People make a fetish of ‘himsa’ (violence) and ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) even on simple issues like the installation of the lions on the Ashoka pillar in a more aggressive format. The opposition seems to have run out of issues. A lion commands respect for its ferocity and aggressiveness just as a cow generates love for its sheer serenity. Arguably, serenity and peace on the face of a lion is as contradictory as a look of aggression on a cow. This depiction of lions is hardly a violation of its essential nature. However, it is amazing that when the so-called ‘right-wing’ or ‘traditionals’ want change, the left-liberals actually oppose it! Ahimsa and non-violence are unfortunately a superficial superimposition upon us an ideal of the nation and this is a big mistake.
Sri Aurobindo used to say that ahimsa and non-violence were tools for personal transformation and spiritual attainment but they are extremely damaging when applied to the dharma of the nation fighting many internal and external adversaries. Sri Aurobindo replied to Gandhiji’s son Devdas on a question about non-violence, ‘If Afghanistan decides to invade India, how would non-violence help?’ There was no answer. It is plain naiveté to expect that by disarming oneself, the enemy would also do the same. However, this was precisely the attitude of Gandhiji which endeared him to the British authorities and the Muslims of that period. As Sri Aurobindo insisted, ahimsa is the dharma of a seeker for moksha or nirvana but it is not the ideal of a Kshatriya fighting inimical forces and protecting the country.
Gandhi was a deeply patriotic great man. However, like all great men, despite having the heart in the right place, his ideas had many contradictory strands. Gandhi’s core worldview of passive or nonviolent direct action strongly evolved in South Africa. His nephew suggested the name ‘sadagraha’ to the movement which Gandhi modified to Satyagraha (‘satya’ means truth; ‘graha’ means firmness). The key idea of Satyagraha was winning over the enemy with love, self-suffering, defying unjust rules, accepting punishments that go along with it, and most importantly, without malice or physical violence against the rulers. The idea is to get rid of the injustice but not to unseat the men from power. The means always must be right to achieve the right ends. There were plenty of contradictions in its application but clearly such a non-violent resistance was more conducive for the British to handle.
The standard narratives trace Gandhiji’s ideas to European thinkers, his mother’s piety, and many Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences. However, European influences could have been more vital. These include Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God is Within You), William Salter (Ethical Religion), and Thoreau (An Essay on Civil Disobedience). Sri Aurobindo saw Gandhiji more as a Russian Christian than a true Hindu with his concepts of Ahimsa, surrender, suffering, and acceptance of evil as a purifying experience. These held true for an individual but not for the nation. A satyagrahi invested a certain amount of trust in the opponent’s sense of ‘fair play’. Throughout Gandhiji’s political life, the opponent was European; and English most often.
One of the earliest problems with Satyagraha was that it was not immune to racial stereotyping as Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed show in their book The South African Gandhi. Only the Indians who have ‘drunk the nectar of devotion’ could lead the people on the right path of Satyagraha. One close associate of Gandhi thought that the native South African would need many generations of culture before they can hope to be passive resisters in the true sense of the term. There were other contradictions too. In South Africa, Gandhiji was witness to two wars – the second Boer war and the Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906 (the second Zulu war) between the colonials and the settler minority. In both, there were tremendous brutalities inflicted by the colonials. In both, Gandhiji was a stretcher-bearer in the ambulance corps and viewed the participation of Indians as a defense of the colony. He was silent on the horrors visited on the African war including the dreaded ‘scorched Earth’ policy. In 1913, a campaign spiraled out of control as the indentured labor went into a severe rioting and bloodshed mode. Gandhiji was unsympathetic to the workers gunned down in defending themselves by chiding that they had brought this upon themselves. There was silence on the violence of the ruling class.
Similarly, in the Empire’s hour of need during the wars, Gandhi showed a startling reversal. When Gandhi landed in England in 1914 en route to his back-home trip to India, the First World War broke out. He surprised his supporters by recruiting Indians in England for non-combatant roles in the war arguing that volunteering would prove their readiness for self-government. It would also be an act of reciprocation to the British who were protecting the Indians. Many contemporary friends of Gandhi and later scholars too found this stance objectionable. One author James Hunt says, ‘there were never any words of the horrors of war or of the folly of European nations in their descent of barbarism.’
The departure from his philosophy was more severe in 1918 where he appealed to Indians to take up arms during the First World War to prove that they were ‘worthy partners of the Empire.’ Previously, in 1899, 1906, and 1914, it was recruiting of only non-combatants. In 1918, however, after Lord Chelmsford’s Indian War Conference in Delhi to increase Indian support to fight the English war, Gandhi traveled extensively to help recruiting soldiers. Gandhi’s recruitment leaflet ‘Appeal for Enlistment’ dated 22 June 1918 calls for Indians to learn the use of arms and acquire the ability to defend themselves and to prevent the tag of ‘effeminacy and cowardice’ of the Gujaratis.
Clear in the racial hierarchy, Gandhi consistently fought for South African Indians for treatment at par with the white subjects being a part of the Empire and having a common Aryan lineage. His not speaking about the twenty thousand Africans who died in the concentration camps reflected his attitude of placing the Africans below the Indians in an imagined racial hierarchy. In both the wars of South Africa where the blacks suffered greatly, there were never any words for the brutalities inflicted on the native population. The Black African movement went in parallel to Gandhi’s fights; there is little evidence to show that Gandhi interacted greatly with the leaders fighting for African rights. One author Patrick French writes, ‘Gandhi’s blanking of Africans is the black hole at the heart of his saintly mythology.’ A strong and unwavering attachment to Empire underpinned and contained Gandhi’s strategic choices in South Africa. His involvement for Indian rights also was weakly successful with huge compromises, basically accepting a second-rate status to Indians.
One of the serious criticisms of Gandhi was that his non-violence was a weapon to the liking of his opponents. His power and hold over the Congress and the masses did neutralize the call of those who sought to use more revolutionary methods, including war, to advance Home Rule. In the 1913 strike of South Africa or later in 1922 (Chauri-Chaura incident) during the post-Jallianwala Bagh non-cooperation call, Gandhi would suddenly call off the movement with incidents of violence on part of the rioting mobs. Some argue that Gandhiji was ironically a powerful tool of the Empire and the British Raj gave him an audience because they saw in him a useful person who could keep the natives in place. The Indian natives hopelessly outnumbered the British in India and any mass armed movement would have the English quickly eliminated. Non-violence as a tool was just perfect for them as many English officials admitted in private. George Orwell (Reflections on Gandhi) says, “…. the British were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence – which from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever – he could be regarded as ‘our man’.”
After his return to India from South Africa, Gandhi desperately sought unity between the Hindus and Muslims despite a hard and hostile stance on the Muslim’s side. He bent over backward to appease the Muslims. Gandhi’s repeated fasts mostly against his own followers but never against the Muslim League; support of Ali Brothers; support of Khilafat movement; support to the Amir of Afghanistan when the latter was contemplating to attack British India; asking Hindu refugees to go back to Pakistan even at the risk of death; befriending Suhrawardy, who as a Chief Minister of Bengal remained inactive on the Direct Action Day (August 16, 1946); the opposition to Arya Samaj and his silence on the killing of Swamy Shraddhananda; forcing the Indian government to pay 550 million rupees to Pakistan, who in turn, in all probabilities, used it to attack India; and a continuing retreat to the extent of proposing a 100% Muslim cabinet were all hard-core Muslim appeasement politics. Ironically, Muslims use Gandhi’s death by a Hindu nationalist as a stick to beat the Hindus constantly ever since.
Other examples of his peculiar non-violence application include a letter to Hitler as a ‘friend’ in a naïve bid to change his heart. Gandhiji wrote in one of his articles asking the British to allow Germany to peacefully conquer them, and the Jews accept killing by the anti-Semites as a supreme act of non-violence. This would surely melt Hitler’s heart! Koenraad Elst in his book on Godse’s defense statement (Why I Killed the Mahatma) says Gandhi made a grave mistake in thinking that one can make the enemy disarm by first disarming oneself.
Gandhi was a great politician who could mobilize the masses like no one else. His major crusades against untouchability, his mobilization of masses, and his almost divine status prevented the nefarious communists to gain a major foothold in India. This prevention of communists to enter India was perhaps his greatest contribution. Post-independent India constructed a saintly image for Gandhiji perhaps a little more than deserved. The Quit India collapsed in 1942, and our independence had a lot more reasons equally important, if not more, apart from non-violence: Subhash Bose, the Naval mutinies, World War 2, Labour Government in England, and the economic hardships of England.
Sri Aurobindo, a critic of Gandhian ahimsa, believed that as a weapon against dominating powers ahimsa was weak and ineffective. At best it could grant some concessions from the dominating powers. The Kshatriya Dharma is the readiness to sacrifice life and even use violent means to protect the integrity of the land and its people. This was the teaching of Lord Krishna to a confused Arjuna at the beginning of the Kurukshetra war. Arjuna understands this at the end of the instruction but the country unfortunately stays confused in mixing personal and the national ideals. Ahimsa is a spiritual quality meant for personal inner transformation but it would be a fallacy to imagine it as an ideal of a nation. The symbolism on the Ashoka pillar is only appropriate and the lions may be just a rediscovered ideal of the nation.
A SHORT LETTER IN THE HANS INDIA ON 15TH JULY 2022
RANDOM MUSINGS 