Golwalkar

Mahatma Gandhi's ideas are contested in India today as rarely before, in the country he led to independence on August 15, 1947, and where he was shot dead on January 30, 1948. What is new is not that he is criticised. He was criticised throughout his political life, often ferociously, and by people he worked alongside. What is new is that the criticism now arrives from two directions that agree on almost nothing else. Sections of the Left and of the Ambedkarite movement attack him from one set of premises, while the Hindu right has its own quarrel with him from another. They begin in different places and reach overlapping conclusions. Whatever the intentions on either side, the effect is cumulative and it falls on a legacy with fewer public defenders than it once had. A question of address Something shows in how he was named. To most of his contemporaries and to most Indians since, he is Gandhiji, or the Mahatma. Golwalkar, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) second sarsanghchalak, wrote of him as MK Gandhi. Ambedkar, in his writings and in the 1955 BBC interview with Francis Watson, called him Mr Gandhi. He refused the title of Mahatma, holding that Gandhi had not earned it and was, in his phrase, an episode in Indian history rather than an epoch-maker. Ambedkar's hostility was not casual and it was not private. In the same interview, he said that having met Gandhi as an opponent, he understood him better than the devotees did, because Gandhi had opened his real fangs to him. Shortly after the assassination, he reached for Roman history, recalling Cicero's reported response to news of Caesar's death: “Tell the Romans your hour of liberty has come.” These are hard words about a man barely dead and there is no softening them. But they were the words of someone who had spent two decades in direct political combat with Gandhi over the representation of Dalits, and who had reason to believe he had been outmanoeuvred. The disagreement was substantive before it was personal. Where the criticisms meet The two lines of attack converge on the two commitments that were most distinctively Gandhi's. The first is Hindu-Muslim unity. This was not one item among many in his politics. It sat at the top of his Constructive Programme and he treated it as the foundation of Indian nationhood. The Hindu right's objection to it was explicit. In “Bunch of Thoughts,” Golwalkar wrote that those who declared there could be no swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity had perpetrated the greatest treason on Indian society. Critics on the Left made a different objection, that the emphasis displaced attention from class but the practical result was the same downgrading of what Gandhi considered central. The second is non-violence. Here too the objections came from opposite premises. BS Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha met Mussolini in Rome in 1931, studied the Fascist youth organisations and returned to build an institutional answer – the Central Hindu Military Education Society at Nashik in 1935 and the Bhonsala Military School, which opened on June 12, 1937. Militarising Hindu society was, by design, the opposite of what Gandhi was proposing. Marxist critics read his non-violence differently, as a method that channelled mass energy away from revolutionary confrontation and into safer forms. For Gandhi, satya and ahimsa were not tactics that could be assessed purely on results. They were the ethical content of the politics itself. Tolstoy's writings shaped that conviction – Gandhi named his South African settlement Tolstoy Farm in 1910 – and Thoreau supplied him with the phrase civil disobedience, which he adopted after his own campaigns were already under way. The argument about caste The critique that lands hardest concerns caste, and it deserves to be met rather than deflected. Ambedkar's objection was not that Gandhi tolerated untouchability. It was that Gandhi sought to abolish untouchability while retaining varna, and that this was incoherent. He said that the practice could not be separated from the structure that produced it. That is a serious argument and it was never satisfactorily answered. What can be said is what Gandhi did. He supported the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924-25 in Travancore, which demanded the right of Ezhavas and untouchables to use the roads around the Vaikom temple and he negotiated its settlement in 1925. A partial one, this opened three of the four roads while the eastern road stayed reserved for Brahmins. Periyar, who had led the agitation on the ground, thought the compromise inadequate and broke with Gandhi over it. Temple entry itself came later: the Travancore Maharaja's Proclamation of November 12, 1936, and, in Tamil Nadu, the day in 1939 when A Vaidyanatha Iyer, president of the Tamil Nadu Harijan Seva Sangh, walked into the Meenakshi temple at Madurai with P Kakkan and five other Dalit companions. Behind both stood the Harijan Sevak Sangh, the Harijan Fund, the padayatras and the Harijan weekly — an apparatus Gandhi built and ran for the better part of two decades. That is a real record, achieved against fierce orthodox resistance, and it is not what his critics usually acknowledge. It is also not an answer to Ambedkar's structural objection and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What formed him The charge that Gandhi was a Hindutva figure in disguise sits awkwardly with what shaped him. Jainism gave him much of his practice – the discipline around truth and non-violence and habits as ordinary as never eating after sunset. The Sermon on the Mount and Tolstoy's “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” left a permanent mark. The Christian emphasis on compassion and forgiveness ran through his politics. The people around him were as varied. Josiah Oldfield, who shared rooms with him in London, opened Christian thought to him. Abdulla Sheth, the Durban merchant whose lawsuit first took him to South Africa, encouraged his reading of the Quran. Henry Polak, in Johannesburg, was his closest Jewish associate. CF Andrews, an Anglican priest, urged his return to India in 1915 and remained a lifelong friend. Gokhale, his political mentor, told him to spend a year travelling India with his ears open and his mouth shut before saying anything about it. Gandhi was a devout and practising Hindu. He was not a Hindu nationalist and the distinction was one his contemporaries on the Hindu right understood perfectly well. Mahatma Gandhi with Romain Rolland. Lived, not theorised On Hindu-Muslim unity, he did not theorise. He walked through Noakhali in the winter of 1946-47 after the killings there. He fasted in Calcutta in September 1947 and in Delhi in January 1948. He was shot 12 days after that last fast ended, by a man who had read his position on Muslims correctly and rejected it. Gandhi did not begin the movement for women's rights in India, as Savitribai Phule, Pandita Ramabai and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain were at work before him. What he did was pull women out of the household and into mass politics on a scale nobody had attempted. Nehru's mother, Swarup Rani, and his wife Kamala both took British lathis. The Congress has elected women to its presidency for more than a century: Annie Besant in 1917, Sarojini Naidu in 1925, Nellie Sengupta in 1933, Indira Gandhi in 1959 and again from 1978 until her assassination in 1984 and Sonia Gandhi from 1998 to 2017 and again from 2019 to 2022. Three of the five were foreign-born. The wider ledger Gandhi drew heavy criticism at home in his lifetime and draws it still. Abroad, the account has read differently: Martin Luther King Jr in the United States, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland. Writing for his seventieth birthday in 1939, Einstein said that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a man had walked the earth in flesh and blood. One may agree with Gandhi or oppose him. Ignoring him has never worked.

Golwalkar

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