Re: [Marxism] Fw: [foil] Gandhi and His Prejudices in the Context of His Times and Trajectory of Evolution

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2015/09/09 06:14 PM, Marla Vijaya kumar via Marxism wrote:

Here is Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi's appraisal of the Mahatma. I hope it will answer 
many questions.Vijaya Kumar Marla
  
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-attacks-on-gandhi-are-good/


*Gandhi’s Empire**
**Despite Rajmohan Gandhi’s defence, evidence suggests that M.K. Gandhi 
sided with the British in subjugating Africans**

*
Written by Ashwin Desai | Published:September 25, 2015 12:25 am

The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, the book I 
co-authored with Goolam Vahed, has elicited widespread comment, mostly 
by people who have not yet read it. Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson and 
biographer of Mohandas Gandhi, writing in The Indian Express (‘Why 
attacks on Mahatma Gandhi are good’, September 9), says the book 
contends that “Gandhi disdained black people and supported British 
imperialism” during his South Africa years. Rajmohan does not deny the 
allegations, but his main contention is that these issues are not new — 
which reveals much of his own way of viewing the liberation struggle in 
South Africa.


Rajmohan is keen to argue that once Gandhi realised that empire was bad 
(in the 1920s), he became its foe. But what does it say about Gandhi 
that during his time in South Africa, he saw empire as a benign, if not 
progressive, force? In Gandhi’s time in South Africa, the British empire 
was at its acme. The Zulu kingdom had been decimated through plunder and 
pillage, while taxes forced African men off the land and into gold and 
diamond mines. Their wives and children were not allowed to accompany 
them. It was a brutal system.


What did Gandhi have to say about empire at work? One “where all races 
would be equal”, as Rajmohan says he believed? He could only envision 
this because he wrote Africans out of history. When he did write about 
them, it was of the ways in which empire could further exploit and 
subjugate them. So it is not just a question of Gandhi’s racism and 
belief in empire, but his view that Indians should be allowed to join 
whites in this system of racist super-exploitation. As for nursing the 
sick, his other passion besides empire, Gandhi did not care for those 
dying in British concentration camps. His ambulance missions were 
limited to showing loyalty to empire.


Did the empire’s batons have to land on Indian backs before Gandhi 
realised its falsity in the 1920s? If so, this aggravates the charge 
that it took assaults upon those occupying the “Aryan” plane of 
civilisation to jolt him out of this most obvious error. It is like 
saying that Gandhi did not care about slavery (except for wanting 
Indians to be allowed their own slaves) because it was limited to 
Africans, but when Indians were turned into slaves he saw the fault and 
fought against it. Gandhi took up empire’s cudgels to ensure that 
Africans were kept in their place. For us, this is what marked Gandhi — 
his begging to be the stretcher-bearer of empire in South Africa. And 
when tired of stretcher-bearing, he asked for guns to defend empire 
against the rebellious natives. Rajmohan goes on to argue that “the 
younger Gandhi [was] at times ignorant and prejudiced about South 
Africa’s blacks… especially when provoked by the conduct of black 
convicts who were among his fellow inmates in South Africa’s prisons”.


“Provoked”? Were their black bodies a provocation, the same provocation 
that in a brutal racist system landed them in prison? Rajmohan then 
argues, “the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way 
for the struggle for black rights”. In one sentence he writes out the 
history of African resistance to colonialism that unfolded much before 
Gandhi arrived on the scene and which he was quite keen to subvert by 
siding with white colonial power. Rajmohan holds that “on racial 
equality, … [Gandhi] was greatly in advance of most if not all of his 
compatriots”. This is a staggering claim. The South African Gandhi 
accepted white racist minority rule, and openly proposed that Indians 
and whites were more civilised than Africans, that they were lazy, and 
that they needed to have more taxes heaped upon them. Of his prison 
experience, he wrote: “We could understand not being classed with the 
whites, but to be placed on the same level with the natives seemed too 
much to put up with.”


Cherry-picking a quote here or there does not nullify this but does say 
much about Rajmohan’s own blinkers, which allow him to write so glibly 
about Gandhi’s siding with empire in the subjugation of Africans.


Rajmohan ends on this resounding note: “Some, however, seem to think 
that they are wiser 

[Marxism] Fw: [foil] Gandhi and His Prejudices in the Context of His Times and Trajectory of Evolution

[Marla Vijaya kumar via Marxism]

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Here is Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi's appraisal of the Mahatma. I hope it will answer 
many questions.Vijaya Kumar Marla

  On Wednesday, September 9, 2015 3:57 PM, Sukla Sen  
wrote:
   

 
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-attacks-on-gandhi-are-good/

Why attacks on Mahatma Gandhi are good

They offer an opportunity to recall what he stood for. The imperfect
Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary
compatriots.

[Rajmohan Gandhi]

Gandhi suggested that our uncertainty over the right course to take
would disappear once we ask how the most helpless person we have known
would be affected by our choice.

Offended by attacks on the Mahatma, some friends who think of me as a
scholar ask about a new book which, according to media reports,
alleges that during his years in South Africa (1893-1914), Gandhi
disdained black people and supported British imperialism. Not having
read it, I cannot comment on the book, but I can address the two
allegations. Before doing so, however, let me say that attacks on
Gandhi should be welcomed, for they offer an opportunity to recall the
things Gandhi stood for.

Gandhi’s “answer to doubt”, given around Independence Day in 1947 —
also known as the “talisman” — is deservedly famed. In that short
text, Gandhi suggested that our uncertainty over the right course to
take would disappear once we ask how the most helpless person we have
known would be affected by our choice.

Less well remembered is Gandhi’s reply when asked, in 1946, to
describe the independent India he wished to see. Drawing a geometric
picture, Gandhi said he wanted “not a pyramid but an oceanic circle”
of complete equality. In such a circle, “the last would be first, in
fact there would be no first and no last”, and the individual citizen,
not a president or prime minister, would occupy the circle’s centre
(Harijan, July 28, 1946).

Yet, along with equality, Gandhi wanted fraternity; along with justice
he sought reconciliation. Demanding justice for Dalits, Gandhi also
strove for a partnership between Dalits and upper-caste Hindus. He
wanted India’s Hindu majority to protect the country’s minorities, but
he also wanted Hindu-Muslim friendship, and he asked Pakistan’s Muslim
majority to protect that country’s Hindus, Christians and
minority-sect Muslims. Internationally, Gandhi wanted a free Palestine
(a cause that many in India have chosen to abandon) — but also
Arab-Jewish reconciliation.

Looking at the clash today between the need to escape from dangerous
and seemingly hellish places and the lack of room in supposedly
heavenly places, do we not yearn for persons with the large and just
heart and wise mind that Gandhi showed?

The same may be true when people desire to improve today’s dangerous
relationship between the so-called Muslim world and the so-called
West. Or when we think of inequalities in India, or of conflicts in
Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Dead now for nearly 70 years, Gandhi did not leave behind precise
solutions for such problems. But his legacy will aid, not impede,
efforts to find the solutions, even if we assume for a moment that
between 1893 and 1914, Gandhi was prejudiced about Africa’s blacks and
backed British imperialism.

Was Gandhi in favour of imperialism?
For some time yes, and openly so. This is no “discovery”. In fact, as
Gandhi put it himself in his autobiography, the British Empire was one
of his two passions at the start of the 20th century. (The other was
nursing the sick.) Hadn’t Queen Victoria and other eminent Britons
declared that in their empire, all the races would be equal and
everyone would enjoy the freedoms of belief and expression and the
rule of law? When Gandhi realised that the imperial claim was false,
he became, as Winston Churchill and a succession of viceroys
complained, the empire’s strongest foe, and India’s masses joined
Gandhi in rebellion.

As for our world’s black people, Gandhi nursed great expectations from
them. In February 1936, he said to Howard Thurman, the
African-American thinker, who was calling on him in Bardoli in
Gujarat: “Well, if it comes true it may be through the African
Americans that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be
delivered to the world” (Harijan, March 14 1936). Nearly three decades
later, when Martin Luther King and his colleagues won their remarkable
nonviolent triumphs for black rights in the US, they did not hesitate
to say that Gandhi and India had inspired them.

But wasn’t the younger Gandhi at times ignorant and prejudiced about
South Africa’s blacks? He undoubtedly was, especially when provoked by
the