Death Of The Mahatma
Ashis Nandy
On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the
ambivalence towards him in India's modernising middle classes. Gandhi was
not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class
Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft,
progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, as Nehru alleged,
but by one who represented 'normality' and 'sanity'.
The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of
her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy
by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished
critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical
liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New,
aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of
globalisation in India.
The fear of Gandhi has been consistent in India and it has never been
confined to the expensively educated Indians now flourishing in the global
knowledge industry. This fear is the fear of ordinary Indian citizens
suffering from that incurable disease called Indianness and suspicion of the
open politics that empowers them and allows them to bring into public life
their strange, alien categories. It was this fear that Nathuram Godse took
to logical conclusion on January 30, 1948. His was the third attempt on
Gandhi's life by the Hindu nationalists, the first of which was made in
1930s. They made no such attempt against any other key secular leader in
India or against Muslim leaders seen as enemies of Hindus.
Godse thought he was executing Gandhi on behalf of a majority. Exactly as
Mayawati and, before her, E M S Namboodiripad felt that they were speaking
on behalf of a majority - the bahujan samaj, the proletariat, the Shudras
and the Dalits - when they attacked Gandhi. However, once the movement to
which Godse belonged began to falter as an ideological formation and succeed
as a political party dreaming of capturing power, it began singing a
different tune. The RSS included Gandhi's name in the daily prayers of its
branches and, in the 1980s, the BJP even adopted 'Gandhian socialism' as its
official party ideology. May be Mayawati's hostility to Gandhi had not waned
when she spoke out because she was yet to make a bid for pan-Indian
presence.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Leninist hacks have always considered
Gandhi a menace to progress, modernity and rationality. The respect to
Gandhi that some of the retired Stalinists have begun to show in recent
years is a consequence of their political demise. The vendors of secular
salvation now find that Gandhi has survived our times better than they have.
M N Roy, who broke away from Marxism, disagreed with the Leninists on many
counts but not on Gandhi. His three essays on Gandhi, read chronologically,
show a declining hostility towards the Mahatma. The first is dismissive, the
second ambivalent, the third mildly positive. As his confidence in being
able to mobilise people for his version of revolution faltered, he came to
grudgingly appreciate Gandhi's ability to touch the ordinary Indians despite
his 'irrational' credo. Indian Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s were
no less hostile to Gandhi. He with his toothless smile seemed to them a sly,
scheming warhorse brainwashing rural India with his bogus ideology, whereas
they, despite their direct communion with objective, scientific history and
theoretical guidance from the great witch doctor at Beijing, had been exiled
to urban India to survive as an ordinary terrorist outfit. As Gandhi was
dead by then, they took out their anger against him by breaking his statues.
Within a decade though, from within the ranks of Indian Maoists emerged some
who drew heavily, often creatively, upon Gandhi. Pushed to the margins of
politics, with their dreams of an early revolution in tatters, the ageing
lions began to ruminate over their failures and take Gandhi seriously. Two
steps backward and one step forward, as the great helmsman might have said!
The liberals have never found Gandhi digestible either. Shankaran Nair, an
early Congress leader, said that Gandhi was against everything that the
great sons of 19th century India stood for. Gopal Krishna Gokhale was even
more forthright. He declared Gandhi's Hind Swaraj to be "the work of a fool"
and prophesied that "Gandhi would destroy it after he spent a year in
India". Such honest estimates are now rare, because the liberals in the
meanwhile have produced their own house-broken Gandhi - modern,
nationalistic, progressive, statist and secular. There is nothing left of
the politically incorrect, intellectual maverick who took on the imperious
Enlightenment vision and refused to accept that its dominance was proof of
its finality.
It is possible that Gandhi sensed his growing isolation in public life. The
200 years of western domination had done its job and the definition of
normal politics had changed in India. Gandhi chose death, using as his
accomplice the naive, lost ideologue, Godse, to sharpen the contra-diction
that had arisen between the Indian civilisation and the newborn Indian
nation-state. Robert Payne understands this when he says, "For Gandhi this
death was a triumph. He died as the kings do, felled at the height of their
powers". And Sarojini Naidu was right when she said: "What is all this
snivelling about? ...Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion?"
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Death_Of_The_Mahatma/articleshow/2741672.cms
The writer is a political psychologist
