Mahatma Gandhi was a unique Indian and world figure. His message of non-violence opened a new dimension in politics, because politics was his weapon of choice. There were other remarkable figures who preached love and tolerance from secluded meditative retreats. Gandhi had his ashram for reflection far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. But such moments led him to his inner voice. Having submitted to this life enhancing experience, Gandhi emerged with new vigour, milling with the multitudes, conversing with colleagues, big and small, consulting with political leaders of every stripe in his visionary endeavours to take society forward in new and novel directions. Gandhi served his early political, social and spiritual apprenticeship in racially divided South Africa, where Africans and other peoples of colour, such as Indians and those of mixed race, all reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water by the country’s white supremacist establishment. Gandhi practised law there, transcending its limits through mass action against unjust laws and injustice in all its forms.
He returned to India on the eve of the First World, which broke out in the mid-summer of 1914. Indian politics at the time was principally led and driven by a middle class elite of lawyers and professionals adept in disputations of constitutional issues with the rulers of British India. Gandhi cast his net wide, drawing in the dumb masses, poor and mostly illiterate, for the most part, giving them a sense of their own worth – a critical struggle that encompassed debilitating caste divisions and loyalties, and caste oppression of the lowly sanctified by time and hallowed ancient tests.
India won its Independence in August 1947. The Partition was a traumatic experience with blood and gore spilled across the country. The Mahatma unflinchingly threw himself into the cauldron, travelling across India to the centres of violence, reproaching the guilty of every faith, appealing to soiled consciences to remember their better instincts and turn a new leaf to redemption. Gandhi was cut down by an assassin nurtured in the culture of vengeance. His martyrdom brought rioting mobs to their senses. A free and sovereign India took the first halting steps to national construction under the rule of law, guaranteeing every citizen his/her rights of free expression and thought irrespective of faith, gender or ethnicity. The pains of labour were, are, self-evident. Much has been achieved, but much more remains to be done to fulfil the dreams of each passing generation.
Gandhi, with his wonderful humour, would surely have smiled at the unending waves of tributes to his memory, the struggles and disappoints he had to endure, and not least, the manner of his tragic death. Such emotional disgorging, alas, contains shoals of hypocrisy: demagogues, unscrupulous politicians, thieving men of business, not to speak of media moguls and their Gandhi supplements bulging with pious platitudes, clichés, empty moralizing and much else that is disreputable. Two national broadsheets included a full page from China’s People’s Daily, the content embarrassingly imbecilic, but, no doubt, paid for handsomely. From the same stable, another broadsheet brings out, from time to time, full page paid advertisements of the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi. Both publications are much given to virtuous sermons on democracy and human rights. Pictures of Gandhi with a quote as embellishment, is an anniversary sport.
An edit-page contributor in the Times of India (October 5) wrote this insightful comment: ‘Gandhi as a political radical did not believe in government and in the state, a troubling aspect for all parties and leaders in government.’ Nor did he believe in industrialisation, as was made abundantly clear in his newspaper, for he was too honest to indulge in the sly casuistry of denial. His preferred constitution, B.R. Ambedkar pointed out, was one best suited to a timeless pastoral.
No political, social, moral system can be ironclad. Gandhi’s methods worked against Jan Smuts in South Africa, and with the British in India because both, by and large, were subject to moral compulsions over unfettered licence; both respected the Mahatma as a man and opponent. Britain’s Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, said of Gandhi at his passing: ‘Throughout his long life he strove for peace and condemned the resort to violence. His loss will be borne by thousands in all walks of life in every country in the world. His moral and spiritual leadership have been an inspiring example in this distracted and troubled age. Britain will share in India’s great grief.’
It was India’s good fortune that Gandhi’s peaceful mass movements deepened and sharpened popular pan-Indian sentiment. Alternative violence might have reverted to competing regional despotisms, which, coinciding with the genesis of the Cold War, could have led to India’s fragmentation. It was Gandhi’s enduring service to his country and people that they remain bonded in common purpose.
A final reflection: Adolf Hitler told British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, that, in Britani’s place, he would have had Gandhi shot without remorse or hesitation. The Nazis dispatched six million non-resisting Jews, men, women and children, to gas chambers. It was the overwhelming might of Allied arms that reduced the monstrous Third Reich to ashes. Force has its uses too.
Dissecting America’s India policy
India is caught in the maelstrom of America’s domestic politics. Democrats and Republicans have been at each other’s throats ever since Donald Trump, against all the odds, won the 2016 Presidential race to the White House. The Democratic Party establishment cried foul and has sought relentlessly to unseat President Trump. If need be through impeachment proceedings. At first sight the Modi-Trump meeting at Houston appeared to be a roaring success. However, closer scrutiny reveals that it was anything but. Both mainstream parties are firmly wedded to the maintenance of US global hegemony, with India perceived by both as an uncongenial Bantustan obstacle.
America’s Manifest Destiny has long been at the heart of the official American narrative. Sanctions regimes, regime change and targeted assassinations of foes, torture chambers, continue to be the staple of American statecraft. That, clearly, is the rub, but such signals rarely register on the general run of partially sighted Indian correspondents, much given to salivating on the projected value-driven union of the world’s two largest democracies. Kashmir is where US coercive diplomacy will be given its first trial run. President Trump was never on board Indian perceptions of Pakistan, repeatedly insisting his willingness to play mediator on Kashmir, pressing for Modi-Imran Khan talks, impervious to Pakistan’s export of Jihadi terrorism to India. Jihadi terrorists have been accommodated, whenever and wherever necessary, in pursuit of America’s geo-political strategies. Remember, also, the studious US neutrality during India’s face-off with China at Doklan in the summer of 2017.Now, bring the pieces together and make the connection: China and Pakistan are all-weather soul mates, Islamabad a common cog in the wheels of Sino-American diplomacy..
The US State Department set Kashmir ball rolling. Senior Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (close to President Trump), on cue, issued a notably harsh statement on Indian transgressions in Kashmir. Fellow Republican Senator Chris Van Hollen made off for New Delhi at the head of a Congressional delegation to voice their concerns on alleged Indian human rights violations and democratic norms in Kashmir to elusive Prime Minister Narendra Modi. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar’s media blitz in Washington, it would appear, left his audiences stone cold. Boisterous twaddle on shared democratic values and much else is scripting drama for the theatre of the absurd.
Making the law an ass
The rule of law can be redemptive; its misuse can reduce its status to that of an ass. Forty-nine celebrities who penned an open letter, way back in July to Prime Minister Modi, expressing disquiet at the abomination of mob lynching did so without naming, shaming or attacking any individual; for this innocuous act have been tarred with the brush of sedition. Sudhir Kumar Ojha, a Muzzarpur lawyer, has filed a petition in the Court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate seeking action against the signatories on the grounds of sedition, public nuisance, and hurt to religious sensibilities. The Muzzarpur police formally registered the complaint – a black comedy of calibrated errors, no doubt, but even for crime-ridden , chaotic Bihar such flights of fancy leave one wondering whether Bihar is a province of China or a State within the Indian Union? Fact is often stranger than fiction.
