Reassessing Mahatma: Did Gandhi-giri really worked?
Several weeks ago, I came across this piece by Dr Dipak Basu (Professor in International Economics in Nagasaki University, Japan) examining the role of Satyagraha in the national freedom movement.
Until I read the article, I used to believe that Satyagraha as a tactic was effective to at least some extent in the fight for freedom. Now I am beginning to have some doubts. I would be very interested to hear from other readers on this topic.
But before that, excerpts from “Satyagraha and India”s freedom Movement” in which Dr Base analyses Gandhi-ji’s three major Satyagraha movements and their impact on the struggle for independence.
Although Gandhi-ji’s involvement with the freedom movement began with his visit to India in 1896, it was not until six years later that he began to get seriously involved.
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“…In his second visit for a year in 1901-2 he attended the Congress session in Calcutta and spent more than a month with G.K. Gokhale, who was very loyal to the British and was opposed to the ideas of freedom movement of Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Chittaranjan Das, Surendranath Banerjee and Bipin Pal. Thus, Gandhi has joined the Empire-loyalist camp within the Congress, disinterested in the Swaraj movement of Tilak.
Gandhi’s first Satyagraha:
Returning to South Africa, Gandhi began to defy the Transvaal Asiatic Ordinance, where the government wanted all Asiatic, Arabs and Turks to carry a pass all the time to prove their eligibility to stay in South Africa. It was not a big issue, as in most countries even today foreigners must carry such documents anyway.
Throughout the Satyagraha, Gandhi emphasized that it was not so much for the rights of the Indians in South Africa as for the honour of the motherland, but which “motherland’ Gandhi was talking about was not clear.
One of the most dramatic events of the Satyagraha was the burning of the passes. The question is did that help the Indians in South Africa. The answer is definitely negative. Indians were rounded up and deported in many cases. The campaign lasted for over seven years, and in 1913 hundreds of people went to jail - and thousands of striking Indian miners faced imprisonment and injury.
Even when General Smut decided to meet Gandhi, it was made clear that there would be no further immigration of the Indians to South Africa. Passes were withdrawn temporarily but soon after laws were passed to restrict the non-Europeans into designated areas in every cities; that was the beginning of the legal racial segregations in South Africa.
By all means Gandhi’s Satyagraha was not a success, but that had not stopped certain people and the English language media in India at that time to propagate Gandhi as victorious against a racist government of British origin for whom Gandhi had worked as medical orderly in the war against the Dutch settlers in South Africa and became a recruitment agent during the First World War…”
Dr Basu also notes that “…(during this time)..Gandhi had practically no contact with the African and their liberation movement”.
Gandhi’s second Satyagraha :
“…Through extraordinary good fortune, due to the deaths of Tilak by September 1920 Gandhi in an extraordinary political coup was elected himself as the president of the All-India Home Rule League and steered a resolution in favour of Non-Cooperation to preserve the Khilafat but got rid of the freedom movement in the Congress session in Calcutta.
Later all the important leaders of the Congress, Bipin Pal, Surendranath Banerjee, Ajit Singh were either expelled or neutralized by Gandhi. Tilak had gathered about Rs.10 lakhs, a huge sum these days to finance his freedom movement. Gandhi used that up to please the followers of Turkish Khalifa, who was defied by the Muslims in the Turkish occupied Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and in Turkey itself by the reforming leader Kamal Attaturk. Gandhi and the Muslim leaders of India were ignorant about these political developments in the Middle East.
The agitation to save the Turkish Sultan by the “Non-Cooperation’ of the Congress party was initiated by the Khilafat leadership, not by the Congress.
Gandhi without consulting other leaders of the Congress made these two issues his own by presiding over the All India Khilafat Conference in Delhi in November 1919, and started his programme of peaceful non co-operation with the British included boycotts of British goods and institutions to protect the Turkish Sultan, leading to arrests of thousands of the people for defying British laws.
Thus, the second Satyagraha has nothing to do with the freedom movement of India and was a regressive movement to preserve the violent crude feudal Sultanate of Turkey who had colonized a vast part of the world, from Iraq to Greece with its inhuman rule…”
Gandhi’s third Satyagraha:
Gandhis political influence was minimal for some years, until the Calcutta Congress in December 1928, where he demanded dominion status for India, and threatened a nation-wide campaign but he had also expelled Srinivas Iyenger from the Congress for demanding complete independence of India.
Subhas Chandra Bose was expelled along with more than 200 of his followers from the Congress party for similar reason in 1939.
On March 12, 1930 Gandhi started a March in Dandi, Gujarat to break the law, which had deprived the people of his right to make his own salt, although for most of the people of India it was only symbolic as they never did used to make their own salt in any way. On April 6, 1930 Gandhi broke the Salt law at the sea beach at Dandi. This simple act was immediately followed by a nation-wide defiance of the law.
This movement came to be known as Civil Disobedience Movement. Within a few weeks about a hundred thousand men and women, thinking mistakenly that it was the beginning of the freedom movement, were in jail, throwing mighty machinery of the British Government out of gear. Gandhi was arrested on May 5, 1930.
After his arrest, a more aggressive non-violent rebellion took place in which 2500 volunteers raided salt depots at Dharsana. In April 1930 there were violent police-crowd clashes in Calcutta. Approximately over 100,000 people were imprisoned in the course of the Civil disobedience movement (1930-31), while in Peshawar unarmed demonstrators were fired upon by the British. Gandhi withdrew himself from the movement. Sacrifice of the people was in vain. The British government had never withdrawn the tax on salt.
In January 1931, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, ordered the release of Gandhi and together they signed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which called for an end of Congresss civil disobedience. In August, Gandhi went to London to represent the Indian National Congress at the Second Round Table Conference; the first one was held without Congress participation in November 1930. That Conference in 1931has failed mainly because of the change of government in Britain.
Gandhi returned to India and decided to resume the civil disobedience movement in January 1932. India was then under the repressive policies of the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon. The Indian National Congress had been outlawed. Gandhi had restricted the civil disobedience movement to him and suspended it completely in 1934.Gandhi then had started his campaign against untouchability.
Thus, Gandhi’s second Satyagraha also could not achieve anything much because Gandhi as usual refused to continue it. That was Gandhi’s last and the only Satyagraha as a mass political movement for the freedom movement.
…
In August 1942, Gandhi gave forth the slogan Quit India for the British but he had no plan how to execute the programme. The Congress passed a resolution on 8 August 1942, which stated that, the immediate ending of the British rule in India, was an urgent necessity both for the sake of India and the success of United Nations. The congress resolved to launch a mass Civil Disobedience struggle on the widest possible scale for the vindication of India’s unalienable right to freedom and independence if the British rule did not end immediately. The day after the resolution was passed, the Congress was banned and all the important leaders were arrested including Gandhi. That provoked spontaneous demonstrations at many places and people resorted to the use of violence, not Satyagraha, to dislodge the foreign rule.
Unarmed crowds faced police and military firing on many occasions and they were also machine gunned by low- flying aircraft. Repression also took the form of taking hostages from the villages, imposing collective fines, whipping of suspects and burning of villages. By the end of 1942, over 60,000 persons had been arrested. Martial law had not been proclaimed but the army did whatever it wanted. The brutal and all-out repression succeeded within a period of 6 or 7 weeks in bringing about a cessation of the struggle. As usual Gandhi already withdrew himself from that movement within a few days after it has started.
Since 1942, Gandhi was busy making plans to partition India to create Pakistan, the idea of which Gandhi has accepted even in 1940, according to both B.R.Ambedkar and Sri Aurobindo. Nehru and Patel as representative of Gandhi were in regular consultations with the Vice-Roy of India on how best to help the British war efforts against Japan and the Azad Hind Fauz. Freedom movement was not in their mind.
Gandhi had initiated a number of his personal Satyagraha on a number of issues unrelated to the freedom movement; most of these were not successful.
Sri Aurobindo made this comment about Satyagraha:
“Gandhi fasted in the Ahmedabad mill-hands strike to settle the question between mill- owners and workers. The mill-owners did not want to be responsible for his death and so they gave way, without of course, being convinced of his position. But as soon as they found the situation normal they reverted to their old ideas. The same thing happened in South Africa. He got some concessions there by passive resistance and when he came back to India it became worse than before.”
Analysis:
It is a common belief in India and in the Western world that Gandhi through his non-violence Satyagraha has gave India independence from the British rule. The truth is somehow very different.
According to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee…the creation of the INA( Indian National Army) and mutiny the RIN ( Royal Indian Navy) of February 18–23 1946 made the British realise that their time was up in India.
An extract from a letter written by P.V. Chuckraborty, former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, on March 30 1976, reads thus:
“When I was acting as Governor of West Bengal in 1956, Lord Clement Attlee, who as the British Prime Minister in post war years was responsible for India’s freedom, visited India and stayed in Raj Bhavan Calcutta for two days. I put it straight to him like this: “The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?’ In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, “Minimal’.”*
(Reference: Anuj Dhar’s website: www.hindustantime.com/news/specials/Netaji/; Dhanjaya Bhat, The Tribune, February 12, 2006; Majumdar, R. C., Jibanera Smritideepe, Calcutta, General Printers and Publishers, 1978, pp. 229-230; R.Borra, “Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian National Army, and The War of Indias Liberation’, The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1982 (Vol. 3, No. 4), pages 407-439; http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v03/v03p407_Borra.html)
Famous historian Ramesh Chadra Majumdar dismissed the contribution of Satyagraha to the eventual independence of India.
He said, “ The campaigns of Gandhi… came to an ignoble end about fourteen years before India achieved independence… In particular, the revelations made by the INA trial, and the reaction it produced in India, made it quite plain to the British, already exhausted by the war, that they could no longer depend upon the loyalty of the sepoys for maintaining their authority in India. This had probably the greatest influence upon their final decision to quit India. (Majumdar, R.C., Three Phases of Indias Struggle for Freedom, Bombay, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan).
Thus, one should not just believe in the official version of the recent Indian history, which has propagated that only Gandhi and Nehru through the Satyagraha has brought freedom to India.
The reality is quite different, but was hidden so far due the massive state power to advertise Satyagraha, which as a mass movement has failed everywhere whether in India or in South Africa.
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Related Posts:
Would “Gandhi…have become an asterisk of history rather than an icon”?
Filed under: British Rule in India, Indian Media, Modern Indian History, Pakistan related, Politics and Governance in India | Tagged: British Raj, Gandhi-giri, Independence Movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Partition, Quit India Movement, Satyagraha
We should look at Gandhi’s patent Satyagrah thing from a practical point of view. What Gandhi wants is that if someone attacks us we should not fight back, far from that we should not even try to stop him from hurting us…and go on receiving blow after blow. And in due process a time would come when the beater will feel pity upon us and hence stop beating us ! This will be our victory - the victory of the good over evil ! Simple ! What a wonderful idea…and how nice it sounds
Dear Sir,
It is not that the author is wrong in his views. Please understand that for the first fifty years after our independence nothing was more stupid than to question the acts of Gandhi and Nehru.
Today questions are being asked , but such a right is being trampled upon by the English media, as the language still rules supreme, and the bullying of the criminal politicians.
Unless a few “true” historians “really” go through all the original documents and the records maintained at that time the truth will never be revealed.
We will only have the histories as propounded by the Stephenians, Loyolites, Xavierites and nobody else, and the truth will never be revealed.
A few questions, related to the pre independence period; Where did all these Institutions get their land to build such institutions, did they pay for them, or a lease was granted or what was the source?
If I can hazard a guess these were outright gifts to these institutions and hence what do you expect from their outputs, something other than what the author has questioned?
Regards,
vck
@Shantanu: The hindustantimes link to Anuj Dhar’s website is broken.
It is hard for me to understand that historians can just tweak information while people who have watched the events live amongst their midst. However, I do agree with some of this thoughts.
While I can understand that satyagraha evoked sympathy from indians who might have enlisted with the brits, I am not sure exactly what it did to the colonists to leave the country.
May be they felt the cost-benefit ratio (cost of running the country to the loot) was such that it made it non-profitable and they left. And satyagraha created enough restlessness in the country to mess up their budgets.
May be satyagraha was the most effective way at that time, since we were lagging behind in weapon technology anyway.
@ Prakash: Good points…and I have the feeling that we may never know the full truth (as vck has hinted as well).
The picture is grey, not black and white and history unfortunately, rarely has answers to “what if?”.
We have this disgraceful habit of looking at our great Independence struggle from a bania point of view. Why do we try to sideline the fundamental question : was Gandhi-giri relevant during those troubled times ? Did Gandhi and his experiments with truths (or what he wrongly believed to be truths) really helped the actual heroes of the Movement ? or it simply helped the enemy within get more and more out of nothing ?
>> May be satyagraha was the most effective way at that time, since we were lagging behind in weapon technology anyway >>
Agree with your first point.
Not so sure about the second one.The Vietnamese were also behind in weapons technology but they kicked out the French at Dien Bein Phu. We also had access to Japanese help under Bose.
I suspect the real answer to why the British were so successful in India lies in their wily exploitation of the caste system. The castes most prone to violence were brutally suppressed and branded criminal tribes. These tribes then diverted their anger from the British to the society around them that accepted such an insult to them.
Nonetheless, a lot of members of the INA were from these groups (at least from my knowledge of TN)
I really do not think the British would have survived even a moderately violent co-ordinated struggle on the scale of the war being waged by the LTTE.
We never really tried and full credit to the British for that.
It is difficult to separate cause and effect, especially when you have multiple events occurring at the same time. Just as Dr Basu has built a circumstantial case against Gandhi, similarly one can do the same for pretty much everyone else who contributed to the Indian Independence movement.
One can keep arguing about what was more important and critical among these:
1. The Civil Disobedience movement - the first real mass mobilisation of Indian people. Dr Basu makes the mistake of saying that this did not achieve anything tangible, but is not the first-time-mobilisation of millions of common people (and not just rajputs or marathas) across the country itself not an achievement? And, the fact that for the first time the British Empire spoke to an Indian politician as an equal interloculator?
2. The killing of Saunders (I think) in Pune - for the first time, the British awoke to the fact that their top officials could also be targeted directly by Indian revolutionaries (terrorists) and they could be picked off one by one.
3. The Dandi Satyagragha - Again Dr Basu, I think deliberately, misses the point about the Dandi March. This was open flouting by an individual and his unarmed followers of the most powerful empire in the world (past and then). Can you imagine the effect of that on the common people of India?
4. The INA reaching India’s North East - This was as at the height of World War II when the British was increasingly being sandwiched between the Germans and the Japanese. I think India’s history would have looked different (not necessarily better!) if Bose had managed to break through Imphal and march towards Delhi. But the shock to the system was huge, despite the defeat of the INA.
5. The Navy Mutiny in Bombay - this was literally the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The final catalyst that led to Independence, and I don’t think our history books underplay this event.
But, think about it - could #5 have come about if national consciousness had not been raised by events #1 and #3? And, could #4 have come about if #2 had not shown the way? And would #1-3 have had any meaning without events #4-5?
Berating and belittling Gandhi has become the latest fashion, I think.
While the history that is taught in schools may have been recast in a heroic Nehru-Gandhi mold, is that the only reason that the “rural” people of India hold Gandhi in such high esteem?
Remember that at the time of India’s independence, literacy rates outside the cities was sub-30% if not lower. So, Gandhi’s stories were passed on in the great verbal tradition by parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to their offspring. By people WHO WERE THERE to their near and dear ones …. that is how the legend of Gandhi has built up.
I wonder what locus standi a historian of today can have against these stories that have been handed down?
It is also true that Gandhi was believed to have said many times in the 20’s and 30’s that people of India were not yet ready for full Independence.
And, when I read that, I wondered how can any person not be ready for independence? Don’t we all desire freedom?
And, today, when I see my fellow citizens break every rule and law that they think they can get away with, I wonder if Gandhi was not indeed not right? That we got freedom, but no civic values or sense or responsibility.
@rc: Thanks for the cmment. This is an intriguing thought:
“I suspect the real answer to why the British were so successful in India lies in their wily exploitation of the caste system.
Does anyone else believes this may have been a contributing factor? I would like to explore this more.
Also, this is interesting:
Nonetheless, a lot of members of the INA were from these groups (at least from my knowledge of TN)
and I would tend to agree with: “I really do not think the British would have survived even a moderately violent co-ordinated struggle
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@ Patriot: My point was not against “Gandhi” as such but against the tactic of Satyagraha.
Good points re. #1-5.
As for why Gandhi-ji is still remembered in villages, there could be many reasons. Although literacy rates were low, India was ruled by Congress for several decades after independence and Gandhiji was the main icon of INC (less so Tilak and even less so, Bose).
It is possible that the ruling elites continued to project the icon and prop up these stories to a point where reality got mixed up with “perception”.
A historian’s locus standi must always be facts - to the extent that we can find them. In that sense, a re-examination of the past is not necessarily something to shy away from (this is my point of view - you may disagree)
As for ” we got freedom, but no civic values or sense or responsibility , that is a separate and I belive quite complex discussion in itself.
Shantanu: “A historian’s locus standi must always be facts - to the extent that we can find them. In that sense, a re-examination of the past is not necessarily something to shy away from (this is my point of view - you may disagree)”
Fully agree with the above. I think we certainly need independent historians to revisit our “history” …. I was actually comparing and contrasting this particular historian with current folk lore, nothing more or less.
Also, a historian may depend on facts, but ultimately he interprets them according to his reasoning. That is why you have many histories!!!!