Today is Gandhi’s 152nd birthday. You will see his epigrams, accompanied by the familiar bespectacled face splashed liberally in newspapers and television, shared extensively by politicians on social media. Depending on your choice of friends and your patience for them, you may even have received a stray WhatsApp forward claiming that his role in the Independence movement was inconsequential; that he caused the Partition, or how Nathuram Godse, his assassin, was the real patriot. Beyond that, he is likely to be forgotten until his next birthday.
What unites Gandhi’s admirers and critics is the peculiar malaise that has reduced our nation’s founders to images and titles. ‘Mahatma’, ‘Netaji’, ’Babasaheb’, ‘Pandit’ or ‘Sardar’ have become either minor deities in the spacious pantheon of Indian gods or the demons that they are busy slaying. To be garlanded and prayed to or caricaturised and villainised. In this process, we have collectively lost out on the ideas of these men, and their vigorous debates that shaped the moral foundations of our republic that could productively inform our political discourse today.
Gandhi has perhaps suffered the worst fate among all of them. On one hand, his image is omnipresent on every piece of our currency. On the other, his ideas, which have inspired the likes of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, have all but vanished from the Indian public sphere. He has instead been reduced to a politically expedient mascot for cleanliness and a trite totem for world peace. This is unfortunate since Gandhi’s ideas of Satya, Ahimsa, Satyagraha and Swaraj give us valuable perspectives to examine our current political realities.
We live in an atmosphere of extreme polarisation. Across the political spectrum, the belief is in the absolute correctness of one’s positions. We don’t think that our opponents have any genuine grievances, that we have nothing to learn from each other’s realities or economic philosophies. We cannot even come together to grieve collective tragedies like a brutal rape or a suicide, for fear that it may hurt our political affiliates. Significantly, we are far more ready to make others hurt in pursuit of our positions than we are willing to go through the purifying process of even self-reflection, let alone self-sacrifice.
As a result, all exchange is meant to defeat, discredit, deride and suppress. Since no one can really be convinced or persuaded through any of these means, all you end up with are truths that are parallel and locked in irresolvable conflict. On the side of power, this worldview is more sinister because it becomes tyrannical, normalises ostracism of dissenters, and unleashes suffering on a mass scale, but even on the other side, it’s dangerous because the resulting frustrations leads to despair and desperate violence. We arrive at an ominous avatar of a democracy, where no mind is without fear, where we’re pushed further towards hate and anger and further away from a collective journey towards truth.
Gandhi emphasised that no one is a possessor of absolute truth in this world, but that’s only a partial, incomplete truth. It was every individual’s moral responsibility to expand one’s truths. This is a part of an ultimate spiritual quest of moving progressively closer to fundamental truths, which he argued united humanity. Ahimsa is essential because violence is incompatible with truth; it suppressed truths which we disliked and makes recipients of violence more resistant to it.
Also read: My Ambivalent Relationship With Gandhi
Satyagraha (truth-force) or (truth-effort) involves sacrifice for truth. Gandhi’s resistance was different from either passive resistance or aggressive civil disobedience that ventured into violence on the opponent. In the Gandhian method, an individual was to attain greater conviction of his own position through self-sacrifice. Be it the hunger strike, the embracing of swadeshi items over foreign goods, or the walk for the salt march – it was key in the Gandhian method that the suffering be exclusively personal. In case his activism lead people into violence Gandhi was ready to put a stop to it, even at the cost of his immediate political objectives. The highest example of this was the stopping of the non-cooperation movement at the height of its popularity when his supporters torched a police station in Chauri-Chaura.
Gandhi’s challenge was much bigger than defeating the opponent, it was to appeal to his highest self and bring about in him a moral transformation. The approach resolved seemingly intractable industrial disputes in the mills in Bombay and create a better settlement for indigo cultivators in Champaran. The greatest test of his methods came during his peace missions around the Partition. In Calcutta, in the aftermath of the Muslim League’s call for ‘direct action,’ the city had turned into a battleground; 5,000 people died in a single day. Gandhi’s prayer meetings and fast onto death were able to bring back the inflamed communities from the throes of retributive violence. In a sight reminiscent of the miracles in scripture, on the fifth day, leaders from both communities brought their weapons and surrendered them at his prayer meeting. This was therapy, done on a mass scale.
His success, nonetheless, was partial. Violence would break out in other parts of the country and continue till after Independence. Gandhi travelled from one epicentre to the other, largely ignored by both the Congress and the League. Yet, Mountbatten spoke of him as ‘One-man boundary force’ who did a better job of keeping peace in the east than 55,000 soldiers did in the west.
Swaraj (self-rule), the call of Gandhi was about more than just freedom, the chief personal and political virtue of the liberal tradition. It was not just the freedom from rule by others, but genuine moral autonomy. According to Gandhi, it also required control over our passions and a commitment to the truth. The weight of keeping others in tyranny did not allow the growth of moral autonomy within the individual, and the expansion of individual truths demanded non-violent exchange with others who themselves have had the autonomy to achieve expansive truths. Swaraj of a country in Gandhian terms is the sum of the swaraj of each of its citizens which for India were held back by the three challenges of economic deprivation, communal-violence, and caste-based discrimination.
Seventy five years since Independence, we should use this litmus test to ask how far we have come personally and politically on this pilgrimage to freedom, and to what extent our politics and national discourse is about the ‘truths’ that can take us there.
Devarchan Banerjee is a Doctoral Student at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. He has previously completed his MPhil from the University of Cambridge as a Rajiv Gandhi Cambridge Trust Scholar. He has worked in Public Policy and International Development in India and Uganda, he may be reached at devarchan@gmail.com.
Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty