“Ironically, Gandhi was killed by a Hindu Chitpavan brahmin who drew his inspiration from the very same Ram who was put at the heart of Hindu nationalism by Gandhi himself. It is this very same Ram that became the source of the worst kind of violence that rocked Gujarat and the country on several occasions. In other words, Ram, who is seen as a hero who protects virtuous people, was never a nonviolent hero.”________________________________
by Kancha Ilaiah
(March 28, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Mahatma Gandhi and his ideas are now being debated in various forums in the context of the 60th year of his assassination. The television channel, CNN-IBN, conducted a Face the Nation debate on January 30 on the relevance of Gandhi. Rev. Jesse Jackson of the United States, who was invited by the Union government to deliver this year’s Gandhi’s Memorial Lecture, was on the panel along with this author and Dr Tridip Surood, an Ahmedabad-based Gandhian scholar.
The questions being pondered were: Was Gandhi’s sacrifice in vain? Did his nonviolence yield any results? How does the nation face Gandhi on the one hand and the Hindutva school of Nathuram Godse, who killed him, on the other? Jesse Jackson reveres Gandhi for being an apostle and a symbol of nonviolence in the world. The admiration of African-Americans for Gandhi goes back to the days of Martin Luther King Jr, who fought for black civil rights.
It is in the background of this black civil rights movement that a host of black leaders, thinkers, artists and writers have emerged. Even the emergence of Barack Obama should be seen in this context. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr got assassinated in the thick of their nonviolent struggle for freedom and human rights.
One major difference between them was that the Gandhian nonviolence was sought to be rooted in Hindu ethic and King’s was sought to be rooted in Christian ethic. These two ethics differ greatly.
Ironically, Gandhi was killed by a Hindu Chitpavan brahmin who drew his inspiration from the very same Ram who was put at the heart of Hindu nationalism by Gandhi himself. It is this very same Ram that became the source of the worst kind of violence that rocked Gujarat and the country on several occasions. In other words, Ram, who is seen as a hero who protects virtuous people, was never a nonviolent hero.
Both Godse and the Hindutva forces invoked the same Ram for justifying Hindu cultural nationalist violence. Gandhi consistently carried the Bhagavad Gita in his hands and that is the book that remains in the hands of his statues. Gita as a spiritual text was constructed in a violent war terrain and the book preaches violence and not nonviolence per se. So what did Gandhian nonviolence and the Hindu nationalism that he sought to build have in common?
Gandhi repeatedly said that his ideal future Indian state should resemble Ram Rajya. What does that imply? Dalit-bahujan intelligentsia from the days of Mahatma Phule had shown that Ram Rajya and Bali Rajya (Bali, a contemporary Shudra King, was killed by Ram at the behest of his brahmin gurus) represent opposite cultural systems and governance. Bali stood for human equality whereas Ram justified the existence of caste system.
Ambedkar, who was also Gandhi’s contemporary, did not own up the Ramayan and Mahabharat heritage and instead he inherited the Buddhist tradition. The Buddhist Indian tradition stands for genuine nonviolence. Why did not Gandhi invoke the Buddhist tradition to be a messenger of nonviolence? The Buddhist tradition of nonviolence would have put his message on a consistent ethical moral course.
Having come from a Baniya family, he could have opted for the Jain tradition as well, because it was the most nonviolent Indian tradition. Why didn’t Gandhi choose that tradition? He chose to remain within the Hindu framework as that was seen as his family religion. But the contradiction between Hinduism and the philosophy of nonviolence is quite obvious. Neither Ram nor Krishna represented the nonviolent philosophical tradition. Gandhi entered into a major contradiction here.
He also projected the nationhood as Hindu. Instead, he should have kept religious belief personal and should have kept Indian nationalism outside the boundaries of religion. Gandhi, unfortunately, combined religion and politics, and the nation keeps on paying a heavy price for that. Neither did he keep his non-cooperation and Satyagraha completely in the secular domain. At every moment, he invoked Hindu symbols. He was the one who constructed an ideological basis for Hindu nationalism.
This is where Ambedkar and Jinnah developed enormous suspicion about the future of dalits and Muslims. Dalits, for instance, had gone through centuries of Hindu violence and Gandhi could not have denied the link between Hindu violence and the suffering of untouchables. Gandhian nonviolence thus is a problematic that could not be essentialised. While Gandhi is being projected as an epitome of nonviolence, India as a nation has got habituated to walk over the corpses without any feeling of loss. This situation should worry all of us
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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