These days, India's corrupt politicians don't pay much attention to the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, writes Ramachandra Guha.Ramachandra Guha
Since independence and partition, no event has so divided the Indian people as the demolition of a mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya in December 1992. Hindu radicals claimed that the mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple, and that the site itself was the birthplace of the god Rama. Throughout the late 1980s and early 90s, bands of volunteers tried to storm the mosque, provoking a series of bloody riots across northern India.
Shortly before the Babri Masjid was destroyed, a group of Gandhians visited Ayodhya. They were led by a woman named Sushila Nayar, an 80-year-old physician who had worked closely with Mohandas Gandhi. A prayer meeting conducted by Nayar ended in the singing of Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram, a favourite hymn of Gandhi. When they came to the line "Ishwar Allah Téré Naam" ("God is named both Ishwar and Allah"), the meeting was disrupted by shouts and slogans. A section of the crowd surged towards the stage. Nayar came down to explain to the protesters that the singers had come "on behalf" of Gandhi. "Aur hum Godsé ki taraf sé," the disruptionists are said to have replied: we have come on behalf of [Gandhi's assassin] Nathuram Godse, and like him we think you Gandhians are too soft on the Muslims.
In contemporary India, it is not just the Hindu right that detests Gandhi. So does the Maoist left, which has recently been described by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as the "greatest internal security threat" facing the nation. The Indian Maoists are known as Naxalites, after the village in north Bengal where the movement began in 1967. Two years later, in 1969, the world celebrated the centenary of Gandhi's birth. In that year, the Naxalites brought down statues of Gandhi in towns and villages across India. Occasionally, by way of variation, they entered a government office to vandalise his portrait.
The Maoists were vanquished by the Bengal police in the 1970s. But they later revived, and are especially powerful now in the states of central and eastern India. Their rise owes much to the work of a former schoolteacher named Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, whose People's War Group mounted a series of attacks on railway stations and police camps. The police finally arrested KS, as he was known; but then he feigned illness, and was admitted to hospital, from where he escaped.
It took the police two years to recapture him. A journalist later asked KS what he had done when on the run. He replied that he went from the hospital in Hyderabad to Gandhi's birthplace in Gujarat 600 miles away. Here the revolutionary got off the train and took a rickshaw to Gandhi's parental home, now a museum dedicated to his memory. "I went there and spat on the maggu," KS told the reporter, maggu being the Telugu word for the painted decorations that are placed outside most Indian shrines. Thus did this Maoist show his contempt for a man acknowledged to be the father of the Indian nation.
So the extremists despise Gandhi. What, however, of the centre? For much of the time that India has been independent, the government in New Delhi has been run by the Congress party, to which Gandhi belonged. On the day of independence, August 15 1947, Gandhi was striving for peace in Calcutta. When the new ministers of the Bengal government went to seek his blessings, Gandhi told them, "You have been tested during the British regime. But in a way it has been no test at all. Now there will be no end to your being tested. Do not fall prey to the lure of wealth. You are there to serve the villages and the poor."
To say that Indian politicians have since dishonoured Gandhi's advice would be an understatement. The first betrayal was the abandonment of the villages and the poor. During the 1950s and 60s the economic policy of the state focused on the urban-industrial sector. Agriculture and crafts were neglected; so, even more grievously, was primary education.
There still remained something Gandhian about the men in power; they were, on the whole, not corrupt. However, from the 1970s, politicians began abusing their position to enrich themselves and their families. A global survey carried out by Gallup in 2004 found that the lack of confidence in politicians in India was higher than anywhere else. As many as 91% of those polled felt that their elected representatives were not honest.
What remains of Gandhi and Gandhism in India today? Before answering this question, let me note that, like the Buddha, Gandhi was born in India but does not belong to this land alone. Just as the Buddha found his most devoted adherents elsewhere, the legacy of Gandhi has been admirably taken over by Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. It is a matter of shame that Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel peace prize; the shame is also felt by those who decide on the prize in Oslo, who have since made amends by awarding it to the four Gandhians mentioned above.
Within India, meanwhile, a Gandhian tradition exists outside politics. There is a vigorous environmental movement; the Gandhian influence is also present in the feminist and human rights movements. Doctors and teachers inspired by Gandhi leave their city homes to run clinics and schools in the countryside. And at least a handful of India's millionaries are influenced by Gandhi. Whereas the majority hoard their wealth, some have given away vast amounts of money to promote primary education and transparency in governance.
Six decades after Gandhi's death, some of his teachings are plainly irrelevant. For example, his ideas on food (his diet consisted chiefly of nuts and fruits and boiled vegetables) and sex (he sought to impose a strict celibacy on his followers) can hardly find favour with the majority of people. That said, there are at least four areas in which Gandhi's ideas remain of interest and importance.
First is the environment. The rise of China and India has brought a long-suppressed and quintessentially Gandhian question to the fore: how much should a person consume? So long as the west had a monopoly on modern lifestyles, the question did not arise. But if most Chinese and most Indians come, like the Americans and the British, to own and drive a car, this will place unbearable burdens on the earth. Back in 1928, Gandhi warned about the unsustainability, on a global scale, of western patterns of consumption. "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the west," he said. "The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [UK] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."
The second area is faith. Gandhi believed that no religion had a monopoly on the truth. He argued that one should accept the faith into which one was born (hence his opposition to conversion), but seek to interpret it in the most broad-minded and non-violent way. And he actively encouraged friendships across religions. His own best friend was a Christian priest, CF Andrews. In his ashram he held a daily prayer meeting at which texts from different religions were read or sung. At the time, his position appeared eccentric; in retrospect, it seems precocious. In a world riven by religious misunderstanding, such interaction between religions can help cultivate mutual respect and recognition.
The third area is non-violent resistance. That social change is less harmful and more sustainable when achieved by non-violent means is now widely recognised. A study by the international thinktank Freedom House of 60 transitions to democratic rule since the second world war found that "far more often than is generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, non-violent civic resistance - which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience to de-legitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders." These were all methods pioneered by Gandhi.
The fourth area is public life. In his Reflections on Gandhi, George Orwell wrote, "Regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!" In this age of terror, politicians may not be able to live their lives as openly as Gandhi. There were no security men outside his ashram; visitors could walk in when they chose. Still, the politicians (and activists) of today might at least emulate his refusal to dissemble and his utter lack of reliance on spin. His campaigns of civil disobedience were always announced in advance. His social experiments were minutely dissected in the pages of his newspapers, the comments of his critics placed alongside his own.
Gandhi was a Hindu; but his Hinduism was altogether less dogmatic than that of the fundamentalists of today. Gandhi fought against injustice; but without recourse to the gun and without demonising his adversary. That, 60 years after his death, the extremists of left and right still need to vilify him is in itself a considerable tribute to the relevance of his thought. So, in a somewhat different way, is the need for mainstream politicians to garland portraits of Gandhi even if their practice is at odds with the man they profess to honour.
Gandhi was a prophet of sorts, but by no means a joyless one. On a visit to London in 1931, he went to Buckingham Palace to meet King George. When he came out afterwards, a reporter asked whether he had felt cold in his loincloth. Gandhi answered: "The King had enough on for both of us." Another version has Gandhi saying: "The King wears plus-fours; I wear minus-fours." In those self-deprecatory jokes lie a good deal of (still enduring) wisdom.
· Ramachandra Guha is the author of India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, published by Macmillan. He lives in Bangalore.
