Mahatma Gandhi

by Dennis Dalton

  “Henceforth, any nation which seeks isolation for itself must come into conflict with the time-spirit and find no peace. From now onward the plane of thinking of every nation will have to be international. It is the striving of the new age to develop in the mind this faculty of universality.”37

  The Gandhi-Tagore controversy thus focused on two aspects of the meaning of swaraj or of freedom in its fullest sense. Tagore argued, first, that on a domestic level, Indians had placed themselves in bondage through their unthinking acceptance of dogma. They idolized a leader who, however saintly, had harnessed their blind allegiance to a gospel of retardation rather than growth. A second and related feature of Gandhi’s teaching was its implications on an international level. Gandhi’s ideas, Tagore argued, had fostered, for the most part, an unhealthy sense of separateness that foolishly spurned the knowledge and advances of the Western world. Each of these attitudes inhibited India’s growth and thus restricted her freedom.

  Gandhi responded to the first of Tagore’s charges that he did not wish to produce a “deathlike sameness in the nation,” but rather to use the spinning wheel to “realize the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads.”38 Spinning was not intended to replace all other forms of activity, but rather to symbolize “sacrifice for the whole nation.”

  “If the Poet span half an hour daily his poetry would gain in richness. For it would then represent the poor man’s wants and woes in a more forcible manner than now.”39 Spinning for Gandhi, then, was a symbolic form of identification with the masses. Tagore, however, remained suspicious of any such abstract appeal and tended to identify this symbolism with aspects of Indian nationalism. Moreover, when Tagore accused Gandhi of narrow provincialism, the latter replied, “I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”40 And when Tagore warned him of the inevitable danger inherent in his nationalism, Gandhi argued, “My patriotism is not exclusive; it is calculated not only not to hurt any other nation but to benefit all in the true sense of the word. India’s freedom as conceived by me can never be a menace to the world.”41

  Yet, despite these assurances, Gandhi could express extreme sentiments of Indian nationalism. “The interests of my country,” he once wrote, “are identical with those of my religion,”42 and, on another occasion, “The attainment of national independence is to me a search after truth.”43 As Gandhi held nothing more sacred than his religion and the quest for truth, it is clear how highly he placed the interests of his country and the struggle for Indian Independence. Tagore detected in such feelings a threat to individual freedom. That he himself was reviled by his countrymen for his heretical criticism of the noncooperation movement and accused of everything from high treason to an inveterate jealousy of Gandhi suggests that his fear of “the Giant Abstraction” was not altogether unjustified.

  Gandhi did contribute, as a political leader and thinker, to the growth of Indian nationalism as much as any figure of this century. Nowhere does he seem to recognize the implicit danger in nationalism to individual freedom, as well as to India’s own free development vis-à-vis the rest of the world. On the contrary, he dismissed all attacks on Indian nationalism, not only from Tagore but also from his Western friends, as totally without foundation. Charles Andrews, his closest British friend, wrote to Gandhi with shock and dismay in September 1921 concerning the burning of foreign cloth. “The picture of your lighting that great pile,” Andrews said, “including beautiful fabrics, shocked me intensely. We seem to be losing sight of the great beautiful world to which we belong and concentrating selfishly on India, and this must (I fear) lead back to the old bad selfish nationalism. If so, we get into the vicious circle from which Europe is now trying so desperately to escape.”44

  Gandhi replied, “In all I do or advise, the infallible test I apply is, whether the particular action will hold good in regard to the dearest and the nearest.”45 He then concludes, “Experience shows that the richest gifts must be destroyed without compensation and hesitation if they hinder one’s moral progress.”46 On this point of view, Tagore made a telling critique: “Experience…has led me to dread, no so much evil itself, as tyrannical attempts to create goodness. Of punitive police, political or moral, I have a wholesome horror. The state of slavery which is thus brought on is the worst form of cancer to which humanity is subject.”47 Tagore, almost alone in his time, insisted not only that there may be more than one path to “moral progress,” but also that the greatest obstacle to be found on each of them was the “slave mentality” that characterized nationalism.48

  What was the strength and weakness of Tagore’s critique of Gandhi? Tagore’s invaluable contribution came with his clear exposition of swaraj as meaning more than political independence, as demanding basic social change and self-realization. Gandhi had of course recognized this but Tagore drove the point home with his case against the culture of nationalism, when he championed personal freedom against political correctness. He had the courage to denounce Gandhi’s doctrines when they lapsed into dogma or duragraha. Yet both Tagore’s theory and practice fell short of a method of political and social change. Enveloped in a system of imperialism and social injustice, he remained a powerful critic with no potential for exercising real political power. If his hold on swaraj was firm, his grasp of satyagraha was weak. To have one without the other is a blow to both, as will be suggested in chapter 6 with the analysis of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi’s contribution lies not only in his idea of freedom as swaraj but as well in his unique conception of the power of satyagraha and the connections that he forged between them. This is his claim to greatness and Tagore’s criticisms do not touch it.

  Gandhi’s further response to Tagore’s criticism of nationalism came with his theories of decentralization and democracy. He argued that the state often represented the greatest obstacle to our realization of swaraj and that we may decrease the scope of political violence and increase the sphere of individual freedom and voluntary action, by decentralizing for a limited democratic state. Gandhi viewed “with the greatest fear” the increasing centralization of power in most states because this “does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality which lies at the root of all progress.”49 Therefore, “if India is to evolve along nonviolent lines, it will have to decentralize,” because “centralization as a system is inconsistent with a nonviolent structure of society.”50 Gandhi did not delineate the precise functions that would be retained by a democratic central authority. The main point is that he advocated for Indian democracy “the maximum possible decentralization of the political and economic power and resources of the state.”51

  Unlike Tagore, Gandhi set forth a theory of democracy as a central part of his political thought. He built this on his idea of swaraj, asserting that “The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.”52 The recurrent theme in his thinking about democracy as also with swaraj, is the necessity of achieving freedom with discipline and self-restraint: “Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious will land itself in chaos and be self-destroyed.”53 This is an abiding danger, that “democracy degenerate into mobocracy.”54 Another theme running through his democratic theory is his preoccupation with the right use of power. If power is wielded by either an authoritarian state or a mobocracy, civil disobedience against it becomes imperative. A legitimate form of power is then exercised but people must understand that in any system, despotic or democratic, “the truth is that power resides in the people.” It may be “entrusted for the time being to those whom they may choose as their representatives” but “The parliaments have no power or even existence independently of the people.”

  If this basic truth is realized then the most
democratic and decentralized state will still carry a corrective within it of satyagraha to remedy abuses of power. At any sign of mob rule, responsible citizens may administer a dose of civil disobedience because that is the real “storehouse of power.” Gandhi asks that we “imagine a whole people unwilling to conform to the laws of the legislature and prepared to suffer the consequences of non-compliance! They will bring the whole legislative and the executive machinery to a standstill… no police or military coercion can bend the resolute will of a people, out for suffering to the uttermost. And parliamentary procedure is good only when its members are willing to conform to the will of the majority.”55 If Gandhi’s advocacy of democracy carries this warning to the government of a continuing sanction for mass civil disobedience, it also admonishes the citizenry of its collective responsibility, for “Every citizen, therefore, renders himself responsible for every act of his government,” and when the government goes astray, “it becomes his duty to withdraw his support.”56

  This, then, is the fullness of Gandhi’s response to Tagore. It also represents a defense against similar criticisms made by M. n. Roy, as suggested in the analysis of Roy below. All three are concerned with abuses of power by political leaders but among them only Gandhi was in a position to exercise substantial power through satyagraha. Gandhi’s defense is that in both theory and practice he remained wholly committed to democracy: “I claim to be a democrat both by instinct and training.”57 The democratic ideal that he espouses correlates with his theory of swaraj, or freedom with restraint, and of satyagraha, as a continuing legitimization of civil disobedience; it shows that he wants power wielded wisely or responsibly controlled in a democracy.

  M. N. Roy’s Critique: Coming to Terms with the Mahatma

  Manabendra Nath Roy was born in 1887 into a Bengali brahmin family in a village outside of Calcutta.58 Twenty-eight years later, as a terrorist revolutionary, he left India for an adventurous career in the Communist international movement. These initial twenty-eight years in Bengal were decisive for the shaping of his personality and thought. Three components of this early experience deserve mention. First, there was the influence of Roy’s brahmanical family background and outlook. This inspired and reinforced his penchant for theory, his elitism, and his strong moral outlook.59 Second, there was Roy’s early, intense belief in Hinduism. His religious frame of mind, like his brahmanical spirit, never left him, but prodded him on in his quest for “those abiding, permanent values of humanity.”60 Third, in this first generation of his life, the ideology of Indian nationalism exerted an immense influence on Roy as it did on many of his contemporary Bengali intellectuals and students.

  “An ideology,” writes Edward Shils, “is the product of man’s need for imposing intellectual order on the world. The need for ideology is an intensification of the need for a cognitive and moral map of the universe…”61 Roy’s quest for an adequate ideology began during his youth in Bengal. It continued throughout his next phase as an orthodox communist and later as a Marxist revisionist. Then, later, having abandoned Marxism for what he called “Radical Humanism,” his search intensified for “a cognitive and moral map of the universe.” It ended not in satisfaction but only with his death in 1954. Yet, in this last phase of his thought, Roy had come closer to the fulfillment of his needs, to realization of his identity through the construction of an ideology, than he had ever approached in his earlier phases. If the outlines of Roy’s cognitive and moral map had been determined in his youth by a brahmanical outlook, a Hindu creed, and the nationalist experience in Bengal, then unlike Gandhi, he never came to terms with the demands of his early formative period and remained alienated from his Indian tradition.

  The year 1915 is a key one in the Gandhi-Roy story. In that year, Roy, as a terrorist schooled under Jatin Mukherjee and Aurobindo Ghose, left Calcutta on a revolutionary mission to obtain German arms for the struggle against the Raj. In that same year, Gandhi returned to India after twenty-one years in South Africa. As Gandhi achieved his extraordinary rise to power in the Congress during the 1920s, Roy acquired his reputation of being “undoubtedly the most colorful of all non-Russian Communists in the era of Lenin and Stalin.”62 From 1915 to 1930, Roy moved about on various revolutionary missions, from Mexico to Berlin, and then Paris, Zurich, Tashkent, and Moscow. In Mexico, Roy was converted to Communism and reputedly helped form the first Communist Party there. In Moscow, he contributed to revolutionary strategy for communist activity in the colonial areas.63 In Europe, he rose to a position of authority in the Comintern, published a series of books and pamphlets on Marxist theory, and edited a communist newspaper. The achievements of both Gandhi and Roy during this period were spectacular, but in complete contrast.

  Yet, for all their respective achievements, there was never anything like a balance of power between these two figures. It was always Gandhi and never Roy who dominated the Indian nationalist movement with his unparalleled genius for mass leadership. Whereas Roy would struggle for decades to gain power in India and fail, Gandhi acquired authority quickly and kept it. While Roy remained preoccupied with Gandhi’s power, the Mahatma rarely mentions Roy in his writings or speeches.64 When Roy returned from prison to the political scene in the late thirties, Gandhi took scant notice of him. Roy was both a cultural and political outsider and suffered as a result. Gandhi, after his return to India in 1915, became rooted in the nationalist tradition and developed a style of political behavior that gained for him personal confidence as well as political power. Thus, while Roy, out of touch with his tradition, never ceased in his effort to come to terms with Gandhi, the Mahatma, secure in his surroundings, could remain aloof. In this sense, a consideration of Roy’s view of Gandhi becomes part of a larger question, that of the relationship of the Indian intellectual to the people.65

  The first detailed Marxist critique of Gandhi appeared in Roy’s early book, India in Transition, written in Moscow in 1921. The book grew out of discussions that Roy had with Lenin and other communist figures at the Second Congress of the Communist International. At this Congress, Roy had argued, contrary to Lenin, that communist policy in the colonial areas must be to support proletarian rather than bourgeois movements. Lenin contended that bourgeois nationalist organizations like the Indian Congress could be considered revolutionary, and since no viable Communist parties existed, these organizations deserved the support of the International. Roy replied that the Indian Congress and similar agencies could only betray the revolution: an Indian proletariat existed, and must be mobilized behind a communist vanguard. Liberation from imperialism could come only under communist leadership. The Roy-Lenin controversy was clearly over fundamental issues and would have implications for communist strategy in the future.

  Roy later reflected back upon his differences with Lenin and concluded that “The role of Gandhi was the crucial point of difference. Lenin believed that, as the inspirer and leader of a mass movement, he was a revolutionary. I maintained that, a religious and cultural revivalist, he was bound to be a reactionary socially, however revolutionary he might appear politically.”66 In Roy’s view, “The religious ideology preached by him [Gandhi] also appealed to the medieval mentality of the masses. But the same ideology discouraged any revolutionary mass action. The quintessence of the situation, as I analyzed and understood it, was a potentially revolutionary movement restrained by a reactionary ideology.”67 “I reminded Lenin of the dictum that I had learnt from him: that without a revolutionary ideology, there could be no revolution.”68 These arguments formed the basis of the position on Gandhi that was developed by Roy in India in Transition.

  “The most serious defect of India in Transition” wrote a leading biographer of Roy “is its underestimation of Mahatma Gandhi’s political potential.”69 Roy begins his critique of Gandhi in this book with the confident assertion that Gandhism has now “reached a crisis” and its “impending wane…signifies the collapse of the reactionary forces and their total alienation from the political movement.”70 R
oy’s confidence was rooted in the classic Marxist belief in the inexorable march forward of western civilization. Gandhism was seen as a temporary obstacle in the path of history, which would soon be swept aside: not by the Raj, but by the masses themselves, once they became conscious of the progressive movement of history. Whatever Gandhi may tell the masses, “post-British India cannot and will not become pre-British India.” Therefore, “Here lies the contradiction in the orthodox nationalism as expressed of late in the cult of Gandhism. It endeavors to utilize the mass energy for the perpetuation or revival of that heritage of national culture which has been made untenable by the awakening of mass energy…. Therefore, Gandhism is bound to be defeated. The signs of the impending defeat are already perceptible. Gandhism will fall victim to its own contradictions.”71

  Roy admits that under Gandhi’s leadership, through the effective use of hartal and noncooperation, “For the first time in its history, the Indian national movement entered into the period of active struggle.”72 Yet, here as elsewhere Roy remains confined within his Marxist categories. Gandhi’s success in 1920, he says, simply revealed that “the time for mass-action was ripe. Economic forces, together with other objective causes had created an atmosphere” which propelled Gandhi into power. Roy tried to drive home his argument against Lenin by stressing the potential role of the Indian proletariat, portraying it as an awakened and thriving revolutionary force. But Roy’s view of the proletariat was as fanciful as his anticipation of “the imminent collapse of Gandhism.”73 In each of these miscalculations, one sees repeated the error of a dogmatic application of Marxist doctrine to an inappropriate political context.