‘only by the goodwill of the Arabs’. As things stood, however, the Jews had become ‘co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them’.

  Gandhi acknowledged that ‘the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have done.’ He also accepted that ‘if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified’.

  Gandhi still hoped that Hitler could be resisted by other than violent means. He asked the Jews in Germany to themselves ‘resist this organized and shameless persecution’. He invoked to them, as he had done to the Czechs, the example of the non-violent movements he had led against the racist regime in South Africa. Gandhi claimed that ‘the Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa’. They were a ‘compact, homogeneous community’; they were ‘far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa’; they had ‘organized world opinion behind them’. Gandhi was ‘convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope’. Such a movement, thought Gandhi, would be ‘a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.’42

  So far as one can tell, Gandhi’s essay on the Czechs elicited no major reactions. However, his essay on the Jews was followed by a torrent of responses. First off the mark was a writer from Berlin, who claimed that no non-German had the right to criticize his country or its actions. Gandhi thought this a false doctrine, for ‘in this age, when distances have been obliterated, no nation can afford to imitate the frog in the well. Sometimes it is refreshing to see ourselves as others see us.’43

  The complaints from Germans, betraying hurt national pride, were followed by anguished reactions from Jewish writers, who thought Gandhi had not understood the depth of their suffering. Two of the foremost Jewish intellectuals of the day, Martin Buber and J.L. Magnes, each wrote a long reply, these printed together in a pamphlet.

  Martin Buber had for long admired Gandhi and closely studied his writings. In 1930, when Gandhi commenced the Salt March, Buber wrote an essay on his attempts to spiritualize politics. He praised Gandhi as a ‘clear-sighted’ and ‘truthful’ thinker, whose moral courage and capacity for self-criticism were ‘worthy of the purest admiration’.44

  Now, eight years later, Buber addressed Gandhi directly, in the form of a personal letter, which he took weeks to compose, anguishing over, drafting and redrafting its sentences and paragraphs. The letter as finally sent argued that Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha, while ‘praiseworthy’ in conception, was totally inapplicable to Jews in Germany. Buber pointed out that the comparison with Indians in South Africa was inapt; for, while the latter were discriminated against, they were not ‘persecuted, robbed, maltreated, tortured, [and] murdered’ as the Jews in Germany were. Moreover, when Gandhi conducted his struggle against that racist regime, he could always look for assistance, moral and financial, from his motherland. The 150,000 Indians in South Africa had drawn immense sustenance from the support of the 200 million Indians at home.

  The Jews were treated infinitely worse in Europe; and the Jews had (as yet) no homeland. But they must have one, argued Buber, to protect them in the present and the future. Invoking the ancient settlements of Jews in Palestine, and the sacrality of that land as enunciated in their holy books, Buber said the ‘question of our Jewish destiny is indissolubly bound up with the possibility of in-gathering, and this in Palestine’.

  Unlike some other Zionists, Buber believed in a binational state, to be peopled by Jews and by Arabs. Like Gandhi, he respected the rights of the Arabs, except that he suggested that these were acquired by conquest. And he was less than impressed by what he called the ‘primitive state of fellah agriculture’. He claimed the Arabs were clinging to unproductive forms of cultivation; and that the Jews were necessary to modernize them and their ways. As he put it, ‘Ask the soil what the Arabs have done for her in thirteen hundred years and what we have done for her in fifty! Would her answer not be weighty testimony in a just discussion as to whom this land “belongs”?’

  Buber told Gandhi he had taken so long to draft the letter as he wanted to make sure he did not fall ‘into the grievous error of collective egotism’. In the end, he did fall into that error; not against Gandhi, nor against the Indians, but against the Arabs. He saw them—in an economic and technological sense—as a distinctly inferior race. Thus he remarked:

  This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us, and through its fruit-bearing for us it recognizes us….The Jewish peasants have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab peasants, to cultivate the land more intensively. We desire to teach them further…45

  J.L. Magnes’s letter to Gandhi was equally long, but less combative. He too had followed the Indian leader’s career closely and read many of his writings. Gandhi’s statement on the Jews, wrote Magnes, was ‘a challenge, particularly to those who have imagined ourselves your disciples’.

  Like Buber, Magnes drew attention to the brutal authoritarianism of Hitler’s regime. If a political prisoner went on a hunger strike in England or America, it might rouse public opinion. But in Germany, it would ‘make not even a ripple’. And while Indians had the great Gandhi, said Magnes, ‘we have no one comparable to you as [a] religious and political leader’. How could one even begin to conceive of satyagraha in such a situation?

  Magnes had long thought of himself as a pacifist. But as far as Hitler was concerned, his pacifism had been placed in ‘a pitiless crisis’. The world was now confronted with ‘a choice of evils—a choice between the capitalisms, the imperialisms, the militarisms of the western democracies and between the Hitler religion’. It was thus that he concluded that war was necessary against the Nazis, a war ‘against the greater evil’. ‘Or do you know of any other choice?’ he asked Gandhi.46

  The Buber–Magnes pamphlet was posted to Gandhi in India. Yet there is no sign that he ever received it. Did it get mislaid on its way across the seas? Did it get mislaid in India, while being redirected from Segaon to wherever he was? Did one of his secretaries (surely not Mahadev) not show the pamphlet to Gandhi because the criticisms were so direct? We shall never know. Had Gandhi seen the letters, he would almost certainly have replied to them. But he very likely didn’t, and we were thus denied the chance of reading an exchange between Gandhi and Buber, two of the greatest moralists of the twentieth century.47

  Gandhi did, however, get to see a critique by another (if less well-known) Jewish thinker. This was Hayim Greenberg, a widely travelled activist, born and raised in Eastern Europe, who eventually made a home in America. Like Buber and Magnes, Greenberg had for long admired Gandhi (since 1914, in his recollection). In 1937, he wrote asking Gandhi why, in his varied and voluminous writings, he had not yet drawn attention to the sufferings of the Jews.

  When Gandhi spoke on the subject a year later, what he said dismayed Greenberg. Gandhi, he remarked, demanded heroism from his fellow Indians but, from the Jews, ‘a measure of super-heroism unexampled in history’. He had suggested that the Jews off
er non-violent resistance to Hitler; but, as Greenberg observed, ‘a Jewish Gandhi, should one arise, could function for about five minutes and would be promptly taken to the guillotine’.

  Like Buber and Magnes, Greenberg was also disappointed that Gandhi did not endorse a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Why was this? ‘With all my respect for the Mahatma (I doubt if there is another man living who evokes within me such a moral awareness of his loftiness),’ wrote Greenberg, ‘I cannot avoid the suspicion that so far as the Palestine problem is concerned, Gandhi allowed himself to be influenced by the anti-Zionist propaganda being conducted among fanatic pan-Islamists’ (in India).48

  When Greenberg’s article was brought to his notice, Gandhi replied to it in Harijan, arguing that while non-violence would surely be harder against dictators, it must still be tried. ‘Its real quality is only tested in such cases,’ he observed. ‘Sufferers need not see the result during their lifetime. They must have faith that if their cult survives, the result is a certainty. The method of violence gives no greater guarantee than that of non-violence.’49

  In his reflections on the Jews, Gandhi was surely guilty of naivéte. He had referred to the Jews as the ‘untouchables’ of Christianity (a formulation first suggested to him by his friend Henry Polak). But he was hopelessly out of touch with the rapidly developing situation in Europe. Once merely segregated and discriminated against, Jews were now being butchered and murdered. Pogroms in Eastern Europe were followed by organized state violence against them in Germany. Hitler had already announced his desire to eliminate the Jews completely. Even as Gandhi was composing his article for Harijan, the Nazis were planning the attacks on Jewish shops and homes since known to history as Kristallnacht.

  Gandhi was wrong to see the Jewish situation in Germany as akin to the Indian situation in South Africa. It was far, far worse. A Jewish Gandhi in Germany was an impossibility. But could there have been a Christian Gandhi in Germany in 1934? That was the year when Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote asking whether he could come to Segaon and stay with, and learn from, Gandhi. Gandhi invited him to the ashram, but in the end, Bonhoeffer did not come. What if he had? Could Bonhoeffer then have returned to Germany and mobilized his fellow Christians in a non-violent resistance movement against the Nazis?

  In 1934, when Bonhoeffer contacted Gandhi, Hitler had not fully consolidated his regime. Had a brave, charismatic Christian priest opposed the authoritarian ruler of a Christian country, he may not—in 1934—have been shot at sight. Could a popular movement have crystallized around the figure of a Gandhi-inspired Bonhoeffer, awakening the conscience not merely of his fellow Germans but of democrats around the world, forcing the other European powers and America to intervene much before they did, forestalling the horrific loss of life in the Second World War?

  Had Gandhi replied to Buber in 1939, it would have enriched intellectual and moral discourse. On the other hand, had Bonhoeffer apprenticed with Gandhi in 1934, it might—just—have influenced social and political history as well.50

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  (Re)capturing the Congress

  I

  Through 1938, Gandhi became increasingly engaged with the politics of the 500 odd princely states. These covered roughly one-third the territory of the subcontinent, and were indirectly rather than directly ruled by the British. The partial self-government mandated by the Government of India Act, and the coming to power of the Congress in many provinces of British India, had in turn inspired the residents of the states to demand greater rights for themselves. Popular movements against autocratic rule, demanding elected assemblies and ministries on the British Indian pattern, arose across the subcontinent; in the princely states of Travancore and Mysore in the south, in Hyderabad in the Deccan, in Jaipur in the north, in Dhenkanal in the east, and in Rajkot in the west.

  Gandhi had initially advocated a policy of non-interference on the part of the Congress as regards the states. As someone who had grown up in princely India, he retained a residual affection for it. He thought it premature to organize satyagrahas to put pressure on the princes, hoping that they would on their own devolve power to their subjects. But the movements carried on regardless. In Travancore and Mysore, democrats, inspired by the ideals of the Congress, organized a series of street protests, provoking repression from the rulers. Some protesters were killed in police firing; others were arrested and put in jails, more accurately described as dungeons and even torture chambers.

  The escalating cycle of protest and repression moved Gandhi to speak out. In September 1938 he wrote:

  If the States persist in their obstinacy and hug their ignorance of the awakening that has taken place throughout India, they are courting certain destruction. I claim to be a friend of the States. Their service has been an heirloom in my family for the past three generations, if not longer. I am no blind worshipper of antiquity. But I am not ashamed of the heirloom. All the States may not live. The biggest ones can live only if they will recognize their limitations, become servants of their people, trustees of their welfare and depend on their existence not on arms, whether their own or British, but solely on the goodwill of the people.1

  Gandhi called the popular movements in the states ‘a very significant event in the national struggle for independence’. He hoped the princes and their advisers would recognize this awakening ‘and meet the legitimate aspirations of the people’. Will ‘they not read the handwriting on the wall’? he asked.2

  They would not, at least not yet. In January 1939, the Chamber of Princes met in Bombay. Opening the conference, the maharaja of Bikaner suggested the creation of a common police force to more effectively deal with popular movements for democratic rights. More focused repression, argued the maharaja, should be combined with inducements to the leading agitators, by giving them State jobs and thus shutting their mouths. Bikaner termed the policy he was advocating ‘kicks and kisses’.

  Quoting this speech, Gandhi thought there was ‘a nefarious plot to crush the movement for liberty which at long last has commenced in some of the States’. But, he hoped, ‘if the people have shed fear and learnt the art of self-sacrifice, they need no favours. Kicks can never cow them.’3

  II

  In December 1938, the popular American magazine Reader’s Digest carried a long essay on Gandhi. This chronicled Gandhi’s life and work, his dietary experiments and political struggles, interspersing the narrative with quotes from the man himself.

  Written by the widely travelled journalist John Gunther, the essay was appreciative, even cloying. It called Gandhi ‘an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall and your father’, the ‘greatest Indian since Buddha’, who, like the Buddha, ‘will be worshipped as a god when he dies’. Speaking on the one side of his ‘colossal spiritual integrity’, and on the other of his ‘very considerable charm’, the profile continued: ‘Despite his 40 years of celibacy, he adores the company of women, and he likes to flirt. He is a saint, but a laughing one.’ It then passed on the (unverified) story that, as secretary of state for India, Samuel Hoare instructed the new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, not to meet Gandhi ‘in order to prevent him [from] succumbing to his formidable charm’.4

  The essay in the Reader’s Digest was a further sign of the growing interest in, and admiration for, Gandhi in America. In his own homeland, however, Gandhi was not without his critics and adversaries. Indeed, even as Gunther was crafting his laudatory profile, its subject was seeking to retain control over his own party. Subhas Bose wanted to continue as Congress president. A second term was very rare; it had been given only twice before, once in the exceptional circumstances of the Salt March when all the major leaders were in jail. Gandhi was not in favour of Bose’s re-election. He looked around for a suitable successor. He first tried Azad, then Nehru. Both refused. So he settled on the Andhra Congressman Pattabhi Sitaramayya, who had been in the running in 1938 as well.5

  Although he had
been Congress president only once (in 1924), Gandhi was in effect, a super-president. Even at times when he was focusing on constructive work, even when he was officially on sabbatical from the Congress, the party looked to him for guidance. His advice was always sought on the choice of president. When major disputes broke out between party factions, the matter was always brought to him for arbitration.

  Subhas Bose had the support of his provincial committee, and of many younger Congressmen, disenchanted with what they saw as maladministration and corruption in governments run by their party. These critics claimed that, in its year and a half in office, the Congress had steadily lost its lustre and credibility. Its long legacy of sacrifice and struggle was put at risk by its embrace of opportunists motivated solely by greed of office.6

  Subhas Bose found support from the young and the left wing in the party, as well as from the one Indian whom Gandhi considered his moral and spiritual equal, namely, Rabindranath Tagore. In late November 1938, Tagore wrote to Gandhi about the question of the Congress presidency. He began by apologizing for the suggestion he was making despite his ‘utter lack of training in politics’. Then he continued: ‘The prospect of a prolonged agony of humiliation for my Province compels me at last to appeal to you with an earnest request that you may use your influence to offer Subhas [Bose] another chance of Presidentship for the next Congress.’

  Tagore knew that Bose was regarded, and not by Gandhi alone, as somewhat hot-headed and temperamental. But he thought (or hoped) that ‘lately he has been thinking and working hard to make himself ready for any great task of responsibility that his country may claim from him and I assure you that I myself will try my best to help him from my own vantage ground if he desires it’.7