Dancing with Dogs: Gandhi (updated again)

Gandhi (updated again)

I was talking to a friend this afternoon and she had mentioned reading Godse’s diaries, so I was vurious and tried to Google up to see if I could find any online. All I found was this website Nathuram Godse and Gandhism. It does contain some interesting information from Godse’s perspective (this is blasphemy for most Indian - we are brought up to think of Gandhi as a saint). Reading Godse’s thoughts and googling up information on some of the incidents mentioned has been informative to say the least.

How many of us really talk of NoaKhali and the Calcutta massacres? Can we really bring about healing of such deep wounds by simply repressing them? How do we solve the current communal crises whose root causes spread so deep into our history?

We call a warmongering person who lets others die for his principles evil - what about Gandhi? Wasn’t he on the other extreme of the spectrum where he let hundreds and thousands of innocent Hindus in India die and refused to sympathize just because of his principles? Again, this doesn’t mean I am saying Gandhi is responsible for all the bloodshed, but I am wondering if his response would have infuriated me if I were alive in those days. Can stubborn refusal to fight be as dangerous to a charismatic leader’s followers as the stubborn refusal to make peace? Discuss and debate…

I found this extract of Godse’s defense testimony in court very interesting -

…Gandhi had done very good in South Africa to uphold the rights and well-being of the Indian community there. But when he finally returned to India he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the Judge of everyone and every thing; he was the master brain guiding the civil disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, it might bring untold disaster and political reverses but that could make no difference to the Mahatma’s infallibility. ‘A Satyagrahi can never fail’ was his formula for declaring his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is.

Thus, the Mahatma became the judge and jury in his own cause. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought that his politics were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, disaster after disaster.

Again, I am not saying any of this true or false, but just food for thought. It is one heck of a defense he presented to the court considering he didn’t want any mercy -

I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone else should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism levelled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in future.

Last update: For some weird reason, all this reminds me of the movie, “Hey Ram”. I don’t think I can bear to watch it again - I was simply devastated by the violence in Calcutta depicted in the movie. It left me extremely shaken.

Another update: Here is a link from uspeed in the comments that has another interesting perspective on Godse - that of the judges who reviewed his case.

update: I know I cannot leave this thing alone - from uspeed’s link -

Quote from the book The Tragic Story of Partition ” Bhajans were also not spared. The soul elevating chanting of �Raghupati Raja Rama patita pavana Sita Rama was intoned on the lips of millions of our countrymen for the last several centuries. A new line ‘Ishwar Allah tere nam, sab so sanmati de Bhagavan’ was added to the original”.

I was completely unaware of this.

Posted by shanti at February 3, 2005 3:15 PM

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In a sense Godse sealed the Gandhi myth by killing Gandhi near his finest hour, because the world never had a chance to see whether the rural, idealistic vision Gandhi proposed actually worked when you were running a country as against running an opposition movement. Which is why this piece was very interesting: …But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan.

Aside: it’s interesting that Godse used the word ‘irrational’ to describe Gandhi. An rational man would probably never have faced the British empire the way he did. (Cue to Shaw’s piece about all progress depending on unreasonable men.)

Tan: you should hear some of the stories certain people (especially older people) tell about Gandhi in Bengal, especially about his shenanigans about Netaji. That Gandhi is uniformly revered as a saint is the official line and is a huge simplification.

Shanti, here is how the jump happened.

1. Amit asks - why did G walk with his arms round the shoulders of two women and not those of men.

2. Methinks (just like you did Shanti) - Oh, Amit is darkly hinting at ‘weird sexual experimentation theories in relation to Gandhi’ (which you mention in your comment). Why do I think that? Because like you, I’ve also come across this allegation many a time during discussions concerning G’s greatness/lack of it.

3. Me also thinks - if we are discussing sexual behaviour here (from 2 above), and Amit is suggesting that men should have been used instead of women, then maybe we are discussing sexual orientation.

4. Presto! Me posts a question to clarify the doubt I have in 3 above.

But I stand corrected now, since Amit was apparently just referring to a lack of judgement on Gandhi’s part in using the wrong tools (well, technically we can call them that in this context I suppose) for the purpose at hand. He probably is uncomfortable that a man who lacked proper judgement in this simple task could have held the destiny of a country in his hands :-)

Amit, I personally don’t think Gandhi himself was too heavy - in fact, frail would be a good adjective to describe him physically I think. In spite of that, I agree that you have a valid point. About what you didn’t get in my comment - I was saying, based on a hunch, that if he had used two men instead, then there would still have been wierd stories floating around - involving them and G :-)

I admire Gandhi as a person, but I am agreement with the people here who say that he wasn’t the sole reason that India became independent. You got to look at the time period, after WWII, England was spent economically and militarily, that’s why they couldn’t withstand a little revolt in Greece and had to give it up. Now if they were in a position that they had to give up a small country has Greece, how could they have managed such a big country as India? If you look at this way, it would seem as Gandhi hindered the independence movement, because if there was a little bit of violence against the British, they would have given up much more earlier. It’s up to you to decide, but account for the history also..

With this side, you got to look at Gandhi’s ideology of “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. Now I don’t support violence, but at the same time I am practical and realize that non-violence just doesn’t come like that and there will always be people who take advantage of nonviolent people. Back to Gandhi’s ideology again, basically he is saying that if someone blinds you, you shouldn’t blind the other man. Do you realize what this means? This means that the other man might just keep on blinding others also, if you let him blind once. So you are actually invoking more violence. Now say if he blinds you and you blind him, that’s the end of the story, he is not going to blind anyone else.

I would love comments on my previous statements..

February 3, 2005

Gandhi (updated again)

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