The legacy
P.C. JOSHI †
I agree with the Seminar proposal that the application of the dialectical method to Gandhism is the only way to rescue it from its deification by the right and the infantile negative attitude of the left which has reduced the left itself to sterility. I would only plead that the dialectical method should be related to the laws of historical materialism or else the debate will become schematic and unhistorical.
The Mahatma was the most Indian of the Indians of his day. He ignited the fire that smoked out British colonialism but be also left behind the smoke that has been blinding and choking his devoted heirs.
The problem is to study objectively the Indian reality which the Mahatma faced and changed and the laws of motion of the various Indian classes, both anti-imperialist and the pro-imperialist, which the national movement headed by him inspired and activised. More, to what extent was the Mahatma aware of the new in Indian national life of which he was the conscious or unwitting instrument?
I do not deny it is a tough problem but it cannot be baulked, for a nation cannot successfully march forward without understanding its national legacy and, more, strengthening its will and acquiring the wisdom to carry it forward.
The Mahatma’s direct heir, who was completely unlike him, Jawaharlal Nehru, has left behind two formulations, the first that Gandhiji was full of contradictions and, second, that most of his ideas were antediluvian but that he had an uncanny political instinct which enabled him to stir the Indian people as no one else could. Both the statements are very correct but do not carry us far in getting something meaningful and forward moving out of the ideological rethinking and dialogue which the centenary year has genuinely evoked.
It is not easy to deny Seminar’s demand, and my own urge to indulge in some loud thinking is irresistible and hence I am scattering a few ideas, minus arguments, into the collective pool.
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he Mahatma’s life, work, and ideas were typically Indian and a potent combination of tradition and the new. His outlook was completely traditional, that of a Baniya Vaishnav, diluted by the then current dose of British-brand liberalism. The Vaishnav Bhakti gave him his undying dedication to the nation and made him seek the help of his ‘inner voice’ in every crisis while the Baniya inheritance showed him the way out, sweet and suave but tricky. Such a son of the Prime Minister of Porbandar and Rajkot could not but effectively react to colonial injustice and aggressiveness when traditional liberal arguments failed him with the British rulers themselves. The ideological structure of this traditional mode was inevitably outmoded and reactionary.This man of unprecedented faith, not only in his God but his people as well, made history by bringing into motion something entirely new in our national life. The conditions and the need of his time impelled him to sweep aside the tactic of petition-mongering to the British ministers and the Parliament for achieving India’s national right and bring into action the Indian people from below, on to the political stage, to demand and fight for Swaraj. This itself constituted a new and revolutionary turn in the Indian national movement.
A reactionary outlook, firmly held, superimposed over an objectively revolutionary movement and initiated by the same person, such was the contradictory phenomenon produced and faced by Gandhiji and the leadership he built up.
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he Mahatma’s traditional outlook was then, in the early twenties, very useful. It made his mass approach irresistible and evoked a spontaneous response. This traditional outlook also had built-in safeguards which made it restrictive of the movement and acted as a brake under the dispensation of a driver unpredictably but meaningfully bold and panicky by turns.His traditional outlook hindered the Mahatma from understanding the laws of motion of the new type mass upsurge which had welled up under his national leadership. The historically irresistible movement found its way forward, through its own trial and error, and threw up a new leadership.
The contradiction facing the movement was solved in the grand, typically Indian, manner. The unquestioned leader of the nation who had failed twice in the twenties and again in the thirties was step by step elevated to the status of the Father of the Nation and the youngest, most modern, and all-round progressive leader from the old collective, Jawaharlal Nehru, was promoted to the head of the nation.
The greatness of the Mahatma lay in the fact that he did not hinder but aided this historic process. Gandhiji had not only nursed Nehru but named him his heir and he knew he was no orthodox Gandhite but an ardent socialist. Such a proud privilege has been the lot of rare individuals in world history. Such was the greatness engendered by the national movement that brought us our freedom.
The old leader, held back by traditional thought to take the movement forward, gracefully yielded place to a new one more suited to new times.
Let me spotlight some of the major issues.
1. The Mahatma had evolved and tested out his technique of satyagraha in South Africa but he began his quest for ‘knowing India’ by going to the peasants and workers. It is in this historic perspective that his leadership of the Champaran peasantry, against the Indigo planters, followed by the Ahmedabad textile workers strike should be viewed.
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e of the left broke through Gandhian class-collaboration on the trade union front by building up the AITUC based on the policy of class struggle and organizing gigantic strike struggles, but we could never break the Gandhian hold over the Ahmedabad Majoor Mahajan. Nor did we realize our weakness which enabled Sardar Patel to initiate, and Asoka Mehta to operate, the plan to split working class unity by starting the INTUC.There is no march forward to socialism without achieving working class unity on a truly democratic basis.
The Mahatma resisted more successfully the independent class organizations of the peasantry. We of the left tried our best to set them up and they grew in areas where the left was strong but after independence, following the disruption of the national democratic movement and left unity, they became local islands.
The mechanical application of the tactic of class struggle did not work in the peasantry. The class issue was mixed up in a complicated manner with the hoary caste system and class differentiation had started with the peasantry itself. The problem of creative application of Marxism to this basic Indian problem was beyond us. The Mahatma relied upon the traditional set-up and held British colonialism as responsible for all their miseries. He protected the landlord class with his theory of trusteeship and won peasant confidence by calling upon them to fight out their anti-feudal grievances. His ideas and tactics thus became a hindrance to the supreme task of integrating the anti-imperialist struggle with the anti-feudal struggle. This lapse has created new problems.
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he traditional feudal dominated areas like Orissa, Rajasthan, etc., have become the strongholds of the right. The character of the agrarian problem has certainly changed but the anti-feudal evolution yet remains to be completed and that calls for a united approach to the peasantry for a democratic socialist future with the same fervour with which the Mahatma took to them the message of swaraj. His trusteeship theory stands blown sky high.2. The problem of Hindu Muslim unity was at one time the achievement of the Mahatma and, in the changed times, his great failure. The anti-imperialism of the Indian Muslims could only express itself in terms of pan-Islamism. The Congress-Khilafat Agreement was a contemporary achievement and it was the glory of the Mahatma that Hindu nationalists twitted him for supporting the Khilafat cause with more zest then the Muslims.
The weakness of Gandhi’s traditional thought lay in the fact that it hindered him from seeking a progressive democratic solution and led to the efforts at top level negotiations and achieving a pact to divide the legislative seats and administrative jobs, an impossible effort with an alien power in control. Communal tension intensified, Partition of the country became inevitable and the relations between the two states have become a problem.
Political realism which was a sound justification for Congress-Khilafat unity once, became the original sin responsible for Partition, etc. History takes its awful revenge if a nation cannot march with the times, from tradition to modernism.
3. The Mahatma’s conception of swaraj in the beginning wilfully remained undefined so as not to scare away the moderates and isolate the British usurpers. He was however no unprincipled opportunist but a hard-headed national leader. He had opposed Hasrat Mohani’s resolution for complete independence at the Ahmedabad Congress but blessed it before the decade was over, at Lahore. His experience of the British imperialists in the first NCO and the appointment of the Simon Commission helped him overcome his illusions, greatly though not completely.
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andhi’s conception of swaraj was certainly national and its anti-imperialist content became sharper and clearer with his own experience of British policy and he did not resist the modernists and progressives, giving it a more and more democratic content from the Karachi Congress onwards.His conception of swadeshi clearly emphasized the concept of economic independence under swaraj but his theory of trusteeship was a twist against democracy in economy. His own followers criticized him in his life time and his firm answer used to be that if trusteeship does not deliver the goods under swaraj he would advocate state ownership. More than two decades after independence, bank nationalization has been enforced. A clean-up of the monopolist trustees of national property, who have violated the mandate of the Father of the Nation and only exploited it in their selfish interests, has begun and must become a planned and sustained national effort. The future of people betrayed and of the nation in chronic crisis depends upon it.
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andhi made non-violence the basic tactic of the national movement which he headed. In Indian objective conditions and during the historic phase which threw up Gandhiji as the leader of the national struggle, the traditional type of armed national uprising was out of the question. We of the left have gulped but not yet understood this unprecedented phenomenon. The last few weeks I have been meeting Professor Low of Sussex University who is trying to work out the riddle, as he aptly put it, of how we won all the battles but lost the war in India. A scientific understanding of this historic phenomenon will alone give flesh and blood to the now popularly mouthed but ineffectively pursued tactic of the possibility of a peaceful path to socialism in India.The above is integrally related to the need for a new evaluation of the Gandhian tactic of satyagraha and non-cooperation. It failed thrice under Gandhiji’s own leadership – in the early twenties, early thirties and early forties. The failure was primarily due to the Mahatma’s willingness to compromise the national aim under the impact of his reactionary ideology. The tactic failed to achieve its aim as planned but the righteous struggle it unleashed deepened the political expression and heightened the democratic consciousness of the Indian people and made them what they are, beaten but not broken by the Chinese aggressors and as a result of this experience, victorious but not aggressive against Pakistan and above all capable of punishing the very organization that had led the struggle for independence for betraying its solemn pledged by routing it in the last general elections.
Satyagraha and non-cooperation are a unique tactical contribution of the Indian people in the armoury of world revolutionary struggles and they are typically Indian. The left can and must take legitimate pride for enriching this national tactical heritage with gheraos and bandhs. With the long delayed basic political differentiation taking place inside the ruling party, the right-centre bloc which so far held sway breaking up (and the Congress is yet the premier national organization in the country) and with the prime minister starting to take up an independent line against the right, the whole political atmosphere is changing and a new political correlationship is coming into being.
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o help speed up the now long desired political constellation of national forces, active intervention by the masses is the dire need of the hour.Gheraos and bandhs were so far practised by the left for achieving limited ends. The time is ripe for and urgently demands that the traditional national weapons of non-cooperation and satyagraha along with their new variants of peaceful gheraos and bandhs be revived, prepared for and put into practice on a broader national and vaster democratic basis embracing the healthy middle of the roaders, loyal to the nation and with a commitment to the people, and not confined to the national left alone.
A truly national and forward moving programme is there in the best of the Gandhian legacy as preached by Gandhiji himself and certainly not as being popularized by the present day Gandhites but as it was developed, changed and enriched by his loyal legatee, Jawaharlal Nehru, minus his Hamlet-like indecision and weakness.
Gandhi and Nehru both had to fight the battle of ideas publicly and draw the masses into making national opinion, Gandhiji against the Moderates, Nehru against the Congress right and Indira Gandhi has to do the same now. This battle of ideals is welcome but like bank nationalization it is only the first step, clearing and changing the political atmosphere, but by itself it does not change political reality.
To change reality, active struggle by the people is necessary. This was so in Gandhiji’s time, it was so in Nehru’s time, it is more so now. The pre-independence legacy of non-cooperation and satyagraha is already being practised in peaceful but never ending strike/struggles, ever growing gheraos and the periodic state-wide bandhs. This traditional tactical legacy as further developed and practised in post-independence India is before all to assess in its effectiveness and application for moulding our future.
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andhiji was the best product of his time. Gandhism was limited and initiated by the interests of the class that then led the nation. Gandhiji is no more and the class which gave birth to Gandhism is prostituting his legacy for its selfish and anti-people aims. Nevertheless, what makes Gandhiji and his work immortal, are the following ideas.* Loyalty to the nation.
* Accepting the primacy of the role of the people and helping them to get going for the nation’s current aim.
* Accepting and building upon the new rising forces.
* Holding and moving together and forward, not backward, nor sitting tight and making excuses.
Gandhiji thought anew for his time. We need to do the same. His thinking and listening to his inner voice was no mere philosophical exercise but his way to evolve a forward moving course of action. We would be false to the Father of the Nation if we fail to do the same, in the conditions of our time and for the fulfilment of the tasks that face us.
Seminar 122, ‘Gandhi’, October 1969, pp. 25-28.