I sit here to write this blog not out to gain publicity or assert some sadist gimmick on my erstwhile social forum as has been exclaimed by most when I brought this subject up. This has left me feeling lost and confused and disillusioned to think that, am I really looking at the wrong picture or am born in a wrong time. I see people around me (mostly) who don’t give a damn about what is happening, what has happened and what we are being fed by a media that is biased, commercial and hypocritical. Facts that are as overwhelming as the towering Himalayas and gory as a slaughterhouse sewer have been thrust aside to proclaim a farce that people have almost inherited as way of life. I am a Bengali and like most Bengalees, I am proud, reverent and possessive about a past that seems so wasted in the hands of my denizens. Denizens, who have inundated themselves into a world of commercial, materialistic soul searching. So much so, that these facts appear fictional and fascistic to them. I was fed into a staple diet of culture, education and politics that is trademark Calcutta. I learnt to appreciate literature, recite Sukumar Ray at school and Sukanta in college. I slept, as a kid with Bibhutibhushan’s “Chander Pahar” and Bankim Chandra’s “Anando Math”. These were aptly replaced by Sesher Kobita, Shei Shomoi and Madhukori as I attained puberty. To fit in to my social nexus I read the likes of Nietzsche, Sartre and Rousseau’s philosophy, Rabindranath and Nazrul Islam were household names. The society slowly unruffled to me the meaning of politics and what lies behind the scarlet scrawl that is so common place in Calcutta. Calcutta political scenario presently causes irksome response from most of the people, they don’t fret to criticize, degrade, chastise the recent Political state of affairs in Calcutta. But surprisingly they do not talk about its glorious political past that was the key cause behind an independent tri colour flying high over our sub continent. Nobody talks about the selfless sacrifices, torture, humiliation, bleak captivity and suffering that the fearless many from this great land of ours, Bangla, has willingly embraced to see the land cleaned of the British. We don’t know who Binoy, Badal and Dinesh were, To most its just the name of place where they have a big terminus for public busses. Nandokumar stands out may be as a comic character from one of the Bangla soaps. Khudiram Bose we know, somebody who got the guillotine for minding other people’s business, a Bangla phrase has actually been coined on these lines. Netaji Subhash Bose – a great leader, fought for independence – well it was not taught in our syllabus. The heroes, that this land has produced is abundant. Forgotten. Forlorn and washed away by brand wave that was successfully fathered by the “Father of the Nation”. Such has been his impact that the country was portioned for mere INR 55 crores. However unfortunately it is considered a sin, immaturity and supercilious to think about this, let alone speak. So I decided to write. Here are some considerations that needs to be re opened.
I refuse to call Gandhi the father, brother, son or even of the nation. I feel humiliated to use the Indian currency notes that have his face on him. I consider him a traitor, a cheat and a selfish and conniving soul who has mutilated the history, culture, tradition and the general soul of this great nation of ours. I say this not merely as a Netaji enthusiast but also as a sane Indian who has dared to delve beyond the fabricated details that has been conveniently presented before him by the Congress media.
Gandhi usurped the credit of India’s independence that many are not ready to acknowledge. There are many evidences that he reached there at the costs of many other heroes’ costs. Well as history is written by the survivors, Gandhi became so famous since he was so out of the range of the gun fire. Gandhi was responsible for the execution of Bhagat Singh. The theory says Gandhi had the ability to stop the execution of Bhagat Singh but he made little effort to do that as Gandhi and Singh were at odds with respect to the path leading to the independence. Singh’s supporters claimed Gandhi felt insecure of Bhagat Singh and hence feared Singh gaining more fame than him. Thus he conspired against Bhagat Singh though this theory is highly controversial. A trait that can be seen many a time repeated against several heroes who are always briefly mentioned.
In 1939, Subhash Chandra Bose became the president of Congress for the second time against the wishes of Gandhi Afterwards Bose was forced to step down due to the lack of support as most of the members in Congress were in favour of Gandhi. Its evident that Gandhi was responsible for this as he and Netaji had many differences regarding their principles. One of the important differences between Gandhi and Netaji was the vision for post Independence India. Netaji was in favour of industrialisation while Gandhi was not. After independence there was no mark of Netaji in India and hence the industrialisation got little importance. Now the question is had Indian government had considered Netaji’s views India could have been very well a developed nation. Was Gandhi responsible for this act? Many feel yes.
Gandhi was the founder of non-cooperation movement. But after the Chauri-Chaura incident, Gandhi called off the movement. Had he continued the movement India might have got independence much earlier. This lead to the collisions between Gandhi and Bhagat Singh.
Another fact regarding Gandhi was the selection of his heir. He appointed Jawaharlal Nehru his successor. But history reveals that Sardar Patel was a far better choice. Nehru was like his pupil and hence Gandhi was more biased to Nehru than Patel.
Gandhi’s critics also hold him responsible for the partition of India. Gandhi’s choice of heir was Nehru and his critics feel he was a power hungry person and he was insecure of Jinnah. Hence he supported partition so that he got the power to rule. However, Sardar Patel had the ability to suppress Jinnah and hence had he got the power he could have prevented the partition. Hence Gandhiji’s wrong selection of successor, lead to this partition. There is another theory which says Gandhi had proposed an idea to Jinnah that both Congress and Muslim League would cooperate for India’s independence and after achieving it there would be the partition. This was one of the reasons behind his assassination.
Nathuram Godse, his assassinator, claimed Gandhi becoming a dictator. Gandhiji’s contemporaries had felt that he never encouraged anyone to differ with him. Whenever anyone objected him, he decided to remove him from his path. This was the reason why he made no effort to save Bhagat Singh. Netaji also suffered the similar fate when he was forced to step down from the Congress president's post.
Post-independence official history of the ending of colonial rule in India is a hagiographic narration of Gandhi’s life and times. Hagiography is the reverential documentation of the life of a saint by his acolytes. History reveals that Aurobindo and Tilak of the pre-1910 years, Ambedkar’s serious differences with Gandhi, the fact that from around 1942, all top leaders of the INC except Nehru, including Gandhi’s close associates and colleagues in his social mission, and even his son Devadas, had all distanced themselves from him, are kept out of the historical narrative of the freedom struggle. Post-independent history writers have refused to even consider the adverse impact that Gandhi’s estrangement with the Congress Working Committee had on the extremely critical tripartite negotiations which the INC was then engaged in with the British government and the Muslim League. The other heroes of our times, Bhagat Singh, Subhash Bose, Ambedkar and Savarkar, and all those ordinary Indians who suffered tortuous incarceration or died for Gandhi, and the broad contours and details of events leading up to the bloody vivisection of 1947, have not merited even a whole paragraph in our history books. Few outside of academe would have heard of Madanlal Dhingra, the Chapekar brothers, MR Jayakar, Tej Bahadur Sapru or the Sapru Committee Report. Fewer still would know that Gandhi machinated the expulsion of Bose from the INC, or that Gandhi had insisted on the resignations of Rajaji and KM Munshi too from the Congress party, because these details did not mesh seamlessly into the hagiography
This dishonest rendering of history of the most important years of this enslaved nation’s existence has made out the freedom struggle to be the achievement of one man whose moral authority resting on non-violence was so overwhelming that the British government shriveled in awe before its force and slinked away in shame. To sustain the incredible fiction of this “non-violent freedom-struggle”, Nehruvian polity’s history writers have chosen to sweep away from sight the violent reprisal of the colonial government against ordinary Indians who followed Gandhi to the streets. A despotic public opinion machinery dubbed Gandhi the Father of the Nation; if that is a given, then equally true is the fact that Gandhi was also the father of the vivisected Hindu nation.
Popular history has intentionally thrown a veil over why the Cabinet Mission failed in June 1946, leading to Direct Action, except to lay the failure dishonestly at Jinnah’s door. Needless to say, for Nehruvian secular politics of minority-ism, while Jinnah remains history’s villain, his vehicle, the Muslim League, is now wearing the false moustache of secularism.
Year after year after year, the nation celebrates its independence from colonial rule; the de-Hinduised secular nation celebrated Nehru’s fiftieth anniversary of his tryst with destiny with a romantic midnight session of Parliament. The nation and its Father and Nehru may have woken up to independence at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, but Hindus woke up to a nation severed of her limbs, torn and bleeding. Nehru’s India and her historians have ensured that while August 15 would always be celebrated, it would never be observed as a day of mourning, of grief and of determination to reverse and avenge the consequences of Direct Action and vivisection. Nehru’s secular India did not allow Hindus to nurse a sense of victim-hood or nationhood.
On Nathuram Godse., Shri Nathuram Godse , who assassinated Gandhi. He was sent to the gallows on 15 November 1949 ,exactly sixty years ago. Most Indians have been brought up on the theory that Nathuram was a monster , who killed the father of the nation. Yet, he was also somebody who made the supreme sacrifice for the nation. Consider this fact , that other heroes like Chandrashekhar Azad or Bhagat Singh died secure in the knowledge that they would be feted as heroes after their deaths. Nathuram died with the knowledge that he would be hated by the majority of the people in this land, and yet he did what he did. Nathuram killed Gandhi because Gandhi fasted so that Pakistan could get the 55 Crore rupees.Today we have the knowledge that the money was used by the Pakistan Govt. to finance the invasion of Kashmir, an invasion that resulted in the deaths of many Indian soldiers and Kashmiris, not to mention the land lost to Pakistan. Here is some excerpts from Godse’s speech. We don’t have any documents of the trial or anything that related to a trial.
Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus were of equal status as to rights, social and religious and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession. I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners in which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Chamars and Bhangis participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other.
I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Nairoji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like England, France, America and' Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of Socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely whatever Veer Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other single factor has done.
all this reading and thinking led me to believe it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (300 million) of Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and the well being of all India, one fifth of human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself to the Hindu Sanghtanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe, could win and preserve the national independence of Hindustan, my Motherland, and enable her to render true service to humanity as well.
Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokamanya Tilak, Gandhiji's influence in the Congress first increased and then became supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to those slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a mere dream if you imagine that the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and, if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force. [In the Ramayana] Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. [In the Mahabharata], Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed the hindus.
n more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim tyranny in India. It was absolutely essentially for Shivaji to overpower and kill an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In condemning history's towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Gobind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhiji has merely exposed his self-conceit. He was, paradoxical, as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom they brought to them.
The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very well in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of the Indian community there. But when he finally 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; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. 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 everyone and everything; he was the master brain guiding the civil disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, it might bring untold disaster and political reverses but that could make no difference to the Mahatma's infallibility. 'A Satyagrahi can never fail' was his formula for declaring his own.
Gandhi's pro-Muslim policy is blatantly in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma's sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and purity of the Hindi language was to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus.
From August 1946 onwards the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of the Hindus. The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi with some retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception, but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which they were a part, the greater was Gandhi's infatuation for them. Lord Wavell had to resign as he could not bring about a settlement and he was succeeded by Lord Mountbatten. King Log was followed by King Stork.
The Congress, which had boasted of its nationalism and socialism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian territory became foreign land.
One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast unto death related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed for its break some condition on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any condition on the Muslims. He was fully aware of from the experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi.
Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he had failed his paternal duty inasmuch as he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His inner-voice, his spiritual power and his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of, all crumbled before Jinnah's iron will and proved to be powerless.
Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may even call me and dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building. After having fully considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage in both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds of Birla House.
I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots.
I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi. I have to say with great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preachings and deeds are at times at variances with each other when he talks about India as a secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note that Nehru has played a leading role in the establishment of the theocratic state of Pakistan, and his job was made easier by Gandhi's persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims.
I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone else should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism levelled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in future. This comes from the book "The man who killed Gandhi" by Lt. Col. Manohar Malgaonkar which is banned in India.
Kokanastha Brahmins like Tilak and Savarkar led the freedom movement. The Maratha community remained largely outside its influence. They were dominated by the rulers of a number of princely states under the protection of British. In the 1935 elections, the Indian National Congress led by Gandhi won less than 50% of the seats in the Bombay legislature. The then Bombay presidency included Gujarat. The implication is that, in Maharashtra area of Bombay, the Congress did not enjoy any support.
The Marathas jumped into the bandwagon of freedom only after the WW-II. They were opportunistic and got hold of political power. It was legitimately theirs because of their numbers, not because of their participation in the freedom struggle. But their anti-Brahminism continued under a new populist cover.
The Congress sacked Brahmin property after Gandhi murder. The riots were a foul act. The motive was vengeance. Love for Gandhi was no more than pretence. There has been nothing like it in the entire country any time before or after. The Brahmin presence in the villages disappeared completely. Such was the wrath and “non violent” principles of Gandhi led Congress that is so much equivocated.
Mahatma Gandhi is often praised as the man who defeated British imperialism with non-violent agitation. It is still a delicate and unfashionable thing to discuss his mistakes and failures, a criticism hitherto mostly confined to Communist and Hindutva publications. But at this distance in time, we shouldn't be inhibited by a taboo on criticizing official India's patron saint.
Gandhiji's mistakes
Without attempting to approach completeness, we may sum up as Gandhi's biggest political failures the following events:
(1) Recruiting Indian soldiers for the British war effort in 1914-18 without setting any conditions, in the vain hope that this unilateral gift to Britain would bring about sufficient goodwill in London for conceding to India the status of a self-ruling dominion within the British Empire, on a par with Canada or Australia. While it was already off line for a pacifist to cooperate in such a wasteful war (as contrasted with World War 2, to both sides a kind of holy war where fundamental principles were at stake), Gandhiji's stance was also a glaring failure of political skill, since he neglected to extract any tangible gains for India in return for the thousands of Indian lives which he sacrificed to British imperial interests.
(2) Committing the mobilisation potential of the freedom movement to the Khilâfat agitation in 1920-22, again a non-negotiated unilateral gift. The Khilafat movement was a tragicomical mistake, aiming at the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate against which the Arabs had risen in revolt and which the Turks were dissolving, a process completed with the final abolition of the institution of the Caliphate in 1924. It was a purely retrograde and reactionary movement, and more importantly for Indian nationalism, it was an intrinsically anti-nationalist movement pitting specifically Islamic interests against secular and non-Muslim interests. Gandhi made the mistake of hubris by thinking he could reconcile Khilafatism and Indian nationalism, and he also offended his Muslim allies (who didn't share his commitment to non-violence) by calling off the agitation when it turned violent. The result was even more violence, with massive Hindu-Muslim riots replacing the limited instances of anti-British attacks, just as many level-headed freedom fighters had predicted. Gandhiji failed to take the Khilafat movement seriously whether at the level of principle or of practical politics, and substituted his own imagined and idealized reading of the Khilafat doctrine for reality.
(3) His autocratic decision to call off the mass agitation for complete independence in 1931, imposed upon his mass following and his close lieutenants against their wishes and better judgment, in exchange for a few puny British concessions falling far short of the movement's demands. His reputation abroad didn't suffer, but to informed observers, he had thrown away his aura as an idealist leader standing above petty politics; the Pact between Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Irwin amounted to the sacrifice of a high national goal in favour of a petty rise in status for the Congress. Also, every delay in the declaration of Independence gave the emerging separatist forces the time to organize and to strengthen their position.
(4) Taking a confused and wavering position vis-à-vis India's involvement in World War 2. His initial refusal to commit India to the war effort could have been justified on grounds of pacifist principle as well as national pride (the Viceroy had committed India without consulting the native leadership), but it was a failure because his followers weren't following. Indian recruits and business suppliers of the Army eagerly joined hands with the British rulers, thus sidelining Gandhi into political irrelevance. By contrast, the Muslim League greatly improved its bargaining positions by joining the war effort, an effect not counterbalanced by the small Hindu Mahasabha's similar strategy. The pro-Partition case which the Muslim League advocated was bolstered while Gandhi's opposition to the imminent Partition was badly weakened. Gandhi was humiliated by his impotence before the degeneration of his "Quit India" agitation into violence and by ultimately having to come around to a collaborationist position himself.
(5) Taking a confused and wavering position vis-à-vis the Partition plan, including false promises to the Hindus of the designated Pakistani areas to prevent Partition or at least to prevent their violent expulsion. He chose not to use his weapon of a fast unto death to force Mohammed Ali Jinnah into backing down from Partition, a move which cast doubt on the much-touted bravery of all his other fasts "unto death" performed to pressurize more malleable opponents. If acquiescing in the Partition could still be justified as a matter of inevitability, there was no excuse for his insistence on half measures, viz. his rejecting plans for an organized exchange of population, certainly a lesser evil when compared to the bloody religious cleansing that actually took place. Gentle surgeons make stinking wounds.
(6) Refusing to acknowledge that Pakistan had become an enemy state after its invasion of Kashmir, by undertaking a fast unto death in order to force the Indian government to pay Pakistan 55 crore rupees from the British-Indian treasury. Pakistan was entitled to this money, but given its aggression, it would have been normal to set the termination of its aggression, including the withdrawal of its invading troops, as a condition for the payment. Indeed, that would have been a sterling contribution to the cause of enduring peace, saving the lives of the many thousands who fell in subsequent decades because of the festering wound which Kashmir has remained under partial Pakistani occupation. Coming on top of Gandhi's abandonment of the Hindus trapped in Pakistan in August 1947, it was this pro-Pakistani demand, as well as his use of his choice moral weapon (left unused to save India's unity or the persecuted Hindus in Pakistan) in the service of an enemy state's treasury, that angered a few Hindu activists to the point of plotting his murder.
Problems with pacifism
The common denominator in all these costly mistakes was a lack of realism. Gandhi refused to see the realities of human nature; of Islamic doctrine with its ambition of domination; of the modern mentality with its resentment of autocratic impositions; of people's daily needs making them willing to collaborate with the rulers in exchange for career and business opportunities; of the nationalism of the Hindus who would oppose the partition of their Motherland tooth and nail; of the nature of the Pakistani state as intrinsically anti-India and anti-Hindu.
In most of these cases, Gandhi's mistake was not his pacifism per se. In the case of his recruiting efforts for World War 1, there wasn't even any pacifism involved, but loyalty to the Empire whether in peace or in war. The Khilafat pogroms revealed one of the real problems with his pacifism: all while riding a high horse and imposing strict conformity with the pacifist principle, he indirectly provoked far more violence than was in his power to control. Other leaders of the freedom movement, such as Annie Besant and Lala Lajpat Rai, had warned him that he was playing with fire, but he preferred to obey his suprarational "inner voice".
The fundamental problem with Gandhi's pacifism, not in the initial stages but when he had become the world-famous leader of India's freedom movement (1920-47), was his increasing extremism. All sense of proportion had vanished when he advocated non-violence not as a technique of moral pressure by a weaker on a stronger party, but as a form of masochistic surrender. Elsewhere (Elst: Gandhi and Godse, Voice of India, Delhi 2001, p.120-121) I have cited four instances of his advice to the victims of communal violence which is simply breathtaking for its callousness in the face of human suffering. Two more instances follow.
During his prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words: "I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. (*) You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain." (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.LXXXVII, p.394-5) It is left unexplained what purpose would be served by this senseless and avoidable surrender to murder.
Even when the killing had started, Gandhi refused to take pity on the Hindu victims, much less to point fingers at the Pakistani aggressors. More importantly for the principle of non-violence, he failed to offer them a non-violent technique of countering and dissuading the murderers. Instead, he told the Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and die. On 6 August 1947, Gandhiji commented to Congress workers on the incipient communal conflagration in Lahore thus: "I am grieved to learn that people are running away from the West Punjab and I am told that Lahore is being evacuated by the non-Muslims. I must say that this is what it should not be. If you think Lahore is dead or is dying, do not run away from it, but die with what you think is the dying Lahore. (*) When you suffer from fear you die before death comes to you. That is not glorious. I will not feel sorry if I hear that people in the Punjab have died not as cowards but as brave men. (*) I cannot be forced to salute any flag. If in that act I am murdered I would bear no ill will against anyone and would rather pray for better sense for the person or persons who murder me." (Hindustan Times, 8-8-1947, CWoMG, vol. LXXXIX, p.11).
So, he was dismissing as cowards those who saved their lives fleeing the massacre by a vastly stronger enemy, viz. the Pakistani population and security forces. But is it cowardice to flee a no-win situation, so as to live and perhaps to fight another day? There can be a come-back from exile, not from death. Is it not better to continue life as a non-Lahorite than to cling to one's location in Lahore even if it has to be as a corpse? Why should staying in a mere location be so superior to staying alive? To be sure, it would have been even better if Hindus could have continued to live with honour in Lahore, but Gandhi himself had refused to use his power in that cause, viz. averting Partition. He probably would have found that, like the butchered or fleeing Hindus, he was no match for the determination of the Muslim League, but at least he could have tried. In the advice he now gave, the whole idea of non-violent struggle got perverted.
Originally, in Gandhi's struggle for the Indians' rights in South Africa, non-violent agitation was tried out as a weapon of the weak who wouldn't stand a chance in an armed confrontation. It was a method to achieve a political goal, and a method which could boast of some successes. In the hands of a capable agitator, it could be victorious. It was designed to snatch victory from the jaws of powerlessness and surrender. By contrast, the "non-violent" surrender to the enemy and to butchery which Gandhi advocated in 1947 had nothing victorious or successful about it.
During the anti-colonial struggle, Gandhi had often said that oppression was only possible with a certain cooperation or complicity from the oppressed people. The genius of the non-violent technique, not applicable in all situations but proven successful in some, was to create a third way between violent confrontation between the oppressed and the oppressor, fatally ending in the defeat of the weak, and the passive resignation of the oppressed in their state of oppression. Rather than surrendering to the superior power of the oppressor, the oppressed were given a method to exercise slow pressure on their oppressor, to wrest concessions from him and to work on his conscience. No such third way was left to the minorities in Pakistan: Gandhi's only advice to them was to surrender, to become accomplices in their extermination by meekly offering their necks to the executioner's sword.
My point is not that Gandhi could and should have given them a third way, a non-violent technique that would defeat the perpetrators of Partition and religious cleansing. More realistically, he should have accepted that this was the kind of situation where no such third option was available. Once the sacrifice of a large part of India's territory to a Muslim state had been conceded, and given previous experiences with Muslim violence against non-Muslims during the time of Gandhi's own leadership, he should have realized that an exchange of population was the only remaining bloodless solution. The Partition crisis was simply beyond the capacity of Gandhian non-violence to control. If he had had the modesty to face his powerlessness and accept that alternatives to his own preferred solution would have to be tried, many lives could have been saved.
Robust pacifism
It cannot be denied that Gandhian non-violence has a few successes to its credit. But these were achieved under particularly favourable circumstances: the stakes weren't very high and the opponents weren't too foreign to Gandhi's ethical standards. In South Africa, he had to deal with liberal British authorities who weren't affected too seriously in their power and authority by conceding Gandhi's demands. Upgrading the status of the small Indian minority from equality with the Blacks to an in-between status approaching that of the Whites made no real difference to the ruling class, so Gandhi's agitation was rewarded with some concessions. Even in India, the stakes were never really high. Gandhi's Salt March made the British rescind the Salt Tax, a limited financial price to pay for restoring native acquiescence in British paramountcy, but he never made them concede Independence or even Home Rule with a non-violent agitation. The one time he had started such an agitation, viz. in 1930-31, he himself stopped it in exchange for a few small concessions.
It is simply not true that India's Independence was the fruit of Gandhian non-violent agitation. He was close to the British in terms of culture and shared ethical values, which is why sometimes he could successfully bargain with them, but even they stood firm against his pressure when their vital interests were at stake. It is only Britain's bankruptcy due to World War 2 and the emergence of the anti-colonial United States and Soviet Union as the dominant world powers that forced Clement Attlee's government into decolonising India. Even then, the trigger events in 1945-47 that demonstrated how the Indian people would not tolerate British rule for much longer, had to do with armed struggle rather than with non-violence: the naval mutiny of Indian troops and the ostentatious nationwide support for the officers of Subhas Bose's Axis-collaborationist Indian National Army when they stood trial for treason in the Red Fort.
So, non-violence need not be written off as a Quixotic experiment, for it can be an appropriate and successful technique in particular circumstances; but it has its limitations. In many serious confrontations, it is simply better, and on balance more just as well as more bloodless, to observe an "economy of violence": using a small amount of armed force, or even only the threat of armed force, in order to avoid a larger and bloodier armed confrontation. This is the principle of "peace through strength" followed by most modern governments with standing armies. It was applied, for example, in the containment of Communism: though relatively minor wars between Communist and anti-Communist forces were fought in several Third World countries, both the feared Communist world conquest and the equally feared World War 3 with its anticipated nuclear holocaust were averted.
The ethical framework limiting the use of force to a minimum is known as "just war theory", developed by European thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius between the 13th and 18th century, but in essence already present in the Mahabharata as well. Thus, waging war can be a just enterprise when it is done in self-defence, when all non-violent means of achieving the just objective have been tried, when non-combatants are respected as such, when the means used are in proportion to the objective aimed for, etc.
One of the less well-known criteria for just warfare which deserves to be mentioned here in the light of Gandhi's advice to the Hindus in Pakistan is that there should be a reasonable chance of success. No matter how just your cause, it is wrong to commit your community to a course of action that only promises to be suicidal. Of course, once a group of soldiers is trapped in a situation from which the only exit is an honourable death, fighting on may be the best course remaining, but whenever possible, such suicide should be avoided. This criterion is just as valid in non-armed as in armed struggle: it was wrong to make the Hindus stay among their Pakistani persecutors when this course of action had no chance of saving lives nor even of achieving certain political objectives.
As the Buddha, Aristotle, Confucius and other ethical guides already taught, virtue is a middle term between two extremes. In this case, we have to sail between the two extremes of blindness to human fellow-feeling and blindness to strategic ground realities. It is wrong to say that might makes right and that anything goes when it comes to achieving victory, no matter what amount of suffering is inflicted on the enemy, on bystanders or even on one's own camp. It is equally wrong to strike a high moral posture which haughtily disregards, and hence refuses to contain or subdue, the potential for violence in human confrontations and the real pain it causes. In between these two extremes, the mature and virtuous attitude is one which desires and maintains peace but is able and prepared to fight the aggressor.
Limiting the use of force to a minimum is generally agreed to be the correct position. In this case, disagreeing with Gandhi is not an instance of Communist or Hindu-chauvinist extremism, but of the accumulated wisdom of civilized humanity. Excluding the use of force entirely, by contrast, may simply whet the aggressor's appetite and provoke far more violence than the achievable minimum. This is a mistake which an overenthusiastic and inexperienced beginner can forgivably make, but in an experienced leader like Mahatma Gandhi during his time at the head of the freedom movement, it was a serious failure of judgment. The silver lining in the massacres which his mistakes provoked, is that they have reminded us of the eternal wisdom of "the golden mean", the need for a balanced policy vis-à-vis the ever-present challenge of violence and aggression. It has been known all along, and it is crystal-clear once more, that we should avoid both extremes, Jinnah's self-righteousness and Gandhi's sentimentalism.
Gandhi is a good example of 'How people can be deprived of reality to make a British agent Father of the Nation?
Congress from its origin knows well, How to rule stupid, ignorant, sentimental, emotional, culturally divided, self-centred Hindus? Do we know any thing about sons of M.K.Gandhi? No we don't because it is not there in our text books. Do you know what went wrong with Hiralal Gandhi who ended up as Abdullah Gandhi? No we don't because it is not being told, The Congress Government showing the History as they want. Do you know any thing about the book “Gandhi nobody Knows” by Richard Grenier? Do we know any thing about Nathuram Godse or His Brother Gopal Gods? The Congress Government never let any information go out of Court rooms where Nathuram Godse's trail took place. Godse is often a misunderstood character. He is referred to as a Hindu fanatic. It is often hard to understand Godse because the Government of India had suppressed information about him. His court statements, letters etc. were all banned from the public The Congress which had boasted of its nationalism and socialism secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the Bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian territory became foreign land to us from August 15, 1947. Lord Mountbatten came to be described in Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what Congress party calls ' freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called 'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice?
When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country. The central government had taken a decision - Pakistan will not be given Rs 55 crores. On January 13 Gandhi started a fast unto death that Pakistan must be given the money. On January 13, the central government changed its earlier decision and announced that Pakistan would be given the amount. On January 13, Nathuram decided to assassinate Gandhi. One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast unto death related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the
Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed for its break some condition on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any condition on the Muslims. He was fully aware of from the experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi.
Onlookers have even commented that Gandhi didn’t say "Hey Ram" as he died. Gopal Godse at the trial had mentioned: No, he did not say it. You see, it was an automatic pistol. It had a magazine for nine bullets but there were actually seven at that time. And once you pull the trigger, within a second, all the seven bullets had passed. When these bullets pass through crucial points like the heart, consciousness is finished. You have no strength. Oops!
And What Gandhi gave to India a present of Nehru and his blood sucking clan who has draped us of our blood till date.
An Addict! An entertainer or a Hindu merely by accident (in his own words)? Nehru gave birth to the problem of Kashmir & China. Nehru had illegal relationships. Nehru hated ‘Vande Mataram”. Nehru was ready with a sword to oppose Subhash Chandra Bose and other stalwarts who had contributed to the cause of independence.
Remember Chacha Neheru! Smoking a cigarette with Edwina Mountbatten. The inspiration behind Childrens’ day!
Nehru’s ‘love’ for Edwina Mountbatten ruined Nation! - Exposed by Edwina’s daughter. Lord Mountbatten “used” his wife Edwina, who shared a “deep emotional love” with Jawaharlal Nehru, to influence India’s first Prime Minister to refer the Kashmir issue to the United Nations, according to the last Viceroy’s daughter, Pamela.
‘Reminiscences of the Nehru Age’ by M. O. Mathai (personal Secretary of Jawahar Lal Nehru) (This book is banned by Congress Government) I am Hindu… by accident - Jawaharlal NehruTo talk of Hindu culture would injure India’s interests. By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim, and I am a Hindu only by accident of birth. I know for the non believer and the politically complacent it would look like material stolen from Karan Johar. But countrymen, its time to think and face the reality.
Bande Mataram! Jai Hind.
