Independence and Netaji

The following article written by historian Barun De and published by The Telegraph on 30 Jan, 2007 only confirms the above fact:

EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH IN A FRACTURED LAND

All of a sudden, the name, Gandhi, and the principles represented by the Mahatma are being invoked in a fractured land for whose swaraj — by which he meant self-rule — he devoted his adult life. People in the film industry daily mint high returns through neo-Gandhian messages of roseate dialogue or persuasion, doing good, through the agency of Everyman persevering along the common ways of life. (Never mind that Everyman in Mumbai slang gets to be called Munnabhai.)

This revival of interest is perhaps not mere rhetoric produced by the tiredness of social and civil-popular activity as a result of contemporary problems. Our world is informed by graft, corruption, and the laxity of public conscience. It is also characterized by sudden, strident eruptions of underclass anger in multiple forms of violence in crowded urban areas and the semi-urban countryside, or by well-planned attacks in remote hilly areas exploiting the roots of mountain rage. But what sort of potential can this neo-Gandhianism represent for popular culture in general? Does it have any place for the responsible civic spirit to present viable alternatives to avert civic degeneration and the brutal violence of the state and of its opponents? Can neo-Gandhianism counteract repression today? Can it awaken ethics, morality and social decency in a stable way? These questions require reflection on the possibilities of revitalizing our current social morality.

Are ahimsa and satyagraha — whose centenary was observed, though without marked enthusiasm — all that there is to Gandhi’s significance? There are two ways of looking at this neo-Gandhianism. One is to see this as an attempt to raise ghosts from the past — like re-jigging the Dandi March draped in tiranga angavastras — as a counter to the violent resolution of private and public disputes. This is too facile an explanation. The roots of nostalgia for non-violent social action lie in the present disgust with the uncertainties of secret and unpredictable outrages in crowded communication networks. No real thought is yet available on a viable policy to counter the current use of cyberspace and of religious fanaticism (Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist) for disseminating hatred and violence.

Another problem is, how do we define satya today? Truth, the standard translation, was, one hundred years ago, an absolute concept that admitted no ambiguities. In his autobiography, Gandhi spoke of the story of his “Experiments with Truth” in the sense of “successive approximations”, that is, specific concrete attempts across points of time to reach a goal of perfection, as well as his failures to attain that absolute. He did imply that verity was a possible goal that could be attained. Those who believe in the path of non-violence as an absolute value also believe this. However, in this era of uncertain and pervasive violence that began with the recurrence of war in 1939, truth too has lost its capital letter and become less certain and far more imperfect. Gandhi’s Truth is the sum of his changing ideas about his and the society’s capacity for perfectibility. In 2006, do we have the spiritual — and I mean spiritual, not religious — resources to inspire satyagraha in the face of physical and mental terror, in the way that Gandhi’s lieutenants did in South Africa or at the Dharasana Salt Depot near Dandi?

At the local levels, we may have such resources. In Manipur, the persistence of the Nupi Lan, the traditional women’s struggle against repression, until 2004 is a case in point. The famous photograph of women stripping naked to dare the state to rape them too, or to remedy the wrong done to their sister, failed to strike any but the weakest shame in the rest of India. Terror bombings catch on. Affronts to religious identity and the sense of endangered community lead to protests and even riots, but satyagraha as a weapon of the weak has now become a vision of the vanquished. It will never be restored to its pristine form in forthcoming decades. This is a shame. But it is the reality.

Nostalgia about ideas rarely makes historical sense. What happened in the past cannot be repeated in the future: humanity can never step back into the same river. It is worth generalizing a bit about the verities of the best days of the Gandhian outlook, as they appeared in the first half of the 20th century. As a method of political action, these verities may be described as repeated attempts to improve one’s consciousness and ethical reason — first individually, then within one’s community, and finally, if one’s courage and convictions still hold out, through a social movement.

This emphasis on conscience ideally evoked by the Mahatma’s message — an individual morality, as distinct from an expedient rectitude — was, however, not universally moral. In South Africa, it led to considerable pain for his own family. Shahid Amin has shown the different meanings that the message acquired politically in Chauri Chaura in 1921. It could be variously interpreted: the mob’s evocation of Gandhi’s Truth ended there in burning down a police outpost, setting alight the agents of state power.

Historically, Gandhism had complex and often contradictory social meanings. It gained ground not so much as the self-discipline that its propagator strove for, but as political action against national subjection by the hold of colonialism on popular minds — especially by alien rule, but also by an indigenous ruling class. Gandhism was thus part of the broader anti-imperialist popular struggle to free British India and its so-called Native States. Yet, it was also a guide to entrepreneurial behaviour, such as the principles of trusteeship and patronage practiced by the Sarabhais in Ahmedabad, Jamnalal Bajaj in the old Central Province, or by G.D. Birla and his kin. To the extent that Gandhism influenced anti-colonial nationalism, it was ahimsa and satyagraha.

As he laid it down on the basis of his changing experiments with social reality, Gandhi’s Truth represented pragmatic principles of sublimating his domestic relationships as well as the ethnic and national movements that he initiated in South Africa and India. These changed from time to time — for uniting Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs after Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, for holding back violence in 1922 after the Mappilla outbreaks in Malabar, the Bannu riots in the North-West Frontier Province and Chauri Chaura, to gain electoral parity over inequitable caste divisions in 1932 (bringing together Dalits and indigenous forest people in the Congress broad front of those days), or to halt the spiral of resurgent armed struggle against weakened British power in 1944 (when he called off the “karenge ya marenge” element of the 1942 movement).

Perhaps Gandhi’s finest hour was when his leading followers ignored his truth in 1947. While they negotiated with Mountbatten and Attlee to partition British Rule in India into Hindu and Muslim majority provinces with disastrous consequences, he raised his ideas of truth above territoriality, flags, and majoritarian democracy or nationality, to ideals of civilization and culture, the relevance of which is becoming clear only now. He sought to rise above ethnicities, whether in Calcutta or Noakhali, Bihar or Delhi, where he gave his life for this new cause.

In these last years, India had become free, but not by his Truth. British rule, brought to its knees by Japanese attack in South-east Asia, was rattled by the azad dastas of Bihar, the Patri Sarkar of Satara, the Tamluk Jatiya Sarkar of Medinipur (1943-44), the Azad Hind Fauj on the North-east frontier fighting against the South-East Asia Command, and by the Royal Indian Navy ratings in Bombay and Karachi as well as their working-class sympathizers. This terrified the Labour government and its viceroy, Wavell, that the Indian Empire, still groggy although Japan had been atom-bombed into surrendering to America, did not have the forces to hold down revolts which were spurting up all over south Asia. Attlee himself told an acting governor in Calcutta’s Raj Bhavan in 1956 that, compared to the role of Subhas Bose and the Indian National Army as a force to make the British to quit, Gandhi’s role had been “minimal”. He repeated this to my friend, Kamal Hossain, and myself in 1960, one morning in Nuffield College, Oxford. Attlee was an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield, and was breakfasting opposite us off glasses of hot water and a small cup of oatmeal porridge.

It is no depreciation of the Mahatma to say that armed struggle and satyagraha, with its connotation of non-violence, together led to India’s independence and partition. Politically, his message was utopian, as much as that of his Congress socialist epigoni, Nehru, Narendra Dev and Jaya Prakash Narayan. That utopia represented only one moment in our history of the 20th century. What was more important was that his name signifies a message of social ethics, practical morality, self-education and, above all, self-rule.