India without Gandhi

On January 30th 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi, by a Hindu extremist opposed to his conciliatory policies towards the subcontinent’s Muslims and overtures of peace to Pakistan. We reproduce below an article from 1948, published shortly after his death.

BRITISH regard for Gandhi is something more than the respect given to a politician sincerely devoted to his principles and prepared to die for them. It is a recognition that in Gandhi’s “soul force” there was a moral and religious factor transcending the ordinary politics of nationalism or democracy. Even so, an Englishman’s appreciation of his life and character must fall short of the feeling which his Indian followers have for them. In India he belongs to the lineage of ascetic saints who have never ceased in the eyes of vast numbers of Hindus to represent the highest form of human life on earth; his title of the Mahatma makes him heir to a great company of religious teachers, mystics and devotees. In the murals at India House Gandhi and the Buddha are the two most prominent figures, and there seems nothing incongruous in their juxtaposition.

The close association of modern nationalist and democratic ideas, imported from the West, with unworldly religious values has been the most striking peculiarity of recent Indian political development. Gandhi has not been unique in displaying this union of aspirations which, elsewhere in the modern world, have tended to draw apart; before him such influential personalities as Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore manifested a similar outlook. But it was in Gandhi that this special ideology first became a real political force. Through him the new, reformed Hinduism began to colour the liberal nationalism which had grown up among the English-educated intelligentsia, while in the reverse direction the new political doctrine began to take hold of the masses, whose attitude was fundamentally conditioned by their religion and who would not respond to propaganda framed in merely secular terms. Through Gandhi’s inspiration the Congress Party was able to produce a huge, popular mass movement, arousing intense enthusiasm and reaching into the villages, where no political consciousness had hitherto existed.

There remained, nevertheless, serious ideological contradictions in the Congress leadership. The conflict between divergent conceptions of human life was not entirely resolved. There was a struggle, if not between the yogi and the commissar, at any rate between the yogi and the secularist. The self-conscious modernists, imbued with the gospel of democratic rights and material progress—spiritual children of John Stuart Mill or Professor Laski—were impatient of Gandhi’s goat, homespun, and prayer meetings, even though they knew that politically they could not do without him. Their primary objectives were industrialisation, the liquidation of illiteracy and superstition, and the mitigation of India’s material poverty and backwardness. They regarded Gandhi's glorification of the simple life as reactionary and as an obstacle to the spirit of vigorous, worldly, constructive purpose which they desired to promote. This attitude was, of course, specially characteristic of the Socialists and Communists to the left of Congress, but it existed strongly within the Congress Party itself.

There was, however, an even more important reason for secularism among Indian nationalists than the idea that religion was an obscurantist and distracting force—“opium for the people” in the Marxist phrase. There were in India two religions, not one, and emphasis on the religious factor, given the Indian historical background, was liable to make for a division of the “Indian nation”. “Communalism” was seen as the enemy of Indian nationalism, as a force of disintegration, even as a device of British imperialism invented to deprive the Indian people of its just rights. Hence the wishful argument, which used to be so characteristic of Congress speeches, that religion was not really important in India, that there was no serious communal problem, and that all cults and creeds would of course have complete freedom and equality within the new Indian secular state.

Gandhi also wanted a united India without discrimination between religious communities. He was able to reconcile this aim with his strong faith as a Hindu because of the comprehensive, tolerant and pacific quality of his religious ideal. But there were in Hinduism tendencies of a very different kind. Although non-violence has always been prescribed in India for monks and hermits—for those who have renounced the world—it has not hitherto been recommended for those concerned with worldly power. The most famous of Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad-Gita, is concerned with the conflict between Arjuna’s military duty and his desire to spare his own kinsmen arrayed against him; and it is Krishna himself who exhorts Arjuna to fight. In the eighteenth century, after centuries of Muslim ascendancy in India, the wars of the Mahrattas and Sikhs had much of the quality of crusades. Militant anti-Muslim Hinduism has revived with the political resurgence of India and has created for itself a special organisation, the Hindu Mahasabha. But it is not confined to the Mahasabha; it has a strong following within the Congress Party itself. This Hindu communalism is not regionally separatist like the Muslim League; it stands, like Congress secularism, for a single Indian nation, but a nation in which the Hindu majority will determine social and cultural questions. Since the Punjab massacres and the Kashmir fighting Hindu communalism claims to be the ally of Indian patriotism for repelling Pakistan aggression and restoring, by force if necessary, the unity of the Motherland.

The militant Hindu communalists have been able to join hands with many Indians who are without religious convictions, but regard the separation of Pakistan as intolerable. But they have been thwarted from within their own ranks by their own prophet and saint; it was he, the Mahatma himself, who became the arch-appeaser of Islam. Against him, therefore, as a traitor to the Hindu cause, the hand of the religious fanatic has been directed in the first place—though Gandhi is believed not to have been alone on the list of those destined for assassination. Gandhi’s solution for the problem of reuniting India—for he, like all Congress leaders, regarded partition as a disaster, even though an unavoidable one—was the practice by the Indian Government of a religious toleration and non-discrimination so scrupulous and fair, that most Muslims would soon lose fear and return to the fold of their own accord. This idea, springing from Gandhi’s belief in the fundamental unity of all religions and their function of promoting human brotherhood, was in line with the views of Mr Nehru, derived from the very different doctrine that religious belief is irrelevant in social and political life. Hence the genuine, though in some ways unnatural, alliance between the Indian Prime Minister and the Mahatma. Against them both on the issue of “appeasement” has stood the Congress “strong man”, the Home Minister, Sardar Patel, whose sympathies with militant Hindu communalism have been notorious.

The death of Gandhi has obviously not removed his influence; he has died a martyr, and the immediate effect of the murder was a violent revulsion of feeling against the Mahasabha. His preaching of humanity and toleration survives the burning of his body as the strongest single force making for peace in India today. Yet the man who said “I thought I ought to kill Gandhi, and I did it”, also represents a force to be reckoned with. If new issues arise between India and Pakistan, it will be easier in future for Indian opinion to be persuaded of the need for strong action (or the expediency of turning a blind eye to Hindu excesses against Moslems) when Gandhi is no longer there to turn men’s hearts by prayer and fasting. There is also a social pressure reinforcing communalism; for the growth of revolutionary social unrest in India, aggravated by present economic difficulties, tends to call forth a counter-revolutionary movement of the Right, for which the most obvious political course is to divert mass discontent into action against an unpopular minority.

There is nothing feigned in the sorrow manifested in this country about Gandhi’s death. Not a few British administrators must at some time have inwardly indulged sentiments about the Mahatma similar to those entertained by Henry II about Thomas à Becket; and it is still possible to question the soundness of Gandhi’s judgment in the past—for example, in his policy during the Japanese war. But in the last few months there has been universal appreciation not only of his greatness of character, but above all of his role as maker. It is not Britain, but another Power, which might have something to gain from warfare and chaos in India. Britain’s desire is to see peace in India and the healing of old wounds and all Britain's goodwill now goes to Mr Nehru in his arduous task of controlling the forces of communal chauvinism and of fostering understanding with Pakistan.