Mahatma Gandhi
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Gandhi’s originality on this point can be appreciated when one realizes its differences not only from Ruskin but especially from the social practices and vast intellectual traditions of India. If any single idea demonstrates or stamps Gandhi’s credentials as a social reformer, it must be his theory and practice of work. The idea pervades his whole reform program, from abolition of untouchability to construction of village latrines and wells. His unique emphasis on public health and sanitation required social workers-cum-political volunteers to engage in labor that would routinely defy caste restrictions. In the hybrid conditions of his ashram communities this principle was pushed to the limit, initially creating severe tensions between caste Hindus and harijans.
In the common kitchen especially, as each member of the ashram performed his or her daily duties of food preparation and cooking, ancient norms of class and caste, sex and religion (as Muslims and Sikhs mixed with Christians and Hindus) provided endless grist for these mills of conflict resolution. Pyarelal Nayar, one of Gandhi’s closest coworkers for twenty-eight years, liked to observe how much more of Gandhi’s voluminous writings are devoted to management of his ashrams than to political campaigns because the former proved by far the toughest testing grounds for his “experiments with truth.”
In a representative comment on labor made a year after returning from South Africa to India, Gandhi reviewed his program of social reforms, including spinning of cotton cloth and wearing of khadi. Then, speaking especially to an audience of Indian students, he concluded: “You may ask: ‘Why should we use our hands?’ and say ‘the manual work has got to be done by those who are illiterate. I can only occupy myself with reading literature and political essays.’ I think that we have to realise the dignity of labour…. I consider that a barber’s profession is just as good as the profession of medicine.” This must have seemed outrageous to his audience, first because according to caste proscriptions, a barber’s work was meant for untouchables, and second, in colonized India, the medical profession, like law, promised entry into a Westernized elite.
But he was not finished. Only when these ideas are clearly understood, he insisted, “and not until then, you may come to Politics,” practicing it not merely as a method of reform but as a creed of right principles infused with one’s religious faith. “Politics, divorced of religion, have absolutely no meaning…. Politics are a part of our being” (CWMG 13: 234). This was Gandhi’s statement in 1916, at the beginning of his thirty-year term of national leadership, and the demands that he made then were nothing short of revolutionary: profound changes in thinking about work, caste, religion, and politics, forming a nexus of ideas that young people must consider and adopt if they wanted to participate in the all-inclusive profession of politics.
Within four years of this speech, Gandhi was at the head of the first mass political movement in India’s history. The extreme demands that he placed on political workers served not as an impediment but as an inspiration. In this new definition of politics as profession and creed, the performance of daily manual labor as a means to develop personal discipline, integrity, and identification with the peasantry became the litmus test for proof of nationalist citizenship.
The second aspect of Gandhi’s originality as a political thinker and leader is the way that he forged connections, in theory and in practice, among the ideas of freedom, nonviolent power, and civic responsibility. This book’s focus is on freedom (swaraj) and the power of nonviolence (satyagraha), but Gandhi usually connected these ideas with a concept of responsibility or moral obligation to improve society through nonviolent action. This connection is implied in the introduction and made explicit in chapter 5 (pp. 164–166), but it needs more clarification and development. Gandhi speaks often of how Indians must exercise responsibility to attain their freedom, and he conceives of this obligation in several ways.
First, he clearly distinguishes between liberty and license as the difference between true freedom (swaraj) and mere “independence” (p. 2). The latter suggests for him a lack of discipline and self-awareness, whereas swaraj requires of the citizen a growing sense of social unity. Second, following Thoreau, he argues that the quest for freedom incurs a definite political obligation or “the duty of disloyalty” when the state fails to represent the people’s interests and needs. That is, “Disobedience of the law of an evil state is therefore a duty” (CJVMG 43: 132–33). Finally, he moves beyond Thoreau by contending that the freedom struggle demands active participation in social reforms, i.e., no one is free until all are free from deprivation and discrimination. In the freedom struggle, volunteers or satyagrahis must dedicate themselves to the “uplift of all” (sarvodaya) by working in the range of reform programs noted above.
All citizens were obligated to keep the peace in times of civil strife. This duty became especially important in 1947 when India plunged into civil war as it gained independence from Britain. Chapter 5 details the history of Gandhi’s leadership during this crucial period, but the conceptual connections among freedom, nonviolence, and civic responsibility merit reinforcement. The main point about civic duty is Gandhi’s insistence that it was the clear and present obligation of the Hindu majority to protect India’s Muslim minority. Hindus justified oppression of Muslims by arguing that in their newfound democracy, a majority had the right to prevail; this is what popular sovereignty meant. Gandhi countered with a liberal affirmation of minority rights and then went further by contending that majority rights should be earned through fulfillment of civic responsibility. In the great public squares of New Delhi, outside the chambers where India’s new federal constitution was being written, Gandhi spoke urgently to his “Brothers and Sisters”:
What I am going to tell you today [June 28,1947] will be something very special. I hope you will hear me with attention and try to digest what I say. When someone does something good he makes the whole world partake of the good. When someone does something bad, though he cannot make the world share his action he can certainly cause harm. The Constituent Assembly is discussing the rights of the citizen. As a matter of fact the proper question is not what the rights of a citizen are, but rather what constitutes the duties of a citizen. Fundamental rights can only be those rights the exercise of which is not only in the interest of the citizen but that of the whole world. Today, everyone wants to know what his rights are, but if a man learns to discharge his duties… if from childhood we learn what our dharma [sacred duty] is and try to follow it our rights look after themselves …. The beauty of it is that the very performance of a duty secures us our right. Rights cannot be divorced from duties. This is how satyagraha was born, for I was always striving to decide what my duty was.
On the next day, he resumed his theme, applying it directly to the problem of religious conflict:
Yesterday I talked to you about duty. However I was not able to say all that I had intended to say. Whenever a person goes anywhere certain duties come to devolve on him. The man who neglects his duty and cares only to safeguard his rights does not know that rights that do not spring from duties done cannot be safeguarded. This applies to the Hindu—Muslim relations. Whether it is the Hindus living in a place or Muslims or both, they will come to acquire rights if they do their duty…. This is a paramount law and no one can change it. If Hindus consider Muslims their brothers and treat them well, Muslims too will return friendship for friendship …. The duty of the Hindus is to share with the Muslims in their joys and sorrows. (CWMG 88: 230, 236–37)
During the struggle for independence, Gandhi demanded that Indians accept responsibility for British colonization: they had allowed it to occur and could end it by doing their duty through satyagraha. When this struggle ended but brought civil war in its wake, Gandhi again insisted that his people accept and then exercise responsibility. How could they claim to enjoy their rights in a free India when failing in their duty to maintain peace and order? Swaraj through satyagraha still required the acceptance of social and political obligations for democracy to
survive.
On August 15, 1997, as India celebrated fifty years of independence, an official ban was lifted on access to confidential documents of the British colonial government. Suddenly, thousands of pages contained in almost 800 separate files became available at the India Office Records collection in London (now located in the new British Library). These files comprise the carefully kept records of the Raj’s secret service, or Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), described by archivists as “a shadowy and formerly non-avowed organization, within the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office in London, devoted to the internal and external security of British India.” The IPI, reporting to Scotland Yard as well as to the India Office, maintained from 1916 to 1947 scrupulous surveillance of all “Indian revolutionaries,” principally Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian National Congress. It reported on their movements, censored or proscribed objectionable Congressional or communist literature (including, for example, Gandhi’s first tract, Hind Swaraj), and regularly intercepted and monitored personal and political correspondence. The newly opened files show that the mission of the IPI was amply met: the reports are highly detailed and documented, often thoughtful, perceptive, and elegantly written.
This fresh data substantiates a main thesis of chapter 4 on Gandhi’s civil disobedience, that his use of nonviolent power effectively disarmed the Raj by creating a paralyzing ambivalence in their attempt at rule. It may appear that he achieved this with ease, but the records show that the British struggled hard to master the situation, agonizing over their predicament, searching for historical precedents when there were none, trying to determine the basic sources or dynamics of Gandhi’s power. One lengthy report on Gandhi assesses the status of his leadership after the conclusion, in 1934, of prolonged civil disobedience. The tone throughout is exasperated and battle weary, resentful of “Gandhi’s malevolent attitude” and “his determined retention of the civil disobedience weapon.” Yet, citing an informant, the agent reports that there seems no way to stop him with “everyone hanging on Gandhi’s smallest word (because he has the power)…. It is clear that nothing can be done without Gandhu and, therefore, no one has the strength or courage to challenge him” (parentheses and underlining in original). After citing several informants to substantiate further this analysis, the report distinguishes the “most striking fact” of Indian politics by 1936:
Gandhi was much the master and director of Congress as ever and he had lost none of either his political astuteness or his inveterate hostility to British rule. Over and over again he intervened to save an open break between “reformists” and “revolutionaries” [liberal against violent factions within the Congress], and, in every such case, it was not difficult to see in the compromise that he brought about that, even when he appeared merely to have temporized, he had, in fact, kept Congress on the course chosen for it by him, deviating neither too far to the right, nor too far to the left, but steering all the time for the destination of mass revolution.
The British were clearly caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, they deplored Gandhi’s “hostility” to their rule and his determined course of “mass revolution” that will end the Raj. On the other hand, Gandhi was surely preferable to the terrorists or communists on the extreme left because the British were never ambivalent about violent opposition. They deemed it hateful and crushed it unmercifully. They hesitated only with Gandhi because however “malevolent” his attitude, the method of nonviolence confounded them. Again and again, this intelligence agent presents the consuming question: how can the government effectively counter Gandhi’s “dominating personality,” “all-pervading influence,” “appeal to the masses and the confidence of the commercial and professional classes,” “while the whole of Hindu India regards him as a Saint who can do no wrong”? “Gandhi is the key-stone in the Congress movement,” “Gandhi’s triumph is a personal triumph… for his personality—to many his semi-divinity—has no rival in India” [Intelligence Bureau. Home Department. May 1, 1937. IOR/L/P&J/12/235]. British imperialism never found an answer to its Gandhi problem because it could not decipher the code to satyagraha, the secret of nonviolent power. Yet how ironic that an obscure English secret service officer should have described the Mahatma’s power in terms that rival those of his most admiring hagiographers.
The analysis of British ambivalence that is presented in this book, especially in chapter 4, has been more recently developed in a trenchant study by D. A. Low, Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929–1942 (1997). Low demonstrates through exhaustive use of British Indian sources and incisive analysis of all sides of the independence struggle that “the British frequently found themselves trapped in the coils of their own ambivalence.” He explains how Gandhi’s ingenious use of satyagraha served “to force their hand and make them grant India the swaraj it demanded in accord with their own self-avowed liberal values.” From unprecedented case studies of Gandhi’s interaction with the Raj, Low concludes that “It is now indeed possible to see that it was above all Gandhi’s masterly grasp of the critical requirements of the Indian national movement in its momentous battle with India’s profoundly ambiguous British rulers that gave him the towering position he came to hold in the Indian national movement” (pp. 31, 38–39). It may be seen, therefore, from Low’s account as well as from the compelling data on this subject now available, that Gandhi succeeded because he wielded power in a unique manner. Alone among leaders of mass political movements in this century, he first conceived and then applied an entirely original method of action, satyagraha. Its use from 1906 to 1948 introduced a new mode of politics that Gandhi called “inclusive” rather than “exclusive.” He demonstrated the power of this inclusivity when expressed, as it must be, through nonviolent action.
Old age is often unkind to political leaders, especially the most powerful or popular. They seem, like Churchill or many American ex-presidents, to outlive their usefulness. If they remain in power, like Mao and Nehru, they may preside over their own worst years. Gandhi in old age offers an instructive example of how nonviolent power may endure. In his late seventies, Gandhi’s direct influence on Congressional policy declined as Nehru, Patel, and other leaders felt forced to accept the partition of India. Yet in other respects Gandhi’s power grew, with his most dramatic and successful fasts in Calcutta and Delhi. The former, in September 1947, as Gandhi approached his seventy-eighth birthday, is examined in chapter 5. The latter, equally effective, occurred in January 1948, only two weeks before his assassination, and was devoted to the same cause, the resolution of Hindu—Muslim conflict, this time in India’s strife-torn capital city.
Nicholas Mansergh, a British historian of the partition cited below, commented on Gandhi’s use of power in these two fasts: “In this, the last year of his life, Gandhi’s influence was transcendent—It was his preaching of the doctrine of nonviolence more than any other single factor that stood between India and bloodshed on a frightful scale” (p. 159). The recently released files offer striking support of Mansergh’s assessment. One lengthy report on Gandhi’s conduct in Delhi after India gained independence ranks among the eloquent testimonies to his power. This is all the more remarkable because it was written by a senior representative of the government that Gandhi and his movement had just defeated. Mr. A.C.B. Symon, newly appointed high commissioner for the U.K. in India, writes with a tone and direction that suggest a resolution of earlier ambivalence. The report concurs with estimates of Gandhi’s power offered by Lord Mountbatten around this time (e.g., pp. 233–34), but Symon provides details derived from firsthand observation of Gandhi’s final four months in Delhi (September 9 to January 30), when he resided “in Birla House exactly opposite the Office of this High Commission”:
During these months Birla House became the focal point of political activity for all India. Day after day, the most important personages in the Dominion of India, as well as its most distinguished visitors, came to see the Mahatma here. Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel, wh
en they were not away from Delhi, were almost daily visitors. Next to these was Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the Indian Christian Minister of Health as well as Maulana Kalam Azad, the Nationalist Muslim Minister of Education. Jai Prakash Narain and other Socialist leaders were also frequent visitors. Provincial Governors and Prime Ministers, too, always called on him when they visited Delhi and meetings of the All-India Congress Committee were invariably held in Birla House. Day after day people of all communities, rich and poor, came to visit him for guidance, assistance or consolation. Many of these were Sikh and Hindu refugees from Pakistan who had suffered personal bereavements and the loss of their homes. Day in and day out, too, Muslims of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his help. Normally too fearful even to leave their homes, they came to him because they had learned and believed that he had their interests at heart and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of preserving them from destruction. Little groups of them, often belonging to the humblest classes of society, and including women, were frequently to be seen waiting outside the gates of Birla House until the Mahatma had time, as he always did, to listen to their requests. And each evening during these recent months congregations—again made up of all classes of society, including many members of the Indian Defence Services—assembled for his prayer meetings and listened to his daily exhortations that all races and creeds belonged to India; that all have the same rights; and that they must live in peace and amity together. There must be no retaliation on either side and conditions must be restored under which Muslims could return to safety to their homes in Delhi and non-Muslims to Pakistan.