Mahatma Gandhi demystified

(Written on request for the Mumbai daily DNA, sent in on 17 Feb. 2018, heard nothing about it after that.)

On 30 January 1948, after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder, India’s political landscape changed dramatically. In the preceding year, the Hindu Nationalist movement had received a strong boost due to Congress’s confused stand on Partition. But then, Nathuram Godse’s bullets squandered its newly-gained political capital in one go. It would need decades to recover.

Prelude to Partition

Until the end of 1945, Partition had seemed to be a mirage existing only in the minds of some Muslim League diehards. With the British, the Congress and even, as per the 1937 elections, most Muslim voters lined up against the Muslim League’s plan, India’s unity seemed assured. But the League understood the essence of politics: “making the inevitable possible”. By fully using the possibilities created by the British need for friends during World War 2, it changed the power equation. The elections of that winter threw up an unexpectedly large majority in favour of the creation of Pakistan among the Muslim electorate. Now, Partition became the central question of Indian politics.

The British began to waver in their resolve to keep India united. Contrary to the Congress propaganda that most Indians swallow till today, the British had not imposed the Partition on India, on the contrary: they wanted to keep their empire in one piece even if they had to abandon it. But like Congress, they were sensitive to changing circumstances. The dawning Cold War made them see the advantages of a divided Subcontinent, with one part joining the Western camp. And after the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946, they understood that opposing the Muslim League would come at a cost for which they did not have the stomach anymore. When Louis Mountbatten became Viceroy in March 1947, it was with the single purpose of transferring power to a bifurcated India.

Fortunately for the Hindus in West Panjab, Sindh and East Bengal, there was at least the Indian National Congress you could count on; or so they thought. But one after another, top Congress leaders were crossing the floor to a hesitating acceptance of Partition. Yet even then, Mahatma Gandhi stood firm. Had he not promised that India would only be vivisected over his dead body? And with his record of fasts unto death, was this not a solid assurance?

Karmic price

However, by June 1947, the Mahatma too gave up. He justified this broken promise with a weasel explanation: if one of the shareholders withdraws from the joint account that is India, no Mahatma could coerce him to do otherwise. Pray, what had all his other fasts been but successful attempts to coerce the other party into doing what it would otherwise have refused to do? Now that numerous lives were at stake, he refused to stake his own because his tender conscience suddenly had discovered how evil it is to pressurize people.

With that, Gandhi conceded defeat to Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It was a karmic come-uppance: in 1920, he had humiliated Jinnah on the dais of a Congress meeting where the still-moderate Muslim leader had opposed the plan to involve Congress in the Khilafat movement. Jinnah had pleaded against mass politics and especially against mixing religion with politics, warning that this would bring disaster. Gandhi’s cheering crowds had sent him packing, and when he returned to politics years later, he had learned his lesson. 

Mind you, the Partition plan could have been reasonable, as in the version thought up by Dr. BR Ambedkar immediately after the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution of 1940. He had worked out a peaceful exchange of population, with all Muslims resettling in Pakistan and all non-Muslims in India. That lucid scheme would have avoided the massacres of 1947 and also those of 1971 and of all the smaller-scale communal riots. But some decision-makers seem to prefer bloodbaths clothed in high principles to this modest and pragmatic accommodation of the inevitable.

Godse’s achievements

There had been lots of criticism of Gandhi during his lifetime, now obscured and tabooed by his halo of martyrdom. For a single example, it was clear to all that he himself became the killer of Gandhism as a political vision when he dictatorially foisted Jawaharlal Nehru on the Congress, and therefore as national leader, as if he didn’t know what this “last Viceroy” stood for. The democratic alternative would have been to nominate Sardar Patel, Congress’s own preference. Later developments confirmed that Gandhi’s choice had been a Himalayan blunder, giving India the Kashmir problem and the proverbial poverty resulting from Nehru’s option for socialism.

When you read Godse’s speech delivered during his trial, you will notice that many of his criticisms were widely shared. In many respects he had been a Gandhian himself, such as activism against untouchability. In others, he simply agreed with many observers, e.g. in frowning on Gandhi’s irrationality. He was an extremist not because of his views, but because he tied the consequence of murder to his views.

That act was indeed unforgivable. Perhaps Godse could not have been dissuaded by its inherent moral evil. But at least he could have retreated before its formidable strategic foolishness. It spectacularly smashed the windows of his own movement for decades to come. But it also achieved something else he would not have wanted: it turned a fallible politician into an immortal saint elevated above normal human judgment.

Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian scholar of India’s ancient as well as contemporary history, presently working at the Indus University in Ahmedabad. Rupa has freshly published a new edition of his detailed review of Nathuram Godse’s stated motives.

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The British were not guilty of Partition; somebody else was

The easiest way before an Indian audience to get hands clapping, is to accuse the British of the Partition of India. Try it for yourself and say out loud: “Partition was engineered by the wily Britishers  in their nefarious design of ‘divide and rule’”, success assured. And the applause is sure to follow no matter whether the audience, whose sensibilities you may not know, is Gandhian, Nehruvian-secularist or Hindu nationalist. Yes, Hindu nationalist too.

“Jinnah was brainwashed into dividing India”, I read in RSS mouthpiece Organiser. Well, if it is that  easy, why doesn’t the RSS brainwash the Indian Muslims into becoming India-loving Hindus? Incidentally, how is it done, this “brainwashing”? In reality, the Hindu nationalists are taking a cheap shot at the British in order to mask their fear of pinpointing Muslim guilt.

One would have expected at least Mahatma murderer Nathuram Godse to have criticized Islam, apart from laying as much of the blame as possible at Gandhi’s feet. But Godse says very little about the guilt for Partition. He accuses the British of a “divide and rule” policy, alright, but doesn’t make this the cause of the Pakistan movement. He accuses Gandhi of not countering the Muslim League’s demand of Partition with his trademark means of action, viz. the fast unto death; but he does not go into the question of why the Muslim League made this demand in the first place. So, even among Godse’s fans you won’t find many articulate opponents of the British conspiracy thesis.

In this article, I will argue that the British had nothing to do with Partition, and that this was a purely Muslim operation necessitated by the present democratic age’s belief in numbers. In the medieval period, the Muslims constituted far less than the 24% of the Indian population which they were in the 1940s, yet they ruled. Mohammed Ali Jinnah thought that this was no longer possible in modern times, so if they wanted to be in power, they needed a smaller country where they would constitute the majority. So, the Two-Nation Theory espoused by the Muslim League necessitated two separate states, one of which would have a Muslim majority.

To be sure, the British were guilty of many things, and the fixation of Hindu nationalists on them is understandable. Principally, they caused several very serious famines, they dismantled the technology and economic structure of India, and they imposed a foreign ideology that harmed the natives’ self-respect. This did not make British rule “the biggest crime in history”, as L.K. Advani claims on his blog (15 July 2012), but it was pretty bad. However, none of that made them guilty of Partition. Nor did their policy of “divide and rule” cause the pre-colonial or post-colonial (and generally not even the colonial) hostility between Hindus and Muslims. It was a tactic used at the negotiation table, not meant for the streets (where riots would only upset economic life), much less for a final Partition of the Indian empire.

Viceroys Lord Victor Linlithgow and Lord Archibald Wavell told Jinnah to his face that they would not countenance the division of their nice and neat Indian empire, not even in the event of decolonization. Their successor, Lord Louis Mountbatten, only accepted Partition because the Muslim League threatened and started violence. Congress leaders did the same, including even Mahatma Gandhi in June 1947. All his so-called fasts unto death, his promise that “India will only be divided over my dead body”, proved hollow in the face of the real chance that these opponents would not give in, so that his fast would only be concluded with his death. .

It is only the fledgling Cold War that made the British and also the Americans see a silver lining in the Partition, viz. that one of the parties would join the Western camp and provide it an outpost to monitor the Soviet  threat. This was apparently also what made Lord Mountbatten more pliable. But it was only in 1945 that the Soviet ally became an enemy, five years after the Muslim League adopted the Pakistan resolution, and more than ten years after the idea of Pakistan was first mooted.

In reality, the ideology of Partition was rooted in Islam. According to Islam, Muslims must always be in power. Thus, Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women but non-Muslim men are not allowed to marry Muslim women because wives are deemed to be at the husbands’ command. In the Middle Ages, Muslim minorities had seemed to subdue the Hindus by military means, and Muslim leaders with a medieval mindset concluded logically that numbers were unimportant to decide who will dominate whom. Thus, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who had given an emigration fatwa during the Khilafat movement) is mis-termed a Nationalist Muslim but aimed in fact at the Islamic domination of the whole of India. However, Jinnah had interiorized the modern value of democracy and didn’t dare to ask for more than a country in which Muslims would form the majority.

Islam is against multiculturalism unless it is treated with utmost respect and has at least the perspective of becoming dominant. By contrast, the Hindu nationalists including Nathuram Godse were prepared to give the Muslims far-reaching concessions in order to keep India united. They were not guilty, Congress was not guilty when it proved insufficiently accommodating to the League, and the British rulers were not guilty. If a section of the Muslims had not desired Partition, then Partition would never have happened.

Hindus who blame the British for Partition, show that they are afraid of the truth, and afraid of Islam. It is far easier to accuse the British, who have safely departed, than to lay the blame at the door of Islam. Blaming Islam opens a can of worms, it is difficult to deal with this religion. It is a challenge to one’s courage, but it is mainly a challenge to one’s intelligence. If you are deficient in these departments, then go ahead and blame the British.

On the other hand, if you have courage and intelligence, it should be easy to face the fact of Muslim causation of the Partition of India. Today, it takes a moderate dosis of courage to criticize Islam: you risk the ire of the institutions (and your job if you are a scholar in the Humanities), the violence of some indignant Muslim, and if you are a Hindu, also the displeasure of your fellow Hindus. But these risks are manageable, and as I will explain on some future occasion, I do not buy the myth of Hindu lack of bravery. Criticizing Islam also requires a large amount on intelligence, viz. the power to discriminate between causes (the doctrine of Islam) and symptoms (the behavior of Muslims, only partly caused by this doctrine), and the balancing act between uncompromising criticism of the doctrine and sympathy at the human level. Even you could have been born and brought up as a Muslim and developed an attachment for Islam’s irrational beliefs. If you believe in reincarnation, you should realize that you even could have been a Muslim, perhaps several times over. So, responsibly criticizing Islam and its role in the Partition of India requires intelligence.

It is here that I have more reason to worry. Though Hindus have shown great intelligence in the literature of the past and ICT initiatives of the present, they have mostly failed to apply their intelligence to the Islam problem, though this is staring them in the face every day. But I am confident that now you will do something about it.

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Questioning the Mahatma (book review)

Mahatma Gandhi was a heartless and manipulative tyrant without the redeeming feature of political merit. On the contrary, his vision for India was confused, he twisted the meaning of straightforward terms like Swarajya (independence) to suit his own eccentric fancies, he never overcame his basic loyalty to the British Empire, and he didn't have the courage of his conviction when it was needed to avert the Partition of India. While playing the part of a Hindu sage in sufficient measure to keep the Hindu masses with him, he never championed and frequently harmed Hindu interests. Finally, his sexual experiments with young women were not a private matter but had an impact on his politics. Thus says a new study of Gandhi's political record by Hindu scholar Mrs. Radha Rajan.





The latest American book on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul, has drawn a lot of attention. This was mainly because of its allegations about yet more eccentric sexual aspects of his Mahatmahood on top of those already known. In particular, Lelyveld overinterprets Gandhi’s correspondence with German-Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach as evidence of a homosexual relationship. Bapu’s fans intoned the same mantra as the burners of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses: “Freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to insult revered figures.” Well, if it doesn’t mean that, it doesn’t mean much.

In particular, Lelyveld has all the more right to disclose what he found in the Mahatma’s bedroom because the latter was quite an exhibitionist himself, detailing every straying thought and nocturnal emission in his sermons and editorials. But do these tickling insinuations carry any weight? Other, more troubling aspects of Gandhi’s résumé are far more deserving of closer scrutiny. Some unpleasant instances of his impact on India and Hinduism have been discussed thoroughly in a new book, Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and His Freedom Struggle (New Age Publ., Kolkata), by Mrs. Radha Rajan, editor of the Chennai-based nationalist website, www.vigilonline.com .

Radha Rajan was already the author, with Krishen Kak, of NGOs, Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-Nation Industry (2006), a scholarly X-ray of the NGO scene, exposing this holier-than-thou cover for both corruption and anti-India machinations. The present book likewise takes a very close look at a subject mostly presented only in the broad strokes of hagiography. In particular, she dissects the Hindu and anti-Hindu content of Gandhi’s policies. Both were present, the author acknowledges his complexity, but there was a lot less Hindu in him than mostly assumed.

Rama had Vasishtha, Chandragupta had Chanakya, Shivaji had Ramdas, but Gandhi never solicited the guidance of any Hindu rajguru. By contrast, every step of the way in his long formative years, he read Christian authors and welcomed the advice of Christian clergymen. This way, he imbibed many monotheistic prejudices against heathen Hinduism, to the point that in 1946 he insisted for the new temple on the BHU campus not to contain an “idol”. (p.466)

Gandhi took his Hindu constituents for granted but never showed any concern for specific Hindu interests. The story that he staked his life to quell the massacres of Hindus in Noakhali in 1947, turns out to be untrue: his trip to East Bengal took place under security cover and well after the worst violence had subsided. There and wherever Hindus were getting butchered en masse in 1947-48, he advised them to get killed willingly rather than fight back or flee. It is breathtaking how often his writings and speeches contain expressions like: “I don’t care if many die.” And it was the first time in Hindu history that anyone qualified going down without a fight against a murderous aggressor as “brave”.

All his fasts unto death proved to be empty play when he refused to use this weapon to avert the Partition, in spite of promises given. It was the only time when he ran a real risk of being faced with an opponent willing to let him die rather than give in. Radha Rajan documents how unpopular he had become by then, not only among fellow politicians who were exasperated at his irrationality, but also among the masses suffering the effects of his confused policies. Had Gandhi not been murdered, his star would have continued to fall and he would have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Gandhi made a caricature of Hinduism by presenting his own whimsical and eccentric conduct as quintessentially Hindu, such as the rejection of technological progress, maintaining sexual abstinence even within marriage, and most consequentially, extreme non-violence under all circumstances. This concept owed more to Jesus’ “turning the other cheek” than to Hindu-Buddhist ahimsa. He managed to read his own version of non-violence into the Bhagavad Gita, which in fact centres on Krishna’s rebuking Arjuna’s plea for Gandhian passivity. He never invoked any of India’s warrior heroes and denounced the freedom fighters who opted for armed struggle, under the quiet applause of the British rulers whose lives became a lot more comfortable with such a toothless opponent.

The author acknowledges Gandhiji’s sterling contribution to the weakening of caste prejudice among the upper castes. His patronizing attitude towards the Harijans will remain controversial, but the change of heart he effected among the rest of Hindu society vis-à-vis the Scheduled Castes was revolutionary. However, once educated SC people started coming up and speaking for themselves, his response was heartless and insulting. Thus, a letter is reproduced in which the Mahatma with chilling pedantry belittles an admiring Constituent Assembly candidate from the scavengers’ caste for his “bookish English” and because: “The writer is a discontented graduate. (…) I fear he does no scavenging himself” and thus “he sets a bad example” to other scavengers. In conclusion, he advises the educated scavenger to stay out of politics.(p.480) Few readers will have expected the sheer nastiness of this saint’s temper tantrums.

Likewise, his supposed saintliness is incompatible with his well-documented mistreatment of his sons and especially of his faithful wife, whom he repeatedly subjected to public humiliation. Here too, Gandhi’s sexual antics receive some attention. The whole idea of an old man seeking to strengthen his brahmacharya (chastity) by sleeping with naked young women, is bad enough. Perhaps we had to wait for a lady author to give these victims a proper hearing. Radha Rajan documents the fear with which these women received Gandhi’s call to keep him company, as well as their attempts to avoid or escape this special treatment and the misgivings of their families. She praises the self-control of Gandhi’s confidants who, though horrified, kept the lid on this information out of concern for its likely demoralizing effect on the Congress movement. The Mahatma himself wasn’t equally discreet, he revealed the names of the women he had used in his chastity experiments, unmindful of what it would do to their social standing.

When Sardar Patel expressed his stern disapproval of these experiments, Gandhi reacted with a list of cheap allegations, which Patel promptly and convincingly refuted. Lowly insinuations turn out to be a frequent presence in the Mahatma’s correspondence. As the author observes: “Reputed historians and other eminent academicians have not undertaken so far any honest study of Gandhi’s character. Just as little is known of his perverse experiments with women, as little is known of his vicious anger and lacerating speech that he routinely spewed at people who opposed him or rejected him.” While careful not to offend the powerful among his occasional critics, like his sponsor G.D. Birla, “he treated those whom he considered inferior to him in status with contempt and in wounding language”. (p.389)

Unlike in Lelyveld’s account, the references to Gandhi’s sexual gimmicks here have political relevance. More importantly, Gandhi’s discomfort with Patel’s disapproval was a major reason for his overruling the Congress workers’ preference for Patel and foisting his flatterer Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister on India instead. Thus, argues Radha Rajan, he handed India’s destiny over to an emergent coalition of anti-Hindu forces. To replace Nehru as party leader, he had his yes-man J.B. Kripalani selected, not coincidentally the one among those in the know who had explicitly okayed the chastity experiments. The Mahatma’s private vices spilled over into his public choices with grave political consequences.


(book review published in The Sunday Pioneer, 15 May 2011)


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