Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi continues to be India?s leading poster-person sixty-three years after he fell to an assassin?s bullets. The Jantar Mantar carnival crowd?s discovery of another Gandhi in the hitherto unknown, Anna Hazare, banished the just-crowned world champion Indian cricket team from the small screens in less time than it takes to realise the redundancy in the term Jan Lokpal. Wags had posed a question during the Cricket World Cup: who was India?s greatest spinner? The answer: Gandhi! As a distinguished columnist of this paper would say, ?no (further) proof required?.
Does this discovery of a new Gandhi in our midst, with certain superficial similarities in appearance and in the mode of agitation?indefinite fast?to gain its ends, bear analytical scrutiny? The answer to this seemingly simple question requires us to travel back in history nearly a century.
Gandhi arrived in India in 1914, after his long and arduous struggle for the civil rights of South Africans of Indian origin. He was already far removed from the rather foppish British barrister who had journeyed to the that racially divided outpost of the British Empire, but still a work in progress, to use a current term.
He espoused the cause of the indentured indigo farmers of Champaran on his return and immediately came face to face with the starkest reality of colonial India. The condition of the virtually enslaved Bihari farmers was far worse than what he had seen in the darkest of Africa. He was the first Indian leader to realise that the struggle for independence meant not just agitations for home rule and passing resolutions in the annual sessions of the Congress, regardless of how strongly they were worded. Freedom of the serfs was an essential and non-negotiable component of the campaign. Unfortunately, in the 1910s, this home truth had not even registered on the radar of most Indian politicians.
Within a decade, Gandhi was the tallest Congress leader, after Lokmanya Tilak?s death in 1920. This period of his ascendancy in the political firmament was accompanied not by efforts to consolidate his power (as later and lesser leaders in India and elsewhere invariably did) but a continuing discovery of India and himself. This intertwined process was often halting and agonising.
A viable political movement in India needed the support of all classes: the long suffering farmers, whose economy lay in ruins, the native manufacturers who suffered from discriminatory policies, the educated upper class bureaucrats and professionals who enjoyed privileges in the name of their ancestral religion but chafed under British domination, all needed to be brought together despite what appeared to be irreconcilable contradictions in their positions.
Gandhi?s truth led him to realise that the country, nominally united under the British rule, needed an emotionally unifying appeal. He understood that only the poet saints of the medieval India drew together a caste-ridden and religiously divided society. And he had his own personal needs for religion. He melded the two into an idealised glorification of the past.
Hindsight tells us that the invocation of simple, self-sufficient, village communities embedded in the concept of Ram Rajya essentially denied the role of technology and was anti-modernising, but we must also realise that nothing else would have attracted alike the peasants and burgeoning middle castes who had acquired a smattering of western education in the India of the 1920s and the 1930s.
His appeal transcended the political radicalism of his party and ventured into metaphysical quests.
Gandhi?s followers in the Congress included professionals who gave up their privileges such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, traditionalists like Pattabhi Sitaramayya and Rajendra Prasad, erstwhile radicals such as Jaya Prakash Narayan and yes, even MN Roy for a while, among others. The Congress, which had started out to be a party in the narrow sense of the term, became a truly national movement under Gandhi?s tutelage.
The correct measure of the universality of Gandhi?s magnetism lies in the fact that it functioned long before the age of instant communication. No electronic media existed then and newspapers took days to reach the countryside. Yet Gandhi?s exhortations to various forms of actions seem to have reached even the farthest corners of the country almost instantaneously?for instance, the 1942 call for Quit India.
The key to understanding Gandhi and his hold on an entire sub-continent is realising that he saw neither his life nor his struggles as being isolated activities. He led by example, practicing first and preaching later. He saw economic, social and religious activities as mutually supporting and evoked the images of a virtuous man and society. He may not have succeeded in creating either, even in his own self, but it is my humble submission that without this overarching dimension to his thought, personality and struggle, he would have been just one among the many illustrious leaders and not very successful at that. Martin Luther King and, much later, Nelson Mandela understood this universal and all-encompassing core of Gandhian appeal and used it successfully in their own struggles.
Gandhi was a complex man, and we still have not understood the full extent of his personality or compulsions. He was certainly not concerned with any one single issue to the exclusion of others. If he acted as a moral dictator at times, such as forcing the new Government of India to release Pakistan?s share of common funds even as the latter had not complied with actions on sharing waters in 1948, overriding the strong protests of Nehru and Patel, he was also mindful of its consequences and advocated the disbanding of the Congress after Independence.
Sadly, one does not see any of these nuances and manifest complexities in the latest self-proclaimed avatar of Gandhism, any more than one does in the hugely popular fictionalised Gandhigiri of Munnabhai. One recent tweet said that we need hazaar Annas. Unwittingly perhaps, the clever play on words also underscored the transient and partial nature of the current agitation.
India needed only one Mahatma to uplift it.
The author has taught at IIM-A and helped set up IRMA