“Gandhi is a thought. Even if you want to criticize him, you have to first read him.” – Times of India

Every Gandhi Jayanti or Shahid Divas since a few years, people ask me why exactly is there so much visceral hatred for Gandhi in a growing and vociferous section of the Indian population.
My reply is: Nobody really is interested in abusing Gandhi. In fact, those who are abusing Gandhi are the least bothered with Gandhi. It is just that today the image of Gandhi stands in the way of something they are trying to accomplish.Therefore Gandhi has to be abused. Gandhi stands as a symbol of something that they want to destroy. If you want to create a society that is highly illiberal and belligerent, then the symbol of empathy and benevolence has to be abused and brought down. If you want to create a society that is deeply fractured on communal lines, then the symbol of communal harmony has to be disparaged. That’s what is happening.
Gandhi is a thought. Even if you want to criticize him, you have to first read him. He’s a philosopher. He was not just randomly walking naked on roads. There was a philosophy behind his actions. He hasn’t been read, but he has to be abused, because today you are trying to achieve something that cannot be achieved without killing Gandhi again. Physically killing him was very insufficient. So, now they are trying to kill him in many other ways.
A huge empty darkness is shooting in the dark, without even knowing who the target is. Worse still, without even knowing who the shooter is. You want ignorance to rule. And therefore, anybody who symbolizes illumination becomes an enemy to you. He has to be reviled, disparaged, assassinated in as many ways as possible. When you cannot fight the force of truth or even the might of ideas, then you become slanderous in a personal way. The 2nd of October is upon us and you will witness a massive orgy. And the environment in India will be totally at odds with the environment in the rest of the world. The world will celebrate Gandhi and India will spit at Gandhi.
It was Einstein who said that the coming generations will have a hard time believing that somebody like this walked upon this earth. Oh, he was prescient. See how quickly his words have become facts. I’m no big Gandhi fan. Gandhi spoke on the Gita. And I find innumerable holes in his interpretation. You read his books and you see an inspiring human story, not a claim to divine perfection. I went to his ashram at Kausani long back, the Anasakti ashram. And some of the Gita stuff that I found there was not quite accurate. But what I can definitely say is that the intention isn’t malicious. Here you had a person who, in spite of all his weaknesses, was trying to do the best he could.
I don’t want to turn him into a larger than life thing, but he deserves ample respect for what he was. And to deny him that respect is to deny humanness itself. Think of any weakness, any vice. And Gandhi displayed it at some point in his life. And credit is due to him to openly accept that. He couldn’t speak in public. He was so frail, introverted, timid. It was one of the reasons why he didn’t want to practice in court as a barrister. And from there, he came to a point where his voice became the voice of an entire nation.
Today one of the accounts on which he is being slandered is his sexual life. People take perverse pleasure in peeping into others bedrooms, rather into others undergarments directly. But Gandhi himself is quite forthright about it. How he wanted to once dominate his wife, how when his father was on his deathbed, Gandhi, in a moment of sexual mindlessness, rather chose to go to his wife. And in that moment, he lost his father. And that remained with him. His experiments with Brahmcharya have been described by him in detail. There is nothing to be exposed there.
He said, the Gita is my mother. And there was a point when he was on the verge of converting to Christianity. And he doesn’t hide that.
Several of his views seem a bit regressive today. We don’t want to raise a new India based on outdated views. But there are certain things that are timeless. That discretion has to be there. If we are to list the number of times Gandhi expressed views that have no relevance today and probably had no utility even when they were expressed, the list will be long. That does not mean that you doubt the man’s integrity, and assassinate him once again.
Even Nehru often did not agree wholeheartedly with Gandhi. We know of the equation Ambedkar had with Gandhi. Even at that time, nobody could agree hundred percent with him. Not even Patel. And we know of the tiff he had with Bose. Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Bose. Nobody was saying, well, you know, we have a god here. What to say of Jinnah or Churchill! So we have a man in flesh and blood, with all his weaknesses, with all the human frailties. Respect him for the courage that he showed. Respect him for the transformation that he underwent. Look at his power, the naked fakir: he would say, I’m not eating anything, Anshan. An entire India would rise with him. His power to mobilize the masses – unprecedented, charismatic.
There might be some truth in the allegation that because of Gandhi, the role of several other freedom fighters has not been fully appreciated. Gandhi has been such a huge tree that a lot has become stunted in his shadow. That’s right. So let’s bring out the real life stories of those we have not honored enough. Let’s felicitate them. But for that, you don’t need to revile Gandhi. It’s simply indecent. The man is not there and now you are shooting allegations at him, will he come to defend himself? Forget about ethics, It’s aesthetically so unpleasant.
He tried meat-eating. He either went to prostitutes once or was on the verge of going there. He tried some alternative schools of medicine, which was quite unscientific. Obviously one cannot agree with everything that Gandhi said or did. Sarojini Naidu said it takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi poor, because he preferred goat milk and was often carrying the goat wherever he went. Even from the point of view of animal rights, one won’t agree here with Gandhi, and one doesn’t always need to. But why kill the man again and again?
One can question whether it was right to participate in Khilafat. Yes, definitely. Because it was a religious matter and a totally foreign affair. Something was happening in Turkey. It was myopic to align Indian Muslims with that, or Indian Hindus, for that matter. With the benefit of hindsight, one can question the withdrawal of the Non-cooperation movement too. There are so many other things one can question: whether Pattabhi Sitaramayya had to be favored at the cost of Bose? But to go so far as to blame him for India’s partition! That isn’t just mindless, its a rather thought out tactic towards nefarious ends. What more could he have done to avert partition? If there was one man who declared that India will not be partitioned, it was Gandhi. But when the fires of communalism have been stoked to that extent that you have defacto genocides going on, cities, villages, many provinces, what do you do? So many lakhs have already been killed, how many more are to be killed? If partition were to be averted, that right actions should have been taken in right earnest in the decades prior to partition.
Once the two communities had been deeply steeped in hatred against each other, partition became inevitable. Two people, full of hate for each other, were stubbornly refusing to stay together – how do you now avoid their separation? Togetherness is not something you can enforce on two people vying to tear each other apart. There was a huge campaign of hatred in the decades prior to partition. By 1946, the equation had already been sealed. In the various events leading to partition, there is no denying that there were errors in Gandhi’s judgment. Let’s criticize him for that. Everybody is susceptible to criticism, so is Gandhi. However, vituperative slander is a totally different thing. What is supremely ironical is that some of the same forces that stoked the communal hatred that led to partition, today accuse Gandhi of not being able to avert partition.
Being a student of both technology and economics, I very well know that Gandhi’s view on self-sufficient village economy are not practical. I also know that India’s textile sector could have done better had it not been for Gandhi’s emphasis on the handloom. I know of all these things, and it is fair to offer a trenchant criticism of Gandhi on these counts.
There were occasions when he also acted quite unreasonably. He offered a very superstitious account of the 1934 Bihar earthquake. He said this is God’s punishment for casteism. Now that’s just so irrational and superstitious. Tagore criticized it strongly, and I too would strongly criticize this kind of thing from a leader. But the man was much more than these statements. And if you don’t see that, go and ask Churchill. He will tell you who Gandhi was. Or ask Jinnah. He will tell you who Gandhi was. Or Mountbatten.
People pit Bose and Patel against Gandhi these days. Now who called Gandhi Rashtrapita for the first time? Bose. And Tagore called him Mahatma. Think of his differences with Gandhi. He said, freedom attained by spinning the charkha is not worth it. And he didn’t like the kind of nationalism Gandhi was promoting. But still, Tagore had a deep respect for Gandhi. In the spiritual domain, Raman Maharshi, he used to say, there are a lot of people that I sent to Gandhi’s ashram and there are a lot of people Gandhi sends to me from his ashram. And we are talking of the stalwart, the topmost spiritual figure of the first half of the last century – Raman Maharshi. And Raman Maharshi is displaying from his top spiritual position such respect for Gandhi.
It is so strange, you see, the fellow who brought religion to the political discourse in the biggest way possible is being accosted by the forces of so-called religion. He gave up his western formals and he said, I am now becoming a monk. Everything he did or said was inspired by religion, as he understood it. We can argue over whether his religiosity was truly spiritual and authentic. But he was very clear that public life must be inspired by religion. Even the last two words attributed to him are Hey Ram! So if we really are a religious people, then Gandhi did what we ask for. He said, no politics without religion. He said, the ideals of religion will guide politics. So then, the religious zealots today should embrace Gandhi. There must be a reason why instead of embracing him, the so-called religious ones today are shooting him down. We want a militant, masculine type of alpha religion, right? We want a Hinduism inspired by Andrew Tate. Now, Gandhi, look at the meek figure he is. It hurts our aspiring masculinity. Rashtrapita! Can’t even stand properly and doesn’t look impressive or smart or handsome. In fact, borderline ugly. Gosh, look at his earlobes!. And what does he carry that stick for if he doesn’t hit anybody with it? His greatest weapon is Satyagraha, Anshan, Amaran Anshan, fasting till death. We don’t like that. We want to be more testosterone driven. We don’t realize that courage is not about your balls or your body, Courage is something far deeper. And it’s not just about Gandhi, It’s been the very Indian message through the millennia, the entire line of seers and sages and saints and knowers who have said that it takes tremendous courage to, first of all, fight against yourself.
Gandhi’s message is so close to that of the Jains. Jin means a winner. Winner because he has conquered himself. That brings us to an auspicious connection – in the elite Hindu scripture Yoga Vasistha, Ram says, “I want to remain as a Jin”. Ram is implying that conquering the self, rather than conquering others, is the highest ideal. And there is the Jain Ramayan– in which Ram becomes so liberated that he doesn’t even kill Ravan, Lakshman kills Ravan. Ram becomes a Jain, becomes a liberated apostle of non-violence. Ram has so much importance in the political milieu of today, why would admirers of Ram want to malign Gandhi?
It’s not as if it’s just Gandhi who is freshly saying that the greatest courage lies in, first of all, conquering yourself. That has been the message of the seers through the centuries. How many of them will you kill? If Gandhi is to be killed for ahimsa, then you will need to kill so many others as well. Because the entire tradition of Indian seers and sages has been saying exactly the same thing. The haters of Gandhi will need to bring down the statues of the saints and Gyanis, erase their memories, despise them, turn them into villains in the history books – the entire line of saints starting right from Gautam Buddha. Is Ahinsa, a Gandhian innovation or invention? If Gandhi is to be villainized for non-violence, one will have to give the same treatment to Gautam.
How do you become a coward if you first of all decide to fight your own inner vices? How is that cowardice? That’s the charge being leveled: Gandhi turned all of us into cowards. How is it cowardice to face your own reality? How do you become brave if you are shying away from your inner fact? I just want to fight the external enemy. And how do you know? How do you even know who the external enemy is if you do not know who you are? We talk of shatrubodh (recognising the enemy) so much these days. That’s fine. But to know your enemy, first of all you must know who you are. If instead of knowing myself as a man I think I’m a mouse, then all the cats are my enemies. Even to know who my enemy is, first of all, I must know who I am. And that is the process of self-knowledge: honestly looking at your own reality. If I am a mouse, then I’ll keep conspiring against cats in fear and hatred. The accusation against Gandhi is that he made Indians into cowards. That accusation should not be reserved for Gandhi alone. It should be leveled against rishis, sages, seers, saints, everybody, the entire line, the whole tradition, all the branches of the spiritual tree. Because all spirituality is fundamentally about looking at yourself first, and then fighting the external battle.
Spirituality, or self-knowledge, does not ask you to not fight external battles. You are being told to first fight the inner battle. And only that will give you the clarity and the power to choose the right external battle and fight it. Look at the battlefield of Kurukshetra, for example. Krishna is not supplying Arjuna with weapons. He is supplying Arjun with self-knowledge. And Arjun wins. Even to win the external battle, you have to firstly win the internal battle. Gita is about Krishna helping Arjuna to win the internal battle. Not without reason, Gandhi used to say – the Gita is my mother. (Though I have my reservations on his interpretation of the Gita)
You ask me, why is there so much hatred against Gandhi? For some reason, Bob Dylan comes to my mind.The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?
And how many times must the cannonball fly before they are forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
Authored by: Acharya Prashant, a Vedanta teacher, social reformer and an author.
The views are the author’s own, and do not represent The Times of India’s.
If you too have a story or view to share, then send it to us at: soulcurry@timesinternet.in