Which war did Mohandas Gandhi support? All of them. There wasn’t a war that the “prophet of non-violence” Gandhi did not support. He was Sergeant Major and won a British medal for war duties. “All Jews should commit mass suicide!” (Gandhi’s Final solution 1940)
Sergeant Major (Retd.) Mohandas K. Gandhi who served in the British Army and won a medal of war for his participation in the Boer War on the side of the British.
There wasn’t a war which Gandhi did not support. He supported all the wars in his time. The prophet of peace Gandhi’s support for the British in the Boer War, the Zulu War, WW1 and WW2—this support extended South African Apartheid, and British colonialism.
Gandhi felt it was his duty to support the British during the Boer War; so he organized and led an Indian Corps to nurse When three hundred free Indians and eight hundred indentured servants volunteered, the whites were impressed. Gandhi was given a medal for his service in the Boer War. Gandhi also supported the British in their war with the Zulus.
Gandhi’s attitude towards the Africans was racist. In South Africa he never did anything for the blacks. In fact he wanted to create a stratified society with Whites at the top and the Africans at the bottom.
Gandhi wanted to be “Recruiter-in-Chief” for the Viceroy. In the spring of 1918 Gandhi was persuaded by the British to help raise soldiers for a final victory effort in the war. In 1917-18, Gandhi began tramping about India, recruiting men for the British Army.
Charlie Andrews criticized Gandhi for recruiting Indians to fight for the British. Gandhi was still loyal to Britain and to the ideals of the British Constitution, with which he later declared to have “fallen in love.
It was World War II that finally brought the itinerant politician back into public life. After war broke out in September 1939, the British immediately brought India into the conflict without consulting the nationalist leadership. Even as howls of outrage rose from the Congress and the Muslim League, Gandhi was invited to see the Viceroy, now Lord Linlithgow. Having never lost his deep respect for Britain Gandhi pledged his personal support to Britain and the allies. Gandhi, unhappy at taking advantage of Britain’s weakness.
Based on a telegram from Reuters, The Times, on September 27, 1947, under the headline “Mr. Gandhi on ‘war’ with Pakistan” reported:
“Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. … (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Spetember 27th, 1947)
He told the Sikhs “don’t let your swords rust”. He wanted India to attack Kashmir.
In his 1949 “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell, regarding the late war, wrote that “one question every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’” Orwell recorded Gandhi’s answer, which was:German Jews should commit collective suicide.
GANDHI ON NON-VIOLENCE
- During a prayer speech: “If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it againstthe British.” – June 16, 1947 (Reference: Gandhi’s “The Last Phase”, Vol II, p. 326)
To the British during WWII: ” You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man.”(Reference: G.D. Birla’s “In the Shadow of the Mahatma”, p. 276)
Gandhi’s limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children’s schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer. Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments of sleeping and bathing naked together, without touching, all apparently to strengthen his chastity. (Whether these experiments were always successful is anyone’s guess.) It is also revealed that Gandhi began a romantic liaison with Saraladevi Chaudhurani, niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore—a disclosure that has created a buzz in the Indian press. The author tells us that Gandhi, perhaps disingenuously, called it a “spiritual marriage,” a “partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609478,00.html
GANDHI ON BLACKS AND RACE RELATIONS
- • “A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if
at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to
believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to
the position of a raw Kaffir.” (Reference: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG), Vol I, p. 150) - • Regarding forcible registration with the state of blacks: “One can understand the
necessity for registration of Kaffirs who will not work.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, p. 105) - • “Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian Location should be chosen for
dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town passes my comprehension…the Town
Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, pp. 244-245) - • His description of black inmates: “Only a degree removed from the animal.” Also,
“Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized – the convicts even more so. They are troublesome,
very dirty and live almost like animals.” – Mar. 7, 1908 (Reference: CWMG, Vol VIII, pp. 135-136)
The Durban Post Office
One of Gandhi’s major “achievements” in South Africa was to promote racial segregation by refusing to share a post office door with the black natives.
Sergeant Major Gandhi
Learn how Gandhi became a Sgt. Major in the British Army and eagerly participated in the 1906 British war against the black Zulus.
Gandhi and South African Blacks
Gandhi wrote extensively about his experiences with the blacks of South Africa. He always termed them “Kaffirs” and his writings reveal a deep-seated disdain for these African natives.
The Nobel Prize rejected the Gandhi nomination because of this war mongering. Why Mohandas Gandhi didn’t win the Nobel Peace prize?
- In his report, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own doubts as to whether Gandhi’s ideals were meant to be universal or primarily Indian: “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse.“
- Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. …(Mohandas K. Gandhi, September 27th, 1947)
- sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (…) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator. Professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi
- he Nobel Committee adviser referred to … critics in maintaining that he was not consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. This was something that had happened during the first Non-Cooperation Campaign in 1920-1921, e.g. when a crowd in Chauri Chaura, the United Provinces, attacked a police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police station.
Appendix A
Gandhi felt it was his duty to support the British during the Boer War; so he organized and led an Indian Ambulance Corps to nurse the wounded on the battlefield. Even this effort was somewhat delayed by race prejudice; but when three hundred free Indians and eight hundred indentured servants volunteered, the whites were impressed. Gandhi was given a medal for his service in the Boer War. In 1902 he traveled in India, and with Gokhale’s support his resolution for the Indians in South Africa was passed by the Indian Congress in Calcutta.
In the spring of 1918 Gandhi was persuaded by the British to help raise soldiers for a final victory effort in the war. Charlie Andrews criticized Gandhi for recruiting Indians to fight for the British.
Aided by a donation of 1500 pounds and the 1,100-acre farm bought and built by architect Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi named this ashram Tolstoy Farm. He exchanged a few letters with the great Russian novelist before he died and continued to write and edit the journal Indian Opinion in order to elucidate the principles and practice of satyagraha
discrimination against “coolies” (as Indians were disparagingly termed) was an entrenched part of South African life-especially in the Boer-ruled regions, where Gandhi and his friends could exercise little influence. In Natal, Indians were not allowed to go out after nine p.m. without a pass; in the Orange Free State, they could not own property, run businesses, or manage farms; in the Transvaal, they could not own land, and were forced to live in the worst urban slums. Even in the Cape Colony, British-ruled for decades, Indians were often forbidden to walk on the sidewalk, and could be kicked off-quite literally, often-by passing whites.
On the political front, a last-minute petition drive failed to stop the passage of the Indian Franchise Bill; however, Gandhi remained undeterred. He proceeded to organize a still larger petition, which was sent to London, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and distributed to the press in Britain, South Africa, and India. It caused a considerable stir, and prompted both the Times of London and the Times of India to write editorials in support of the Indian right to the vote. Meanwhile, Gandhi set about establishing a political organization for the Natalese Indians, which came to be called the Natal Indian Congress (a clear reference to the Indian National Congress, at that point a relatively tame body). Gandhi faced difficulties in financing the Congress, but the body soon possessed a library and a debating society, held regular (and lively) meetings, and published two major pamphlets. They were entitled An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa, and The Indian Franchise-An Appeal, and offered a cogent, detailed case for putting an end to discrimination in South Africa.
India and World War I
The First World War began with the murder of an Austrian Archduke by a Serbian assassin in June of 1914, and soon mushroomed into a conflict that gripped Europeanpe and the world in four years of strategic stalemate and unparalleled butchery. When war was declared in August, Gandhi was in England, where he immediately began organizing a medical corps similar to the force he had led in the Boer War. But ill health soon forced his return to India, where he received a wildly enthusiastic welcome. In his absence, his fame as the politician-saint of South Africa and the founder of satyagraha had spread throughout India, and now cheering crowds cried “Mahatmaji” (“ji” being a suffix connoting affection) wherever he appeared. “Mahatma” meant “Great Soul,” an appellation applied to the holiest men of Hinduism, and was first conferred upon Gandhi by the great Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. Gandhi, of course, insisted that all souls were equal, and found bothersome the religious adulation lavished upon him, even as it gave him great practical power on the subcontinent. But despite his distaste for it, Mahatma was a title he would bear until his death and beyond, and while there were other Mahatmas in the India of his lifetime, Gandhi is the only one remembered today.
Gandhi spent his first year in India in retirement from public life. However, the year was punctuated by a brief visit with the British Governor of Bombay (and future Viceroy of India), Lord Willingdon, whom Gandhi promised to consult before he launched any political campaigns, and then the death of G.K. Gokhale, Gandhi’s political mentor, an event that left him feeling somewhat adrift in the currents of Indian political life. Indian nationalism was a fast- growing phenomenon, as some members of the Indian National Congress had begun to push for Swaraj, or “home-rule.”
But Gandhi steered clear of these agitators, in part because he was not yet certain that he agreed with them, and in part because he had to resettle his family and the other inhabitants of the Phoenix Settlement (and the Tolstoy Settlement, a twin he had founded near Johannesburg) in India. To this end, he established a new settlement near the town of Ahmedabad, the capital of the western province of Gujarati, near where he had been born. It came to be known as the Satyagraha ashram, ashram being an Indian word for a communal settlement, and was officially founded on May 25, 1915. Its initial inhabitants included some twenty-five people, all sworn to chastity and poverty- -and among them was a family of untouchables, India’s lowest caste.
By living in a communal space with untouchables (whose very presence, it was believed, defiled higher-caste Hindus), Gandhi deeply offended many of his supporters and lost considerable financial support. He was actually considering a move to the untouchable district in Ahmedabad when a generous Muslim merchant donated enough money to keep the ashram running for a year-by which time Gandhi’s communal life with the untouchables had become slightly less of an outrage.
Gandhi’s public life in India commenced in February of 1916, when he gave a speech at the opening of the new Hindu University in the city of Benares. The speech was typical of Gandhi, as he urged the assembled, westernized Indians that they would never be worthy of self-government unless they looked out for their less fortunate brethren. He then went on to catalogue the awful living conditions of the lower classes that he had observed during his travels around India-with a special focus, as always, on sanitation. The speech enjoyed little popularity among the Indian intelligentsia, but Gandhi hardly cared. He had begun to approve of the idea of home rule, but he had no interest in exchanging government by a British elite for rule by an Anglicized Indian elite. If swaraj was to come to India, he argued, it must come as part of a wholesale social transformation that stripped away the old burdens of caste and crippling poverty.
During the war years, he set about putting these principles into action. His intervention (and willingness, as always, to face arrest) in the Champaran district on behalf of impoverished indigo-cultivators led to a government commission being appointed to investigate abuses by the indigo planters. At the same time, he discovered what was to become one of his most effective weapons in late years-the fast. He had always fasted as part of his personal regimen, but when a group of striking Ahmedabad mill-workers, whose cause he had supported, turned to violence in their struggle with the mill-owners, he resolved to fast until they returned to his principle of non-violence. As it happened, the fast only lasted three days, as the two sides came to the bargaining table and hammered out an agreement. But it set a precedent for later action, and he would continue to use it as weapon in the arsenal of satyagraha-despite criticism from those who condemned such behavior as little more than a form of blackmail.
As the war in European dragged to its conclusion in 1917-18, Gandhi began tramping about India, recruiting men for the British Army. Although his dreams of home rule had grown stronger, he was still loyal to Britain and to the ideals of the British Constitution, with which he later declared to have “fallen in love.” But the Indian people, having listened to him preach non-violence and resistance to unjust authority, had a difficult time accepting him in the role of recruitment officer-how, they wondered, could the apostle of peace ask them to take up arms in defense of the Raj? Wearied from his journey, he fell ill with dysentery; it was his first serious illness, and he resolutely resisted treatment, preferring his own regimen. As a result he spent a long time as a convalescent.
While Gandhi lay in bed in his ashram, the war came to an end. In a sense, the long struggle had been a great vindication of the British Empire and its Indian “jewel”: the subcontinent had remained loyal, for the most part, and Indian troops had fought valiantly for the Empire around the globe. But the seeds of the Raj’s downfall were sown. Britain was drained, of both manpower and will, and would never again regain the sunny optimism that had characterized its 19th century rule. The interwar years would soon bring a malaise to the Empire, as a series of mediocre governments stood by impotently in the face of a hostile Germany’s rise to power and the progressive loss of their own domination. Meanwhile, India was restive: the British had destroyed the world’s only Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, and the loyalty of Indians Muslims was questionable. And having fought a war whose supposed purpose was to protect the rights of small states and independent peoples from tyranny, the rhetoric of British rule in India had begun to ring hollow.
In this atmosphere, the harried British government made a frightful mistake. They elected to follow the recommendations of the Rowlatt Committee, which advocated the retention of wartime restrictions in India-including curfews and the suppression of free speech. Gandhi, reading the soon-to-be-passed Rowlatt Act in his sickbed, was too weak to mount a protest, but his loyalty to the Empire, which he had long viewed as the guarantor of Indian liberties, suffered a major blow; events of the next few years were to shatter it entirely.
It was World War II that finally brought the itinerant saint-politician back into public life. After war broke out in September 1939, the British immediately brought India into the conflict without consulting the nationalist leadership. Even as howls of outrage rose from the Congress and the Muslim League, Gandhi was invited to see the Viceroy, now Lord Linlithgow. Having never lost his deep respect for Britain, and detesting Nazism as “naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science,” Gandhi pledged his personal support to Britain and the allies. Nehru, however, was less excited by the idea of aiding the Empire’s war effort, and along with the other Congress leaders, he drafted a manifesto that essentially asked for complete independence in return for Indian support against the Nazis. Gandhi, unhappy at taking advantage of Britain’s weakness (it was now 1940, and the Germans were rolling across France), reluctantly went along.
Gandhi’s support was immaterial-Churchill was now in command of Britain, and he had no intention of allowing Indian independence, certainly not in war- time, and not with the issue of minorities (Muslims, practically speaking) still unresolved. Nehru’s demand was turned down, and now Gandhi, previously unwilling to further debilitate the British in their time of struggle, agreed to a small-scale campaign of civil disobedience, in which only the Congress leaders went to jail. This small-scale campaign lasted until 1942, when Sir Stafford Cripps arrived on the subcontinent, offering India Dominion status in the British Commonwealth after the war (which meant de facto independence, since a nation could leave the Commonwealth at any time). The Congress might have accepted this, however the proposals also insisted-in an effort to deal with the Muslim problem-that any province would have the right to secede from the Dominion. This Gandhi and the rest of the Congress could not accept, since it would mean the “vivisection” of India.
With the failure of the Cripps mission, the Congress now decided on an immediate campaign of civil disobedience. Before it could begin, however, all the Congress leaders, including Gandhi, were arrested in August of 1942 and imprisoned in the palace of the Aga Khan. Without the Mahatma’s voice to calm the people, India exploded into violence. The Viceroy demanded that Gandhi speak out against the civil strife, but for once he refused, choosing instead to begin a fast in February of 1943 that lasted for three weeks and left the government terrified that he might die in confinement. But still, he seemed less dangerous to them in his velvet prison than out of it, and so the government kept him in the Aga Khan’s palace, surrounded by his friends and family, while the war dragged on. He was not released until May of 1944, a month before D-Day, and he left the palace nursing a profound personal grief- Kasturbai, his wife and companion for the last sixty-two years, had died during their confinement.
During the speech the crowd issued approving hums and adoring sigh. When it was over the speaker received a standing ovation. The audience, regardless of what spurred them to their feet, in their reasons for standing should have included this: to signal their gratitude that the U.S. government and the rest of the world’s democracies know the speaker’s message is irresponsible and immoral.
===
The speaker was Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma, and last week, in a lecture titled “Lessons Learned From Grandfather,” Gandhi spoke to a University audience about the philosophy of nonviolence.
Pacifism is difficult to digest, and to make it even somewhat palatable Arun Gandhi, a professed pacifist, had to address a question he should have expected and which was asked after his speech. It is a question the answer of which banishes the relativism of even the most incurable liberal. And it is a question one 20th century writer would not ignore.
In his 1949 “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell, regarding the late war, wrote that “one question every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’” Orwell recorded Gandhi’s answer, which was: German Jews should commit collective suicide.
Ghastly, yes, but as Orwell wrote, “Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way.”
Perhaps not wanting to tell the assembled undergraduates, law students, professors and local citizens that the German Jews should have all raised their hands for Auschwitz, Arun Gandhi, when asked about the issue, (to paraphrase) replied:
Well, Hitler didn’t just come about out of the blue. The pressures on Germany after World War I helped create the conditions for Hitler’s rise. And we humans are not very good at conflict prevention. We always wait until the conflict-management stage. Gandhi’s beliefs have no practicality. Matt Emerson
Sergeant Major (Retd.) Mohandas K. Gandhi who served in the British Army and won a medal of war for his participation in the Boer War on the side of the British.
There wasn’t a war which Gandhi did not support. He supported all the wars in his time. The prophet of peace Gandhi’s support for the British in the Boer War, the Zulu War, WW1 and WW2—this support extended South African Apartheid, and British colonialism.
Gandhi felt it was his duty to support the British during the Boer War; so he organized and led an Indian Corps to nurse When three hundred free Indians and eight hundred indentured servants volunteered, the whites were impressed. Gandhi was given a medal for his service in the Boer War. Gandhi also supported the British in their war with the Zulus.
Gandhi wanted to be “Recruiter-in-Chief” for the Viceroy. In the spring of 1918 Gandhi was persuaded by the British to help raise soldiers for a final victory effort in the war. In 1917-18, Gandhi began tramping about India, recruiting men for the British Army.
Charlie Andrews criticized Gandhi for recruiting Indians to fight for the British. Gandhi was still loyal to Britain and to the ideals of the British Constitution, with which he later declared to have “fallen in love.
It was World War II that finally brought the itinerant politician back into public life. After war broke out in September 1939, the British immediately brought India into the conflict without consulting the nationalist leadership. Even as howls of outrage rose from the Congress and the Muslim League, Gandhi was invited to see the Viceroy, now Lord Linlithgow. Having never lost his deep respect for Britain Gandhi pledged his personal support to Britain and the allies. Gandhi, unhappy at taking advantage of Britain’s weakness.
Based on a telegram from Reuters, The Times, on September 27, 1947, under the headline “Mr. Gandhi on ‘war’ with Pakistan” reported:
“Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. … (Mohandas K. Gandhi, Spetember 27th, 1947)
He told the Sikhs “don’t let your swords rust”. He wanted India to attack Kashmir.
In his 1949 “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell, regarding the late war, wrote that “one question every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’” Orwell recorded Gandhi’s answer, which was:German Jews should commit collective suicide.
GANDHI ON NON-VIOLENCE
- During a prayer speech: “If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it againstthe British.” – June 16, 1947 (Reference: Gandhi’s “The Last Phase”, Vol II, p. 326)
To the British during WWII: ” You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man.”(Reference: G.D. Birla’s “In the Shadow of the Mahatma”, p. 276)
Gandhi’s limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children’s schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer. Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments of sleeping and bathing naked together, without touching, all apparently to strengthen his chastity. (Whether these experiments were always successful is anyone’s guess.) It is also revealed that Gandhi began a romantic liaison with Saraladevi Chaudhurani, niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore—a disclosure that has created a buzz in the Indian press. The author tells us that Gandhi, perhaps disingenuously, called it a “spiritual marriage,” a “partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609478,00.html
GANDHI ON BLACKS AND RACE RELATIONS
- • “A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if
at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to
believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to
the position of a raw Kaffir.” (Reference: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG), Vol I, p. 150) - • Regarding forcible registration with the state of blacks: “One can understand the
necessity for registration of Kaffirs who will not work.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, p. 105) - • “Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian Location should be chosen for
dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town passes my comprehension…the Town
Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, pp. 244-245) - • His description of black inmates: “Only a degree removed from the animal.” Also,
“Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized – the convicts even more so. They are troublesome,
very dirty and live almost like animals.” – Mar. 7, 1908 (Reference: CWMG, Vol VIII, pp. 135-136)
The Durban Post Office
One of Gandhi’s major “achievements” in South Africa was to promote racial segregation by refusing to share a post office door with the black natives.
Sergeant Major Gandhi
Learn how Gandhi became a Sgt. Major in the British Army and eagerly participated in the 1906 British war against the black Zulus.
Gandhi and South African Blacks
Gandhi wrote extensively about his experiences with the blacks of South Africa. He always termed them “Kaffirs” and his writings reveal a deep-seated disdain for these African natives.
The Nobel Prize rejected the Gandhi nomination because of this war mongering. Why Mohandas Gandhi didn’t win the Nobel Peace prize?
- In his report, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own doubts as to whether Gandhi’s ideals were meant to be universal or primarily Indian: “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse.“
- Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. …(Mohandas K. Gandhi, September 27th, 1947)
- sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (…) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator. Professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi
- he Nobel Committee adviser referred to … critics in maintaining that he was not consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. This was something that had happened during the first Non-Cooperation Campaign in 1920-1921, e.g. when a crowd in Chauri Chaura, the United Provinces, attacked a police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police station.
Appendix A
Gandhi felt it was his duty to support the British during the Boer War; so he organized and led an Indian Ambulance Corps to nurse the wounded on the battlefield. Even this effort was somewhat delayed by race prejudice; but when three hundred free Indians and eight hundred indentured servants volunteered, the whites were impressed. Gandhi was given a medal for his service in the Boer War. In 1902 he traveled in India, and with Gokhale’s support his resolution for the Indians in South Africa was passed by the Indian Congress in Calcutta.
In the spring of 1918 Gandhi was persuaded by the British to help raise soldiers for a final victory effort in the war. Charlie Andrews criticized Gandhi for recruiting Indians to fight for the British.
Aided by a donation of 1500 pounds and the 1,100-acre farm bought and built by architect Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi named this ashram Tolstoy Farm. He exchanged a few letters with the great Russian novelist before he died and continued to write and edit the journal Indian Opinion in order to elucidate the principles and practice of satyagraha
discrimination against “coolies” (as Indians were disparagingly termed) was an entrenched part of South African life-especially in the Boer-ruled regions, where Gandhi and his friends could exercise little influence. In Natal, Indians were not allowed to go out after nine p.m. without a pass; in the Orange Free State, they could not own property, run businesses, or manage farms; in the Transvaal, they could not own land, and were forced to live in the worst urban slums. Even in the Cape Colony, British-ruled for decades, Indians were often forbidden to walk on the sidewalk, and could be kicked off-quite literally, often-by passing whites.
On the political front, a last-minute petition drive failed to stop the passage of the Indian Franchise Bill; however, Gandhi remained undeterred. He proceeded to organize a still larger petition, which was sent to London, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and distributed to the press in Britain, South Africa, and India. It caused a considerable stir, and prompted both the Times of London and the Times of India to write editorials in support of the Indian right to the vote. Meanwhile, Gandhi set about establishing a political organization for the Natalese Indians, which came to be called the Natal Indian Congress (a clear reference to the Indian National Congress, at that point a relatively tame body). Gandhi faced difficulties in financing the Congress, but the body soon possessed a library and a debating society, held regular (and lively) meetings, and published two major pamphlets. They were entitled An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa, and The Indian Franchise-An Appeal, and offered a cogent, detailed case for putting an end to discrimination in South Africa.
India and World War I
The First World War began with the murder of an Austrian Archduke by a Serbian assassin in June of 1914, and soon mushroomed into a conflict that gripped Europeanpe and the world in four years of strategic stalemate and unparalleled butchery. When war was declared in August, Gandhi was in England, where he immediately began organizing a medical corps similar to the force he had led in the Boer War. But ill health soon forced his return to India, where he received a wildly enthusiastic welcome. In his absence, his fame as the politician-saint of South Africa and the founder of satyagraha had spread throughout India, and now cheering crowds cried “Mahatmaji” (“ji” being a suffix connoting affection) wherever he appeared. “Mahatma” meant “Great Soul,” an appellation applied to the holiest men of Hinduism, and was first conferred upon Gandhi by the great Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. Gandhi, of course, insisted that all souls were equal, and found bothersome the religious adulation lavished upon him, even as it gave him great practical power on the subcontinent. But despite his distaste for it, Mahatma was a title he would bear until his death and beyond, and while there were other Mahatmas in the India of his lifetime, Gandhi is the only one remembered today.
Gandhi spent his first year in India in retirement from public life. However, the year was punctuated by a brief visit with the British Governor of Bombay (and future Viceroy of India), Lord Willingdon, whom Gandhi promised to consult before he launched any political campaigns, and then the death of G.K. Gokhale, Gandhi’s political mentor, an event that left him feeling somewhat adrift in the currents of Indian political life. Indian nationalism was a fast- growing phenomenon, as some members of the Indian National Congress had begun to push for Swaraj, or “home-rule.”
But Gandhi steered clear of these agitators, in part because he was not yet certain that he agreed with them, and in part because he had to resettle his family and the other inhabitants of the Phoenix Settlement (and the Tolstoy Settlement, a twin he had founded near Johannesburg) in India. To this end, he established a new settlement near the town of Ahmedabad, the capital of the western province of Gujarati, near where he had been born. It came to be known as the Satyagraha ashram, ashram being an Indian word for a communal settlement, and was officially founded on May 25, 1915. Its initial inhabitants included some twenty-five people, all sworn to chastity and poverty- -and among them was a family of untouchables, India’s lowest caste.
By living in a communal space with untouchables (whose very presence, it was believed, defiled higher-caste Hindus), Gandhi deeply offended many of his supporters and lost considerable financial support. He was actually considering a move to the untouchable district in Ahmedabad when a generous Muslim merchant donated enough money to keep the ashram running for a year-by which time Gandhi’s communal life with the untouchables had become slightly less of an outrage.
Gandhi’s public life in India commenced in February of 1916, when he gave a speech at the opening of the new Hindu University in the city of Benares. The speech was typical of Gandhi, as he urged the assembled, westernized Indians that they would never be worthy of self-government unless they looked out for their less fortunate brethren. He then went on to catalogue the awful living conditions of the lower classes that he had observed during his travels around India-with a special focus, as always, on sanitation. The speech enjoyed little popularity among the Indian intelligentsia, but Gandhi hardly cared. He had begun to approve of the idea of home rule, but he had no interest in exchanging government by a British elite for rule by an Anglicized Indian elite. If swaraj was to come to India, he argued, it must come as part of a wholesale social transformation that stripped away the old burdens of caste and crippling poverty.
During the war years, he set about putting these principles into action. His intervention (and willingness, as always, to face arrest) in the Champaran district on behalf of impoverished indigo-cultivators led to a government commission being appointed to investigate abuses by the indigo planters. At the same time, he discovered what was to become one of his most effective weapons in late years-the fast. He had always fasted as part of his personal regimen, but when a group of striking Ahmedabad mill-workers, whose cause he had supported, turned to violence in their struggle with the mill-owners, he resolved to fast until they returned to his principle of non-violence. As it happened, the fast only lasted three days, as the two sides came to the bargaining table and hammered out an agreement. But it set a precedent for later action, and he would continue to use it as weapon in the arsenal of satyagraha-despite criticism from those who condemned such behavior as little more than a form of blackmail.
As the war in European dragged to its conclusion in 1917-18, Gandhi began tramping about India, recruiting men for the British Army. Although his dreams of home rule had grown stronger, he was still loyal to Britain and to the ideals of the British Constitution, with which he later declared to have “fallen in love.” But the Indian people, having listened to him preach non-violence and resistance to unjust authority, had a difficult time accepting him in the role of recruitment officer-how, they wondered, could the apostle of peace ask them to take up arms in defense of the Raj? Wearied from his journey, he fell ill with dysentery; it was his first serious illness, and he resolutely resisted treatment, preferring his own regimen. As a result he spent a long time as a convalescent.
While Gandhi lay in bed in his ashram, the war came to an end. In a sense, the long struggle had been a great vindication of the British Empire and its Indian “jewel”: the subcontinent had remained loyal, for the most part, and Indian troops had fought valiantly for the Empire around the globe. But the seeds of the Raj’s downfall were sown. Britain was drained, of both manpower and will, and would never again regain the sunny optimism that had characterized its 19th century rule. The interwar years would soon bring a malaise to the Empire, as a series of mediocre governments stood by impotently in the face of a hostile Germany’s rise to power and the progressive loss of their own domination. Meanwhile, India was restive: the British had destroyed the world’s only Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, and the loyalty of Indians Muslims was questionable. And having fought a war whose supposed purpose was to protect the rights of small states and independent peoples from tyranny, the rhetoric of British rule in India had begun to ring hollow.
In this atmosphere, the harried British government made a frightful mistake. They elected to follow the recommendations of the Rowlatt Committee, which advocated the retention of wartime restrictions in India-including curfews and the suppression of free speech. Gandhi, reading the soon-to-be-passed Rowlatt Act in his sickbed, was too weak to mount a protest, but his loyalty to the Empire, which he had long viewed as the guarantor of Indian liberties, suffered a major blow; events of the next few years were to shatter it entirely.
It was World War II that finally brought the itinerant saint-politician back into public life. After war broke out in September 1939, the British immediately brought India into the conflict without consulting the nationalist leadership. Even as howls of outrage rose from the Congress and the Muslim League, Gandhi was invited to see the Viceroy, now Lord Linlithgow. Having never lost his deep respect for Britain, and detesting Nazism as “naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science,” Gandhi pledged his personal support to Britain and the allies. Nehru, however, was less excited by the idea of aiding the Empire’s war effort, and along with the other Congress leaders, he drafted a manifesto that essentially asked for complete independence in return for Indian support against the Nazis. Gandhi, unhappy at taking advantage of Britain’s weakness (it was now 1940, and the Germans were rolling across France), reluctantly went along.
Gandhi’s support was immaterial-Churchill was now in command of Britain, and he had no intention of allowing Indian independence, certainly not in war- time, and not with the issue of minorities (Muslims, practically speaking) still unresolved. Nehru’s demand was turned down, and now Gandhi, previously unwilling to further debilitate the British in their time of struggle, agreed to a small-scale campaign of civil disobedience, in which only the Congress leaders went to jail. This small-scale campaign lasted until 1942, when Sir Stafford Cripps arrived on the subcontinent, offering India Dominion status in the British Commonwealth after the war (which meant de facto independence, since a nation could leave the Commonwealth at any time). The Congress might have accepted this, however the proposals also insisted-in an effort to deal with the Muslim problem-that any province would have the right to secede from the Dominion. This Gandhi and the rest of the Congress could not accept, since it would mean the “vivisection” of India.
With the failure of the Cripps mission, the Congress now decided on an immediate campaign of civil disobedience. Before it could begin, however, all the Congress leaders, including Gandhi, were arrested in August of 1942 and imprisoned in the palace of the Aga Khan. Without the Mahatma’s voice to calm the people, India exploded into violence. The Viceroy demanded that Gandhi speak out against the civil strife, but for once he refused, choosing instead to begin a fast in February of 1943 that lasted for three weeks and left the government terrified that he might die in confinement. But still, he seemed less dangerous to them in his velvet prison than out of it, and so the government kept him in the Aga Khan’s palace, surrounded by his friends and family, while the war dragged on. He was not released until May of 1944, a month before D-Day, and he left the palace nursing a profound personal grief- Kasturbai, his wife and companion for the last sixty-two years, had died during their confinement.
During the speech the crowd issued approving hums and adoring sigh. When it was over the speaker received a standing ovation. The audience, regardless of what spurred them to their feet, in their reasons for standing should have included this: to signal their gratitude that the U.S. government and the rest of the world’s democracies know the speaker’s message is irresponsible and immoral.
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The speaker was Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma, and last week, in a lecture titled “Lessons Learned From Grandfather,” Gandhi spoke to a University audience about the philosophy of nonviolence.
Pacifism is difficult to digest, and to make it even somewhat palatable Arun Gandhi, a professed pacifist, had to address a question he should have expected and which was asked after his speech. It is a question the answer of which banishes the relativism of even the most incurable liberal. And it is a question one 20th century writer would not ignore.
In his 1949 “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell, regarding the late war, wrote that “one question every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’” Orwell recorded Gandhi’s answer, which was: German Jews should commit collective suicide.
Ghastly, yes, but as Orwell wrote, “Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way.”
Perhaps not wanting to tell the assembled undergraduates, law students, professors and local citizens that the German Jews should have all raised their hands for Auschwitz, Arun Gandhi, when asked about the issue, (to paraphrase) replied:
Well, Hitler didn’t just come about out of the blue. The pressures on Germany after World War I helped create the conditions for Hitler’s rise. And we humans are not very good at conflict prevention. We always wait until the conflict-management stage. Gandhi’s beliefs have no practicality. Matt Emerson
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Gandhi delayed the demise of the British Empire
Gandhi did not bring the British Empire to its knees—they had already decided to leave. By supporting the war “Recruiter-in-Chief”, Sergeant Major Gandhi extended colonialism, and sent thousands to their death as cannon-fodder.
By supporting the British in the Boer War, their war against the Zulus, and the World Wars, Mr. Gandhi actually extended the life of the Empire and enhanced their ability to hold on to the Subcontinent. Using Mr. Gandhi as the self-proclaimed “Recruiter-In-Chief” help send thousands of People to the war effort of the British.
Gandhi vehemently supported the prolongation of the British Raj in South Asia. He was a loyal citizen of the British Empire, which he thought was the most benevolent in the world. He wanted to perpetuate the Empire–so he coerced Indians to go and fight for the empire..he as its “Recruiter In Chief”.
Mr. Gandhi was firmly opposed to independence..the entire spectrum wanted independence,e Jinnah, Ambedkar, Akali Dal, the Muslim League, Jamiat e Ulema Hindh, the RSS and the Jan Sangh—only Gandihi wanted “dominion status” based on on British overlordship.
This bitter divide split the Congress between Gandhi and Nehru. Here is Gandhi asking Nehru “to Go Slow”–a euphimism for continue the British Raj.
I have not been able to find the letters on the internet–but Jaswant Singh narrates them in his book Jinnah. they are listed on Pages 158-161 (hardcopy).
Page 159: In a letter dated January 4, 1928, he [Gandhi] told Nehru..’you are going to fast’….’you should have taken time to think and become acclimated. Most of the resolutions you framed and got carried could have been delayed for a one year. Your plunging into the Republican army was a hasty step….’but I do not mind these acts of yours [badly timed, ill-judged resolutions] so much as I mind your mischief-makers and hooligans. I do not know whether you still believe in Non-violence. But even if you have altered your view, you could not think that unlicensed and unbridled violence is going to deliver the country. If careful observation of the country in the light of your European experiments can convince you of the error of the current ways and means, by all means enforce your views, but please do form a disciplinary committee
“On January 1928, Gandhi responded to Nehru’s denail of the Gandhian self. he tells Nehru that he mush have historically suppressing his tru self al these years. he is free to ‘revolt againsg me’. The article criticizing Nehru and the work of the Madras annual session were a misfire all around. ‘I had to notion of the terrible extent of [our] differences’. Whou you were in state [of self-supression], you overlooked the very things which appear to you now as my serious blemishes’. Similar criticisms on previous occasions were noticed because while you [were] under stupefaction, these things did not jar you as they do now…’the differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and racial that there seems no meeting ground between us.
Page 159: An angry Nehru replied on 11 January 1928: It amazes me to find you using langauge which appears to be wholly unjustified…you have….specially slected some resolutions for…criticism and condemnation…You have referred to discipline..
Nehru then cut to the substance…’you have described the Independence Resolution ‘hastily conceived and thoughtlessly passed”..no stretch of language can justify the use of the words “hastily conceived..thoughtlessly passed”…a demand of independence and all that implies has come to mean a great deal for me and I attach more importance to it than to almost anything else..I doubt if anyone outside a small circle understands your position..
Nehru then turned to the more general questions of Gandhi’s ideas and leadership, questions which bear more directly on the modernity–post modernity divide. ‘You know how intensely I have admired you and believed in you as a leader… I have done so spite of that fact I hardly agreed with anything that some of your previous publications–India Home Rule [Hind Swaraj] etc–contained. I felt and feel that you were and infinitely greater then your little books. Since you have come out of prison [Feb. 1924] something seems to have gone wrong…You…repeatedly changed your attitude…most of us were left utter bewilderment…I have asked you many times what you expected in the future and you answers have been far from satisfying..you..said that..you expected the khadi movement to spread rapidly…the miracle has not happened..I am beginning to think if we are to wait ’till khadi becomes universal in India, we shall have to wait a ’till the Greek Kalends…out khadi work is almost wholly divorced from politics…What then can be don? You say nothing..you only criticize and no helpful lead comes from you…
Page 160: Nehru then turns to worldview..”Reading many of your articles in Young India, –your autobiography etc.– I have often felt how very different my ideals were from yours…You midjudge greatly, I think the civilization of the West and attach too great importance to its many failings..I nehing think that the so called Ramraj was very good in the past, nor do I want it back. I think that western or rather industrial civilization is bound to conquer India…Everybody knows these defects and the utopia and social theories are mend to remove them
..I doubt very much if the fundamentally causes of poverty are touched by [your remedy of village employment and constructive work]…You do not say a word against the semi-feudal zamidari [landlord] system…or against the capitalist exploitation of both the workers and the consumers.
Gandhi was not non-violent. Gandhi was Sergent Major in the British Army. He supported all the British wars, Boer, Zulu, Kaffir, WW1 and WW2. He threatened the British –”if we had the atom bomb we would use it against Britian”. He urged the government of Bharat (aka India) to wage war on Pakistan.
Martin Luther King used Thoreau, not Gandhi. As stated earlier–Dr. King did not follow fasting or filling the jails as they would not have worked in the USA. Dr. King thus followed Thoreau not Gandhi—despite the claims of the missionary who wanted to use Gandhi to convert all of Bharat to Christianity. The title “Mahatma” was to fool the poor Hindus into believing that Gandhi was an incarnation of Christ–this is how they converted thousands of Hindus to Christianity. All this is well document by Dr. Watson in his books
in the 60s, the hippy generation had no knowledge about the true colors of Gandhi–so there was some euphoria. The truth as it becomes more and more available will further eliminate all vestiges of the nonsense that has been accumulated.
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in a stately and handsome three-storied home in Porbandar, grandson of the chief administrator of the small Princely State in coastal Gujarat. Acknowledging that he was born into a family of politicians, always involved in secret alliances and mutual promotions, in one letter, he wrote: "I knew then, and know better now, that much of my father's time was taken up in mere intrigue." In another letter to his nephew, Chaganlal, he acknowledged the notoriety of his political family: "...that is, we are known to belong to a band of robbers". It is to Gandhi's credit that he saw his family for what it was, and attempted to transcend it's narrow Modh Bania outlook; but often, subconsciously learned behavior dies hard. The tendency towards backroom wheeling and dealing did not entirely escape Gandhi himself as he rose to become the Indian National Congress's most influential political leader. (See Collected Works, vol. 24, p.170, vol. 12, p.381)
Although most biographies of Gandhi focus on Gandhi's political career after he returned from England in early 1915, and begin with his involvement in the Civil Disobedience Movement from the early 1920s, it is important to note that Gandhi arrived on the National Scene rather late, and in the first half of his political life was considerably beholden to the Raj. At a time when literacy in British India was barely 8%, Gandhi enjoyed the rare option of studying in Britain and spent the years 1888-1893 in London before taking employment in South Africa. Although Gandhi became politically active in South Africa, and led 'Satyagrahas' against unjust laws, Gandhi was hardly yet an anti-imperialist radical or revolutionary. In fact, in 1914, he was still very much in awe of the British empire, and Martin Green in his biography of Gandhi describes his state of mind as follows: "When Gandhi left South Africa, he still believed in the British empire. though tentatively. "Though Empires have gone and fallen, this empire may perhaps be an exception....it is an empire not founded on material but on spiritual foundations....the British constitution. Tear away those ideals and you tear away my loyalty to the British constitution; keep those ideals and I am ever a bondsman"." (See Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolutionary, p. 208)
It is especially notable that at the age of 45, Gandhi saw in the British empire a "spiritual foundation" - a sentiment many in the Indian Freedom Movement would have found astounding, even nauseating. As early as 1884, the most advanced Indian intellectuals were already quite clear that British rule in India was built on a foundation of economic pillage and plunder - and was devoid of any high social or moral purpose. "Nadir Shah looted the country only once. But the British loot us every day. Every year wealth to the tune of 4.5 million dollar is being drained out, sucking our very blood. Britain should immediately quit India.'' So wrote the Sindh Times on May 20, 1884, a year before the Indian National Congress was born and 58 years before the ''Quit India'' movement of 1942 was launched.
But in 1914 Gandhi was quite far removed from the most radical elements of the Indian Freedom Movement. In 1913, poor emigrant farmers from the Punjab in California launched the Ghadar Party and released their manifesto calling for complete independence from British Rule. Several years earlier, before his internment, Tilak had cogently described the Indian condition under British colonial occupation as being utterly ruinous and degrading. Tilak, Ajit Singh, Chidambaram Pillai and their associates in the National Movement saw few redeeming qualities in the British dispensation, and saw colonial rule as being entirely inimical to India's progress, asserting that the contradictions between the British oppressors and the Indian people were completely irreconcilable.
Although Gandhi was critical of specific aspects of colonial rule, in 1914, his general outlook towards the British was more akin to that of the loyalist Princes than the most advanced of India's national leaders. Particularly onerous was his support of the British during World War I. Even as the Ghadar Party correctly saw in WWI a great opportunity for India to deepen its opposition to the British, and liberate itself from the colonial yoke, Gandhi instead tried to mobilize Indians on behalf of the British war effort. Although many biographers of Gandhi have studiously omitted making any mention of such dishonorable aspects of Gandhi's political life, Martin Green makes a brief reference to Gandhi's attitude towards WWI when he was in England:"To return to London in wartime: Gandhi quickly raised his ambulance corps amongst the Indians in England. As before, he had offered his volunteers for any kind of military duty, but the authorities preferred medical workers". Martin Green also observes: "Many of his friends did not approve the project. Olive Schreiner, who was in London, wrote him that she was struck to the heart with sorrow to hear that he had offered to serve the English government in this evil war - this wicked cause". (See Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolutionary, p. 247)
Gandhi's ideas on non-violence did not then extend to the British Imperial War, and upon his return to India in 1915 attempted to recruit Indians for the British War effort. Gandhi's position echoed that of the Maharajas, many of whom (like the Maharaja of Bikaner) played a pivotal role in supporting the British, both in terms of propaganda and providing troops. Gandhi's attitude towards the empire emerges quite clearly from this statement of Martin Green: "Gandhi himself had twice volunteered for service in this war, in France and in Mesopotamia, because he had convinced himself that he owed the empire that sacrifice in return for it's military protection." (See Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolutionary, p. 267)
Gandhi's role in championing the British War effort did not however go unchallenged. At a time when Gandhi was still addressing "War Recruitment Melas'', Dr. Tuljaram Khilnani of Nawabshah publicly campaigned against War Loan Bonds. When Gandhi sought election to the AICC from Bombay PCC, the delegate from Sindh opposed his election in view of his support to the British war effort. The Ghadar Party was especially acerbic in it's criticism of Gandhi and other such political leaders in the Congress who had not yet been able to sever their umbilical chord to the British Raj.
But even as Gandhi was able to justify in his mind support for the imperial war, his attitude towards the revolt of Chauri Chaura (1921) brought about a very different and very harsh assessment. Labeling it a crime, he wrote thus: "God has been abundantly kind to me. He has warned me the third time that there is not yet in India that truthful and non-violent atmosphere which and which alone can justify mass disobedience....which means gentle, truthful, humble, knowing, never criminal and hateful. He warned me in 1919 when the Rowlatt Act agitation was started. Ahmedabad, Viramgam, and Kheda erred. Amritsar and Kasur erred. I retraced my steps, called it a Himalayan miscalculation, humbled myself before God and man, and stopped not merely mass civil disobedience but even my own which I knew to be civil and non-violent" . (See Collected Works, vol. 22, p.415-21)
Gandhi's Chauri Chaura decision created deep consternation in Congress circles. Subhash Chandra Bose wrote: "To sound the order of retreat just when public enthusiasm was reaching the boiling point was nothing short of a national calamity. The principal lieutenants of the Mahatma, Deshbandhu Das, Pandit Motilal Nehru and Lala Lajpat Rai, who were all in prison, shared the popular resentment. I was with the Deshbandu at the time, and I could see that he was beside himself with anger and sorrow." (quoted from The Indian Struggle, p.90)
To describe Gandhi's decision as a "national calamity" was indeed right on the mark. To lay such stress on non-violence - that too only three years after he had been encouraging Indians to enroll in the British Army was not only shocking, it showed little sympathy towards the Indian masses who against all odds had become energized against their alien oppressors.
For Gandhi to demand of the poor, downtrodden, and bitterly exploited Indian masses to first demonstrate their unmistakable commitment to non-violence before their struggle could receive with Gandhi's approval (just a few years after he had unapologetically defended an imperial war) was simply unconscionable. Clearly, Gandhi had one standard for the Indian masses, and quite another for the nation's colonial overlords. But this was not to be the first occasion for Gandhi to engage in such tactical and ideological hypocrisy.
Although Gandhi's defenders may disagree, not only were Gandhi's ideas on non-violence applied very selectively, they were hardly the most appropriate for India's situation. At no time was the British military presence in India so overwhelming that it could not have been challenged by widespread resistance from the Indian masses. Had Gandhi not called for a retreat after Chauri Chaura, it is likely that incidents such as Chauri Chaura would have occurred with much greater regularity - even increasing in frequency and intensity. This would have inevitably put tremendous pressure on the British to cut short their stay. As it is, British administrators were constrained to send back British troops as soon as possible, because many clamored to return after serving for a few years in India. Had India become too difficult to control, mutinies and dissension in the royal armies would have occurred more often, and the British would have had to cut and run, probably much sooner than in 1947.
Some critics saw in Gandhi's Chauri Chaura turnaround as indicative of his deep fear and distrust of the Indian masses - that Gandhi feared the spontaneous energy of the poor and the downtrodden more than the injustice of British rule. Certainly, the conservatism of Gandhi's tactics lends credence to such views. As late as 1928, Gandhi resisted Nehru and Bose, and campaigned for the rejection of a resolution calling for complete independence at the session of the Indian National Congress. And unlike other leaders in the freedom struggle, Gandhi often entertained false hopes about the British. In a 1930 letter, Motilal Nehru chided Gandhi for resting his hopes on the Labor Government and the sincerity of the Viceroy.
In much of Motilal Nehru's correspondence with his son, (and with others in the Congress), there are expressions of frustration with Gandhi's tendency towards moderation and compromise with the British authorities and his reluctance to broaden and accelerate the civil disobedience movement. There are also references in Motilal Nehru's letters to how large contributions from the Birlas were enabling certain political cliques (led by Madan Mohan Malviya - a close confidante of Gandhi) to "capture" the Congress. That Gandhi was close to the Birlas is now widely acknowledged, and it is not unlikely that his conservatism was either encouraged by them, or may have been coincidental but was compatible with their desire for restrained and moderate resistance to the British.
Motilal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose both complained of Gandhi's tendency to ignore party resolutions when they went against his wishes, and to work with cliques rather than consult and cooperate with all party members. In a letter dated March 28, 1939, from Manbhum, Bihar - Bose complained bitterly to Nehru of Gandhi's quiet campaign of non-cooperation with him. Bose had just won the Presidency of the Indian National Congress, defeating Gandhi's chosen nominee, Dr Pattabhi. At first, Gandhi had tried to talk Bose out of running for the post, and tried to work out a backroom deal for Dr Pattabhi's ascension (as he had done on many earlier occasions). But Bose was determined to seek the mandate of Congress activists, and won by a handsome margin in an election where the official machinery of the Congress had put all its weight behind Gandhi's hand-picked nominee.
Bose's historic election signified the mood of the Indian masses, who were becoming increasingly impatient with Gandhi's tepid nationalism. Bose had always strived to accelerate the freedom struggle, and the mass of Congress Party workers appreciated his sincerity and unswerving commitment to the national cause. In many ways, he was the best person to lead the Congress, with intellect and vision that exceeded Gandhi.
But Gandhi, along with Patel and Nehru formed a tactical block against Bose, and prevented him from functioning effectively as leader of India's preeminent national organization. In vain did Bose make his case with Nehru, who remained unmoved, and eventually, it led to Bose having to quit the Congress, and organize outside it's tedious confines.
One of the most problematical aspects of Gandhi's philosophical disposition was his emphasis on matters religious over practical. In a 1918 speech concerning India's future he espoused a position that truly secular Indians ought to find rather troubling: "I feel that India's mission is different from that of other countries, India is fitted for the religious supremacy of the world....India can conquer all by soul-force". (See Collected Works, vol. 14, p.53)
To this day, Western analysts continue to evaluate India as though its only contribution to world civilization is in matters of religious exotica and spirituality. And many Indians unquestioningly accept such one-sided formulations. But to pigeon-hole India as this exotic land - full of religious devotion and piety does great injustice not only to India's rich history of secular pursuits, but it also leaves many rational, scientific and technologically-oriented Indians bereft of any philosophical affirmation and intellectual leadership.
On more than one occasion, Gandhi would begin with statements such as "God has warned me", or "...spoken as such.....". Coming from any ordinary person, such claims would normally be viewed with great suspicion and skepticism because they can only be accepted on faith, never independently verified. In fact, any ordinary person who claimed as often to have a 'hotline' to 'God' might even be seen as a lunatic, as someone prone to hallucinations. But from Gandhi, such utterances were quietly tolerated or accepted.
That Gandhi espoused such religious-centric views is not surprising considering the milieu in which he was raised and educated. Most British-educated Indians were kept completely ignorant of India's rich history of rational thought and (pre-industrial) scientific endeavour. So it was inevitable that Indians would seek inspiration from religious texts - Hindus from the Gita, Muslims from the Quran, Sikhs from the Granth Sahib. But unlike Tilak who derived from the Gita, a call to action, a call to rise against injustice, Gandhi found in the Gita an appeal to pacifist idealism. In a world that was rife with violence, Gandhi's insistence on non-violent purity was, in practical terms, an exercise in infantile futility. Not only did it delay the onset of freedom, it led to particularly disastrous consequences during partition, and in Kashmir.
Whereas the Muslim League was armed, the Congress was not and entirely dependant on the British police and military apparatus. When the partition riots first began in West Punjab and East Bengal, the Congress had no means to defend the hapless victims. Being unable to prevent the slaughter and rape, or protect the stream of Hindu and Sikh refugees, it lost the moral authority to prevent a communal backlash in India. A similiar situation prevailed in Kashmir. The Muslim League sent in its armed hooligans even as Kashmir's most popular political party, the National Conference had decided to throw in its lot with secular India. In Baluchistan and the Frontier Province, majority sentiment was in favor of unity with India. Had the Congress been armed, it could have at least held out for for a better deal, and at least some of the horrors of partition may have been averted.
There were many other serious incongruities in Gandhi's world view. As one reads through Gandhi's letters and sundry writings, time and time again, he uses the term 'Dharma 'in the context of how Indians should behave vis-a-vis the British, and the term "right" in the context of what the British could do to their Indian subjects. In Gandhi's ethical framework, not only did the conquered have very limited rights, they were burdened with all types of duties under the rubric of 'Dharma '. Conquered Indians were repeatedly lectured on how they must be concerned with the highest morality when dealing with their British oppressors - even as the British conquerors were little restricted by any 'Dharmic' pressures, and enjoyed the ultimate authority to take away the life of Indians they chose to put on trial for 'sedition'.
In all other theories of democratic liberation, ethical and moral codes emanated from one essential principle - which is the fundamental right of enslaved people to be free from alien exploitation. But in Gandhi's moral framework, the need of the Indian masses to liberate themselves from a brutally unjust colonial occupation did not come first, it was subject to all kinds of one-sided conditionalities.
For instance, in the context of Bhagat Singh's hanging, even as Gandhi condemned the British government, he observed: "The government certainly had the right to hang these men. However, there are some rights which do credit to those who possess them only if they are enjoyed in name only." (See Collected Works, vol. 45, p.359-61, in Gujarati)
Whether Gandhi was confusing the term "right" with the term authority or might, or he actually granted the colonial government the "right" to execute Indian freedom fighters is hard to tell. But in general, it appears that Gandhi had not worked out in his mind the true essence of natural human rights, and desirable human duties in a civilized society. Nor had he come to realize that in any democratic dispensation, governments cannot be assigned any inherent rights, for they are only the proxies of the people who elect them, and they only have duties and obligations to ensure the rights of the people, and to prevent the exercise of those individual rights that might violate, restrict or inveigh on the rights of others.
In the context of Bhagat Singh, the British government was under no popular obligation to execute him. On the contrary, his actions had widespread support, and there were fervent appeals for the commutation of his sentence. In such a context, Gandhi could have only spoken of British authority - and that too a stolen and usurped authority to execute Bhagat Singh. Had he been truly moved against Bhagat Singh's death sentence, he would have spoken of how the British were able to execute him only because of their military might - that their action had no ethical or moral sanction.
A true revolutionary - (such as Bhagat Singh) would not have granted the exploitative colonial regime any "rights" whatsoever. In fact, it would have been the right of the Indian revolutionary to resist colonial rule by any means necessary. If Indians obeyed British orders, it was only out of practical necessity, out of an instinct to survive. But if some were prepared to risk their lives in confronting the British military occupation, it was their inalienable right to do so. Indians had duties and obligations towards each other, but none to the British occupiers and exploiters. From a revolutionary, moral, ethical, or national perspective, there was no necessity to grant the British colonial authorities any rights whatsoever, because their very presence was illegal and obtained without the democratic consent of the Indian masses. Indians, therefore, had no moral duty, or 'Dharma', obliging them towards obeying their orders, or respecting the lives of the Britishers who had occupied Indian territory by force.
But Gandhi was never completely able to overcome a deeply ingrained tendency towards tolerating or accepting the "rights" he saw intrinsically bound with authority figures. In the feudal order that Gandhi was born in, the masses had no inherent rights, only duties towards the sovereign. And Gandhi was never able to completely reject this iniquitous paradigm. He was never fully able to complete the transition to a democratic order in which citizens enjoyed inalienable rights in addition to bearing duties towards each other. He did not fathom that in a democratic society, the role of the state was to ensure the rights of the people, not to exercise any arbitrary hegemony over them. Moreover, in a democratic state, the masses could not be burdened with unnecessary duties, only those that obliged them to respect the rights of others, and required them to provide services in exchange for what they received from the state, or others in society.
While many of the qualities Gandhi sought to elicit from the masses were commendable and desirable qualities to strive for - one could not make such qualities conditions for granting the masses certain fundamental rights - such as freedom from hunger, homelessness and exploitation. And if the poor masses were enjoined to be more noble in character, then such requirements also had to be made mandatory for authority figures.
In these (and other such) ways, Gandhi's formulations were theoretically and practically inadequate.
While there will always be admirers of Gandhi, intimate contact with his record reveals him to be a seriously flawed leader, popular more due to the particular conditions and circumstances of colonial (or post-colonial) India (and his unwavering leadership during the Quit India Movement), rather than the visionary or enlightened nature of his general tactics and formulations. The India of the future might well need to look beyond the myth and mystique of "Mahatma Gandhi" if it hopes to build a more just and harmonious order.
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Did Mahatma Gandhi sleep with virgins?
Dear Cecil:
In his book The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress: Secrets of the Female Taoist Masters, Hsi Lai writes that Mahatma Gandhi "periodically slept between two twelve-year-old female virgins. He didn't do this for the purpose of actual sexual contact, but as an ancient practice of rejuvenating his male energy. . . . Taoists called this method 'using the ultimate yin to replenish the yang.'" Now, far be it from me to disparage anyone's best-intentioned efforts to have his yang replenished. Still, I confess that this Gandhi-virgin-sandwich yarn pushes the needle of my BS detector way into the red. Did Gandhi indeed kip with preteen jail-quail? If so, what was his source of supply?
— David English, Somerville, Massachusetts
Well, they weren't 12. They also weren't all virgins; so far as is known they worked solo rather than in pairs; and Gandhi claimed he wasn't trying to rejuvenate his manly energy but rather prove he had it under control. In all other respects, however, the tome you cite (whatsamatter, David, the bookstore was out of The South Beach Diet?) is 100 percent accurate: the leader of the movement to free India of the British yoke did sleep with young females--and what's more, both parties were often naked at the time. He was 77 when this odd practice came to light, and from what we know sleeping was all they did. However, when a renowned holy man of any age pulls a stunt like this, he takes the chance that it'll turn up in a book with a title like The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress.
Remarkably, the critics eventually quieted down. Even Bose, who quit in protest and later discussed the issue in a book, My Days With Gandhi, remained an admirer. Gandhi continued to sleep with women until his assassination in 1948, and the matter is little remembered today. The esteem in which Gandhi was held no doubt partly accounts for the lack of repercussions, along with his advanced age. His notoriously eccentric views on sex may have been a factor too. Gandhi believed that sex for pleasure was sinful (for that matter, he felt eating chocolate was sinful), that sexual attraction between men and women was unnatural, and that husband and wife should live together as brother and sister, having sex only for purposes of procreation. (I take most of this from a memoir by journalist William Shirer, another admirer.) He swore off sex at age 36, required a similar vow of his disciples, and publicly freaked when he had a nocturnal emission in 1936 at age 67. Many hearing him rationalize his unusual blanket substitute probably figured, eh, that's the mahatma for you. (For what it's worth, the kinkier takes on the story--e.g., that Gandhi was regularly massaged by naked women--have no basis in fact that I can discover.) Whether or not you buy the notion that he didn't get off on contact with his very young bedmates (or feel that that would make it any less creepy), it says something about this profoundly strange guy that you can hear his claim that naked sleepovers were tests of purity for both participants and go: You think?
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**Supporters of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Hindu hard-right seem to believe that Gandhi is single-handedly to blame for partition, and for the mollycoddling of Muslims at the expense of the concerns, feelings and rights of Hindu communities. Members of hard-right Hindu political parties have often been quoted making anti-Gandhi remarks. In 2004, the state of Gujarat was criticized for including anti-Gandhi passages in its mandated school history textbooks
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Mahatma Gandhi's letters to Hitler
Dr. Koenraad ELST
Mahatma Gandhi's admirers are not in the habit of confronting embarrassing facts about their favourite saint. His critics, by contrast, gleefully keep on reminding us of a few facts concerning the Mahatma which seem to undermine his aura of wisdom and ethical superiority. One of the decisive proofs of Gandhi's silly lack of realism, cited by both his Leftist and his Hindutva detractors, is his attempted correspondence with Adolf Hitler, undertaken with a view to persuading Germany's dictator of the value of non-violence. I will now take upon myself the ungrateful task of arguing that in this attempt, Gandhi was (1) entirely Gandhian, and (2) essentially right.
Gandhi's first letter to Hitler
Both of Gandhi's letters to Hitler are addressed to "my frie nd". In the case of anyone else than the Mahatma, this friendliness would be somewhat strange given the advice which Hitler had tendered to the British government concerning the suppression of India's freedom movement. During a meeting with Lord Halifax in 1938, Hitler had pledged his support to the preservation of the British empire and offered his formula for dealing with the Indian National Congress: kill Gandhi, if that isn't enough then kill the other leaders too, if that isn't enough then two hundred more activists, and so on until the Indian people will give up the hope of independence. Gandhi may of course have been unaware of Hitler's advice, but it would also be charac teristically Gandhian to remain friendly towards his own would-be killer.
Some people will be shocked that Gandhi called the ultimate monster a "friend". But the correct view of sinners, view which I imbibed as the "Christian" view but which I believe has universal validity, is that they are all but instances of the general human trait of sinfulness. Hitler's fanaticism, cruelty, coldness of heart and other reprehensible traits may have differed in intensity but not in essence with those very same traits in other human beings. As human beings gifted with reason and conscience, sinners are also not beyond redemption: your fiercest persecutor today may repent and seek your friendship tomorrow. If Gandhi could approach heartless fanatics like Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a spirit of friendship, there is no reason why he should have withheld his offer of friendship from Hitler.
In his first letter dd. 23 July 1939 (Complete Works, vol.70, p.20-21), and which the Government did not permit to go, Gandhi does mention his hesitation in addres sing Hitler. But the reason is modesty rather than abhorrence: "Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an imper tinence." But the sense of impending war, after the German oc cupation of Czech-inhabited Bohemia-Moravia (in violation of the 1938 Munich agreement and of the principle of the "self-determination of nations" which had justified the annexation of German-inhabited Austria and Sudetenland) and rising hostility with Poland, prompted him to set aside his scruples: "Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth." Even so, the end of his letter is again beset with scruples and modesty: "Anyway I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you. I remain, Your sincere friend, Sd. M. MK Gandhi".
The remainder and substance of this short letter reads: "It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?"
This approach is held in utter contempt by post-War generations. Thus, the Flemish Leftist novelist and literature professor Kristien Hemmerechts has commented ("Milosevic, Saddam, Gandhi en Hitler", De Morgen, 16-4-1999): "In other words, Gandhi was a naïve fool who tried in vain to sell his non-violence as a panacea to the Führer."
This presupposes that Gandhi was giving carte blanche to Hitler for doing that which we know Hitler to have done, viz. the deportation of Jews and others, the mass killings, the ruthless oppression of the subject populations, the self-destructive military policies imposed on the Germans in the final stage of the war. But in reality, Gandhi's approach, if successful, would precisely have prevented that terrible outcome. Most of Hitler's atrocities were made possible by the war circumstances. In peacetime, the German public would not have tolerated the amount of repression which disfigured their society in 1941-45. Indeed, even in the early (and for German civilians, low-intensity) part of the war, protests from the public forced Hitler to stop the programme of euthanasia on the handicapped.
Moreover, it was the paranoia of the Nazi leadership about Jews as a "fifth column", retained from their (subjective and admittedly distorted) World War 1 experience of Leftist agitators in the German cities stabbing the frontline soldiers in the back, which made them decide to remove the Jews from society in Germany and the occupied countries. This is clear from official Nazi statements such as Heinrich Himmler's Posen speech of October 1943. In a non-war scenario, at least an organized transfer of the Jews to a safe territory outside Europe could have been negotiated and implemented. Under a peace agreement, especially one backed up by sufficient armed force on the part of the other treaty powers, Hitler could have been kept in check. By escalating rather than containing the war, the Allied as much as the Axis governments foreclosed the more humane options. (More on this in Elst: The Saffron Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi 2001, p.506-517, and in Elst: Gandhi and Godse, Voice of India, Delhi 2001, p.48-56)
When you start a war, you don't know beforehand just what terrible things will happen, but you do know in general that they will be terrible. That is the basic rationale of pacifism, and Gandhi was entirely correct to keep it in mind when most political leaders were getting caught up in war fever. Containing Hitler for a few more decades would have been a trying and testing exercise for Germany's neighbours, but Gandhi never claimed that non-violence was the way of the weak and the lazy. At any rate, would this effort in long-term vigilance not have been preferable to a war with fifty million dead, many more lives ruined, many countries overrun by Communism and fated to further massacres, and the unleashing of nuclear weapons on the world?
The chances for peace in 1939
At that point in time, Hitler's "worthy object" to which Gandhi refers, the topic of heated diplomatic exchanges and indeed the professed casus belli of the impending German invasion of Poland, was the rights of the German minority in Poland along with the issue of the "corridor". This was a planned overgro und railway-cum-motorway which should either link German Pomerania with German East Prussia through Polish West Prussia (including the city of Danzig); or, in case a referen dum in West Prussia favoured the region's return to Germany from which it had been taken in 1919, link land-locked Poland with a harbour set aside for the Poles on the Baltic coast through West Prussia. In 1945, all the regions concerned were ethnically cleansed of Germans and allotted to Poland, and Germany no longer claims any of them, but in 1939 many observers felt that the German demands were reasonable or at any rate not worth opposing by military means ("Who would want to die for Danzig?").
It was common knowledge that Poland was oppressing its German and Jewish minorities, so a case could be made that the advancement of the German minority (it goes without saying that Hitler cared less for the Polish Jews) was a just cause. It was also the type of cause which could be furthered through non-violent protests and mobilizing non-violent international support. It wouldn't formally humiliate Poland by making it give up territory or sovereignty, so perhaps the Polish government could be peacefully persuaded to change its ways regarding the minorities. On this point, Gandhi was undeniably right as well as true to himself by high lighting the non-violent option in striving for a worthy political object.
The question of the corridor was less manageable, as it did involve territory and hence unmistakable face-losing concessions by one of the parties. The apprehension which troubled the Poles and their well-wishers was that the demand of a corridor was merely the reasonable-sounding opening move of a total conquest of Poland. It is difficult to estimate Nazi Germany's exact plans for conquest, which was then already and has since remained the object of mythoma nic war propaganda. Among the uninformed public, it is still widely believed that the Nazis aimed at "conquering the world", no less; but this is nonsense. Hitler was ready to respect the British empire, and his alleged plan for an invasion of America was shown to be a British forgery planted in order to gain American support. In repeated peace offers to France and Britain in autumn 1939 and throughout 1940, Hitler proposed to withdraw from all historically non-German territories (which would still leave him in control of Austria, Sudetenland, West Prussia and some smaller border regions of Poland and, from May-June 1940 on, also Luxemburg, the Belgian East Cantons and French Elzas-Lotharingen) and maintain a territorial status-quo thenceforth.
It is possible that he meant it when he agreed to limit his territorial ambitions to historically German regions, at least where the competition consisted of allied or somehow respected nations such as the Italians or the French. However, in the case of the despised Slavic countries Poland and Ukraine, the fear of German conquest was more thoroughly justified.
In early 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the fledgling Soviet Union gave Germany control of Poland and western Ukraine. As a soldier, Hitler had applauded this gain of "living space", which was to be settled with German farmers after moving the Slavs to Siberia. It was also this brief gain which made the subsequent defeat in World War 1 and the implied loss of territory so unbearable for Hitler and many Germans of his generation. There is no doubt that the Nazi leaders had an eye on these fertile territories for a future expansion of Germany. It was less certain that they wanted to conduct this annexation at once: would they abide by an agreement on a mere corridor if one were concluded, respecting Poland's sovereignty over the rest of its territory?
The safest course was not to take chances and contain Hitler's expan sionism by military deterrence. As Poland itself could not provide this, it sought and received the assurance of help from Britain and France. This implied that a brief local war triggered by German aggression against Poland would turn into a protracted international war on the model of the Serb-Austrian crisis of 1914 triggering the Great War now known as World War 1. It was at this point that Gandhi asked Hitler to desist from any plans of invading Poland. There can be no doubt that this was a correct demand for a pacifist to make. Was it perhaps a foolish demand, in the sense that no words should have been wasted on Hitler? We will consider this question later on, but note for now that in July 1939 everything was still possible, at least if we believe in human freedom.
Gandhi's second letter to Hitler
On 24 December 1940, on the eve of Christmas, which to Christians is a day of peace when the weapons are silenced, Gandhi wrote a lengthy second letter to Hitler. The world situation at that time was as follows: Germany and Italy controlled most of Europe and seemed set to decide the war in their favour, the German-Soviet pact concluded in August 1939 was still in force, and under Winston Churchill, a lonely Great Britain was continuing the war it had declared on Germany immediately after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
On this occasion, Gandhi took the trouble of justifying his addressing Hitler as "my friend" and closing his letter with "your sincere friend", in a brief statement of what exactly he stood for: "That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespec tive of race, colour or creed." This very un-Hitlerian reason to befriend Hitler, what Gandhi goes on to call the "doctrine of universal friendship", contrasts with the Hitler-like hatred of one's enemy which is commonly thought to be the only correct attitude to Hitler.
Gandhi certainly earns the ire of post-war public opinion by stating: "We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents." To be sure, this was written in a period of fairly limited warfare, well before the total war with the Soviet Union and the USA, and well before the mass killing and deportation of Jews. But the prevailing attitude today is one of judging Hitler and his contemporaries' dealings with him as if they all had the knowledge that we have acquired in and since 1945. By that standard, anyone doubting the British government's hostile depiction of Hitler, including Gandhi, was practically an accomplice to Hitler's crimes.
However, while not giving up on the chance of converting Hitler to more peaceful ways, Gandhi was not that mild in judging the crimes Hitler had already committed. In particular, he criticized the already well-publicized Nazi conviction that the strong have a right to subdue the weak: "But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especial ly in the estimation of men like me who believe in human friendline ss. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity."
So, Gandhi felt forced to join the ranks of Hitler's opponents: "Hence we cannot possibly wish success to your arms." Yet this did not make him join the British war effort nor even some non-violent department of the British Empire's cause: "But ours is a unique position. We resist British imperialism no less than Nazism." To Gandhi, British imperialism is closely akin to Nazi imperialism: "If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny."
In outlining his position vis-à-vis British imperialism, Gandhi at once explained his attitude vis-à-vis Nazism: "Our resistance to it does not mean harm to the British people. We seek to convert them, not to defeat them on the battle-field." This was exactly what Gandhi was now trying out on Hitler: to convert him rather than defeat him, thus sparing him defeat if only he had listened.
Follows an explanation of the Gandhian method of making "their rule impossible by non-violent non-co-operation", based on "the knowledge that no spoliator can compass his end without a certain degree of co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the victim". In a slogan: "The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls." To this, Hitler probably made a mental comment that prisoners, such as the many people whom he himself was locking away, were quite entitled to their souls, as long as they left their land as living space and their bodies as slave labour to the rulers.
Unlike many of his countrymen, Gandhi rejected the idea of achieving freedom from British rule with German help: "We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid." Instead, Gandhi explained to Hitler, the non-violent method could defeat "a combination of all the most violent forces in the world".
In Gandhi's view, a violent winner is bound to be defeated by superior force in the end (a prediction proven true in Hitler's case), and even the memory of his victory will be tainted by its violent nature: "If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud." Here Gandhi probably projected his own disapproval of violent methods onto the masses of mankind, who are less inhibited by scruples about glorifying violent winners. Look at the lionization of Chengiz Khan in Mongolia, of Timur and Babar in Uzbekistan, of Alexander in Greece and Macedonia, even though their empires didn't last forever; and rest assured that the Germans would likewise have been proud of Hitler if he had been victorious.
Gandhi had to address Hitler
Gandhi would not have been Gandhi if he hadn't attempted to prevent World War 2. This was, to our knowledge, the single most lethal war in world history, with a death toll estimated as up to 50 million, not mentioning the even larger number of refugees, widows and orphans, people deported, people maimed, lives broken by the various horrors of war. It would be a strange pacifist who condoned this torrent of violence.
Nowadays it is common to lambast those who opposed the war. American campaigners against involvement in the war, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh, are routinely smeared as Nazis for no other reason than that they opposed war against the Nazis (or more precisely, war against the Germans, for only a minority of the seven million Germans killed during the war were Nazis). Leftist readers may get my point if they recall how those who opposed anticommunist projects such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba were automatically denounced as being Communists themselves. Do they think this amalgamation of opposition to war and collusion (or actual identity) with the enemy is justified?
Gandhi's utterances regarding Nazism leave no doubt about his firm hostility to this militaristic and freedom-hating doctrine. Yet, he opposed war against Nazism. This was entirely logical, for he rejected the militaristic element in both Nazism and the crusade against it. He did support the fight against Nazism but envisioned it as a non-violent struggle aimed at convincing rather than destroying.
It is not certain that this would have worked, but then Gandhism is not synonymous with effectiveness. Gandhi's methods were successful in dissuading the British from holding on to India, not in dissuading the Muslim League from partitioning India. From that angle, it simply remains an open question, an untried experiment, whether the Gandhian approach could have succeeded in preventing World War 2. By contrast, there simply cannot be two opinions on whether that approach of non-violent dissuasion would have been Gandhian. The Mahatma would not have been the Mahatma if he had preferred any other method. Our judgment of his letters to Hitler must be the same as our judgment of Gandhism itself: either both represented a lofty ethical alternative to the more common methods of power politics, or both were erroneous and ridiculous
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Mahatma Gandhi on the Martyrdom of Bhagat Singh
Freedom fighter Sardar Bhagat Singh was hanged by the British on accusations of anti-government activities on March 23, 1931. Here, Gandhi pays tribute to the patriotism of the young martyr while disagreeing with his revolutionary methods. Excerpted from Gandhi's article in Young India.
Bhagat Singh and his two associates have been hanged. The Congress made many attempts to save their lives and the Government entertained many hopes of it, but all has been in a vain.
Bhagat Singh did not wish to live. He refused to apologize, or even file an appeal. Bhagat Singh was not a devotee of non-violence, but he did not subscribe to the religion of violence. He took to violence due to helplessness and to defend his homeland. In his last letter, Bhagat Singh wrote --" I have been arrested while waging a war. For me there can be no gallows. Put me into the mouth of a cannon and blow me off." These heroes had conquered the fear of death. Let us bow to them a thousand times for their heroism.
But we should not imitate their act. In our land of millions of destitute and crippled people, if we take to the practice of seeking justice through murder, there will be a terrifying situation. Our poor people will become victims of our atrocities. By making a dharma of violence, we shall be reaping the fruit of our own actions.
Hence, though we praise the courage of these brave men, we should never countenance their activities. Our dharma is to swallow our anger, abide by the discipline of non-violence and carry out our duty.
March 29, 1931
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Comment from different blogs :
1. It is completely unjust to compare a patriot like bhagat singh with a hypocrite like gandi.
Most problems faced by our country today are due to gandi's biased and wrong policies.
This farcical secularism (which means only muslim appeasement), family politics, controlling of media and abjection of indian culture are all gandi's brainchildren.
PS - Hypocrite is an euphemism for 'traitor'.
2. our country did not get freedom due to the charkha
but people give all the credit to Gandhi
the british govt. did not get uprooted due to their dhoties
whose snap they have got on their currency notes
the ones who got freedom by shedding their blood
their contributions have been totally forgotten
by forgetting brave fighters like Bhagat Singh
people have made Gandhi as BAPU!
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