Relevance of Gandhi —
Inherent Contradictions and the Way Out

Vinod Jain

Earlier Twentieth Century saw the rise of two great Indians who were giants in their respective fields. One hailed from the western state of Gujarat, the other from the eastern state of Bengal. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or M.K. Gandhi was from Gujarat. Manabendra Nath Roy or M.N. Roy was from Bengal. Gandhi came to become a mass leader as India had not seen before. Roy established himself as an intellectual giant as India had not witnessed for a long time.

After spending some formative years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and was in the Congress as a leader. His rise was such that by 1920 he was dominating the Indian National Congress. At the time of his Dandi March against the Salt law of the British in 1930, he was at the peak of his leadership.

Young Roy (then Naren) before 1915, was working as a terrorist under the leadership of Jatin Mukherjee. In that year he left for Java in search of German arms to help insurgency against the British. Subsequently he moved on to Mexico where he gave up his ardent nationalism of younger days and adopted Communism. Establishing the first communist party outside the Soviet Union, he was invited by Lenin to Moscow to attend the Comintern meeting. Here he impressed Lenin and other delegates. By 1929 his achievements in the Soviet Union were spectacular. But by the end of that year, as a result of various factors, he was out of favour with Moscow and was expelled from the Comintern. He decided to come to India, where by the end of 1930 he was arrested. In 1931 he was jailed for six years by the British.

In Jail both Gandhi and Roy read a lot and wrote voluminously. By November 1936 when Roy was released he had already written 6000 pages of “Philosophical Consequences of Modern Science.”

Both in their own ways, were working for India’s liberation from the British Rule. But their approaches were fundamentally different from each other’s.

I

When I was young, somebody close to me said that when Gandhi came to India from South Africa, he said, ‘India needs a Mahatma. I have decided to be one’.

When Gandhi came to India he must have realized that the people of India were poor, illiterate, orthodox, lacking in confidence, scared of the powerful British and of the mighty empire. Obviously the first and foremost task would be to awaken them and restore their confidence so that they are enabled to participate in a struggle for independence.

Trying to awaken these masses would require communicating with them. The only way to effectively communicate with these poor, illiterate and downtrodden people would be to stoop to their level. And Gandhi did just that. Giving up his attire and putting on the loin cloth of the average poor man was one step. Giving the public meetings a touch of the prayer meeting was another. The overall impression given was of an orthodox believer.

This suited the people well. They started flocking to Gandhi’s meetings. This was a master-stroke.

Tradition of non-violence came to Gandhi through his mother who was a devout Jain. He practised it in South Africa against Apartheid. He realised its potential there. Another thing he practiced in South Africa was what he called Satyagraha—insistence. He knew it would unnerve the British as well.

The Indian people were not expected to take up arms against the mighty British. It suited the downtrodden people well.

An organiser has to keep his flock together and busy. They should feel that they are participating in an independence struggle. For this Gandhi devised a few things.

He asked the people to use spinning wheel (Charkha). This in order to produce hand-spun and hand-woven cloth (Khadi) and stop wearing clothes made of British cloth. This gave the people a sense of participation, a sense of sacrifice, a sense of achievement.

He asked the congressmen to take to early-morning rounds in their localities (Prabhat-Pheris) whenever they were required to convey something to the people in general. This was so easy to do.

Whenever there were activities like the Dandi Salt March, participating people were required to remain non-violent, not run away in the face of show of force, and to calmly suffer lathi blows whenever lathi-charged. This was the maximum sacrifice they were to suffer. This was well designed to shame the British in the eyes of the Indian public, as well as in the eyes of the world at large.

Another of the simple programme Gandhi devised was to first tell and convince the people that going to British jails, in order to fight for independence, is a good thing instead of bad. That this should not be treated as a stigma.

So it was all so very convenient for the congressmen fighters for independence. And it was all so very convenient for the people who flocked to Congress meetings or to Gandhi’s prayer meetings.

Devising such unbelievably simple things for the people to do was another master-stroke of the Mahatma. This is how the process of awakening the backward and the down-trodden got on to a steady start.

It is obvious that these few things were the basics, but not the content, of the Gandhian independence movement. For the content, two different kinds of things were required to be looked into.

The first was: what shall we do with our independence and the polity once the Britishers are gone? The second was: what we do with the poor, illiterate, orthodox and down-trodden people of a backward society?

But before touching upon these questions, let us take a look at Gandhi’s concerns. Gandhi was acutely aware of the Hindu-Muslim question. He knew that the British ever since 1857 have been trying to tear the two communities apart, because they wanted to divide and rule. He wanted friendliness, cooperation and solidarity among the communities. Even in his prayer meetings he would use Ishwar and Allah (God) together.

Gandhi for the first time persuaded the women to come out of the confines of their households and participate in the independence struggle. Women did come out in good numbers and participated. This had not happened before.

Another pressing question was that of the caste-system: particularly the question of untouchability. He did go out of his way to mix with the Harijans (untouchables). He even went to stay in their huts and dine with them.

As we had seen at the outset, when Gandhi came to India and took stock of Indian social scene and found poverty, illiteracy, lack of confidence and orthodoxy, he decided to stoop to the level of the average Indian and started talking in the poor man’s idiom. Gandhi was a believer and his belief in God went well with orthodox Indians. This on the one hand made Indians flock to him. But it had other consequences as well.

It was one thing to ask women to come out to participate in the struggle for independence, but quite another to bring about social change. Orthodoxy could never prompt social change. So it stopped at that.

The prayer meetings that attracted Hindus to Gandhi in large numbers, did not click with the Muslims. It could not have. If an orthodox Muslim leader had attracted orthodox Muslims to his meetings, would orthodox Hindus be similarly attracted to it?

When Gandhi sided with the existing Hindu social system, the upper caste Hindus identified themselves with him. But the Harijans were disappointed. They saw no way out of the clutches of the oppressive social system. No social change was called for and none happened. Whatever Gandhi wrote and said and did for the upliftment of Harijans was just ignored by the upper caste people including Gandhians.

At that time, there was among the people a sentiment against the British Rule. Gandhi identified with their sentiment and the people were with Gandhi. Many a thing other than this, the people ignored.

We may now take a look at one of the two questions we posed: the question of social change. The above discussion shows how the Gandhian movement failed to make a lasting impact on the Indian Society. It could not have. An orthodox approach could not have released an orthodox society from its age-old orthodoxy and superstitions. This was one of the major inherent contradictions of the Gandhian movement and thought.

Let us take a look at the second question raised above: what shall we do with our independence and polity once the Britishers are gone?

The fact is no thought was given to it. No preparation was made. This was another inherent contradiction of the movement.

It was a monumental lack of foresight and forethought on the part of the Gandhian leadership. India paid dearly for this and continues to pay.

Another significant factor Gandhi introduced in the movement was non-violence. Apart from the impacts mentioned above, there was a moral aspect to it. It was introduced to cleanse politics. It showed the importance of the age old moral dictum that the end does not justify the means. It suggests Gandhi sincerely wanted politics to be governed by moral considerations.

On 16 August 1946 the Muslim League’s ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta resulted in unprecedented communal riots. 4000 Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered in four days. Gandhi resorted to Satyagraha and fast unto death in Calcutta and later on in Delhi. When violence spread to Noakhali and Bihar, Gandhi moved fast and effectively. He was able to restore peace and trust.

These steps by Gandhi stunned everyone as well as moved everyone—the British, the Hindus and the Muslims.

But these last acts of the Mahatma’s greatness could not reconcile the Hindus and the Muslims, could not avoid partition, could not avoid the holocaust of the massacres of partition.

II

Within three years of M.N. Roy’s release from jail the Second World War broke out. Once the nature of the war became clear to him he said it is not an imperialist war. Roy said it is a war between Fascism on one side and Democracies on the other. He said the defeat of the Fascist powers in the war would bring the defeat of Fascist elements in each country. He also said that with the defeat of the Fascist powers, imperialism would wither away. His prophesy came true when with the end of the war British, French and Dutch imperialisms got liquidated.

Soon after the war started Roy had predicted that India would become independent within ten years. He also said that instead of wasting this time period, it should be utilized to prepare ourselves for independence.

By the end of 1942, it became clear that the war would end in the defeat of Fascist powers. Thereupon, Roy started thinking in terms of post-war developments in India. He started thinking about the economic and political structure of free India.
He and his colleagues, in 1944, prepared a people’s plan for economic development. With an investment of Rs. 15,000 crores over a period of ten years it was to improve agriculture and social services. He believed the question of food, clothing and shelter of the poor people is to be tackled first.

After a year Roy prepared an outline for India’s political structure. It came in the shape of a draft constitution of free India.

He put forth the idea of a Constituent Assembly as well as of economic planning.
Things as they happened in the Soviet Union during the war, upset Roy. He moved away from Communism/Marxism towards Radical Humanism. Roy was aware of the defects of parliamentary democracy in Europe as well as of the laissez faire dominated economy there. He wanted the people of India to steer clear of these.

In 1946 he released the manifesto of New Humanism.

“Radical Humanism brought Roy nearer to Gandhi and his school of thought. There were now many similarities among the two. Both accepted the individual as the central point of all social thought and action. Both stood for decentralization of political and economic power, and both suggested partyless politics for purifying politics. There were, of course, some fundamental differences. Roy was a materialist and rationalist; while Gandhi was a spiritualist and relied more on his “inner voice”. That did not, however, come in the way of working together for some practical ends. Common work of that type developed in later years between the Radical Humanists and the Sarvodaya followers of Gandhiji.” (V.B. Karnik)

III

Gandhi was not a philosopher, nor a revolutionary. He was a man of the moment. He saw the ground realities, saw what needed to be done, realised what leadership was required. He shaped himself just to do that. When he left, India was changed fundamentally but gently. Social system did not change, but women were out. Untouchability was not removed but dalits can publicly abuse Gandhi. Muslims in India are safe and growing in numbers; Hindu minorities in Pakistan are a different story though.

But that could not be the relevance of Gandhi today.

Roy was not a man of the masses, nor could he stoop to the level of average Indian. He was not fighting just the British Rule. He was fighting countless centuries of orthodoxy, ignorance, superstition and inertia. He was aiming not just at independence. He was aiming at freedom of the lay Indian. He wanted every Indian to be free politically, economically, socially, culturally and spiritually. He worked and wrote extensively to show how it can be done.

Gandhi’s relevance lies in the fact that he brought India to a stage from where it could proceed further.

Roy’s relevance lies in showing how and on what lines it could be done.

Our relevance lies in understanding this, appreciating this and implementing this.

If Roy’s model of economic development is properly implemented today, the 77% of Indians who live below 20 rupees a day level, will be able to breathe in comparative prosperity. This need not be done either by removing Capitalist industry, or by doing away with the state enterprises. This can be done in addition to the existing models. If NREGS can co-exist, so can this.

Roy’s model of political democracy, can check the alienation of the common man. It can apply a break on Maoism, Naxalism and insurgency.
Giants like Gandhi and Roy do not happen every day. If we, like them, rise above petty considerations and play our part, coming generations will be thankful to us.

—Vinod Jain
e-mail : irhayouthforum@gmail.com