There appears to be in the current dispensation, a serious attempt to co-opt Mahatma Gandhi, shifting the focus to the more spiritual ‘Mahatma’ aspect of him and less on the more rooted and undeniably secular ‘Gandhiji’.
So while the Hindu Mahasabha bellows that his face should be removed from our currency, their more public-friendly face, the RSS, promptly drafts him into their Hindutva pantheon as a ‘great social reformer’ in the hope they can, on such frail premises of sand, cement their specious claims to have led India to freedom.
That was definitely not the case, and only needs a cursory glance at the writings of those of Gandhi’s contemporaries who also happened to be RSS ideologues to understand their reluctance in joining a freedom struggle that included Indians who just happened to be Muslim. They were, ironically, it must not be forgotten, the other side of the Muslims Only brigade – two states of intransigence that will keep this country constantly at war with itself.
Traditional stick brooms in hand, the Khaki soldiers launched their much-flaunted Swachata Abhiyan on Gandhi Jayanti. Our prime minister no less, inaugurated a ‘Dandi Kutir’ in January, where Gandhi, magically was made to visit an RSS camp in Wardha along with Ghanshyamdas Birla. Gandhi, we are told, was so impressed by its functioning he wanted to meet Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS.
As Ram Punyani, my old friend and Mumbai-based crusader against communalism posted recently, it was Gandhi, who in the Harijan on 9th August 1942, noted: “I have heard of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its activities; and also know that it is a communal organization”. As Ram notes, Gandhi was referring to the drill of RSS volunteers shouting that India belongs to the Hindus and that once the British left, they would fix the others. “I hear many things about RSS”, Gandhi was to write. “I have heard it said the Sangh is at the root of all this mischief.”
Ram also emphasizes that it was Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal who narrated an event that took place after the 1946 riots. Pyarelal writes: “A member of Gandhi’s entourage had praised the efficiency, discipline, courage and capacity for hard work shown by RSS cadres at Wagah, a major transit camp for Punjabi refugees. Gandhi quipped back, ‘but don’t forget, even so had Hitler’s Nazis and Fascists under Mussolini’. Gandhi characterized the RSS as a communal body with a totalitarian outlook”
Those are words of someone who may have known him better than most. You need them sharper than that?
And yet, as if at this dispensations astrological advisers, this year’s ‘Pravasi Bharatiya Divas’ coincided with the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India for good. The government’s advertising agencies were quick to fit such a coincidence into their conical worldview.
In an article timed as part of the campaign to consolidate NRIs’ support to the current dispensation and targeting largely traditionalist and conservative Hindus in South Africa, Sudheendra Kulkarni, author of a book imagining Gandhi in the age of the internet writing in the Indian Express (http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/thank-you-south-africa/), puts forward a much more sophisticated argument.
In a long article that conflates history and carefully selects its facts, Kulkarni first make him morph into the ‘Mahatma’, then gives some reasons to show how Africa changed him, and lastly, and more importantly, his ‘conversion’ to ‘Hindu’.
But let’s stick with his essential argument first, vacuous though it may be:
There is first the blare of trumpet. He offers us Jung’s term ‘Synchronicity’ to explain the “pre-determined purpose or meaning” that impelled chance coincidence – for Gandhi’s sojourn in South Africa in fact (another blare of trumpet here) to be “an event of destiny-driven super-synchronicity (in this dispensations parlance DDSS)”.
Out of nowhere then to bestow sainthood on Gandhi comes Kulkarni informs us, one Pranjivan Mehta, one of Gandhi’s benefactors and supporters. Regardless of the fact that the old man had hundreds (if not thousands) of supporters who wrote to him and to whom he probably replied, Kulkarni hones in on one that Mehta wrote in 1909, saying:
“During my last trip to Europe I saw a great deal of Mr Gandhi. From year to year (I have known him intimately for over 20 years.) I have found him getting… more and more selfless. He is now leading almost an ascetic sort of life — not the life of an ordinary ascetic that we usually see but that of a great Mahatma and the one idea that engrosses his mind is his motherland.”
To keep South African NRIs in the frame, Kulkarni that “it was in South Africa that (Gandhi) understood, and first articulated, the idea of India and also the true meaning of India’s freedom”.
Then comes the strategy (no blare of trumpet this time, but the steady clink of a cymbal): “After overcoming a spiritual crisis in his life,” Kulkarni writes, “he became deeply Hindu, while simultaneously becoming deeply secular, gaining profound understanding of and unshakeable respect for all the world’s religions”.
Kulkarni strings together all the school book facts to make Gandhi more real to the South African NRI – that “he devoured the noblest thoughts from foreign minds — Socrates, Plato, Ruskin, Tolstoy, Wallace, Thoreau, Carlyle, Emerson and many others. He credits Gandhi with undertaking a “fascinating journey on the path of internationalism, which, in later decades, gained breadth unmatched by any other contemporary world leader”.
One understands if he leaves matters there, at the level of a haphazard attempt to co-opt a national icon who struggled – as we all must – to understand the meaning of secularism. But no, Kulkarni must toe the ‘party line’...
“His ethics-based understanding and practice of faith was very different from the bigotry being spread by divisive forces today in the name of their respective religions”.
Now if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is.
(Hartman de Souza is a third generation African of Indian origin who has been living and working in India since 1967. His book 'Eating Dust - Mining and Greed in Goa' will be published by Harper Collins)