How to read Gandhi today

Attempts to selectively appropriate or abominate the Mahatma must stop

A Party that gets Pragya Thakur elected to the Indian Parliament ought not to be celebrating Gandhi’s 150th anniversary. Thakur had openly proclaimed her admiration for Gandhi’s murderer, and she is not alone. Many saffron-clad goons have over the years sought to deify the assassin, thereby valourising the murder, reinforcing the politics of hatred against Gandhian ideals. The very fact that Thakur still remains a BJP MP casts a dark shadow of hypocrisy over the NDA government’s efforts to worship the Mahatma today. A real tribute to Gandhi by Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be a visit to Gandhi Smriti, where the Mahatma was killed, and not Raj Ghat, where the shiny black marble slab reflects the grandeur of its visitors, usually accompanied by the paraphernalia of power. The Raj Ghat or the Grand River Bank is not where Gandhi’s soul lives; every Indian ought to visit Gandhi Smriti with folded hands, beseeching forgiveness for killing Gandhi over and over again, wallowing in a culture of violence.

Gandhi

PM Modi no doubt has recalled Gandhi more often than most contemporary Indian politicians, including Congress leaders, but his admiration for Gandhi is selective. He seeks the Gandhi of Dandi, who broke the salt law to mobilise Indians against the British, and the Gandhi who asked the British to quit India, but not the Gandhi of Noakhali, who wiped away the burning tears of revenge from the faces of Hindus subjected to unspeakable cruelties during the riots organised by Jinnah’s Muslim League; and not the Gandhi of Delhi, who desperately wanted the Hindu refugees to let Muslims stay, and finally died wanting to reunite his nation. Our fiery freedom fighters had every reason to call him ‘the father of our nation’, as Subhas Chandra Bose did for the first time in a radio broadcast from Rangoon on July 6, 1944. Gandhi has to be understood and assimilated in totality, something that Netaji Bose did better than many others, even as he disagreed with Gandhi over the means of attaining freedom. Netaji had indeed imbibed the greatest of Gandhian values of Hindu-Muslim amity and put that in practice when he built the Indian National Army. A Gandhi brigade may seem like an oxymoron, but when war was a reality, Netaji fought it forging an Indian army of all religions and castes, as Gandhi would have wanted it, seeking him out: ‘Father of our nation, in this holy war for India’s liberation, we ask for your blessings and good wishes.’

But while we mark Gandhi’s 150th anniversary, the new leaders of our nation seem to be forgetful of these very values. Of course, Jinnah’s ghost still haunts our western borders, but that is no reason for us to look at ourselves as majority and minority. We have thwarted the gravest of threats to our nationhood, remaining one, and it is important to remember that keeping the Kashmir valley locked down is no solution to the integration of the lone Muslim-majority state of the country. Only true Hindu-Muslim brotherhood can heal the wounds of hatred; and the Hindutva identity, with the Muslim as the ‘other’, is anathema to Gandhian principles.

Gandhi has been a victim of not just selective appropriation, but selective abomination too. For a man who led a very active, articulate life of 78 years, Gandhi had evolved tremendously. Almost all his ideas had got modified, qualified, or even drastically altered, during his life. In his early days in South Africa, he was an unabashedly racist person who articulated a hierarchy in which the Africans came last. Last year, protesters in Ghana got a Gandhi statue removed, quoting his utterances when he was in his twenties, obviously ignorant, biased and racist.

Back in India, Gandhi was initially a defender of the Varna system, only to evolve into a complete anti-caste crusader, who declared that he would only attend inter-caste weddings. Gandhi is best compared to an Indian thali with numerous dishes — sweet, sour and even bitter. From all the things that Gandhi had said and done, it is easy to cherry-pick arguments to prove a presumption against him. The greatest offering to the Mahatma today would be a resolve to end cherry-picking Gandhi to legitimise one’s own politics.

( Tribune India)