Gandhi and the Socratic art of dying

There is a process of learning in the Gandhian act of self-suffering

Today is the 71st anniversary of Gandhi’s death. His assassination was a great shock. But, strangely, his death unified those in India who had lost faith in non-violent co-existence. As Nehru said, “the urgent need of the hour is for all of us to function as closely and co-operatively as possible.”

As a matter of fact, Gandhi’s death taught everyone about the worth of civic friendship and social solidarity. Gandhi himself was well aware of this, long before his return to India and his rise as the non-violent leader of the Indian independence movement. For example, in a letter to his nephew on January 29, 1909, he wrote, “I may have to meet death in South Africa at the hands of my countrymen... If that happens you should rejoice. It will unite the Hindus and Mussalmans... The enemies of the community are constantly making efforts against such a unity. In such a great endeavour, someone will have to sacrifice his life.”

It is interesting, how Gandhi, all through his life, talked about his death with a great deal of openness and with no sanctimony. It is as if for him the fundamental philosophical question — ‘should I live or die; to be or not to be’? — had already found its answer in the idea of self-sacrifice.

An intertwining

In the Gandhian philosophy of resistance, we can find the intertwining of non-violence and exemplary suffering. Perhaps, self-sacrifice is the closest we come to ethical dying, in the sense that it is a principled leave-taking from life; an abandonment of one’s petty preoccupations in order to see things more clearly. As such, there is a process of learning in the Gandhian act of self-suffering. For Socrates, to philosophise was to learn how to die. In the same way, for Gandhi, the practice of non-violence began with an act of self-sacrifice and the courage of dying for truth.

Socrates inspired Gandhi on the importance of self-sacrifice and the art of dying at a time when the latter was developing his idea of satyagraha in South Africa. Gandhi referred to Socrates as a “Soldier of Truth” ( satyavir ) who had the willingness to fight unto death for his cause. His portrayal of Socrates as asatyagrahi and a moral hero went hand in hand with the affirmation of the courage and audacity of a non-violent warrior in the face of life-threatening danger. Consequently, for Gandhi, there was a close link between the use of non-violence and the art of dying, in the same manner that cowardice was sharply related to the practice of violence.

Socratic aspects

Gandhi remained a Socratic dissenter all his life. Though not a philosopher, Gandhi admired moral and political philosophers, who, as a manner of Socrates, were ready to struggle for the truth. Like Socrates, Gandhi was neither a mystic nor a hermit. He was a practitioner of dissident citizenship. Gandhi considered Socrates’ civic action as a source of virtue and moral strength. He affirmed: “We pray to God, and want our readers also to pray, that they, and we too, may have the moral strength which enabled Socrates to follow virtue to the end and to embrace death as if it were his beloved. We advise everyone to turn his mind again and again to Socrates’ words and conduct.” Gandhi’s approach to death exemplified another Socratic aspect: courage. Gandhi believed that when fighting injustice, the actor must not only have the courage of his/her opinions but also be ready to give his/her life for the cause. As George Woodcock says, “the idea of perishing for a cause, for other men, for a village even, occurs more frequently in Gandhi’s writings as time goes on. He had always held thatsatyagraha implied the willingness to accept not only suffering but also death for the sake of a principle.”

Gandhi’s dedication to justice in the face of death was an example of his courageous attitude of mind as a Socratic gadfly. Further, one can find in Gandhi a readiness to raise the matter of dying as public policy. This is a state of mind which we can find as the background motto of Gandhi’s political and intellectual life. Indeed, for Gandhi, the art of dying was very often a public act and an act of publicising one’s will to be free.

There is something revealing in the parallel that Gandhi established between the struggle for freedom and the art of dying. In a speech at a meeting of the Congress in Bombay in August 1942, he invited his fellow freedom fighters to follow a new mantra: “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give to you. You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is ‘Do or Die.’ We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery... He who loses his life will gain it, he who will seek to save it shall lose it. Freedom is not for the coward or the faint-hearted.”

Note here both the conviction in Gandhi that no other decision but dying was possible if the declaration of freedom was unachieved. Unsurprisingly, straightforward and honest. Which brings us back to January 30, 1948 when Mahatma Gandhi fell to the bullets of Nathuram Godse. One can understand this event as a variety of the Sophoclean saying: “Call no man happy until he is dead.” Like it or not, it seems that for Gandhi, to be human was to have the capacity, at each and every moment, to confront death as fulfillment of a Socratic life.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is Director, Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace, Jindal Global University, Sonipat

Source: The Hindu, 30/01/2019

Gandhi did not want and does not need statues

India should see the removal of Gandhi’s statue in Ghana as the decision of a sovereign people having a say in the design of their political architecture and their public spaces.

It will be a waste of good money to spend Rs 25,000 on erecting a clay or metallic statue of the figure of a man who is himself made of clay…” Gandhi, Harijan on February 11, 1939

His view ignored, Gandhi statues were proposed, in his lifetime, across India and in Europe, and clay busts of him came up , without any reference to him, in several places on the subcontinent. They continued to do so, in prodigal numbers, after he was no more, right to our present times. London raised a stunning one in bronze in Parliament Square in 2017, beside those of his two jailors — white South Africa’s Jan Smuts and the Raj’s Winston Churchill.

Statues have a life beyond the vision of their initiators and sculptors. If devotion’s soft petals have been laid on Gandhi’s statues in India, so have antagonism’s sharp points. Such has been the case with statues of his formidable contemporary BR Ambedkar. One can imagine Gandhi laughing at the darts , not without pain. Likewise, one can imagine the architect of India’s Constitution saying , with his wry humour , that he never needed such ‘protection’ of metal gratings under the British Raj.

Liberty and prejudice join hands on freedom’s soil. This is as it should be, as long as the exercise be free of violence and reflect, in court language, “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

Last week, “in deference to faculty opinion”, a Gandhi statue was taken down from its plinth in the University of Ghana’s campus in Accra. What caused the “faculty opinion” ? Something that has exercised scholarship and political narratives for quite some time, namely, that Gandhi’s work in South Africa saw him engage exclusively in securing the rights of Indian South Africans, with no interest shown in the much larger and far more outrageous crushing of the rights of Africans. More, that in his writings a younger Gandhi used vocabulary and nomenclature that showed bias against Africans.

What should India’s response to this be ?

Should, in fact, there be an Indian response to this at all ? How can there not be one ? But it must see two truths.

First, Gandhi believed he was born in India but made in South Africa. This makes his Accra statue, in a vital sense, an African entity’s statue being judged by a subsequent African generation, exactly as a Gandhi statue in India would be seen by a contemporary Indian generation.

Second, that being the case, we in India should see the Accra de-installation as the decision of a sovereign people having a say in the design of their political architecture and their public spaces and for them to be able to say, as part of that ‘say’, that Gandhi does not deserve to have a statue raised to him in Africa.

So — and this is where India must come in — we must do so with the honesty which that searingly honest man deserves. Truth demands, Gandhi’s truth demands, that India should recognise that his use of term ‘Kaffir’ for Africans jars and is, today, unacceptable. But ‘the whole truth’ requires us to turn to President Mandela’s comment on Gandhi’s 125th birthday, “Gandhi must be judged in the context of the time and the circumstances.”

When Gandhi visited Britain in 1931, for the Second Round Table Conference, he had an important visitor: young Jomo Kenyatta. The future freedom fighter requested Gandhi to sign his diary. Gandhi did, writing : “Truth and non-violence can deliver any nation from bondage.” The scholar-lawyer Anil Nauriya tells us Kenyatta preserved the diary and its entry with care, even carrying it in his solo suitcase to prison. Gandhi was in Oxford in October, 1931. Speaking of South Africa’s native population as being “ground down under exploitation”, he said: “Our deliverance must mean their deliverance. But, if that cannot come about, I should have no interest in a partnership with Britain, even if it were of benefit to India.”

On January 1, 1939, he said to the Rev S S Tema of the African National Congress who queried him about a future collaboration between Indian and native South Africans : “You… are the sons of the soil who are being robbed of your inheritance. You are bound to resist that. Yours is a far bigger issue.”

African leaders like Kenya’s Kenyatta, Nigeria’s Azikiwe, South Africa’s Luthuli and Mandela saw in Gandhi’s non-violent defiance of racism, an Asian’s quickening of a future African impetus for freedom.

Gandhi did not want and does not need statues. Accra does not want and does not need advice on its statues. But diminishing Gandhi’s role in the history of decolonisation is to reduce a life-size historical verity to ground-level, and prospects of Afro-Asian solidarity to the flatness of a lifeless plinth.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is distinguished professor of history and politics, Ashoka University

Source: Hindustan Times, 18/12/2018

F

David Hardiman

November 20, 2018 12:54:33 am

Do Mahatma Gandhi and his legacy have anything to offer us in the face of attacks by terrorists? Gandhi himself was deeply concerned with the question as to how non-violence could displace violence in political life. In his own day, he was faced with revolutionary nationalists who believed that imperial rule in India could best be fought through targeted violence against British officials and institutions. Gandhi was strong in his condemnation of such a strategy.

We can see this in his reaction to the assassination by an Indian student called Madan Lal Dhingra of a retired Indian civil servant, Sir Curzon Wyllie, when he came to speak to a group of Indian students in London in 1909. Vinayak Savarkar, who was a friend of Dhingra, argued that he acted as a Hindu patriot. Gandhi was horrified by the killing. He stated that Dhingra acted in a cowardly manner, and that he had been “egged on by this ill-digested reading of worthless writing”. Wyllie had gone as a guest of the Indian students, and he had been betrayed. If the British left India because of such acts, murderers would become rulers.

Gandhi sought to provide a different way to fight British rule — namely through nonviolent satyagraha. He argued that if the established nationalist leaders failed to provide a nonviolent outlet for the nationalist fervour of young Indians, they might well be attracted to violent methods. In other words, his form of protest would provide an outlet for radicalised Indians to protest against what Gandhi projected as the “terrorism” of the state as well as provide a counter to the violence of revolutionary nationalists. In a letter of 1919, he maintained that: “The growing generation will not be satisfied with petitions etc. Satyagraha is the only way, it seems to me, to stop terrorism.”

He wrote, similarly, in the same year: “If you do not provide the rising generation with an effective remedy against the excesses of authority, you will let loose the powers of vengeance and… violence will spread with a rapidity which all will deplore… In offering the remedy of self-suffering which is one meaning of satyagraha, I follow the spirit of our civilisation and present the young portion with a remedy of which he need never despair.”

According to Gandhi, means determine ends. He held that unleashing violence was like letting a genie out of a bottle; once released, it was not easy to put back.

Revolutionaries who had learned to settle matters using violence frequently found it hard to adapt to more peaceable means after a change of power has occurred. It was also a less democratic method. Violence tended to be the method preferred by small and secretive cells that could ignore the need for mass mobilisation in their political strategy. It tended to involve mainly the able-bodied and males, with women, the elderly and children having marginal roles. The need for arms and training similarly excluded many. Almost anyone could, by contrast, participate in nonviolent protest. It was a method, moreover, that encouraged dialogue and negotiation, and did not alienate potential allies.

It was thus a far more effective force for building a future democracy. Following this, Gandhi set about organising and leading a series of satyagrahas in India from 1917 onwards in a way that attracted many erstwhile radicals. Many became convinced and principled advocates of nonviolence. Gandhi built a mass base through what he called his “constructive programme”, that is, painstaking activity in which his followers worked at the local level, helping people in their everyday needs. In this way, they gained the sympathy of the masses.

Despite this, the tradition of revolutionary nationalism survived. During the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920-22, many revolutionaries participated in the nonviolent campaign with enthusiasm, but once Gandhi withdrew civil disobedience in 1922, they — disillusioned with his leadership — reasserted their earlier methods, namely targeting the British to both undermine British morale as well as inspire Indians in general. Gandhi was left appealing to the British to make concessions to the mainstream Congress so as to marginalise the revolutionaries. He thus argued at the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, that if the British did not change their attitude towards the nonviolent Congress, what he called “terrorism” would come to the fore.

He noted the distrust that the British had of the Congress, and went on to say: “I invite you to trust the Congress. If you will work [with] the Congress for all it is worth you will say goodbye to terrorism.” Although the British made certain concessions to the Congress, it was done in a grudging and often half-hearted way; and the revolutionaries were not, as a result, marginalised in the way that Gandhi had hoped. Many participated in the 1942 Quit India Movement, making it the most violent of Gandhi’s major protests.

In the end, we may say that the Indian nationalist movement combined both nonviolent and violent streams, and together they worked in an uneasy symbiosis to eventually remove British rule in 1947. By itself, revolutionary nationalism could not have achieved this — mass nonviolence organised by Gandhi provided an essential element in the undermining of imperial rule over three decades.

The lesson from this is that political violence associated with small secret groups is unlikely to undermine the power of a strong state such as India under both British and independent rule. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan have provided convincing evidence in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict that over the course of the past century, nonviolent forms of resistance to oppressive regimes have in general been more successful than violent methods. In other words, for there to be any profound change, mass nonviolent mobilisation and protest is generally essential.

This, of course, is easier said than done. As a rule, it requires long years of patient organisation in constructive work that gains mass sympathy for a cause — the protest comes only as a culmination. This is the Gandhian response to political violence, and it is not one that is undertaken lightly.

Today, of course, we are in a very different political world. Terrorist organisations are international in their reach, as we saw in Mumbai in 2008. Nonviolence in one country can hardly prevent such attacks. We don’t know how Gandhi might have reacted to such a situation. He was, however, always inventive in his responses — coming up with inspired new strategies in ever-shifting situations.

We should remember, too, that Pakistan had its own great leader in nonviolence — Abdul Ghaffar Khan — and his influence there is by no means dead today. Malala Yousafzai is in this tradition. Nonviolent resistance has been seen in Pakistani politics, as, for example, in the movements against both Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf. Powerful and enduring nonviolent movements in both India and Pakistan — with a feeling of fraternity between both — would almost certainly go a long way in stopping such terrorism. At present, however, we are a long way from achieving any such outcome.

Source: India Express, 20/11/2018

Hardiman is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick and author of Gandhi, in his times and ours. or Gandhi, satyagraha was the only way to stop terrorism. Even in a changed world and context, the Gandhian response is not to be taken lightly.

The Mahatma’s economics

Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy has urged the replacing of GDP with a measure of progress that gives primacy to social and environmental well-being.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at a time when a nonviolent economic system was almost unthinkable. A hundred-and-fifty years later, there is a growing clamour to reconfigure the world’s economic systems in ways that minimise violence on people and the planet, while fostering actual well-being rather than wealth-as-money. Why is Gandhi’s intellectual and activist legacy vital to these contemporary struggles?

Gandhi was born 12 years after the revolt of 1857 just as the British crown was consolidating its power over India. Globally, imperialism with its flagrant claim that “might is right”, was more deeply entrenched than at any time since Christopher Columbus sailed westward in 1492. Volume One of Das Kapital had been published just two years before Gandhi’s birth. However, the Marxist challenge to the systemic brutalities of capitalism and imperialism was not non-violence but the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1869, the book that was to shape Gandhi’s thinking on the equation between samaj, sarkar and bazaar was the subject of ridicule. Unto This Last by the prolific art historian John Ruskin was a response to the depths of degradation which most working class Britishers experienced in the mid-19th century. The cause of this degradation, Ruskin argued, was a delusion that lies at the heart of the modern science of political economy. As paraphrased by Gandhi, “the social affections are accidental and disturbing elements in human nature; but avarice and the desire of progress are constant elements.” John Maynard Keynes validated this prognosis when he wrote in 1930 that: “For at least another 100 years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not.”

Finding nonviolent ways out of this dimension of modernity was Gandhi’s life mission. Ending British rule in India was a relatively small part of this endeavour. Gandhi’s most widely-known economic ideas were revitalisation of village industries and local economies while promoting the concept of trusteeship by owners of large industry. Behind them were two fundamental principles which now hold the key to the survival of our species. One, redefining wealth so it is equated with actual well-being rather than units of exchange value. Two, purity of means in creation of such wealth.

In the 70 years since Gandhi was killed, there have been important milestones in this audaciously ambitious mission. The least known of these is Economy of Permanence, a book by Gandhi’s contemporary and disciple J C Kumarappa. This was one of the inspirations for E F Schumacher and his famous text, Small is Beautiful.

In 1972, the first report by the Club of Rome marshalled data to reconfirm Gandhi’s prediction that one Earth is not sufficient for all people to live like the Western nations — and he was referring to consumption levels in the 1940s. The 1980s saw the rise of the Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) movement in the Western countries. It created mechanisms to enable institutional and individual investors to make choices based on the social and environmental impacts of companies, not merely their monetary profits. After a slow start, the SRI sector now has approximately US $23 trillion under management. This process has been aided by the concept of Triple Bottom Line, a term coined by John Elkington in the late 1990s, and the adoption of the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investing by some of the world’s largest corporations in 2006.

However, even while more and more companies adopt such measures, the process of mineral extraction and industrialisation continues to result in violent displacement of people and destruction of ecosystems. The globalised economy, while creating new money-wealth for some, is at war with local economies everywhere. Thus, today the cutting edge of that larger mission initiated by Gandhi is not so much the SRI phenomenon but a mobilisation around the deliberately chosen shock-word, “Degrowth”. What began as a platform of West European intellectuals in 2008 is now a global network of activists and social entrepreneurs who are convinced that a combination of environmental degradation and lack of adequate livelihoods is poised to plunge our species into chaos.

Their answer is to urge governments, corporations and societies to rapidly redefine growth — partly by abandoning Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic progress and replacing it with a measure that gives primacy to social and environmental well-being for all. Some of the groundwork for this approach has been done over the last two decades by the development of metrics like Genuine Progress Indicators in North America and the related concept of ecological footprint.

Not surprisingly, the Indian equivalent for Degrowth has been identified as “Sarvodaya”. The African equivalent is “Ubuntu,” which can be roughly translated as “You Are Therefore I am”. The Latin American equivalent for “Degrowth” is “Buen Vivier” or Good life for Humans and Ecosystems.

Are all these endeavours, even if taken together, ready to push the world towards nonviolent economic systems of the kind that Gandhi believed are possible? If this question is addressed with only the present in mind, the answer will be a depressing “no”. But then “might is right” was the norm when Gandhi was born; that is no longer acceptable. Yes, there is a bitter struggle to stop the actual violations; this includes the repression of many who challenge the supposedly “development’”projects on humanitarian grounds and are pilloried by the powers that be as “anti-progress” and “anti-national”.

These struggles may or may not be drawn to nonviolence as a method of protest. But they are a living continuation of Gandhi’s legacy because, like him, they seek to build a new kind of economics rooted not in mechanistic redistribution of resources but in moral animation.

Source: Indian Express, 3/10/2018

Reaching for the Mahatma

There is anger and exhaustion in engaging with his writings. But most of all, he evokes awe with his commitment to truth, his ability to listen to others.

Reading Gandhi can be both exasperating and exhilarating. And elevating. You often feel exhausted with his fads about health like his staunch avowal for pure and simple life which meant, for instance, the tyranny of food without spices in his ashrams. He had a resistance to medicines and tried out on his son Manilal for nearly one-and-a-half months a “water therapy”, which he had either read about or “invented”. It is a relief to learn that Manilal finally recovered. One is enraged when, in the absence of toilet facilities in the house in South Africa, he forces Kasturba to carry their guests’ urine to dispose “with a smile on her face” as a mark of true seva; or feel angry at his having deprived his children of formal education and the effect it had on one of his sons, Harilal, who went through a series of travails, at Gandhi’s righteous justification despite his regrets. There would be umpteen such instances that would leave one confused and unsettled.

It is, however, the same man who stood facing a violent crowd baying for his blood during the terrible communal riots in Calcutta, during the days of Independence in 1947. He escaped a deadly assault when a heavy wooden danda thrown at him missed its target. And as Pyarelal recounts, the man who threw the danda eventually sought his forgiveness after peace was restored. In South Africa and later in India, he worked tirelessly to bring honesty into legal practice. He forgave those who assaulted him and refused to file court cases against them. One reads the diaries of his grandniece, Manu Gandhi, in rapt attention recounting in detail his daily padayatra which covered over a thousand miles; first across the rugged tracts of Noakhali in rural Bengal where the Hindus bore the brunt of an unprecedented violence, and then in rural Bihar, where Muslims suffered in a brutal backlash, to witness the remains of carnage and devastation in village after village ravaged by the worst communal riots.

Before beginning the padayatra he had resolved to walk bare-foot in empathy with the poor villagers. He had already abandoned stitched clothing for a dhoti and a chaddar from 1922 onwards during the campaign for the boycott of foreign goods. During the padayatra, he camped in makeshift huts and held daily prayer meetings, which began with recitations from Islamic and Hindu scriptures, where he would ask the perpetrators of violence to shun hate, and begged them to bring back their old neighbours who had fled the village. Pyarelal reports of the instances of people expressing remorse over their actions and receiving their old neighbours back into their fold.

Pulled away from these padayatras by the spectre of Partition, he returned to Delhi and lived in the Bhangi Colony from where he conducted his daily prayer meetings. There he was heckled by disgruntled men who objected to his inclusion of the Islamic along with all other prayers. He suspended the prayers until those present agreed to multi-religion prayers. He then began visiting refugee camps and urged his countrymen to return to sanity. And when nothing worked he resorted to his only weapon, of fasting, both to cleanse the soul and instil peace.

Going through accounts narrated by Pyarelal in Mahatma Gandhi, The Last Phase and Manu, in her daily diaries, one is left with the sense of trauma at the plight of the victims on both sides of the borders but also of incredulity at the actions of this one man who seemed to fight an oceanic tide of violence and hate that had engulfed the newly-independent nation. You even wonder if such a man did really exist. He had several forebodings of his assassination but he stood firm, often making jokes about it.

Reading his own account of South Africa and his autobiography is indeed an uplifting experience. The subtitle of his autobiography is My Experiments with Truth. The steadfast belief in truth was cardinal to his existence; and took on several aspects. These were manifest through an unwavering courage — moral, ideological or physical — in his personal and public life. I am not in the least surprised that those who came close to him must have felt a life-changing experience. Here was a man in flesh and blood, like any one of us, who stood by the ideals he cherished against all odds. He says he is no saint or Mahatma and he betrays all the human traits of fallibility and of grace, but above all, an unrelenting grit to fight all the forces of untruth and violence.

Reading Gandhi today leaves you in a state of total despair as the voices of sanity and civilised conduct in our public life have been extinguished, dissent muzzled, freedom curtailed. Even the detractors of Gandhi would agree that he respected the other, or any view or opinion that countered his own. He listened to those who disagreed with him, who objected to his methods or means, who often reviled him, upholding their right to differ with respect and humility. Manu wrote in her diaries that he continued to answer every mail he received, and would even refer to the hate-mail he received in his daily prayer meets.

My friend, historian Sudhir Chandra, described the Gandhi phenomenon as an impossible possibility. Gandhi has begun to matter more as the world he left behind has turned increasingly more violent. Hardly a day passes without the news of violent happenings the world over. There is no need to describe these happenings as we all know they occur with relentless continuity. What would he have done if he were alive today? Sceptics might say he would have been assassinated in the first instance of facing this violence with his ahimsa. Since he is no more, the question would be about the idea of Gandhi. Some would say, that we have already killed it.

Source: Indian Express, 29/09/2018

Truth about the last person

Gandhi reminded us and continues to do so that India is united in its poverty and deprivation, its structures of humiliation and violence. His legacy is this awareness.

I wish to begin this reflection with two images. One of a pair of sandals, now somewhat withered with age, and use, which lies in a glass cage in the Constitution Hill Museum in Johannesburg. These sandals reflect the attraction that its maker had for the minimalism of the Trappist aesthetics as also fondness for the material, leather. M K Gandhi, as a prisoner, made these in South Africa and gifted them to General Jan Christian Smuts. It tells many stories, but the story I wish to bring to attention is Gandhi the sandal-maker.

The other image is of Gandhi sitting cross-legged, peering with his left eye into a microscope raised with a fat volume. If the image is not cropped we see an open (note) book and a somewhat amused Pyarelal Nayyar by his side. Gandhi was examining leprosy germs.

These two images are reminders of what we have chosen to forget about Gandhi, of the various silences that surround the man. Among the many things we have chosen to forget about Gandhi is his lifelong work with leather and his desire to shod every feet with leather chappals. We would prefer Gandhi the spinner of fine, “pure” yarn. Leprosy, one of the oldest infectious diseases in human history has created for all cultures its “untouchables”. The leper and the leather worker are subject to the most enduring — albeit from different grounds — forms of exclusion and humiliation. They are Gandhi’s “last person”.

Silence was dear to Gandhi. He liked debate, even acrimony, but in that he wanted his silence. Each Monday he observed silence, and at times weary and unable to see his way in the darkness that surrounded him and us, he retreated into long periods of silence. Silence for him was not withdrawal from engagement. It was a mode of communion and of communication. His silence was both going inwards and reaching out.

Our silence, our amnesia about various aspects of Gandhi is a well-crafted manoeuvre. And in this the Indian State, since its inception, and Gandhi’s institutions after Gandhi, have been collaborators. The first of this has been to render Gandhi’s institutions into “anti-thought” establishments. Serious intellectual challenges posed to Gandhi’s thought and life practices are met either by a petrified silence or disdain arising out of certainty of the perfectness of the Master. This has created a deep and lasting inability to be morally innovative or ethically responsive. This is most deeply felt in the realm of political economy. In a world where the ethical in the economic, the normative in the market have been rendered illegitimate, Gandhi’s concern with the last person finds place only in a regime of subsidy, instead of in the creation of enabling institutional structures. The move away from Trusteeship to Philanthropy captures this predicament.

Gandhi’s lifelong quest was to create a possibility of collective non-violence, Ahimsa, not only as personal ethic but as political imperative, and as political economy that recognises the violence of poverty and deprivation. Gandhi like no other after him recognised the transformative potential of seva. Seva is derived from saha and eva meaning “together with”. Understood thus, seva is the epitome of fellowship, of a state of communion with self, other beings and the divine. It is an act of being with others, being that is non-acquisitive, being that seeks only to serve so that pain is alleviated, suffering made bearable, joy experienced and divine made immanent. In this sense, seva is the complete opposite of servitude and slavery, where both self and self-volition are denied. Violence is the perfect opposite of seva. Seva as service, as care, as non-acquisitive selflessness is a necessary condition for Ahimsa. Violence unto the others occurs when they are pushed outside the realm of care and of seva. Seva is no longer part of lokniti and much less of rajniti. And memorials by their very nature cannot perform seva. Bereft of seva our capacity to deal with violence that surrounds us is enfeebled.

Disobedience of what is repugnant to one’s conscience is imperative for any form of lokniti, rajniti and hence of citizenship. This right of disobedience is predicated upon it being “civil”, that is, non-violent and upon its relationship to conscience. This right requires fundamental obedience — for Gandhi, not to the state, not to the nation, and certainly not to law or courts — to truth and non-violence and a recognition of the right of others to be equally adherent to their conscience. (Let us recall Gandhi’s seven days of fasting in 1934 for an assault by his followers on Pandit Lalnath who opposed Gandhi’s work on eradication of untouchability.) That the state and its apparatus, the courts, will be unable and unwilling to recognise this, is writ in the very nature of conscience. The modern state and law do not recognise conscience as a category and hence to seek amelioration of conscientious objection from them is to constrict the realm of the conscience. Our reliance upon law to expand the realm of autonomous moral action is for this reason deeply flawed. So long as we are willing to undergo the punishment for our conscientious disobedience, we retain the right to disregard the injunctions of law. But this right is not absolute, it accrues to those who engage with fellow beings through seva, that is, constructive work.

Gandhi reminded us and continues to do so that India is united in its poverty and deprivation, its structures of humiliation and violence. His legacy is this awareness. To the extent we remain conscious of this, we become tuned to his silence and would have less need to create silences around him.

The writer has recently published an annotated critical edition of M K Gandhi’s autobiography

Source: Indian Express, 28/09/2018

Gandhi, The Economist

His idea of trusteeship needs to be revisited in times of growing inequality

The “Gandhi Conclave” in Patna on April 10 and 11 commemorated the centenary of Gandhi’s visit to Bihar in 1917 in connection with the Champaran Satyagraha, which, for the first time, lent a mass character to the Congress-led freedom movement in the country. At a time when the country is enveloped by clouds of helplessness, the conclave underlined how Gandhian strategy has a non-violent solution for almost every problem confronting the world.

Two conclusions can be drawn if one approaches Gandhism in a simple manner. One, Gandhi appears compulsively antediluvian; two, he was not bound by standard frameworks. The period when he wrote Hind Swaraj was probably Gandhi’s most negative phase, though the text should be treated as a critique of India’s de-industrialisation by colonialism. From 1919, after the successful Champaran Satyagraha, Gandhi scripted the Swadeshi Movement which gave a foundation to domestic industrialisation. He was possibly the first Indian to underline that the development and emancipation of the country required concurrent dialogues with the colonial state, civil society, the market and corporate sector.

Apart from the Patna conclave, two books I read inspired me to revisit Gandhi’s philosophy, specially its economic dimension — How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reason For World’s Hunger by Susan George and Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns To Untax The One Percent by Isaac William Martin. George makes three seminal points: One, the Third World War will be over water; two, the consumption of cereals by pets in the First World is higher than by human beings in the Third World; three, four Earths would be required if the Third World emulates the First World’s consumption pattern.

Martin’s book is about the counter movement of the rich for tax holidays and their demand of removing all financial fetters. He writes on the “tax day, April 15, 2010 hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out to rallies around the United States to protest against taxes and big Government… offered forthright defense of capitalists and the rich using grassroots tactics of the poor”.

I revisited two basic Gandhian economic principles after reading the two books. One, the limitation of wants: No maximisation technique is enough to satisfy unlimited wants, and social interest outweighs self-interest. Production should be mindful of the earth’s capacity. The unbridled use of natural resources will lead the world towards disaster, as prophesised by George. Two, the concept of “trusteeship”: With the idea of market-centric development under mammoth multinationals assuming hegemonic proportions, there is a need to appreciate this concept.

Even though Gandhi promoted Indian capitalism as a spin-off of the Swadeshi Movement, he was aware of the monstrous consequences of capitalism. Just before his assassination, Gandhi finalised the “practical trusteeship formula”, which would have transformed the “present capitalist order of society into an egalitarian one (in which) an individual will not be free to hold or use wealth for selfish satisfaction”.

Liaquat Ali Khan, the finance minister of the interim government in 1946 under the premiership of Jawaharlal Nehru, held similar views. He not only introduced 91 per cent income tax in the maiden budget of the interim government, but also instituted a commission to investigate ill-gotten accumulation during WW II. G.D. Birla, who was in the visitor’s gallery of Parliament when the budget was presented, not only walked out but organised fortnightly strikes of the stock exchange in protest. India’s top industrialist and closest comrades of Gandhi rallied to demand Khan’s ouster from the cabinet.

Partition and Gandhi’s assassination meant that the principle of trusteeship and equity-centric taxation never got full play. Today, we pride ourselves on having the third highest numbers of billionaires when we also have the highest number of poor in the world. The “Gandhi Conclave”, I hope, will bring back Gandhi’s ideals on the centrestage, nationally and globally. Unless the counter movement of the rich is stalled, the world won’t have authentic economic democratisation.

The writer is member secretary, Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), Patna

Source: Indian Express, 23-5-2017

The idea of Gandhi is universal and immortal

When an unwritten truth confronts us in an extraordinary moment, it leaves us awestruck. Oh I knew this! Why didn’t I realise this till today, we think.
I had a similar experience many years ago at Uganda’s Lake Victoria. We had reached there from Kampala. On the way, someone had told us that Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were immersed here. I was captivated. In those days, Lake Victoria hadn’t yet become a tourist attraction. If the lake was a human being, people would have been left mesmerised by its natural beauty. A little eddy was forming noiselessly at the place where the Nile emerges from the lake’s womb. I imagined that the Mahatma’s ashes would have dissolved into a similar whirl. At that moment I realised for the first time how deeply people from my generation — who have grown up listening to all sorts of lofty statements for and against Gandhi — are connected to the Mahatma.
Even Gopal Godse’s flawed logic made us revere the Mahatma even more. Nathuram Godse’s younger brother was an accused in Gandhi’s assassination. After completing his prison term, he went around the country justifying why they had carried out Gandh’s ‘vadh’ (murder). During this time he offered some laughable examples. At one time he claimed they had killed the Mahatma the way Krishna had slayed Jarasangh. I replied by asking him whether he put himself in the same category as Lord Krishna? How does it matter, he argued, our feelings were similar. At Lake Victoria I had discovered a connection with the Mahatma along with a growing feeling of sadness. During my conversation with Gopal Godse, the sentiment was turning into a seething anger, but there were people in Agra who had hosted him. They listened to him with a lot of respect. On that day I realised Gandhi’s biggest strength are his detractors. The more they resist him, the more his ideas will keep inspiring people.
It has happened with every great man.
That is why, when the Father of the Nation’s picture was missing from the All India Khadi Gram Udyog calendar this year, I wasn’t upset. Power attracts sycophancy and that is how sycophants damage the image of politicians in power. The prime minister’s office didn’t just offer a clarification, but also tightened the screws, but the Opposition had sensed an opportunity by then. One result of this illogical debate over Gandhi was that the Mahatma’s magic was again before the world in all its glory. According to Google News statistics, the number of people searching for the Mahatma grew by 50% in India and 62% worldwide in this period.Clearly, those in this generation who were not familiar with him got to know the Mahatma. This inquisitive quality in the younger generation is its biggest elixir.
 
I am fortunate that I have visited Gandhi memorials in various corners of the globe. Surprisingly, even after so many years, how does the Mahatma manage to elicit such a mix of curiosity and respect, that too in alien lands? In October 1997, when I met Nelson Mandela face to face along with former Prime Minister IK Gujral, at the residence of South African president Mahlamba Ndlopfu, I wanted to ask him the same question, but could not get an opportunity.
Later, the secret of Gandhi’s popularity was revealed while speaking with anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada. Kathrada told him that when Mandela was imprisoned at Robben Island, he had many charges of violent crimes against him. The prison was the South African equivalent of our Kala Pani (Cellular Jail). It was a tried and tested method of white colonialists. They confined people to such uninhabited islands. Mandela realised this tactic. He told his colleagues they would protest against the white regime staying within prison regulations. Mandela was imprisoned there for 28 years, but pursuing his unique policy, he evolved from a person to an idea. It is the only instance in the history of humanity that a man could lead a freedom movement for so long from within the prison. And when he was released, he saved his country by adopting the policy of forgive and forget.
According to Kathrada, Mandela had learnt this lesson from the Mahatma. Perhaps, Kathrada said this as a mark of respect to his guests, but not just Mandela, four other Nobel laureates of the 20th century — Martin Luther King Jr, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel — have admitted that Gandhi’s philosophy influenced them. If we take out these evolved human beings from the last century, we’ll be left with nothing more than two World Wars and injuries from innumerable other wars. Gandhi and his ideological disciples have played a big role in keeping the earth worth living for human beings.
Today is January 30. Do you remember this was the day Nathuram Godse pumped bullets into the Mahatma’s body. But could he kill Gandhi?
He certainly couldn’t. Gandhi is alive in the minds of innumerable admirers and will continue to live there.
Shashi Shekhar is editor in chief, Hindustan

Source: Hindustan Times, 30-01-2017

Before he became Mahatma

Coming to terms with Gandhi’s South African phase is a challenge for both his supporters and his critics

Gandhi scholars generally see his political work in South Africa (1893-1914) as but a prelude to the remarkable role he played in reshaping the politics of the Indian freedom struggle. In recent years, however, a flurry of writings on Gandhi, some authored by known South African scholars, has catapulted to the centre stage ofGandhiana his ‘racist’ attitude towards Africans and Coloured people, exclusion of this segment from the political struggles that he organised, his failure to form political alliances with all oppressed people, his sexual preferences, and his imperial patriotism. How do we begin to reconcile these insights with the widely held belief in India and abroad that Gandhi is a Mahatma?

A telling contradiction

We can follow different paths to address this contradiction in Gandhi’s thought. We can, for instance, shrug off the problem by quoting the poet Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am vast, I contain multitudes.” Gandhi certainly contained multitudes, he held odd views on social relations, his defence of the caste system is unjustifiable, and he was eccentric to a fault. But he also had an extraordinary gift for understanding the political significance of the moment, and grasping it. He lived a life of contradictions, as we all do.

Neera Chandhoke

Alternatively, armed with numerous cups of tea as Munna Bhai did in the marvellous film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, we burrow into dusty volumes of his letters and writings, acknowledge he was wrong at that moment of his life, and cite him to establish self-correction in his later life. The project is tiresome but doable. Thereby we follow the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who in the 1960s pointed out an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought, and distinguished between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx. We can accordingly speak of a ‘young’ and a ‘mature’ Gandhi.

Or we can focus on the historical context of his remarks. The Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner suggests that before we judge words spoken in the past, we must know what they signified then. In the work The Prince (1513), the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli advises the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, thus. A prince, he said, must know when not to be virtuous. For these words, Machiavelli has been slammed throughout history as the teacher of evil, and as immoral for separating, as he did, ethics and politics. Prof. Skinner asks us to consider what virtue meant in 16th century Florence. At that time virtue signified either a life devoted to reflection in the Platonic sense, or a life lived in accordance with the tenets of Christian morality. Lorenzo de' Medici, destined in Machiavelli’s view to unite a fragmented and conquered Italy, needed a different set of virtues. He had to possess pagan virtues of honour, valour, and courage. Virtue held different implications in the public sphere compared to the private sphere. Consider the time Gandhi lived in settler-dominated South Africa. Dominant linguistic conventions sanctioned the use of derogatory terms for non-whites. Indians, for instance, were called coolies. Gandhi erred because he did not question a practice that violated his own understanding of what human beings are due.

Does it really matter if Gandhi statues and photographs are removed, if M.G. roads are renamed, or if our present government tries to depoliticise a politically subversive leader by designating October 2 as Swachh Bharat? Gandhi, who wielded the broom with some dexterity, would not have minded. As Munna Bhai’s inner-self manifested as Gandhi’s apparition instructs him, do all this, just keep my teachings in your heart.

At this time in Africa

But there was a time when African freedom movements drew upon Gandhi; today, nationalist Africans attack him. Therefore, none of the paths suggested above might help us to reconcile the contradiction in Gandhi’s ideas or mollify our African friends. Witness the extent of anger. In June 2016 a Gandhi statue was installed in the University of Ghana during the visit of President Pranab Mukherjee. Soon thereafter a number of academics, students, and artists demanded the removal of the statue. Last year an online campaign ‘#Ghandimustfall hashtag’ gained traction, even as his statue in Johannesburg was vandalised in April during a rally against ‘Gandhi the racist’.

This anger is understandable. There was a time when Indian leaders were committed to solidarity with other postcolonial countries. Today as Indian industrialists/entrepreneurs compete with China to appropriate land and resources in Sub-Saharan Africa, we see the rise of resentment against the new colonisers. Therefore, Gandhi, who inspired Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, and Kwame Nkrumah, is now unacceptable to many Africans. The exploitation of vulnerable countries by India, an emerging power, has bred a rather bitter harvest.

We can ask why something said or done a hundred years ago still has the power to evoke offence. Arguably, a reinvented nationalism that has swept the world as ‘hatred of the other’ revisits the past to identify those who belong, and those who do not. In parts of Africa, Gandhi is clearly perceived as someone who came in from the outside, and began to mobilise an otherwise disparate community of Indians: indentured labour, Memon and Bohra merchants locally called Arabs, and other Indians against discriminatory laws. He was indifferent to the plight of African and coloured people.

But that was not his project. Gandhi entered South Africa as an inexperienced and brief-less lawyer to assist a case involving two prominent Memon traders. At that time of his life, a 24-year-old Gandhi believed that the British Empire would ensure the freedom of its subjects in an oppressive settler colony. He supported the British in the Boer war (1899-1902), and raised a unit of stretcher bearers to accompany troops to the front. He expected the British to reciprocate by protecting Indians. His hope was belied, and Gandhi the imperial patriot was transformed into Gandhi the leader who touched the hearts and minds of millions. He learnt the grammar of anti-colonial nationalism in exile, and amidst oppression, much as Irish immigrants became Fenians on American soil.

His idea of India was expansive and included all Indians wherever they may work; the fulcrum remained a territorial entity called India. In a farewell address he gave to a Gujarati audience on July 9, 1914, he said: “For me there can be no deliverance from this earthly life except in India. Anyone who seeks such deliverance must go to the sacred soil of India. For me, as for everyone else, the land of India is ‘the refuge of the afflicted.’” His project simply did not include Africans and coloured people, even though they were oppressed.

The task Nehru took up

Gandhi failed to grasp the importance of an alliance between oppressed groups. That task was taken on by his heir Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru learnt the virtue of solidarity by participating in the ‘Congress of Oppressed Nationalities’ in Brussels in February 1927. The 1927 congress was the precursor of the Bandung Conference in 1955. In The Color Curtain, Richard Wright wrote of the 1955 Conference, which excluded the West, thus. “Only brown, black and yellow men who had long been made agonizingly self-conscious, under the rigors of colonial rule, of their race and their religion could have felt the need for such a meeting. There was something extra-political, extra-social, almost extra human about it, it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces... And the call for the meeting had not been sounded in term of ideology. The agenda and the subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants.”

Gandhi would have approved, because in his later life he came to believe that the ‘other’ is a part of ‘us’. By then African sensibilities had been wounded. Gandhi has to be faulted for this lack of understanding. Perhaps it is time for Gandhians to apologise to South Africans and atone for the ‘sins of their fathers’.

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science, Delhi University.

Keywords: Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa, Jawaharlal Nehru

Source: The Hindu, 8-10-2016

TOI INTERVIEW - Kallenbach was Gandhi's `wailing wall': Researcher

Kounteya Sinha

London: TNN





Priceless documents discovered in Israel have revealed, for the first time ever, the role a Jewish architect played in creating the phenomenon that was Mahatma Gandhi. When Lithuania unveils the statue of Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach in Rusne on October 2, researcher Shimon Lev of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, who has extensively studied the archive, will reveal to the world the story of the deep friendship between India's father of the nation and his “soulmate“. Excerpts from Lev's exclusive interview to TOI:How did you get your hand on the Gandhi Kallenbach documents?

Some years ago, I wrote a series of articles about a hiking trail across Israel. During my hike, in a cemetery near the Sea of the Galilee, I went to see the neglected grave of Kallenbach.I published a few lines about him, which resulted in an invitation from his niece, Mrs Isa Sarid, to “have a look“ at Kallenbach's archive. The archive was located in a tiny room in a small apartment up on Carmel Mountain in Haifa. On the shelves were numerous files carrying the name of Gandhi. One of the less known chapters of Gandhi's early biography was waiting for a researcher to pick up the challenge. Finding an archive like this might be the fantasy of any historian.
You call Gandhi and Kallenbach soulmates. Were they truly?

Their friendship was characterized by mutual efforts towards personal, moral and spiritual development, and a deep commitment to the Indian struggle. On a personal level, Kallenbach provided Gandhi with sound emotional support. He was Gandhi's confidant, with whom Gandhi could share even the most personal matters, such as troubles with his wife and children. Gandhi's letters to Kallenbach and documents in the archive reveal their relationship to be an extremely complex and highly unconventional one, with elements of political partnership and surprisingly strong personal ties for two such dissimilar men.
Any interesting anecdotes fom their lives that show their proximity to each other?

Kallenbach was Gandhi's “wailing wall“. When Harilal, Gandhi's eldest son, ran away to Delgoa Bay on his way to India in an effort to get the formal education his father denied him, it was Kallenbach who was sent to bring him back.

What was the unique historical significance in their encounter?
I think that one of most important contributions of Kallenbach is the establishment of Tolstoy Farm in 1910.It is impossible to over-emphasize the influence of the experiment on the formulation of Gandhi's spiritual and social ideologies. But what made their story even more unique was the “second round“, which took place in 1937, when Hitler was already in power. Kallenbach was asked by future Israeli PM Moshe Sharet to brief Gandhi on Zionism, hoping to get his support for a Jewish homeland. That is when Gandhi came out with the disturbing proclamation, The Jews, in 1938, in which he called the Jews to begin civil resistance and be ready to die as a result. Gandhi used Kallenbach as an example of the tension between his nonviolence doctrine and what was going on in Europe.
“I happen to have a Jewish friend...He has an intellectual belief in non-vi olence. But he says he cannot pray for Hitler. I do not quarrel with him over his anger...“
So the chronicles of their relationship traverse the dramatic events of the first half of the 20th century.
What was unique about this relationship and why isn't their relationship so widely known?
Kallenbach was Gandhi's most intimate European supporter. He was the one who Gandhi could mostly trust.
There may be a number of reasons for the general disregard of Kallenbach's contribution. Their forced separation due to Kallenbach's confinement in a British internment camp during World War I is partly to blame.Had Kallenbach gone to India, it is probable that he would have become the administrative manager of Gandhi's Indian ashrams. Moreover, the scarcity of first-hand sources regarding their relationship makes the study of his influence difficult.
Who inspired whom in the relationship and how?

Obviously, Gandhi was the one who inspired everyone else around him, including Kallenbach. He was the spiritual authority ­ no doubt about this. Kallenbach's Jewish family regarded him as one trapped by “Gandhi's spell“.
How will this statue help in telling their stories?
Well, definitely it will make their fascinating story more known. I claim that it is impossible to understand Gandhi without understanding his relationships with those close to him.Between 1906 and 1909, Gandhi underwent an extremely significant transformation, the result of which was that his doctrine became fully solidified. His partner in these crucial years was Herman Kallenbach.

Source: Times of India, 30-09-2015