While Gandhi was touring the villages of Bihar, Nehru was preoccupied with running his inter-Asian relations conference in Delhi. Gandhi had been persuaded to attend, so he left Bihar at the end of March to address the closing session. During the summer in Delhi, recurrent reports of disturbances in Bengal and Bihar unnerved Gandhi, and the summer was subsequently broken with visits to Calcutta and Patna. Then, at the end of July, he traveled throughout Kashmir, leaving there in early August for Calcutta en route to Noakhali. Gandhi came to Calcutta, then, as a revered leader who had courageously fought religious violence, first, on behalf of the Hindu minority in Noakhali and then in defense of the Muslim minority in Bihar. His reputation had indeed grown, and for good reason: among India’s leaders he was unique in having gone to the villages and struggled there in the interests of both communities. Moreover, as both Hindus and Muslims turned increasingly to him with trust, Gandhi’s own confidence in his mission increased. Only days before the Calcutta killing, he had said, “I have never had the chance to test my nonviolence in the face of communal riots.” Now, this had been tested. The results were successful—not as dramatic, perhaps, as the Calcutta fast, but the work in Noakhali and Bihar did restore in him confidence in the power of satyagraha to combat communalism.
Gandhi’s method of satyagraha and his inclusive mode of leadership, abundantly manifest in his ingenious use of traditional Indian language, images, and symbols, goes further than any other single factor to explain the source and dynamics of his power. His entire style of expression had been cultivated since his early South African experience. It is most evident in his use of words, like satyagraha, swaraj, sarvodaya, ahimsa and harijan. These were terms which Gandhi either coined or reinterpreted. Language, though, represents only one element of his style: other components, often less obvious, contributed equally to the way in which he communicated with the Indian people. In his last phase, his style had, after a lifetime of public contact, become largely instinctive; and for this reason, his power over the Indian people reached its zenith.
Gandhi’s “experiment” at Hydari mansion marks an imaginative use of satyagraha in terms of its inclusiveness. The richness of symbolism here shows everywhere the touch of the master. For at Hydari mansion appeared the microcosm on which the whole should be patterned: Gandhi, the “Hindu of Hindus,” moving into a house owned by a Muslim widow, cared for throughout by a volunteer squad of Muslim friends and admirers, and receiving daily an endless stream of Muslim devotees into his “confessional” (men and women, the latter, he always proudly said, never observing purdah in his presence). Then there was his companion, Suhrawardy, the last Muslim for whom any Calcutta Hindu would have felt “brotherly love.” Yet, here was Gandhi, saying often and unrepentantly of this notoriously untrustworthy Muslim politician, “I trust him, he is my friend.”96 All this Gandhi could do because he was Gandhi. But there were reasons why this man came to be seen as the Mahatma; and the inclusive spirit of satyagraha, now fully developed, was not the least of the reasons.
Another aspect of satyagraha appears with his use of a device tested in Noakhali and Bihar and further developed in Calcutta: the prayer meeting. In this last phase, almost all Gandhi’s major moves and decisions, often of political import, were first announced, not at press conferences, party conventions, or political assemblies, but in prayer meetings. These meetings had two parts: the first consisting of a reading from religious texts followed by hymns and prayers; the second, that of Gandhi’s personal “post-prayer message,” which he said should “be regarded and listened to as an integral part of the prayer.”97 The first part served to set an example of tolerance: verses from the Koran and the Bible were read along with those from Hindu texts unless, that is, a member of the audience objected. In that case, Gandhi would omit the prayers, and, with consummate skill, take as his text for the “post-prayer message” the very example of intolerance that the objector had shown, discoursing on exclusivity vs. inclusivity. The maneuver often resulted in the audience itself castigating the objector and insisting that the prayers be read after all.98 At the huge gatherings in Calcutta, the emphasis in Gandhi’s post-prayer message was often on the need for social discipline; and Gandhi used the meeting itself as a testing ground for the maintenance of discipline, censuring the crowd’s restiveness or praising their orderliness. After the meetings, Hindus and Muslims could mingle together in an atmosphere of trust; and although the attendance in Calcutta generally numbered in the hundreds of thousands, no incident of communal violence occurred at Gandhi’s prayer meetings. Rather, they provided the opportunity for a needed release of anxiety and display of friendship.
The prayer meeting and its associated psychological effect date far back into the history of organized religion. Gandhi’s genius, in this as in other instances, was to adapt a traditional concept and experience to his own use, in this case for the resolution of communal conflict. The most brilliant example of this adaptation appears in his theory and practice of fasting, which is suggestive of some of the main assumptions underlying his conception of satyagraha. “Satyagraha,” he said, “has been designed as an effective substitute for violence,”99 that is, to wage nonviolent conflict in a way that will resolve a conflict situation. When he had been asked about the prospect of fasting in early August 1946, just days before the Calcutta Killing, he responded: “If and when the call comes to fast unto death, I will do so irrespective of others joining it or not. Fasting unto death is the last and the most potent weapon in the armoury of satyagraha. It is a sacred thing. But it must be accepted with all its implications. It is not the fast itself but what it implies that matters.”100 Gandhi repeatedly used the term “weapon” when describing the technique of the fast: “a fiery weapon,” “an infallible weapon.”101 The term is employed to convey the idea of waging nonviolent conflict. The course of this conflict should be carefully plotted by the satyagrahi, and the fast should come only as “a last resort when all other avenues of redress have been explored and have failed.”102
Beyond this consideration, two special conditions should be attached to the fast: first, it must be used in a constructive sense, to reform an individual, to gain his repentance for a wrong committed, to awaken his conscience and induce a reexamination of his position. Its general aim, therefore, is “to evoke the best in him [the wrongdoer]. Self-suffering is an appeal to his better nature, as retaliation is to his baser. Fasting under proper circumstances is such an appeal par excellence.”103 The second condition attached by Gandhi to the fast reveals his understanding of its dynamics. He says that a satyagrahi should always fast against a “lover”; that is, one who shares, however unconsciously, an underlying sympathy and respect for his aim. This condition is significant for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it indicates Gandhi’s awareness of the fast’s inherent limitation. He concedes that “You cannot fast against a tyrant.”104 On the other hand, with this condition may be seen Gandhi’s insight into the real source of the fast’s power: in his case the overwhelming sympathy of Indians, manifest in the fact that his fasts worked best when waged against his own people, Hindus and Muslims.105
All these requirements and conditions that Gandhi attached to fasting in satyagraha were fulfilled in the Calcutta fast except the last; this was only partially met. The Calcutta criminal elements—goondas—were not tyrants, but even Gandhi did not assume that they were sympathetic to his cause. Rajagopalachari’s first objection (noted above) when Gandhi proposed the Calcutta fast came with the question “Can one fast against the goondas?” Gandhi replied that the criminals could be overcome by a society determined to keep the peace. It is this emphasis upon social responsibility that lies at the heart of Gandhi’s conception of satyagraha: since society, he reasoned, is responsible for the existence of goondaism in the first instance, then it both bears the moral responsibility for curing this disease of the body politic as well as the power to do so. Neglect of this responsibility is tantamount to moral cowardice. “Goondas do not
drop from the sky, nor do they spring from the earth like evil spirits. They are the product of social disorganization, and society is therefore responsible for their existence. In other words, they should be looked upon as a symptom of corruption in our body politic.”106
This was Gandhi in 1940. When in 1946 he was confronted with the Bihar riots, he again unequivocally placed the responsibility where it belonged by deploring “the habit of procuring a moral alibi for ourselves by blaming it all on the goondas. We always put the blame on the goondas. But it is we who are responsible for their creation as well as encouragement.”107 Gandhi argued these simple truths because he was intensely involved in the problems posed by communal violence and desperately sought their resolution through satyagraha. For those more removed from the heat of the struggle, it was easier to sidestep the implications of Gandhi’s arguments. After Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had visited Gandhi during the Calcutta fast, he commented to the press: “I have told Mahatmaji not to confuse between goonda activities and communal violence. What had happened in Calcutta during the last few days was absolutely the work of goondas and nothing else.”108 From Gandhi came a reasoned restatement of earlier views which again steadfastly refused to dodge the crucial question of social responsibility, and the subsequent issue of the right method of social control:
The conflagration has been caused not by the goondas but by those who have become goondas. It is we who make goondas. Without our sympathy and passive support, the goondas would have no legs to stand upon…. During one year of past anarchy, it is understandable how these elements in society have gained respectability. But the war between Pakistanis and those for Undivided India has ended. It is time for peace-loving citizens to assert themselves and isolate goondaism. Nonviolent non-co-operation is a universal remedy. Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living on and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives is withdrawn. The heart of the anti-social elements may or may not be changed; it will be enough if they are made to feel that the better elements of society are asserting themselves in the interests of peace and in the interests of normality.109
Gandhi’s hopes for communal harmony rested, in the last analysis, not with government or law enforcement agencies, but with the “better elements of society” willing to assert themselves “in the interests of peace and normality.” The Calcutta fast, he stressed, was “meant to activize the better, peace-loving and wise elements in society,” for only these could forge lasting bonds of communal friendship. In the days immediately after the Calcutta fast, and before his departure for Delhi, Gandhi met with numerous civic groups in an attempt to consolidate, through them, the salutary results of the satyagraha. Private citizens, businessmen, students, volunteer groups, and other social agencies were formed into “Peace Bridges” and assigned to patrol affected areas of the city. These civic forces alone, Gandhi believed, could strengthen the fabric of their society, after a year of incessant violence had left it in shreds. If there was a “miracle” in Calcutta, then it occurred when one man’s leadership restored to more than four million people the will and sense of responsibility needed to mend their strife-torn city and ultimately to transform their lives.
The type of ambivalence that Gandhi created in the instance of the Calcutta fast was quite different from the salt satyagraha, yet its key role should be recognized. Here the target of the satyagraha was the Indian population of Calcutta, not the British authority. When Gandhi entered the city he found its inhabitants bitterly divided in their respective Muslim and Hindu communal hatreds but united in their fierce determination to inflict maximum casualties on one another. Gandhi’s satyagraha managed to create an ambivalence in that determination. The subsequent pause in the religious violence that followed eventually led to a reexamination of motives that he believed to be essential in the quest for swaraj. Nonviolent power depends on this capacity to pause, evoked now by Gandhi in Calcutta, as earlier from the Raj. In the days following the fast, Gandhi reflected on its lessons and felt both despair and solace in what he had learned. The grim truths that India remained far from real swaraj, that the road ahead appeared so painful, and that the practice of satyagraha had not come more easily were all hard to accept.
Yet there were heartening lessons as well. Calcutta’s response to the fast proved again a truth vital for satyagraha, that a common need for peace and security transcends partisan and violent interests even when the latter seem unassailable; that the unusual power of satyagraha can force warring parties to a point where their common interest becomes clear and compelling; and, if India’s journey to swaraj was not over, the way to it had proved its worth under the worst circumstances. Gandhi now found a certain glory in how an inclusive act had triumphed over all the exclusivist factions in the city and in how a goal like swaraj still held forth a promise of liberation finer than mere independence, a deeply personal freedom from fear and freedom for peace.110
By January 1948, the month of his assassination, Gandhi had determined to fast again, this time in Delhi, once more for communal peace and once again, after six days, the fast ended in success. Yet, northern India was still alive with conflict, so he prepared to leave for the riot-torn Punjab. Only his willingness to perform these heroic acts of self-sacrifice made a difference where civilian or military police could not. Yet, his supreme act of self-sacrifice now lay immediately ahead of him. He must have known this because on January 20 a bomb exploded in one of his prayer meetings. Some Hindus were enraged by his efforts to protect Muslims.
One historian recognizes as Gandhi’s “finest hour” these efforts to combat communal violence; but he then concludes: “Unfortunately, Gandhi himself lost his life at the hands of a Hindu fanatic—a tragic commentary on his cherished principles of non-violence and faith in the ‘change of heart.’”111 This judgment does not take into account that Gandhi’s assassination, more than any other single event, served to stop the communal violence surrounding partition. It achieved this in the same way as his fasts, by causing people to pause and reflect in the midst of their fear, anger, and enmity: to ask themselves if the cost was worth it. A mixture of motives was probably at work, merciful and rational as well as grief-stricken or guilt-ridden. But somehow a determination came to stop the killing. If Gandhi’s assassination had resulted, as so many assassinations have, in an increase of violence and recrimination, then it may be deemed a tragic comment on the futility of nonviolence. As it happened, in the eloquent words of a prominent Muslim politician: “His assassination had a cathartic effect and throughout India men realized with a shock the depth to which hatred and discord had dragged them. The Indian nation turned back from the brink of the abyss and millions blessed the memory of the man who had made redemption possible.”112 There was no higher tribute to his life than the impact of his death, his final statement for swaraj.
• CHAPTER SIX
Mohandas, Malcolm, and Martin
My nationalism as my religion is not exclusive but inclusive and they must be so consistently with [the] welfare of all life.”
—Gandhi1
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
—Malcolm X2
Gandhi and Malcolm X: In Quest of Swaraj
Striking comparisons between the life experiences of Gandhi and Malcolm X begin with the fact that they (unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., or most other political leaders), have produced extraordinarily revealing autobiographies. These are of such quality that they have become classics of modern world literature as stories of self-realization that express stages of personal and political development explicable in terms of their common responses to racist oppression.
The initial chapters of both autobiographies tell stories of childhoods marked by terrible fears of inadequacy related to their perceptions of white superiority.3 In an important sense, th
eir lives become examples of handling fear and their success is then conveyed to their followers who share their feelings. The centrality of the emotion of fear in Gandhi’s experience is emphasized by Jawaharlal Nehru in the passage cited in chapter 3. Nehru said there about Gandhi that “The essence of his teaching was fearlessness,” a teaching sorely needed because “the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear, pervasive, oppressing, strangling fear,” that “it was against this all-pervading fear that Gandhi’s quiet and determined voice was raised: Be not afraid,” and consequently “that black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders, not wholly, of course, but to an amazing degree.” Nehru’s claim is worth recounting because it explains the dynamics of leadership in a situation fraught with racial oppression and thus suggests parallels between Gandhi and Malcolm X.4
Both connect their assumed inferiority to their skin color as a result of fears inspired by white racism. Gandhi is explicit about how tales of “the mighty Englishmen” ruling inferior Indians relate to his childhood fears of personal inadequacy.5 Malcolm’s account of an encounter with his eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, is unforgettable. Malcolm had been an outstanding student and one afternoon when they were alone together, his teacher asked him if he had thought about a future career. Malcolm replied that he would like to be a lawyer. Mr. Ostrowski “looked surprised” and then responded: “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic…you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.” Mr. Ostrowski suggested that carpentry was an appropriate career choice. Malcolm said that afterwards the conversation “just kept treading around in my mind,” and “It was then that I began to change—inside. I drew away from white people. It became a physical strain simply to sit in Mr. Ostrowski’s class. Where ‘nigger’ had slipped off my back before,” now it was different.6 No other experience that Malcolm recounts exacerbated his fears of personal inadequacy more than this exchange with a white teacher he had respected. The rest of the autobiography may be interpreted as his struggle to overcome these fears by proving himself, striving to gain self-esteem within a racist system. This became his fight for swaraj and, like Gandhi, it developed into a powerful statement of leadership. As Malcolm’s biographer, Bruce Perry, observes, “His ability to conquer his fear—and to inspire his followers to conquer theirs…was part of his uniqueness” and a major source of his appeal.7
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