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THE MOST TRENCHANT criticism of Gandhi and Gandhism came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the man who murdered him, Nathuram Godse. He chose the role of assassin, fully expecting to be caught and making no plans to escape, precisely because the trial would give him a platform from which to condemn Gandhi. He spoke for five hours in English on 8 November 1948. Gandhi would have wryly acknowledged that his killer had used a very Gandhian trick: accepting a punishment for an action he considered righteous, in order to use the resulting trial as a vehicle for his ideas.
Born in 1910 to a Brahmin family in Maharashtra, Godse was an early follower of Gandhi. A committed nationalist, he was also a supporter of Hindu reform: ‘I publicly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus should be treated with equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be high or low on merit alone;’ he used to attend anti- caste dinners in which thousands of Hindus broke intercaste rules by dining together.1 He subsequently joined pro-Hindu organisations and came under the influence of Savarkar, who gave him funding to start a newspaper to propagate their views.
He could not object to Gandhi’s principles of truth and non-violence: ‘No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement.’ But it was a mere dream, he went on, to consider that non-violence could apply to every situation, when honour, duty, love of family and of one’s country might require force. Gandhi was, ‘paradoxical as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence.’2
Godse praised Gandhi’s work in South Africa, but said when he returned to India
he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility... either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the judge of everything and everyone... ‘A satyagrahi can never fail’ was his formula for declaring his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a satyagrahi was. Thus the Mahatma became the judge and counsel in his own cause. These childish inanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible.3
Far from being the father of the nation, according to Godse Gandhi had encouraged and appeased the Muslims, assisted them in dismembering the nation; he was not the father of India, but the father of Pakistan. He felt Gandhi’s was a continuing malign influence on the government and the only way to stop him was to kill him. Despite requests for clemency by Manilal and Ramdas Gandhi, Godse and Apte were hanged on 15 November 1949.
Godse’s reading of the situation could not have been more wrong. Gandhi had been a declining influence at least since the blunder of the Quit India campaign. The success of his fast for the immediate payment of the money owed to Pakistan was probably his last gasp. His next move was going to be to call for Congress to disband as a political party and for its supporters to dedicate themselves to good works around the country. His expectations of high-mindedness among politicians would surely have been disappointed: few people who had fought for so long for political independence would renounce the opportunity of power, not to mention personal position and wealth. The decline in his status was set to continue.
Politically, the most important thing Godse did in martyring Gandhi was to discredit the Hindu hardliners, who were not to revive their fortunes for another fifty years. It was not until 2002 that the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) felt able to acknowledge Gandhi’s old adversary Vinayak Savarkar as its hero and cult figure. In terms of Gandhi’s reputation, Godse’s act completed the process of deifying his victim. Gandhi is an enduring symbol of India; along with Buddha he is one of two Indians of whom everyone has heard, whose image can be immediately brought to mind.
Gandhi was always proud of his achievements, many of which have stood the test of time. In the modernist first decade of the twentieth century his ideas looked out of date, particularly to such progressives as Nehru. But the twenty-first century brought a world in which many ideas of his that had been considered eccentric have become mainstream. Gandhi would find common cause in the developed world with his intolerance of smoking, which he considered worse than drinking alcohol; it is certainly less well tolerated in Europe today. His dietary experiments were in his own times the mark of an oddity. Today many millions of people pay minute attention to details of diet such as eating no more than a certain number of calories a day, eating only single kinds of food, eating no carbohydrates, eating five vegetables a day and other seemingly endless permutations. Gandhi could certainly be a modern dietitian, and such qualities of his as thrift and self-reliance have made a comeback as virtues, now being represented as saving the planet.
Gandhi is enduringly remembered for public fasting, a spiritual exercise that he adapted for political ends. He successfully fasted for peace in Calcutta but also fasted when members of his ashram were guilty of what he considered to be moral lapses by finding each other attractive. When he engaged on the ‘epic fast’ for a joint electorate for the caste Hindus and the untouchables he was successful not because of his spiritual purity but because there would have been a massacre of untouchables had he died in what he saw as their cause.
Controlled fasting is a standard practice in major religions. Those who attempt a fast unto death to attain political ends, however, have usually been linked to terrorist organisations such as the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers and animal-rights militants. The act of fasting is associated with the militancy of violence contained, a violence that can do no more damage but turn in on itself. The power of the faster is that of the anorexic or the voluntary mute, who has control over a tiny area, that of their own body functions, and determines to dominate it to an extreme degree. In the end fasting to death is an aggressive act, like the suicide who says: ‘I will really hurt myself and then you will be sorry Gandhi has had few imitators in this field, and governments have generally been prepared to see fasters the rather than concede.
The week before Indian independence Gandhi wrote: ‘So long as my faith burns bright, as I hope it will even if I stand alone, I shall be alive in the grave and what is more speaking from it.’4 No friend to false modesty, he said: ‘If I can say so without arrogance and with due humility, my message and method are indeed in their essentials for the whole world.’5 In fact it took some time for him to apply his message of equal human rights more widely than just to Indians of his own class. His argument in South Africa was that the white political masters should treat Indians more like themselves in terms of political rights, and less like the native Africans; in this he showed a tacit acceptance of African inferiority. As time passed, however, Gandhi was to see other nationalist campaigns in the same light as his own. In 1944 he was arguing that ‘freedom for India will bring hope to Asiatics and other exploited nations. Today there is no hope for the Negroes, but Indian freedom will fill them with hope.’6
The American civil rights movement came to cite Gandhi as a godfather. African-Americans had been reading about his message of righteous resistance in such periodicals as The Crisis since the 1920s. Martin Luther King, sometimes referred to as the ‘black Gandhi,’ spent a month in India in 1959. ‘To other countries I may go as a tourist. But to India I come as a pilgrim,’ he said.7 As a young man, having heard a lecture on Gandhi, he went out to buy half a dozen books on his life and works. These taught him, he said, that the Christian injunction to non-violence, which he had felt to be valid only in conflicts between individuals, could be applied to racial groups in conflict with nations. He interpreted Gandhi’s message as ‘non-violent resistance to evil.’ When he went as a pastor to Montgomery, Alabama, and found himself spokesman of the civil rights movement, he said he was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method.8
Nelson Mandela cites Gandhi’s influence in his battle against apartheid in South Africa. Gandhi was ‘the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.’9 Gandhi’s ideals were the inspiring force for nationalist movements on the African continent up to the 1960s. He conceded, however, that the African National Congress had been able to take Gandhi’s ideals only so far, maintaining a non-violent resistance as long as possible but then feeling constrained to launch a guerrilla war in 1961 with its founding of the Spear of the Nation wing. It was for his involvement with this organisation that Mandela suffered imprisonment for more than a quarter of a century before being freed to become the first president of a democratic South Africa.
Gandhi did not value sexual diversity any more than did the average conservative of his time, which makes it ironic that some of the most quintessentially Gandhian protests have been sexual. After the arrest of two men for kissing in public in central London, the homosexual activist group OutRage! staged a kiss-in at the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus in September 1990 in which, in an ultimate act of non-violent civil disobedience, demonstrators simply kissed, thereby challenging the police to do their worst, secure in the knowledge that any act of repression would reflect badly on the authorities. Similarly, the filmmaker Michael Moore, for a television programme he was making, drove a ‘sodomobile’ through US states where sodomy laws were still in place, proclaiming that forbidden acts were going on in the van. Clearly, any action to enforce such absurd laws would bring ridicule on the authorities while generating publicity for Moore. The spirit of Gandhi’s salt protest shines through such prankish gestures of defiance.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament too likes to consider Gandhi a spiritual godfather even though, he explained to a journalist, he very much doubted that the advent of the atomic era would basically affect human problems.10 Pressed on the matter he later said: ‘Ahimsa is a mightier weapon by far than the atom bomb. Even if the people of Hiroshima could have died in their thousands with prayer and goodwill in their hearts, the situation would have been transformed as if by a miracle.’11 Gandhi cannot be challenged for not having all the answers to a nuclear arms race that had hardly begun when he died, but this points up a recurrent failing in his perception: his moral vision was profound, but it was about individual fulfilment. He could conceive of personal animosity, but genocidal destruction was beyond his understanding. Confronted with massive evil—the Armenian massacres, the Japanese massacres, the Nazi Holocaust—his philosophy faltered. It offered endless suffering but no salvation. Gandhi was a great nationalist, but his adversary Churchill was a better role model for the challenges the world’s nations faced in the 1930s,
Gandhi’s contribution was an approach that worked where there was a common principle and an expectation of civil obedience; where there was a legal framework in which courts showed at least a pretence to objectivity; where there was a standard of common decency to which he could appeal; where there was a free press to publicise injustice and a population concerned about it; where his opponents’ ranks contained sympathisers with the nationalist cause who were free to express their views. In the case of India he was operating in a situation where the British had already conceded the principle of ultimate independence; the question was when it would take place. There was no comparison to life under a totalitarian state; Gandhi’s suggestion of a moral equivalence between the democracies and the Axis Powers shows he did not know or was not interested in knowing what real dictatorship was.
In turning his back on the Western constitutional model of nationalist progress embraced by Jinnah and insisting on a village model, Gandhi promoted division among the nationalists. His ideas, his belief in the action of spiritual forces working on the elements here on earth, his apocalyptic notions of what independence would achieve, all played well in the countryside but they were not the stuff of statesmanship.
Aside from the democide of the partition process itself and of the Bangladesh conflict, partition was disastrous for the subcontinent for long-term reasons. Partition was also an administrative catastrophe: it destroyed the military, economic and administrative unity developed by the British over more than a century. One result of this has been the poor economic performance of Pakistan as compared to India; Pakistan has become the underdeveloped theocratic state that Gandhi hoped India would be. Partition did not even end the communal problems in India; communal violence has taken place every year since independence and there is evidence the situation is getting worse. India and Pakistan have fought a war almost every decade since independence, and both are now armed with nuclear weapons.
Was Gandhi in any way responsible for partition, the primary charge levelled by his assassin? Indian nationalists were equipped with two misconceptions, which Gandhi fostered: that communal tension was a result of the imperial system, and that the East was spiritually elevated as compared to the West. Gandhi explained: ‘It is the British statesmen who are responsible for the divisions in India’s ranks, and the divisions will continue so long as the British sword holds India under bondage.’12 Indian nationalists witnessing communal cruelties consoled themselves with the fiction that Hindu-Muslim disunity was a function of a British divide-and-rule policy; without the British there would be no disunity. It did not take a very profound thinker to realise that the disunity had to be present in the first place, to be exploited by a ruler.
Gandhi, his followers and such spiritual adventurers as Annie Besant and Charles Andrews had promoted the notion of Indian moral superiority. This suffered a collapse in the very first days of the new nation, when atrocities took place worse than anything that had happened under the British Raj. Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus behaved as badly as each other; none were distinguished by the restraint of their creeds or the control of responsible leadership. Gandhi’s contribution to peacekeeping was courageous and welcome, but in most places there was no Gandhi, or he arrived after the massacres. It is a grim truth, but it was not the spiritual superiority of the East and the ethical demise of the West that became apparent in the events of the 1940s, but a rather more sobering fact: the moral oneness of humanity—each is as bad as the other.
These misconceptions meant that the very basis on which nationalists operated—that everything would be for the best after independence—was grievously wrong. The cynical British and the determined Jinnah had a better grip on life’s realities. For Gandhi, politics was the art of the impossible—the centuries-old conflicts between Hindus and Muslims could be reconciled within a united India by imposing a morally improved model of village relationships. More experienced politicians begged him to accept a solution to India’s constitutional problems. The creation of Pakistan had been rejected by the cabinet mission because it would not solve the communal problem—a grouping of provinces into Muslim-majority areas was preferred. Whether ‘grouping’ would have worked it is not possible to tell, but we do know that Jinnah would be dead within thirteen months of independence. Had the cabinet mission’s scheme been in place, even with Jinnah wishing to secede his Muslim-majority provinces from the rest of India, without his skill and determination perhaps Pakistan would not have been created. Gandhi certainly bears some responsibility for refusing to back the cabinet mission’s proposal until it was too late, by which time the creation of Pakistan was inevitable.
Gandhi has to take responsibility for the Muslims’ wanting Pakistan so badly that they were willing to dismember India to get it. He could be said to be responsibile for the Hinduisation of politics, making Muslims feel increasingly isolated within a nation where the Hindu majority hoped for a return of the Rama Raj. Gandhi’s political objectives were tied up with the reform of Hinduism. His achievement was in bringing the masses of the Hindu devout into politics; his failure was in linking independence so closely with goals of Hindu reform that there was no place, politically, for the huge minority of Muslims or for the untouchables, for whom Hinduism offered no boons, only curses. Worse was his suffusing Indian politics in a religious haze so that everything had to be interpreted in terms of spiritual attainment—an atmosphere that alienated Jinnah and other secular politicians but empowered hypocrites whose mouthing of religious sentiments proved sufficient for advancement.
Gandhi’s work on behalf of untouchables, the other large minority in India, bore fruit, but not in the way he expected. In resisting a separate electorate for untouchables he wanted Hindus to realise their spiritual obligations to this despised class and embrace them. What has happened subsequently has been grounded rather more in self-interest. In Gandhi’s time, the untouchables were a small percentage of the total population of united India. The ‘depressed castes’ constitute about 20 per cent of the population of modern India. Their needs cannot be ignored by politicians hoping to be elected; political parties need to have untouchables on their slate if they want to claim to be representative of local populations. A separate electorate, as requested by Gandhi’s adversary B.R. Ambedkar, would have confirmed their assumed difference; the joint electorate undermines it.
Ambedkar drafted the constitution of India to outlaw the practice of untouchability, and great progress has been made in the cities. Ironically, it is in Gandhi’s idealised villages that the ‘sin of untouchability’ is most apparent in today’s India. His anti-industrial model of Indian life was not accepted by other nationalist leaders: Nehru, for instance, pushed on with nationwide industrialisation and with an ambitious nuclear programme. India’s economic strength is now a matter for national pride. It has given great satisfaction to Indians that the richest man in Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century was the Indian industrialist Lakshmi Mittal; and the Indian Tata Group took over the once mighty British steel industry in 2007. Tata family members had been contributing to Gandhi’s work since his days in South Africa. A future of industrialisation and concomitant prosperity was not one that Gandhi predicted for India, or desired. It would appal him that between 15 and 25 per cent of Indians (depending on the criteria used) still live in abject poverty; but it can give quiet satisfaction to his successors that, whatever measurement is used, this figure has been falling rapidly since the mid-1970s, in keeping with industrial growth.
To the public, Gandhi is better known from Richard Attenborough’s adulatory Gandhi rather than from Feroz Abbas Khan’s film Gandhi My Father, which described his troubled relationship with his family. If Gandhi is any kind of role model, it is not as a husband and father. He behaved worst towards Kasturba, badly towards his sons and not always well towards his friends and supporters, but wonderfully towards people he did not know, and with an outflowing of spontaneous benevolence towards those toiling masses that he would never know in person.
His poor treatment of his own children stemmed from a disgust at the carnality of their creation, as if he saw in his own sons nothing but the embodiment of the copulatory urge that had to be tamed. As noted earlier, Gandhi’s resentment against his own childhood marriage was that it obliged him to explore his sexuality before he had the opportunity to renounce it and address his spiritual nature. A soul contaminated with sex, even in youth, needed higher levels of discipline to purify it than could be achieved by simple abstinence as an adult. Gandhi’s sexual preoccupations were well known and were already damaging his reputation when he was alive. The Congress Party hierarchy warned him of this as did members of his entourage and others who worked for him, including those left to edit his newspaper while he was in Noakhali, who resigned rather than print Gandhi’s own reports of his sexual behaviour. Some of his supporters, including Nehru, could overlook his sexual peccadilloes or treat them with exasperated tolerance, but his opponents would not. Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, prime minister of Travancore, told Mountbatten that Gandhi was ‘a most dangerous, semi-repressed sex maniac.’13 This was no passing insult: the premier was negotiating to prevent the riches of his state, including thorium deposits, falling into the hands of a Congress Party that had put itself in thrall to a man such as Gandhi.
Gandhi’s musing on sex was not occasional or cursory: his accounts were frequent and detailed. His amanuensis Pyarelal, knowing he would himself be criticised, defended his dwelling on brahmacharya in writing about Gandhi on the grounds that it was ‘fundamental and integral to Gandhiji’s philosophy of life, and on account of the great importance he himself attached to it and his own injunction to me in that behalf.’14 Gandhi was very clear as to the relative importance he placed on his political as compared to his spiritual life: ‘My mahatmaship is worthless. It is due to my outward activities, due to my politics, which is the least part of me and is therefore evanescent. What is of abiding worth is my insistence on truth, non-violence and brahmacharya.’15
Gandhi’s thoughts and writings were suffused with sex. In dealing with it so publicly he was very much in tune with the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, which have seen the increasing sexualisation of society. The difference is that, though Gandhi’s discourse was apparently aiming to discourage sex, he referred to it constantly, so sex was ever present.
If ‘having sex’ means genital penetration, then for the last forty years of his life Gandhi was, as he would have put it, pure. But if we think of the sex urge as becoming more generalised with age, he was not. Had Gandhi spent more time understanding sex rather than suppressing it, he might have noticed that for men in their later years, with declining testosterone production, sex tends to become more diffused. Where for a young man penetration and ejaculation are imperative, a less specific eroticism seems sufficient for elderly men—the sound of women’s voices, a female touch, the sight of nakedness. One could, of course, argue that it is because old men have less opportunity for active sex that they have to be satisfied with less. However it is viewed, Gandhi certainly maximised his sexual opportunities; in his terms, he did so in order that his renunciation might be all the more pronounced—to the disdain of Congress colleagues who were more men of the world than he. Gandhi in his sixties and seventies, with his daily naked massages, joint bathing and young women bedfellows, was getting a good deal more intimate female contact than any but sex industry moguls and rich sybarites do. The honest Sushila, whose concept of truth corresponded more closely to an accepted norm than did Gandhi’s, made the point that his sleeping with women came first, while the notion that it was some kind of a spiritual experiment emerged after his behaviour had been challenged. Sushila died only in 2001, unmarried; in her sixties she transferred her spiritual affections to another guru, Sathya Sai Baba. Abha died at sixty-eight in 1995; she and her husband Kanu Gandhi had devoted their lives to running the Kasturba Ashram, one of the few memorials to Kasturba. Manu Gandhi married one Surandra Mashruwala, and died in 1969 at the age of forty.
While there are celibates in the Hindu as in the Christian religion, Gandhi was remarkable for the importance he attributed to celibacy. The impact of his sexual experiments and of his views on chastity on the world, however, has been nil or has worked to the detriment of his teachings. His admirers normally revere his non-violence, but not the chastity that he considered a supremely important aspect of his life. Gandhi was explicit about what people must do who would follow his path, and why they should do it. He recognised that truth can be a subjective matter, so anyone seeking after truth—which he identified with God—must standardise his or her conditions, just as conditions in a scientific experiment have to be standardised in order that that experiment can take place. He declared: ‘Those who would make diligent search after Truth—God—must go through these vows: the vow of truth—speaking and thinking of truth—the vow of brahmacharya, of non-violence, poverty and non-possession. If you do not take these five vows you may not embark on the experiment.’16
His wish to divest himself of the things of this world led him to an ostentatious poverty, a kind of show pauperism that had to be underwritten by his wealthy backers, as it had to be kept on the road during Gandhi’s travels around India in specially hired trains with only third-class carriages. If only Bapu knew the cost of setting him up in poverty’ was Sarojini Naidu’s oft-repeated remark.17 The ultimate criticism that might be made of Gandhi is that of pettiness: there is always the suspicion that his preoccupation with clothes, food and sexual abstinence was a waste of his great gifts. To such a challenge he would have replied that his body was the instrument of his teachings and that he had to refine that instrument.
Gandhi is widely seen as having secured Indian independence, and he was certainly the best-known of India’s leaders at the time of independence. His principles of non-violence are more often cited as moral exemplars than put into practice, but they nonetheless have been an inspiration to others. His renunciation of sex, alcohol and even interesting food did not spawn a world of imitators. His resistance to racism and an appreciation of the value of all religions, however, strikes a thoroughly modern note. As a man, he is most remarkable for making every day, perhaps every minute, a matter of reaching forward, for never settling in any one place in his long, intricate spiritual journey.
He never gave up. In his seventies he was still striving, feeling that his vision of truth and non-violence ‘is becoming clearer day by day.’18 He was ultimately heroic, the metaphysical warrior. As he declared defiantly in the forests of Noakhali when he had less than a year to live: ‘The whole world may forsake me but I dare not leave what I hold is the truth for me. It may be a delusion and a snare. If so, I must realise it myself. I have risked perdition before now. Let this be reality if it has to be.’19