Archive for The Legacy of Gandhi
Seven Social Sins
For Gandhi, the seven social sins are:
Politics without principles.
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Education without character
Pleasure without conscience.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Death of the Mahatma
On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the ambivalence towards him in India’s modernising middle classes. Gandhi was not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft, progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, as Nehru alleged, but by one who represented ‘normality’ and ’sanity’.
The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of globalisation in India.
The fear of Gandhi has been consistent in India and it has never been confined to the expensively educated Indians now flourishing in the global knowledge industry. This fear is the fear of ordinary Indian citizens suffering from that incurable disease called Indianness and suspicion of the open politics that empowers them and allows them to bring into public life their strange, alien categories. It was this fear that Nathuram Godse took to logical conclusion on January 30, 1948. His was the third attempt on Gandhi’s life by the Hindu nationalists, the first of which was made in 1930s. They made no such attempt against any other key secular leader in India or against Muslim leaders seen as enemies of Hindus.
Godse thought he was executing Gandhi on behalf of a majority. Exactly as Mayawati and, before her, E M S Namboodiripad felt that they were speaking on behalf of a majority – the bahujan samaj, the proletariat, the Shudras and the Dalits – when they attacked Gandhi. However, once the movement to which Godse belonged began to falter as an ideological formation and succeed as a political party dreaming of capturing power, it began singing a different tune. The RSS included Gandhi’s name in the daily prayers of its branches and, in the 1980s, the BJP even adopted ‘Gandhian socialism’ as its official party ideology. May be Mayawati’s hostility to Gandhi had not waned when she spoke out because she was yet to make a bid for pan-Indian presence.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Leninist hacks have always considered Gandhi a menace to progress, modernity and rationality. The respect to Gandhi that some of the retired Stalinists have begun to show in recent years is a consequence of their political demise. The vendors of secular salvation now find that Gandhi has survived our times better than they have.
M N Roy, who broke away from Marxism, disagreed with the Leninists on many counts but not on Gandhi. His three essays on Gandhi, read chronologically, show a declining hostility towards the Mahatma. The first is dismissive, the second ambivalent, the third mildly positive. As his confidence in being able to mobilise people for his version of revolution faltered, he came to grudgingly appreciate Gandhi’s ability to touch the ordinary Indians despite his ‘irrational’ credo. Indian Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s were no less hostile to Gandhi. He with his toothless smile seemed to them a sly, scheming warhorse brainwashing rural India with his bogus ideology, whereas they, despite their direct communion with objective, scientific history and theoretical guidance from the great witch doctor at Beijing, had been exiled to urban India to survive as an ordinary terrorist outfit. As Gandhi was dead by then, they took out their anger against him by breaking his statues.
Within a decade though, from within the ranks of Indian Maoists emerged some who drew heavily, often creatively, upon Gandhi. Pushed to the margins of politics, with their dreams of an early revolution in tatters, the ageing lions began to ruminate over their failures and take Gandhi seriously. Two steps backward and one step forward, as the great helmsman might have said! The liberals have never found Gandhi digestible either. Shankaran Nair, an early Congress leader, said that Gandhi was against everything that the great sons of 19th century India stood for. Gopal Krishna Gokhale was even more forthright. He declared Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj to be “the work of a fool” and prophesied that “Gandhi would destroy it after he spent a year in India”. Such honest estimates are now rare, because the liberals in the meanwhile have produced their own house-broken Gandhi – modern, nationalistic, progressive, statist and secular. There is nothing left of the politically incorrect, intellectual maverick who took on the imperious Enlightenment vision and refused to accept that its dominance was proof of its finality.
It is possible that Gandhi sensed his growing isolation in public life. The 200 years of western domination had done its job and the definition of normal politics had changed in India. Gandhi chose death, using as his accomplice the naive, lost ideologue, Godse, to sharpen the contra-diction that had arisen between the Indian civilisation and the newborn Indian nation-state. Robert Payne understands this when he says, “For Gandhi this death was a triumph. He died as the kings do, felled at the height of their powers”. And Sarojini Naidu was right when she said: “What is all this snivelling about? …Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion?”
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Ashis Nandy; The Times of India, 30 January 2008
Why Bapu Matters
Is he revered more because of his absence than his presence?
Gandhi’s gloriously original and inventive life continues to be extraordinarily fascinating. But his assassination remains shrouded in embarrassed silence. At the Indira Gandhi memorial, visitors are subjected to the details of her assassination. Gandhi, on the other hand is memorialised, but not primarily through Birla House, a monument that still does not have its rightful place in the historical itineraries of Delhi. There is a simple story we have told about the assassination: Gandhi was killed by a fanatic representing the fringes of society, and that is that. But for a life whose every gesture was overloaded with meaning, the interpretive silence over Gandhi’s assassination itself begs for interpretation. Was it the enormity of that crime that silences us? Or was it its marginality? Were the perpetrators distant from us? Or was there a wider complicity, if not with the assassination itself, with the sentiments that fuelled it? The question, ‘Why was Gandhi killed’, is an easy one to answer only if we deliberately shut ourselves to the complex political realities of the time.
There is a sense in which Gandhi’s death, notwithstanding the extraordinary grief it elicited was, with hindsight, an occasion that gave political relief to the nation. Perhaps it is the fate of great lives that they, at some point, achieve more in their death than by living. Gandhi had already become marginal to the new forms Indian politics was taking in the late forties. He was out of sync with the political tendencies of the time: communalism, Partition, new constitutionalism, and development. He also had the sense of being marginalised in his personal relationships with leaders of the time. He had to plead to be consulted on major decisions, including Partition. But to see what his death achieved, just think of the counterfactual. One of the matters he attended to before his death was the rift between Nehru and Patel. His death, as Ram Guha has argued, ensured that the two would continue to work together. Imagine the strain it would have been on the fledgling republic if the Congress had openly split around these two personalities.
It has to be admitted that his continual presence and riposte to the government that was coming into being would have been an extraordinary liability for Nehru. On almost every issue of the time there were serious tensions between the emerging state and what Gandhi stood for; and his stance would have continually cast a shadow of doubt over Congress’s legitimacy. To put it bluntly, it was beginning to be felt that with Gandhi around, normal politics would have been near-impossible. But perhaps most importantly, had it not been for Gandhi’s assassination, the new state would not have been able to delegitimise Hindu nationalism to the extent it did. It has become all too easy to forget the fact that by the late forties Hindu nationalism was in the position of being a potent political force, and the assassination made it difficult for more people to openly avow it. In a way, the surprise is not that Hindu nationalism reappeared in the eighties, legitimised by the excesses of the Congress; the surprise is that the guilt of being killers of Gandhi remained a damper on its aspirations for so long.
It is a pity that we still don’t fully come to terms with Godse’s claims at his trial. I suspect it is because his words are a mirror unto a widespread complicity about Gandhi’s political place in modern India. The parts that those who read the speech focus on are the familiar ones: Godse as the fanatic who blamed Gandhi for Partition, appeasing Muslims and bringing ruin to Hindus. These are easily dismissed. But it is more difficult to shake off his sense of being imprisoned by Gandhi. He speaks of an accumulated 32 years of resentment. But the essence of his case has three prongs: Gandhi was a failure, the charkha could not even clothe 1 per cent of the nation and non-violence was an ideal honoured only in the breach. Second, Gandhi was impractical. But most importantly, Gandhi’s virtue had become his vice: “Gandhiji should have either changed his policy or could have admitted his defeat and given way to others of different political views to deal with Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League.” The problem with Gandhi, on this view, was that his own path was too impractical to succeed, but his presence was powerful enough to ensure that no other path could gain equal legitimacy. Gandhi remained the high ideal, but he was now the ideal that stood in our way. In a way Gandhi’s resolute individuality, Ekla Chalo had become, not a signifier of leadership, but an ability to block. Again to quote, “Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.” In a sense this captured the schizophrenia over Gandhi: his undoubted power over us, but also an experience that this power was a fetter to our conception of practicality.
One of the judges presiding over the trial had little doubt that had the audience on the day of trial been constituted into a jury, they would have returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ on Godse. To say that we were all complicit in Gandhi’s death would be to obscure several important moral distinctions. But it is not too far-fetched a claim to say that by the late forties no one had any idea about what to do with him. Even Patel and Nehru were at their wit’s ends. The moral force of his ideals could not be denied, even if living up to them was impossible; his personality remained a powerful force that could move people to peace. But it was peace sustained by the aura of his personality, not an acceptance of his ideals. In some contexts, Gandhi still remains supremely relevant. There is little doubt, for instance, that the Palestinian cause would have succeeded far more if it had taken a Gandhian turn. His manner of constructing a fearless and inventive self remains supremely instructive. As the first genius to master mass politics, he remains, to use the defining aspiration of our times, cool. But on the sixtieth anniversary of his assassination, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that he is revered more because of his absence than his presence. As with Munnabhai, his ghost occasionally haunts us, but the important thing is that it is only a ghost. His assassination allowed us to cope with him.
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Pratap Bhanu Mehta; Indian Express, 30 January, 2008
Faith Communities in a Civil Society – Christian Perspectives
On September 11th, 1906, Mohandas Gandhi addressed a meeting of some 3,000 people in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg to protest against the introduction of registration and fingerprinting for all Indians in South Africa – part of the first wave in the terrible history of legal racism in South Africa which ended at last in the final decade of the last century. It was a Muslim in the audience, Haji Habib, who firstproposed that the decision for non-violent resistance to the legislation should be taken ‘in the name of God’. Gandhi stressed the great solemnity of such a form of words, but the meeting rose to affirm this as their will. The satyagraha movement was born, the movement of ’soul force’ whose central principle was that our behaviour must witness to truth whatever the cost – and that this witness to truth can never, of its very nature, involve violence or a response to oppression that simply mirrors what has been done by the oppressor. In Gandhi’s vision, Christ’s prohibition against retaliation came together with his own Hindu heritage to inspire a lifetime of absolutely consistent labour on behalf of this ’soul power’; and on that day in Johannesburg, as at many other points in his life, Gandhi was wholeheartedly supported by his Muslim allies.
The ironies don’t need to be spelled out today. It is also the anniversary of an act of nightmare violence which has set in motion a further chain of retaliation, fear and misery. In 1906, the convergence of traditions and disciplines of faith signalled the possibility of escaping from the calculations of ordinary political struggle, the world in which we simply go on imitating the behaviour that has damaged us inthe insane hope that we might somehow arrive at a point where someone has a sufficient monopoly of the power to generate fear to guarantee stability. A hundred and one years on, that system of political calculation seems stronger than ever in much of our world; and worse still, religious communities are regularly blamed for its persistence and power. If we ask whether the coming together of religious groups works today as a sign of hope, the response from a good part of the educated public is not very encouraging. Part of our agenda, then, both in the working of the Christian-Muslim Forum and in the discussions of this meeting, has to be to recover that sense of a convergent belief in the possibility of liberation from the systems of violent struggle, in a way that genuinely opens doors in our world.
Gandhi’s own conversion to a consistent philosophy of non-violence was, he tells us in My Experiments with Truth (p.195), greatly assisted by an insight that brought together legal training with his study of the Gita: ‘I understood the Gita teaching of non-possession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee, who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.’ This offers a very useful way in to the question of what it is that makes or ought to make the perspective of religious faith liberatingly distinctive in human society – both in the sense Gandhi intended and in a much wider and more radical sense. Gandhi is reflecting on the emphasis in the Bhagavad-Gita on detachment: our natural or instinctive way of operating in the world is to imagine ourselves as controlling both our own destiny and the conditions in which we live, so that we struggle for the conditions that promise us such control. But the divine imperative is that our actions should be determined not by this but by the fixed resolve to act in accordance with the truth – that is, with the truth of who and what he actually are both in society and in the universe itself. When we have learned to act in this way, we are free from fear; we give up the anxious effort to master our circumstances by force. Who we are and what we have come to us from God, and what they communicate to us of God’s goodness can never be lost; so it is possible for us to see both who we are and what we have as given for the sake of others. Hence we are trustees: we own nothing absolutely, but are commissioned to communicate to others in spiritual and in directly practical ways the assurance that God has given us.
Gandhian satyagraha is thus rooted in an attitude which, in his eyes, should be fundamental to all religious practice and belief worth the name, an attitude that relativizes the claim of the self to absolute possession or absolute control. But it does not entail – as the superficial observer might think – absolute passivity or the acceptance of injustice; as Gandhi’s witness so consistently shows, it is rather that it dictates the way in which we resist. We do not resist in such a way that we appear to be seeking the same kind of power as is now injuring or frustrating us. We do not imitate anything except the truth: our model is the divine communication of what is good. But beyond this obvious principle is the further point which Gandhi implies but does not fully state: belief itself is not a possession, something acquired by the ego that will henceforth satisfy the ego’s needs for security and control. To believe in God is to be a ‘trustee’ of God’s truth. My belief is not a thing I own; I might say, truthfully enough, that it ‘owns’ me, that I am at its service, not that it is at mine. When I claim truth for my religious convictions, it is not a claim that my opinion or belief is superior, but a confession that I have resolved to be unreservedly at the service of the reality that has changed my world and set me free from the enslavement of struggle and rivalry. To witness to this in the hope that others will share it is not an exercise in conquest, in signing up more adherents to my party, but simply the offer of a liberation and absolution that has been gratuitously offered to me. When Gandhi reminded his Johannesburg audience that a promise made in the name of God was a serious matter, he was underlining for them the fact that commitment to God in their work for justice involved them in an act of renunciation in the name of truth, the renunciation of any style of living and acting that simply reproduced the ordinary anxieties and exchanges of force that constitute the routine of human society.
Now not all of us are going to agree about how far the claims of Gandhi’s legacy extend, how far he was able to see their full implications within his own Indian context or how they are to be implemented in our contemporary setting. But if we are asking about the place of religious commitment in modern civil society, it seems to me that these aspects of his vision of satyagraha are a very suggestive starting-point. What he is asserting is that the religious witness is at its most clearly distinctive in society when it most plainly declares itself answerable to an order quite beyond the balances and negotiations of social conflict and its containments; and when it thus renounces the claim to have a place among others in the social complex.
This is, I grant, a startling way of putting it; surely what any religious believer wants is to have the voice of faith heard within the pluralist debate, to have a guaranteed place at the table? Surely that’s why we are discussing the whole question of faith and civil society and why we want to answer once and for all the reproach that religion is a dangerous and destabilizing presence in our culture? Well, yes; but the point which Gandhi invites us to consider is that we shall persuade our culture about this only when religion ceases to appear as yet another human group hungry for security, privilege and the liberty to enforce its convictions. To have faith, Gandhi might say, is to hold something in trust for humanity – a vision of who and what humanity is in relation to a truth that does not depend on worldly victory. And to witness to a truth that does not depend on worldly victory – a truth that, in Plato’s terms, is not just the interest of the strong or successful – implies that we do not battle for its survival or triumph in the way that interests and parties do in the world around us. In a paradox that never ceases to challenge and puzzle both believers and unbelievers, it is when we are free from the passion to be taken seriously, to be protected or indeed to be obeyed that we are most likely to be heard. The convincing witness to faith is one for whom safety and success are immaterial, and one for whom therefore the exercise of violent force against another of different conviction is ruled out. And the nature of an authentically religious community is made visible in its admission of dependence on God – which means both that it does not fight for position and power and that it will not see itself as existing just by the license of human society. It proclaims both its right to exist on the basis of the call of God and its refusal to enforce that right by the routine methods of human conflict.
All this is, for the Christian believer, rooted in the gospel narrative and in the reflections of the first Christians. Jesus himself in his trial before Pilate says that his royal authority does not derive from anything except the eternal truth which he himself embodies as the incarnate Word of God; only if his authority depended on some other source would his servants fight (Jn 18.36-7). Earthly authority needs to reinforce itself in conflict and dominance; if the community of Jesus’ followers reinforced itself in such a way, it would be admitting that its claims were derived from this human order. The realm, the basileia, of God, to which Jesus’ acts and words point is not a region within human society any more than it is a region within human geography; it is that condition of human relationships, public and private, where the purpose of God is determinative for men and women and so becomes visible in our history – a condition that can be partially realized in the life of the community around Jesus but waits for its full embodiment in a future only God knows. And for the first and second generations of believers, the community in which relation with the Risen Jesus transforms all relationships into the exchange of the gifts given by Jesus’ Spirit has come to be seen as the historical foretaste of this future, as it is here and now the embodiment of Jesus’ own identity – the Body of Christ – to the extent it shows this new quality of relation.
The Church is, in this perspective, the trustee of a vision that is radical and universal, the vision of a social order that is without fear, oppression , the violence of exclusion and the search for scapegoats because it is one where each recognizes their dependence on all and each is seen as having an irreplaceable gift for all. The Church cannot begin to claim that it consistently lives by this; its failure is all too visible, century by century. But its credibility does not hang on its unbroken success; only on its continued willingness to be judged by what it announces and points to, the non-competitive, non-violent order of God’s realm, centered upon Jesus and accessible through commitment to him. Within the volatile and plural context of a society that has no single frame of moral or religious reference, it makes two fundamental contributions to the common imagination and moral climate. The first is that it declares that, in virtue of everyone’s primordial relation to God (made in God’s image), the dignity of every person is non-negotiable: each has a unique gift to give, each is owed respect and patience and the freedom to contribute what is given them. This remains true whether we are speaking of a gravely disabled person – when we might be tempted to think they would be better off removed from human society, or of a suspected terrorist – when we might be tempted to think that torture could be justified in extracting information, or of numberless poor throughout the world – when we should be more comfortable if we were allowed to regard them as no more than collateral damage in the steady advance of prosperity for our ‘developed’ economies.
But the point of this first contribution, as it affects civil society, is this: the presence of the Church, not as a clamorous interest group but as a community confident of its rootedness in something beyond the merely political, expresses a vision of human dignity and mutual human obligation which, because of its indifference to popular success or official legitimation, poses to every other community a special sort of challenge. ‘Civil society’ is the recognized shorthand description for all those varieties of human association that rest on willing co-operation for the sake of social goods that belong to the whole group, not just to any individual or faction, and which are not created or wholly controlled by state authority. As such, their very existence presupposes persons who are able to take responsibility for themselves and to trust one another in this enterprise. The presence of the Christian community puts to civil society the question of where we look for the foundation of such confidence about responsibility and trustworthiness: does this set of assumptions about humanity rest on a fragile human agreement, on the decision of human beings to behave as if they were responsible, or on something deeper and less contingent, something to which any and every human society is finally answerable? Is the social creativity which civil society takes for granted part of a human ‘birthright’?
The second major contribution made by the presence of the Church is what we might in shorthand call universalism – not in the technical theological sense, but simply meaning the conviction that every human agent is involved in either creating or frustrating a common good that relates to the whole human race. In plainer terms, we cannot as Christians settle down with the conclusion that what is lastingly and truly good for any one individual or group is completely different from what is lastingly and truly good for any other. Justice is not local in an exclusive sense or limited by circumstances; there are no classes or subgroups of humanity who are entitled to less of God’s love; and so there are no classes entitled to lower levels of human respect or compassion or service. And since an important aspect of civil society is the assumption that human welfare is not achieved by utilitarian generalities imposed from above but requires active and particularized labour, the fact of the Christian community’ presence once again puts the question of how human society holds together the need for action appropriate to specific and local conditions with the lively awareness of what is due to all people everywhere. This is not only about a vision of universal human justice as we normally think of it, but also applies to how we act justly towards those who are not yet born – how we create a just understanding of our relation to the environment.
In short, the significance of the Church for civil society is in keeping alive a concern both to honour and to justify the absolute and non-negotiable character of the human vision of responsibility and justice that is at work in all human association for the common good. It is about connecting the life of civil society with its deepest roots, acknowledged or not. The conviction of being answerable to God for how we serve and respect God’s human and non-human creation at the very least serves to ensure that the human search for shared welfare and responsible liberty will not be reduced to a matter of human consensus alone. And if the Church – or any other community of faith – asks of society the respect that will allow it to be itself, it does so not because it is anxious about its survival (which is in God’s hands), but because it asks the freedom to remind the society or societies in which it lives of their own vulnerability and their need to stay close to some fundamental questions about the nature of the humanity they seek to nourish. Such a request from Church to society will be heard and responded to, of course, only if the Church genuinely looks as though it were speaking for more than a self-protecting set of ‘religious’ concerns; if it appears as concerned for something more than self-defense. To return to what was said earlier, it needs to establish its credentials as ‘non-violent’ – that is, as not contending against other kinds of human group for a share in ordinary political power. To put it in severely condensed form, the Church is most credible when least preoccupied with its security and most engaged with the human health of its environment; and to say ‘credible’ here is not to say ‘popular’, since engagement with this human health may run sharply against a prevailing consensus. Recent debates on euthanasia offer a case in point; and even here, it is surprisingly often claimed that the churches are concerned here only to sustain their control of human lives – which sadly illustrates what all too many in our society have come to expect of the Church.
I have spoken so far, as I was invited to do, about the Christian understanding of the role of faith in civil society, and have attempted to connect it with some of the most fundamental elements of the Christian revelation – the absolute difference of the power and action of God as against human power (embodied in the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion as the climax of God’s incarnate work), and the universal promise offered in the Resurrection (embodied in the mission of the Church as mediating Christ’s living presence). In doing this, of course, it is impossible not to be aware of the distinct ways in which other religious traditions understand their role in relation to the ambient society. As many have observed, Islam takes as central the conviction that the law and public practice of a society ought ideally to conform to revealed law; Muslims are often puzzled by the Christian insistence on separation between the religious and the political, and it might well be thought that the vision outlined here is so antithetical to the Islamic frame of reference that there is no possible convergence.
Yet there are three considerations that should make us hesitate before settling for this conclusion. The first is that, in understanding divine law as universal and equally applicable to all, Islam, like Christianity, refuses to make faith either subservient to the social order or simply an aspect among others of social life: it is something that offers transformation to the entire range of human activity. The second is that Islam itself recognizes the reality of potential conflict between political power and faithful obedience to revealed law; nothing in Islamic tradition suggests that there could be a guarantee of fidelity to God simply through formal allegiance to Islam by the ruling authority, and the legitimacy of passive resistance to unjust authority is acknowledged. And third, the Qur’anic dictum that there is no compulsion in religion is the foundation for any Muslim account of the imperative of non-violence. This stands, of course, alongside the no less significant tradition of the imperative to jihad as the duty to defend the Muslim community wherever its integrity and survival are at risk; but the question which is bound to arise in our day is whether, given the complex realities of today’s world, there would ever now be the kind of situation which would justify the same sort of defensive jihad that was envisaged in the earliest days of Islam – or whether those commentators are right who insist that the only jihad now justifiable is the struggle against evil in the heart and the resistance to a culture of cruelty and indifference to suffering, a struggle which of its nature must be non-violent.
I look forward to hearing reflection on this and related issues; but my chief point is that the convergence that occurred on this day in Johannesburg in 1906 was not an illusory or opportunistic affair. Both our faiths bring to civil society a conviction that what they embody and affirm is not a marginal affair; both claim that their legitimacy rests not on the license of society but on God’s gift. Yet for those very reasons, they carry in them the seeds of a non-violent and non-possessive witness. They cannot be committed to violent struggle to prevail at all costs, because that would suggest a lack of faith in the God who has called them; they cannot be committed to a policy of coercion and oppression because that would again seek to put the powerof the human believer or the religious institution in the sovereign place that only God’s reality can occupy. Because both our traditions have a history scarred by terrible betrayals of this, we have to approach our civil society and its institutions with humility and repentance. But I hope that this does not mean we shall surrender what is most important – that we have a gift to offer immeasurably greater than our own words or records, the gift of a divine calling and a renewal of all that is possible form human beings.
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(c) Address by Rowan Williams - The Archbishop of Canterbury to the Christian Muslim Forum at Kings Collage, Cambridge – circulated among South Asia Contact group on 11 September 2007.
The Legacy of Gandhi: A 21st Century Perspective
The workshop on “The Legacy of Gandhi: A 21st Century Perspective” was organized by the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore at the Orchard Hotel to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s 138th birth anniversary on 2 October. It began with an introductory address by the acting director Prof. Tan Tai Young where he argued that India has emerged as a strategic player not only economically but also politically and culturally and is embracing the role of a balancing power in the politics of world affairs today. In such context it is important to examine how the views and thinking of Gandhi has shaped the life and developmental trajectory of post-independence Indian nation.
The first speaker of the afternoon was Prof. Ishtiaq Ahmed [Visiting Senior Fellow, ISAS] who spoke about “Mahatma Gandhi and Hindu-Muslim Relations”. How do we look at the legacy of Gandhi? The British Historian Eric Hobsbawm described the 20th century as the “Century of the Extremes” which marked many bloody wars in the name of nationalism and dominance. Gandhi’s effort of achieving freedom, liberation and rights lied not in using force and violence but in peaceful resistance which brings shame to the oppressor. Many have predicted that the 21st century will be the “Century of Asia” and given the growth and developments, such optimism is justified. India and China have emerged as great engines of economic growth. In such context Gandhian idea of self-sufficient villages and national economies may not sound significant but Gandhi’s legacy is a saving grace for our troubled times. Instead of relying on the politics of confrontation, Gandhi defined civilization in the language of peace. He cherished a peaceful and just social order. Even the architect of Kargil war and Pakistan President General Pevez Mussaraf, during his visit to Gandhi Samadhi in Delhi wrote that “your (Gandhi’s) ideas are needed today more than ever before”.
According to Rajiv Sikri, [Former Secretary (east) – Ministry of External Affairs], though many have believed that Nehru has shaped India’s foreign policy, its roots lie in the freedom movement which is influenced by Gandhi. Indian foreign policy, in reality, was inspired by Gandhi and directed by Nehru. Some of the ways in which Gandhian ideas inspired Indian foreign policy are – (1) Non-Aligned Movement, (2) Moral and Economic support against Colonialism and Racism, (3) Non-violence and Nuclear Disarmament, and (4) India’s role as International Peace Maker. The renowned biographer of Gandhi, B.R. Nanda has written that Gandhi has fought against three things – (1) Revolution against Racism, (2) Revolution against Colonialism, and (3) Revolution against Violence. He has been successful in the first two revolutions and his ideas and legacies are still fighting against the third one. As a legacy of Gandhi and as an example of the relevance Gandhi’s ideas October 2 is celebrated by the United Nations as the International Day of Non-Violence.
How has Gandhian ideas influenced the economic policies of the Indian nation state? Speaking about the economic views of Gandhi Prof. D.M. Nachane [Visiting Senior Research Fellow, ISAS] argued that there were three historical conditions that shaped Gandhi’s economic thinking at the time – (1) the neglect of agriculture by the British, (2) the neglect of textiles by the British, and (3) the checking of Indian entrepreneurship by the British because it was thought as a challenge to British Industrialization. He also mentioned that there were four intellectual influences on Gandhian economics – (1) pastoral romanticism – Rousseau, (2) belief not in materialism but in the morals of the people – Ruskin, (3) values – true economics do not militate with ethics, and (4) writings of Karl Marx which mentioned about the exploitation of labour. However, Gandhi deviated from Marxist methodology of revolution and violence and advocated for “trusteeship”. Based on the socio-historical and intellectual influences, Gandhian economics got expressed in four basic ways –
- Swadeshi – which is the outcome of the decline of handicraft industry and colonial exploitation
- Opposition to industrialization influenced by his exclusive emphasis on village community as the ideal form against the western individualism and modernity. He operationalized his model through “charkha” and “khadi” and khadi mentality represented the decentralization of production into the villages.
- Opposition to technology – he was not against technology as whole but towards “western” technology because it was labour-displacing and labour-degrading. Instead, he advocated for what he called the “appropriate technology” which became the developmental catchword in the 1980s.
- Austerity or limitation of wants – he described the consumerist society as the anti-thesis and urged for the voluntary restriction of wants.
Many in the west have misunderstood Gandhian ideas of austerity and thrift with Protestant Ethics. But it was different. While for Protestant Ethics, thrift is meant for higher capital accumulation; for Gandhi, thrift or frugality was not meant for profit. Gandhi opposed centralized planning and heavy industrialization but never opposed capitalism as such. He opposed multinational accumulation of capital but was not against private ownership of capital. Thus Gandhian ideas were reflected in Nehru’s planning and his concessions for small and cottage industries and labour friendly policies. In real sense Gandhian economics was highly implemented during the times of Indira Gandhi and the Janata government. Banks were nationalized to reduce rural poverty; agriculture was emphasized and import substitution policies were adopted during the period. But, Gandhian economics was widely abandoned since 1986 with economic reforms. Though the reforms have generated outstanding growth rate for Indian economy and produced billionaires like Mukesh and Anil Ambani, Ajim Premji and Laxmi Mittal, the benefits of this economic growth has not percolated down to the poor and marginalized and as a testimony to this 30,000 farmers commit suicide every year.
Prof. Partha Nath Mukherjee [S.K Dey Chair at ISS, New Delhi] argued that Gandhi today is not getting forgotten. His legacies did not end with the end of his life. If we are to describe Gandhi in one sentence, it would be the quote that Einstein made – “generation to come, people would disbelieve that such a man flesh and blood ever walked on earth”. It might be true that his idea of communitarian habitation and Swadeshi will not prevail in globalize era but his principles do influence the world. Some of them are – (1) the power of truth and non-violence, (2) participatory democracy – not representative democracy which was the contributions of the west, (3) appropriate technology – because of western technology’s exploitative and alienating nature, (4) emancipatory power of women, (5) rejection of the institutionalized inequality like caste and race, (6) human being as part of nature, (7) rights should be embedded in obligations, and (8) non-western civilizational perspective on “nation”.
One of the central questions Mukherjee tried to look at is how has Gandhian ideas influenced the democratic decentralization process. To him democratic decentralization in India has moved from independence to interdependence through the panchayati raj system and village republic. There are 700,000 villages in India. According to Gandhi, Panchayats or villages will be the “units of self-government”, but paradoxically we inherited the British institutions of democracy and centralized planning which discarded the “village” and adopted the “individual” as the unit of democracy. There were many dilemmas and ambiguities prevalence during the time about the appropriate nature of policies and Nehru was trapped in one such ambiguity between the western modernity on the one hand and the rich civilizational heritage of India on the other. Instead of making “village” as the agencies of change, in Nehruvian period, “state” became nodal agency of social change, development and fast social transformation with “centralization” as the major strategy. However, there has been major shift in development planning over the years. It has been moving from “government programme with people’s participation” to “people’s programme with government participation”.
Despite this, Indian democracy suffers from certain problems which pose challenges before democratic decentralization in India – (1) elite capture of resources, (2) non-elected resource rich NGOs competing with panchayati raj system, (3) rent seeking behaviour, (4) proxy panchayats where husbands of women representatives control panchayat affairs, (5) rigid bureaucracy, and (6) political clientlism.
Dr. Gyanesh Kudaisya [Acting Head, South Asian Studies Programme, NUS] spoke about the global relevance of Gandhi and his legacy in conflict and conflict resolution. He defined conflict not in the traditional way as it is defined in International relations theory but in the way it was understood by Gandhi. Gandhi understood conflict in four basic ways –
- conflict between man and man
- conflict between man and woman
- conflict between man and machine, and
- conflict between man and nature
He quoted Salman Rushdie that “Gandhi today is up for grab” indicating the example of Telecom Italia’s use of Gandhi in their advertisement. To him, Gandhi communicated through his body, through his dressing. He was the greatest communicators in the world. Gandhian politics was dialogical that fought against oppression, hierarchy and technology. Explaining the African American struggle for civil rights, he quoted Martin Luther King that “I found in the non-violence resistance philosophy of Gandhi …the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom”. He also quoted Nelson Mandela to explain the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, “we in South Africa brought about our new democracy relatively peacefully in the foundations of Gandhian thinking regardless of whether we were directly influenced by Gandhi or not”. Mandela also mentioned that “man’s goodness is a flame that can be hit but never extinguished”.
He also explained how Gandhian thinking has influenced various environmental and anti-authoritarian movements. Gandhian ideas and views have provided sustainable economic alternatives to centralized development planning. One of Gandhi’s favourite quotes on sustainability is “the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for anyone’s greed”. Ang San Sun Kyi’s resistance against the Burmese authoritarianism is one of the recent examples of Gandhian method of passive resistance against the oppressive forces. Kyi mentions that the younger generation believes that non-violence will not work in the case of Burma. “Some people think that non-violence is passiveness. It is not so”.
The seminar was followed by a question answer session where many important questions were asked. How was Gandhi perceived in the Muslim world? How great was Gandhi (great man’s theory)? Was he a product of his milieu? And what are the failures of Gandhi? The speakers provided many insights on these questions. Dr. Gyanesh Kudaisya defined Gandhi as a “yugparivartak” – who transformed the time of his age not only in the terrain of politics but also in other spheres of social life. To him, though can not be called as a failure, the difference between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the issue of untouchability was important. While he went on fasting saying untouchables as the part of Hindu society, Ambedkar defined them as separate from Hindu society asked for separate representation like the Muslims. Others also provided many insights on these issues. Gandhi was criticized for his failure to communicate with the Muslims and ambiguity on his religious and secular principles. Some others saw his domestic life as strenuous and troubled, especially with his son. Many also argued that the lack of respect for law and the destruction of public property in post-colonial India have roots in Gandhian idea of civil disobedience movements. Some others also argue that one of the major political blunders Gandhi committed was that he betrayed the nationalist cause by not supporting the case of Bhagat Singh due to his over emphasis on non-violence. Gandhi failed to convert the Congress into a mass organization of the people as its leadership was drawn from the landlords and upper middle class populations.
Would India have achieved independence if Gandhi was not there? If Tilak was not there, how difficult would it have been for Gandhi to enter into national movement against colonialism? The social and historical conditions did produce Gandhi as Mahatma. His experience in South Africa and his training in British law had major influence on him. As Marx had rightly said “men create their own history not independently but in the context of existing history and circumstances”. Gandhi thus was a product of history. Had there been no British colonialism and oppression there would have been no Gandhi.
How would have Gandhi reacted if he was alive to see the large gap between two Indias – the rural and the urban? What would have been his reaction to this divide and exclusionary growth process? How is he relevant today? His “never give-up” attitude influence Indians today. His relevance is reflected through movies like Munna Bhai and others which has “demystified Gandhi” and described him not as a great man or leader but as an ordinary man whom we all can follow. He is present, in a way, in all of us.
The Relevance of Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi is considered as the father of Indian Nation who, with the moral force of satyagraha or passive resistance freed India from the shackles of colonialism. The violent and oppressive structure of British rule crumbled before this moral force after 200 years of exploitation. The method Gandhi adopted was not violence or tit-for-tat, but the force which was more stronger than violent means was the moral force of passive resistance to oppression. According to Gandhi violence or torture is not the means to solve any problem in the world because instead of solving the problem it increases violence and creates a revenge mentality in the minds of the enemy. He argued that “torture is ineffective not just because it rarely produces useful information but also because it corrupts the moral character of a society that allows it to be used”. As we have seen, the “global war on terror” or the “struggle against radical Islam” has not brought any solution to the problem of terrorism and violence in World. Non-violent, peaceful negotiation and understanding of the problem, according to Gandhi, could create appropriate space for global terrorism. As we also have seen, the war on global terrorism, instead of targetting the problem has targetted the persons. Terrorism is not a problem created by Muslims but is problem of a complex reality which can only be solved if we learn how to “empathise with the enemy”.
