Gandhi’s successes in forging a sense of dignity and national purpose were in large part a product of his methods. A country so large, so staggeringly diverse and so desperately divided could never have been united by a leader (or leaders) marked by ideological rigidity or personal arrogance. Travelling through India in 1938, meeting Gandhi and studying his work, talking to his followers and his critics, the American journalist John Gunther came to the conclusion that perhaps the most striking thing about Gandhi was ‘his inveterate love of compromise….Surely no man has ever so quickly and easily let bygones be bygones. He has no hatreds, no resentments; once a settlement is reached, he co-operates with enemies as vigorously as he fought them.’31
Gandhi himself expressed it slightly differently. In November 1936, an English visitor to Sevagram asked for details of Gandhi’s village programme. He answered: ‘I cannot speak with either the definiteness or the confidence of a Stalin or Hitler, as I have no cut-and-dried programme I can impose on the villagers. My method, I need not say, is different. I propose to convert by patient persuasion.’32
Promoting an ethic of dialogue and compromise was one way in which Gandhi brought different kinds of Indians together. A second was through the Congress Party, which, under his direction, transformed itself from a body of urban middle-class professionals into a mass political organization, with branches in states and districts, its networks touching every part of India and virtually every section of Indian society. By promoting the mother tongue, Gandhi drew peasants, workers and artisans into a continuing conversation with lawyers, businessmen and intellectuals.
The social base of the Congress was far deeper than that of the Muslim League, one reason why democracy has established itself more solidly in India than in Pakistan, a point that some Pakistani scholars themselves acknowledge.33 Another key difference between Gandhi and his great rival Muhammad Ali Jinnah was that the former assiduously nurtured leaders for the future, whereas Jinnah was verily the Great and Only Leader. There were no analogues in his party of Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, Azad and others.
That, amidst the wreckage of Partition, there were some capable men and women at hand to build a nation anew was largely the handiwork of Gandhi. I have already spoken of the partnership between Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister and Vallabhbhai Patel as home minister. A third Gandhi associate, Maulana Azad, served as education minister; a fourth, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, as health minister. Formally placed above them all, as the President of the Indian Republic, was Rajendra Prasad, whose potential Gandhi first saw in Champaran in 1917.
One of Gandhi’s closest colleagues, J.B. Kripalani, left the Congress shortly after Independence to start his own party. A second, C. Rajagopalachari, served as the governor of West Bengal and as the last governor general while the country was still a dominion, and as home minister of India and chief minister of Madras province after the country became a republic. However, he became increasingly disenchanted with Nehru’s policies, and in 1959 formed a new party, Swatantra, promoting the values of market liberalism in opposition to the centralized economic planning that the prime minister favoured. Meanwhile, as an opposition member of Parliament, J.B. Kripalani was relentlessly harrying Nehru on his appeasement of Chinese communism.
Gandhi himself had little interest in constitutional processes or the functioning of Parliament. But indirectly, he played a considerable role in stabilizing the democratic institutions of independent India. Through the 1950s and 1960s, some of the men and women he had trained ran the ship of state, while others were in the Opposition, holding the government to account. It was also followers and admirers of Gandhi, such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and J.C. Kumarappa, who laid the foundations of the civil society movement in India, by working to promote cooperative housing projects, revive traditional handicrafts, and renew the rural economy.34
As the major leader of the freedom struggle in the largest colony of the world’s greatest Empire, Gandhi also profoundly influenced anti-colonial movements elsewhere. Gandhi was admired by such (widely different) African nationalists as the Kenyans Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya, the Zambian Kenneth Kaunda, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, and the Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah.35 In Botswana, when the British exiled the extremely popular king, Seretse Khama, chiefs and headmen refused to elect a new leader, and said they would not pay taxes unless Seretse returned with his honour and position intact. Their movement of civil disobedience was inspired by their knowledge of the satyagrahas led by Gandhi in India and South Africa.36
In South Africa itself, the struggles against apartheid were directly inspired by Gandhi. The long-time leader of the African National Congress, Albert Luthuli, counted himself a disciple of Gandhi, and so, less surprisingly, did leaders of the Indian community such as Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo. The first major mass movement against apartheid, the Defiance Campaign of 1952, used methods pioneered by Gandhi, with African and Indian protesters defying racial laws by entering offices, train compartments and other public spaces designated for ‘Europeans only’.37
In 1960 the African National Congress (ANC) abandoned non-violence. For the next thirty years it practised various forms of armed struggle. But the Gandhian element returned after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the negotiations for the transfer of power. After the ending of apartheid, and his taking office as the first President of a democratic South Africa, Mandela promoted a Gandhi-like path of reconciliation with the white race, and among the different sections of South African society. That the Constitution of democratic South Africa refused to privilege a particular race, religion, or linguistic group also owed something to the Indian, or one might even say, Gandhian, experience.
VI
As the second millennium of ‘the Christian era’ drew to a close, Time magazine decided to choose a Person of the Century, a once-in-a-hundred-years variation on its annual Person of the Year. The magazine organized an online poll, which threw up the name of the singer Elvis Presley. Fortunately, it had a backup plan, namely, nomination by a jury of experts. This ranked the scientist Albert Einstein first, and Gandhi second (jointly with Franklin Roosevelt).
Even professedly, ‘global’ magazines are not immune to nationalist sentiment, and doubtless Time’s choice of Einstein as the Person of the Century was influenced by the fact that he was an American, and a naturalized American at that, thus further feeding into the myth of the Lady of Liberty who always provides refuge to the worthy and the needy. But Einstein himself would have been embarrassed at being so anointed. For, he absolutely venerated Gandhi, as the first of the three epigraphs to this book demonstrates. An authoritative recent study of the scientist’s political views states unambiguously that ‘for Einstein it is clear that Gandhi was the supreme moral compass’.38 In Einstein’s Berlin study, there were portraits of Newton, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell. When he moved to Princeton in 1935, he added a portrait of Gandhi. However, a scientist friend who visited him in 1954 observed that while the portraits of the physicists had been taken down, that of Gandhi remained. When asked about this, Einstein answered that the Mahatma was ‘the greatest man of our age’.39
Einstein had lived in Europe and America, and seen the work of Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman at close quarters. He would never speak of them in remotely the same terms as he did about Gandhi. Nor was he alone. In a memoir of his boyhood in the Italy of the 1930s, the writer Italo Calvino observed: ‘When I think back to the personalities who dominated world news at the time, the one who stands out from all the others in terms of his visual image is without a doubt Gandhi. Although huge numbers of anecdotes about him circulated, and he was very often caricatured, his image managed to instill the idea that there was something serious and true in him, albeit very remote from us.’40
To the verdicts of Einstein and Calvino let me add that of the widely travelled British man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge. In the 1920s, Muggeridge taught in a college in Kerala. Many years later, he wrote that
the ‘three outstanding men of action’ of his time were Gandhi, Stalin and De Gaulle. ‘Of my three men,’ he continued, ‘Gandhi, without disposing of so much as a popgun, got us out of India, where Churchill had said we must remain for many a year to come. No one who saw, as I did, the fabulous following he had among the poorest of the poor in India could doubt the reality of his influence, unsupported, as it was, by any sort of ceremonial trappings or material resources’ (trappings and resources which both Stalin and De Gaulle, as well as Roosevelt and Churchill, had in abundance).41
Einstein, Calvino and Muggeridge lived through the tumultuous interwar decades when Gandhi was at the height of his influence and renown. Yet, in our own time, this curiosity in, and admiration for, Gandhi, is manifest in many parts of the world, and among human beings mighty as well as powerless. Two examples must suffice. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama had a photo of Gandhi in his office, alongside portraits of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall. Many years later, after he was elected President of the United States, a journalist asked Obama which person in history, dead or alive, he would most like to have dinner with. Mahatma Gandhi, answered the President, wittily adding that it would have to be a frugal meal.
Obama’s interest in and admiration for Gandhi was impressive; but not, in itself, entirely surprising. One would expect an African-American graduate of Columbia and Harvard universities to know of Gandhi’s influence in India and (via the civil rights movement) within the United States too. My second illustration of Gandhi’s global reach may be more striking. Early in Obama’s second term as President, I was visiting his country, to promote my book Gandhi Before India. A waiter who brought me tea in my New York hotel room saw the book lying on the table. Not knowing that I was the author, he saw the cover photo and asked: ‘That’s the young Mr. Gandhi, isn’t it?’ I answered in the affirmative. ‘In my country we admire him a great deal,’ said the waiter. ‘And which country are you from?’ I asked. The surprising answer was the Dominican Republic.
Gandhi probably did not know of the Dominican Republic. But, long after he was dead, one of its citizens knew about him and admired him; they could even identify him in a rare photo where he was clad in a suit and tie rather than his trademark loincloth.
This posthumous, worldwide praise for Gandhi would have amazed the men who jailed him in British India. Successive viceroys dismissed him as a humbug, a hypocrite, a back number. Their insolence towards him could be extreme: during the Second World War, Gandhi was reduced to corresponding with, and being reviled by, an additional secretary in the home department, who reported to the home secretary who reported to the home member who reported in turn to the viceroy. But who now remembers that arrogant civil servant, or his boss, or his boss’s boss’s boss, who once sat in a grand palace atop Raisina Hill in imperial New Delhi? This revenge of history is a mark of the greatness of Gandhi the man, and of the profound political changes he helped bring about: namely, the dismantling of the British Empire and the institutional and ideological edifice that once sustained it.
VII
For a man who has been dead seventy years, and who held no public office, Gandhi is extraordinarily well known across the globe. The world knows of him, but what should it know about him? In what ways does Gandhi speak to the predicaments and peoples of the twenty-first century?
Gandhi is still relevant on account of the method of social protest he pioneered. In 1931, a British journalist based in India wrote to Gandhi that ‘whether or not you are to be the architect of India’s new constitution, your advocacy of the doctrine of non-violence as a political weapon will remain throughout history as your greatest contribution to the world’.42 Four years later, the Bombay Chronicle observed that ‘the gospel of Satyagraha is the choicest gift that Gandhiji, the Congress and India have given to the world. And we are confident that ere long the world will be grateful for the gift.’43
These verdicts were prophetic. After Gandhi’s death, his techniques of non-violent protest have been successfully used in several continents. Martin Luther King and his colleagues applied the force of truth to shame the American government into overturning racial legislation. Across Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and their comrades used the power of non-violence to replace communist dictatorships with democratic regimes.
Gandhi himself used satyagraha to oppose colonial rule. But even when countries are formally free, and formally democratic, non-violence can play a crucial role in challenging injustice and discrimination. Such was the case in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, when the denial of equal rights of citizenship for African Americans was confronted, and overcome, by the civil rights movement. And such is the case in India today, where multiparty democracy and an independent judiciary exist side by side with pervasive social inequalities.
In his own country, Gandhi’s methods of satyagraha have been applied in different ways and to different ends. In the 1970s, peasants in the Himalaya launched the Chipko movement, protesting the deforestation caused by logging companies by threatening to hug the trees still standing. In the 1980s, tribals in Central India launched a series of satyagrahas in protest against a massive dam that would submerge their homes, lands and shrines, and devastate large areas of forest as well. Most recently, in the summer of 2011, tens of thousands of Indians held rallies and fasts to protest against the large-scale corruption of the country’s political class. These movements have all drawn inspiration from Gandhi, carrying his portrait, humming the hymns he liked, starting or ending their campaigns on the day he was born, 2 October, or the day he died, 30 January.44
Non-violent opposition to the arbitrary use of state power is one manifestation of the legacy of Gandhi today; social work among the poor and disadvantaged is another. Gandhi himself placed as much importance on reconstruction as on protest. Men and women inspired by him have nurtured rural cooperatives, restored ravaged habitats, and in other ways built up the social capacity of vulnerable groups. One of the more noteworthy of these Gandhian initiatives is SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association, headquartered in his own town of Ahmedabad, which has organized more than a million women in producer cooperatives, the provision of child and maternal health care, and even a cooperative bank.45
Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. He was never chosen, in part because of Norway’s extremely close relationship to Britain. That Gandhi was never awarded the prize remains a matter of deep embarrassment to the Nobel Committee in Oslo. They have since tried to make amends, by awarding prizes to (among others) Albert Luthuli, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi, all of whom were inspired by Gandhi.
VIII
The theory and practice of non-violent resistance to unjust authority has been, as those prescient journalists of the 1930s predicted, Gandhi’s most enduring legacy. But there are others too. I myself think that his ideas on religious pluralism and interfaith harmony speak directly to the world we live and labour in today.
Gandhi was born in 1869, a decade after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This was a time of widespread scepticism among the educated classes in Europe, a sentiment captured in the title of Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘God’s Funeral’. Outside the Continent, this was also a time of heightened missionary activity. In their new colonies in Africa and Asia, European priests sought to claim the heathen for Christianity.
Gandhi rejected both the atheism of the intellectuals as well as the arrogance of the missionaries. He did not think science had all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Faith answered to a deep human need. Yet Gandhi did not think that there was one privileged path to God either. He encouraged inter-religious dialogue so that individuals could see their faith in the critical reflections of another.
Despite his long battles with the Hindu orthodoxy, Gandhi still called himself a Hindu. Perhaps this was out of sentiment
al attachment to an ancestral faith, or for tactical reasons, since positioning himself as an outsider would make it harder to persuade India’s Hindu majority of his reformist and egalitarian credo. Yet, Gandhi’s faith resonates closely with spiritual (or intellectual) traditions that are other than ‘Hindu’. The stress on ethical conduct brings him close to Buddhism, while the avowal of non-violence and non-possession is clearly drawn from Jainism. The exaltation of service is far more Christian than Hindu. The emphasis on the dignity of the individual echoes Enlightenment ideas of human rights.
The best tribute to Gandhi’s religious ecumenism that I have come across relates to a memorial meeting held after his death in the Tamil town of Tirupattur. Presiding over the meeting was the founder of a Christian ashram modelled on Sevagram. ‘The most moving speech,’ he reported later, ‘was that of the Secretary of the local Muslim League, who said: “Mahatma Gandhi was the twentieth century Christ, and he died for us Muslims.”’46
Gandhi’s respect for other religions was intimately connected with his philosophy (and practice) of non-violence. He opposed injustice and authoritarian rule, but without arms. He reached out to people of other faiths, with understanding and respect. Where the proselytizer took his book (and sometimes his bayonet) to the heathen, Gandhi chose instead to study Islamic and Christian texts, bringing to them the same open, yet not uncritical, mind that he brought to Hindu scriptures. In a world riven by inter-religious violence and misunderstanding, Gandhi’s ideas and example may yet provide a moderating influence.47
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