Gandhi,
Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869-1948), Indian thinker,
statesman, and nationalist leader who led India
out of the British Empire. Gandhi, also known
as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar, in the modern state of Gujarat, on October 2, 1869, into a political Hindu
family, both his father and grandfather having been prime ministers to the
rulers of two adjacent and tiny princely states. After a mediocre career at
school, he went to London
in 1888 to train as a lawyer, leaving behind his young and illiterate wife,
whom he had married when she was barely in her teens. Gandhi qualified as a
barrister three years later and returned to India.
After an undistinguished performance in a legal practice
in India, Gandhi left for South Africa in
1893 to serve as legal adviser to an Indian firm. The 21 years that he spent
there marked a turning point in his life. The racial indignities to which he
and his countrymen were subjected there turned the hitherto shy and diffident
lawyer into a courageous political activist. Realizing that violence was evil
and rational persuasion often unavailing, he developed a new method of
non-violent resistance, which he called satyagraha and which he used
with some success to secure racial justice for his people. Gandhi also
reflected deeply on his own religion, interacted with Jewish and Christian
friends, and evolved a distinct view of life based on what he found valuable in
his own and other religions. He commanded a Red Cross unit in the South African
Wars, and organized a commune near Durban
based on the ideas of Leo Tolstoy.
Gandhi finally returned to India in 1915, after the government
of the Union of South Africa had made important concessions to his demands,
including recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for
them. After travelling all over India
to familiarize himself with the country of which he had only a limited
understanding, he plunged into politics, and soon became the unquestioned
leader of the Indian nationalist movement. Almost single-handedly he
transformed the middle- and upper-class Indian National Congress into a
powerful national organization, bringing in large sections of such hitherto
excluded groups as women, traders, merchants, the upper and middle peasantry,
and youth, and giving it a truly national basis. Following the Amritsar
Massacre in 1919, Gandhi led a nationwide campaign of passive non-cooperation
with the government of British India,
including the boycott of British goods. He was first imprisoned by the British
in 1922 for two years.
III
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DEVELOPMENT OF GANDHI’S THOUGHT AND PRACTICE
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Convinced that independence had no meaning without a
radical moral and social transformation, Gandhi launched a comprehensive
programme of national regeneration. This involved fighting prejudices against
manual labour, overcoming the urban-rural divide, developing love of indigenous
languages, and eradicating the caste-based discriminatory practice of
Untouchability. Gandhi also fostered among his countrymen national self-respect
and confidence in their ability to overthrow British rule. He gave Hinduism an
activist and social orientation, generously borrowed from other religious and
cultural traditions, and became an inspiring example of a genuine inter-faith
and inter-civilizational dialogue. He perfected the method of satyagraha
that he had discovered in South
Africa, added new forms of action to its
repertoire, and developed what he called the “new science of non-violence”
involving moral conversion of the opponent by a delicate “surgery of the soul”.
His actions inspired the great poet Rabindranath Tagore to call him Mahatma
(Sanskrit, “great soul”).
While fighting simultaneously on the social, economic,
religious, and political fronts, Gandhi carried on an even fiercer battle at
the personal level. Determined to become as perfect as any human being could
be, he set about mastering all his senses and desires. From 1901 onward he
embarked on daring experiments in sexual self-control. Rejecting the “cowardly”
celibacy of traditional religions, he lived among and later slept naked with
some of his women associates, both to probe the outermost limits of sexuality
and to show that it was possible to attain “absolute” and child-like innocence.
His moral courage, candour, and experimental vitality have few if any parallels
in history.
Gandhi’s moral and political thought was based on a
relatively simple metaphysic. For him the universe was regulated by a Supreme
Intelligence or Principle, which he preferred to call satya (Truth) and,
as a concession to convention, God. It was embodied in all living things, above
all in human beings, in the form of self-conscious soul or spirit. Since all
human beings partook of the divine essence, they were “ultimately one”. They
were not merely equal but “identical”. As such, love was the only proper form
of relation between them; it was “the law of our being”, of “our species”.
Positively, love implied care and concern for others and total dedication to
the cause of “wiping away every tear from every eye”. Negatively, it implied ahimsa,
or “non-violence”. Gandhi’s entire social and political thought, including his
theory of satyagraha, was an attempt to work out the implications of the
principle of love in all areas of life.
For Gandhi, the state “represented violence in a
concentrated form”. It spoke in the language of compulsion and uniformity,
sapped its subjects’ spirit of initiative and self-help, and “unmanned” them.
Since human beings were not fully developed and capable of acting in a socially
responsible manner, the state was necessary. However, if it was not to hinder
their growth, it had to be so organized that it used as little coercion as possible
and left as large an area of human life as possible to voluntary efforts.
As Gandhi imagined it, a truly non-violent society
was federally constituted and composed of small, self-governing, and relatively
self-sufficient village communities relying largely on moral and social
pressure. The police were basically social workers, enjoying the confidence and
support of the local community and relying on moral persuasion and public
opinion to enforce the law. Crime was treated as a disease, requiring not
punishment but understanding and help. The standing army was not necessary
either, for a determined people could be relied upon to mount non-violent
resistance against an invader.
Since the majority rule violated the moral
integrity of the minority and “savoured of violence”, and since unanimity was
often impossible, all decisions in a non-violent society were based on
consensus, arrived at by rational discussion in which each strove to look at
the subject in question from the standpoint of others. For Gandhi, rational
discussion was not just an exchange of arguments but a process of deepening and
expanding the consciousness of the participants. When it was conducted in a
proper spirit, those involved reconstituted each other’s being and were reborn
as a result of the encounter. In extreme cases, when no consensus was possible,
the majority decided the matter, not because it was more likely to be right but
for administrative and pragmatic reasons. If a citizen felt morally troubled by
a majority decision, that person was entitled to claim exemption from and even
to disobey it. Civil disobedience was a “moral” right. To surrender it was to
forfeit one’s “self-respect” and integrity.
A non-violent society was committed to sarvodaya,
the growth or uplift of all its citizens. Private property denied the
“identity” or “oneness” of all men, and was immoral. In Gandhi’s view it was a
“sin against humanity” to possess superfluous wealth when others could not even
meet their basic needs. Since the institution of private property already
existed, and men were attached to it, he suggested that the rich should take
only what they needed and hold the rest in trust for the community.
Increasingly he came to appreciate that the idea of trusteeship was too
important to be left to the precarious goodwill of the rich, and suggested that
it could be enforced by organized social pressure and even by law. Gandhi
advocated heavy taxes, limited rights of inheritance, state ownership of land
and heavy industry, and nationalization without compensation as a way of
creating a just and equal society.
IV
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LEADERSHIP TO INDEPENDENCE
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In 1930 he proclaimed a new campaign of civil
disobedience, calling upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes,
particularly the tax on salt. The campaign involved a march to the sea, in
which thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmadabad
to the Arabian Sea, where they made salt by
evaporating sea water. This highly symbolic and defiant gesture proved very
effective. Once more the Indian leader was arrested, but he was released in
1931, halting the campaign after the British made concessions to his demands.
In the same year Gandhi represented the Indian National Congress at a
conference in London.
In 1932, Gandhi began new civil disobedience
campaigns against the British. Two years later he formally resigned from
politics, being replaced as leader of the Congress Party by Jawaharlal Nehru,
and travelled through India,
teaching and promoting social reform.
A few years later, in 1939, Gandhi again
returned to active political life, attacking colonial policy over the
federation of Indian principalities with the rest of India. When World War II broke out,
the Congress Party and Gandhi decided not to support Britain
unless India
was granted complete and immediate independence. Even when Japan entered
the war, Gandhi refused to agree to Indian participation. He was interned in
1942, but was released two years later because of failing health.
By 1944 the British government had agreed to
independence, on condition that the Congress Party and the Muslim League
resolve their differences. Despite Gandhi’s resistance to the principle of
partition, India and Pakistan became separate states when the British
granted India
its independence in 1947. Bloody sectarian violence ensued.
Though Gandhi was born a bania, there was a
powerful and endearing streak of the gambler and the outlaw in him. When Hindus
and Muslims were engaged in fierce intercommunal strife in 1946 and 1947, he
moved among them alone and unprotected, dared them to do their worst, and by
sheer force of personality consoled the inconsolable, dissolved hatred, and
restored a climate of humanity. When a bomb was dropped at one of his prayer
meetings a few weeks later, he chided his frightened audience for being scared
of a “mere bomb”. Through fasts, he quelled violence in Calcutta
and New Delhi.
When the government of independent India
decided, with popular support, to renege on its promise to transfer to Pakistan its
share of assets, he took on the entire country, and successfully fasted to
awaken its sense of honour and moral obligation. This deeply angered a section
of Hindu nationalists, one of whom, after respectfully bowing to him, shot him
dead at a prayer meeting on January 30, 1948.
Gandhi’s intellectual influence on his countrymen was
considerable. Some were attracted by his emphasis on political and economic
decentralization; others by his insistence on individual freedom, moral
integrity, the unity of means and ends, and social service; still others by his
satyagraha and political activism. For some students of India, Gandhi’s
influence is responsible for its failure to throw up any genuinely radical
political movement. For others it cultivated a spirit of non-violence,
encouraged the habits of collective self-help, and helped lay the foundations
of a stable, morally committed, and democratic government. Gandhi’s ideas have
also had a profound influence outside India, where they inspired
non-violent activism and movements in favour of small-scale, self-sufficient
communities living closer to nature and with greater sensitivity to their
environment.