[mukto-mona] Please read - Death of The Mahatma

Dear Friends - I will go out on a limb & post these two articles that will most likely annoy everybody from development boosters, to leftists to religious chauvinists of all hues and everyone in between. But on the 60th anniversary of his death, we need to learn from his life and sacrifice more than ever everywhere in this world.

Robin.

Death of The Mahatma

30 Jan 2008, 0136 hrs IST

Ashis Nandy

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Death_Of_The_Mahatma/articleshow/2741672.cms

 

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 contradiction 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?"

 

The writer is a political psychologist. 

 

Why Bapu matters

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Indian Express

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/266779.html

 

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.

 

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research

pratapbmehta@yahoo.co.in

 

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