Evaluating Gandhi’s complex legacy

A hundred and fifty-two years after his birth, Gandhi still remains the ubiquitous icon whose face adorns currency notes,  the walls of government offices, and the posters of government schemes.

Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth is what Einstein said about Gandhi.

When glowing epithets such as these are conferred upon an individual, he becomes a projection of the perceptions and myths. It becomes impossible to differentiate fact from myth, hence fair analysis is often unachievable.

Gandhi is known today as the prophet of non-violence and for leading an ascetic life wearing merely a loincloth. He continues to be the leading champion for altruism, humility, and truth.

The questions remain how did this journey begin, what were his reasons, and did he always remain true to his principles?

He was born in Porbandar, his father was the chief minister of that province. He lead a fairly privileged life. At the age of 19 went to London to study law. There he lived ostentatiously, wearing the finest suits and even flaunted a watch-chain of gold. He eventually proceed to live a much simpler life upon reading the works of philosophers and religious scholars.

When he returned to India upon completing his education he set up a practice in Bombay but failed. Subsequently, he set up another practice in Rajkot, where he was offered to a case based in South Africa.

South Africa presented the first occasion in life he experienced discrimination. A judge ordered him to remove his turban in court. He was thrown out of first-class compartment of a train because those luxuries were not afforded to people of colour. He was compelled to sit with the coachman in a horse-driven carriage, while the white conductor passengers sat inside.

The reason it caused great shock within him is that he was accustomed to being treated with dignity.

He was in his mid-twenties yet he was shielded from any major incident of discrimination, despite living in a country that was ruled by a foreign power who regularly brutalized their subjects.

It is the stark contrast between the privileged and protected life in India and the humiliation in South Africa that caused deep anguish

Gandhi then learned of the institutionalized racism in South Africa. In certain provinces, Indians were prevented from owning property and voting.  They regularly had to submit their fingerprints and register with the government.

Had Gandhi belonged to a marginalized and impoverished community like 150,000 Indians were in South Africa as indentured labourers, he probably would have swallowed his pride and focused on earning his living instead.

But the indignation was obviously not the only factor that earned him success as an activist.

Different people react differently to discrimination. Some individuals take it in their strides while others move to a more tolerant place to live.

A rare kind among the affronted chose to react in the form of protests. Among those who organize protests, few find sustained supporters. Often sustained movements fail to bring about any change. But the rarest among the rare kind not only organize sustained protests but also manage to bring about real change.

His first few speeches to the Indian community in South Africa were spectacular fiascos. But he quickly learned the art of people management, symbolism, and rabble-rousing by using emotions to get the public charged. He made it personal as he cited specific instances of potential insults to specific communities after the South African government has passed more discriminatory laws.

Gandhi also developed his philosophy of passive resistance. He innovated peaceful measures of expressing dissent such as demonstrations, boycotts, marches, and sit-ins.

He also knew if the protests were to be restricted to just South Africa, it would probably be ruthlessly crushed. Hence he took aid from the liberal international media, liberal groups, and progressive religious leaders to spread his message against discrimination.

The astute media management where he promoted both himself and the movement was perhaps the primary reason his movements received success during his 22 years in South Africa.

However, when Gandhi landed back in India after his triumph in South Africa, he was unclear about participating in the freedom struggle.

It was Dr. Gopal Krishna Gokhale who saw Gandhi’s methods of passive resistance as the way toward total freedom for India. He urged Gandhi to participate in the movement and to travel the length and breadth of India to comprehend the ground realities.

When Gandhi interacted with the leadership of the freedom movement he realised that almost all of them, despite their Indian roots, were privileged and affluent, with almost no connection whatsoever to the ground. In their hands, the freedom struggle would probably have been negotiation and an eventual deal between the elites of India and Britain. He realized that for millions of poor toiling relentlessly there probably would be no difference.

When Gandhi led the civil disobedience movement to protest against the injustice meted out to tenant farmers in Champaran district of Bihar. Unlike other leaders in the freedom struggle, he abandoned all privileges and luxuries and lived among the peasantry.

During the course of his work, Gandhi collected testimonies of over 8,000 farmers and petitioned the British government. This resulted in an agreement granting farmers better compensation and control over farming. The root cause of the success was Gandhi had transformed the freedom struggle into a mass grassroots movement. This display of strength was unique and not a fist was raised or a gun fired.

Next was Non-Cooperation campaign of 1920–22 where Gandhi lead a mass boycott of British goods, government educational institutions, the courts, government service, elections. He eventually urged supporters to give up positions in the British government and refuse to pay taxes.

In 1930, Gandhi launched the civil disobedience movement that began with the famous Salt March. This movement weakened British authority and united India’s masses in a movement for independence under Gandhi. The British authorities jailed over 60,000 people for non-payment of the colonial salt tax.

In 1942, Gandhi launched the Quit India movement with the clarion call, “Do or Die”. This mass protest that demanded total freedom for India was followed by arrests of prominent members of the Indian National Congress and 100,000 activists.

These movements had a lot in common. First, they first had a catch but terse name and slogan that resonated with all the people on the ground. Gandhi always found a way to meaningfully involve regular people in his movement. He knew that large masses of people always had an impact and even would instill fear in the minds of the British.

Gandhi made sure to involve the liberal international media to cover this. This was the beginning of the deification of Gandhi as his image was assiduously built with favorable articles and photos of him leading hordes of people. He had thus positioned himself as the face of India’s freedom struggle. 

Despite the general perception, Gandhi’s actions weren’t always rational and empathetic.

He withdrew from the Non-Cooperation after the Chaurichaura incident where activists set fire to a police station causing the death of 22 police personnel. In his mind, this was a violation of the principle of nonviolence that he advocated.

Despite being the champion of compassion, it didn’t occur to him withdrawal was gravely unfair toward regular people who made supreme sacrifices by giving up their jobs, education, and immolating British good.

This suspension of the movement was deeply resented by many in the Congress party. Subhas Chandra Bose wrote: “To sound the order of retreat just when public enthusiasm was reaching the boiling point was nothing short of a calamity.”

Once he comprehended his sway over the masses, he used fasting as a means of getting his way. These fasts were often brought about positive changes on the ground.  During partition riots, his fasting resulted in a quelling of anger as politicians and leaders of communal bodies agreed to a joint plan for the restoration of normal life in the city. He also took several other fasts for Hindu-Muslim unity and for the upliftment of oppressed communities.

But there was a level of caprice in applying this method. He was also astute to know when to fast, i.e. which audience would bend to his emotional blackmail.

For instance, while he vehemently opposed the partition but held no fast to oppose the partition, perhaps he knew it would have actually been fast to death.

Despite his claims against non-violence, he supported and recruited for British war efforts during the earlier part of his life, such as the Zulu war and the Second Boer War both of which were unjust wars that just served the British interests. Gandhi advocated that Indians fight on the British side during World War I.  

He was often impracticable in his approach as he wrote two letters to Hitler the first appealing him to show restraint in favour of peace prior to World War 2 and the second chiding him for entering into war.

Gandhi preached the need to rise about the desire for carnal pleasures After Kasturba passed away, Gandhi began highly questionable ‘experiments’ where shared his bed with naked women including his own grandniece to verify if he had achieved brahmacharya. But it didn’t care about the humiliation the women must have felt when they were compelled to participate in these ‘experiments’.

He was also perhaps the first mass leader to use religion as a means to mobilize the masses during various movements of civil disobedience. By today’s liberal standards, he probably would have been branded ‘communal’.  It could be argued that the fervor for independence was alone enough and there was no real need to bring religion into the mix.

He said “The title of Mahatma has deeply pained me and there is not a moment I can recall when it may be said to have tickled me.” He maintained he had become “literally sick of the adoration of the unthinking multitude.” However, he took no measures to prevent it enter common parlance. Considering the immense hold he had over his supporters, he could have brought a stop to this deification.

“Plain living and high thinking” was Gandhi’s motto for life and largely practicing what he preached. He consented to serve his jail sentence in grand Aga Khan palace following the quit India movement. He could have rejected it in favor of the jail that regular freedom fighters were sent to.

If Gandhi is almost canonized today, it is because he was very media savvy and he allowed his personality to be built by the media and by word of mouth.

He claimed to abhor European doctors and called Hospitals he once described as “institutions of sin” because they enabled people to live intemperate lives and then be cured of the consequences.  He prevented doctors from administering penicillin on an ailing Kasturba because he felt that antibiotics were ‘unnatural’. However, he willing took quinine when he suffered from malaria and consented to his appendicitis operation in 1923-24 conducted by an English surgeon.

Gandhi believed that the mission of the Indian National Congress was to liberate India from foreign rule; once that goal was accomplished, he wanted the INC to be dissolved. He proposed that leaders who wanted to serve the public should form their own political parties and contest elections. Indeed, this would have been democracy in the real sense.

Nehru and others in the INC knew that they could ride the wave of goodwill earned by the party during the freedom struggle. Any challengers to the INC could implicitly or explicitly be branded as a traitor for challenging the ideas of free India’s ‘founding fathers’.

Gandhi, despite his influence in the party, didn’t vehemently insist on the dissolution of the INC, he instead allowed Nehru and the rest to do as they pleased.

Congress party documents show that despite Gandhi’s preference for Nehru during for party president 12 of 15 state committees preferred for Patel. Instead of accepting the mandate of the committees, Gandhi urged Patel to withdraw. Rajendra Prasad later lamented that Gandhiji “had once again sacrificed his trusted lieutenant for the sake of the “glamorous Nehru” and further feared that “Nehru would follow the British ways”.

Gandhi’s legacy is therefore complex, replete with shades of greys and often a lot of contradictions.

He was an astute politician who knew how to conceive, plan and execute mass movements. However, it was his human empathy that raised him above the common place of the typical leader or activist. He was among the few who were willing to reject a comfortable life and live among the poor.

Every demonstration, boycotts, marches, and sit-ins that occur today owe a debt to Gandhi who pioneered this passive resistance as a means of fighting injustice.

However, his unreasonable idealism and quest for purity often functioned as impediments to the freedom movement. It could be argued that without Gandhi perhaps our freedom from British rule could have been achieved earlier, however, it probably would have been bloody and violent. India would have had the moral upper hand that we have today.

While he claimed to be a fervent proponent of democracy, he didn’t always follow the principles of democracy. He was almost authoritarian in his views and often used fasting as a means to get his way. On certain occasions and rather displayed an absolute lack of human understanding.

What is beyond any doubt is his integrity, honesty, and uprightness. In his autobiography willingly shared his numerous dual standards, failings, and shortcomings. We know of his inadequacies is only because he placed them on record without hesitation. Such honesty is non-existent in any contemporary or historic public figure.

It is unsparing honesty and objective self-analysis that we must all aspire to follow.