New Context Of Remembering Gandhi

Is this the India Gandhi wanted? In his last days, Hindu-Muslim unity and protection of minorities in independent India were the only priorities. After he was killed by a Hindutva activist, the dominant discourse on Gandhi remained centred around his efforts to bring peace in riot-torn parts of India. People did not do what he thought of India as a civilization. His arguments against modern civilisation were almost forgotten

“I wish that my name is forgotten, and only my work endures. The work will endure only if the name is forgotten,” Mahatma Gandhi writes on 24 November 1909 to his nephew Maganlal Gandhi after completing his book ‘Hind Swaraj’. Like every year, we will remember him this year also on coming 2 October.

We proved him wrong. His name lives on and will live on eternally. However, there is no sign of his works or ideas surviving for long. We are determined to make an India that should not have any trace of what Gandhi dreamt of. Only yesterday a cop, popularly considered a super cop, was arguing on a TV channel that Akshay Shinde, the accused of sexual assault of a minor in a suburban school in the Mumbai suburb of Badlapur, was rightly shot while being transported to the court. The Mumbai High Court has questioned the authenticity of the encounter.

These incidents are not limited to one or two States. They have become norms. We have seen how encounters have become the norm in Uttar Pradesh, and the accused could be shot in judicial custody as well. The Chief Minister boasts of being ruthless to criminals. His assertions distinctly target a community, the Muslims. He is famous for his bulldozers. He goes on doing so, despite the verdicts and comments of the Supreme Court. He reissued the order that all eateries should have nameplates of their owners and managers. The Supreme Court had forced him to withdraw a police order of the same nature for a pilgrimage route. He just wants to snatch the livelihood of the poor Muslims.

Is this the India Gandhi wanted? In his last days, Hindu-Muslim unity and protection of minorities in independent India were the only priorities. After he was killed by a Hindutva activist, the dominant discourse on Gandhi remained centred around his efforts to bring peace in riot-torn parts of India. People did not do what he thought of India as a civilization. His arguments against modern civilisation were almost forgotten. It all happened despite the efforts of his great disciple Vinoba Bhave and others to bring his other ideas on reconstructing a rural India. Most of these miserably failed. Vinoba tried to solve the land problems without violence and tried to mitigate the fire the Telangana Revolt had generated. His Bhoodan movement could not survive, and another revolt against feudalism hit Indian countryside in the mid-nineteen sixties. This was known as the Naxalite movement. Gandhi’s other disciple, Jaiprakash Narayan, camped in a village near Muzaffarpur district of Bihar to extinguish the fire. However, the movement could not be stopped from spreading. Within a decade, Jaiprakash was himself on the streets to protest against the misrule of Indira Gandhi. He was supported by the RSS and the Bhartiya Jansangh, the predecessor of the Bhartiya Janata Party. The RSS till then a pariah in Indian politics got legitimised, leaving Jaiprakash lamenting that they deceived him by refusing to shun their communal stance.

Indians have always been ambivalent toward Gandhi. The same was the case when he came out with his ‘Hind Swaraj’. His guru, Gopalkrishna Gokhle, completely disapproved of his ideas. His disciple Jawaharlal Nehru did the same. The latter dismissed his idea of self-governing villages and thought it was romantic. His ‘Discovery of India’ may be considered an antithesis of what Gandhi thought about Indian civilization. Though both have expressed pride in depicting the greatness of Indian civilisation, their reference points are different. Both of them praise the pluralism of Indian society and its spiritual achievements.

The difference between Gandhi and Nehru on shaping India has been exploited by the RSS and likes. However, they are based on a high order of superficiality. They never differed on secularism, individual liberty, and democracy. They differed on the kind of technology India was to adopt. Nehru was convinced that India needs modern technology and science to get rid of the poverty it has inherited from colonial rule. The RSS supports the idea of big machinery and modern equipment without referring to Nehru. However, it ridicules him for his adherence to secularism. The RSS and the BJP have been opposed to Gandhi’s idea of secularism. Hindutva organisations have been trying to reduce Gandhi to a man whose ideals were limited to sanitation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his program, his sanitation programs, with all fanfare. The RSS has been running a parallel program to rewrite the history of freedom struggle and try to establish VD Savarkar as a national hero.

However, Gandhi cannot become irrelevant. He is relevant for the entire world, including India. How can we establish peace without following him? How can we think of surviving the challenge of climate change? While receiving the Nobel Prize, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that Gandhi’s writings are most relevant in fighting climate change.

“Gandhi spoke of Hind Swaraj as his seed text. As the seed comes to life, it is extinguished. Life within the seed may lie still and silent for long. But its beginning marks the end of that from which it began. And in that is inscribed the profound and intensely fluid distance between beginning and end. Seed as the metaphor for beginning speaks of beginning as silent and primal. Its presence is felt and known, and yet it abides unseen, “writes historian Suresh Sharma.

Should not we go to his basic ideas and make a fresh reading of Hind Swaraj?

“Hind Swaraj was written between 3 and 22 November 1909 on the way to South Africa from England, aboard the steamer Kildonan Castle. Ten days of almost continuous writing on the ship’s stationery were marked by restless intensity of a kind that Gandhi had perhaps never known before. He wrote when he could no longer 'restrain’ himself. When the right hand tired, Gandhi wrote thirty-eight pages with his left hand,” Sharma writes. We need to remember all these on his Jayanti.

(The author is a senior journalist. He has experience of working with leading newspapers and electronic media including Deccan Herald, Sunday Guardian, Navbharat Times and Dainik Bhaskar. He writes on politics, society, environment and economy)