Gandhi Naked Ambition by Jad Adams

 

Great Soul or Unsavory Character?

1

Children begin by loving their parents, after a time they judge them; rarely if ever, do they forgive them. Oscar Wilde

2

--- posterity, in time, will give us all our true measure and assign to each of us our due and humble place; and in the end it is the judgment of posterity that really matters. --- And it is well to remember that there is in general no correlation between the judgment of posterity and the judgment of contemporaries. Nobel Laureate S. Chandrasekhar

 

And so, six decades after his demise, the Father of the Nation- Gandhi, is standing up to be judged by his children, the citizens of India. The record is mixed and the Jury is ambivalent. The glare of hindsight has dimmed the halo. Gandhi is not anymore what he appeared to his contemporaries. The author prosecutes with objectivity and dispassion that is rarely seen among the writers on Gandhi.

To begin with the author dispenses with the sobriquet that preceded his name, and simply calls him Gandhi. To validate this deviation from normal, the author quotes Gandhi himself, who admitted that the word ‘Mahatma’ leaves a stink in his nostril. Stripped of this prefix, the residual Gandhi is human enough to stand up to close scrutiny.

Autobiographies. Gandhi wrote two autobiographies, of which the first relating to his Satyagraha in South Africa, was found to be caddish, and detracting from the “good opinion one might have of the author, because it is not honourable” (Sonja Schlesin, for more on this see my review of the book Going Native by Thomas Weber). His second and widely cited autobiography is curiously titled the “Story of My Experiments with Truth”. The author justifiably argues that the only experiment that one could do with truth, is to propagate falsehood, or speak untruth, or at the very least suppress truth. Was Gandhi entirely truthful in his autobiography? Close inspection shows numerous instances when he was not.

(1)   He denied having become a Member of the Theosophical Society, but evidence suggests that he had become an Associate Member on 26^th March 1891. Why would he misrepresent this seemingly trivial piece of information? Is it likely because of the poor reputation some of the members of this organization?

(2)   In South Africa, Gandhi met a German Jew, Kallenbach, a confirmed bachelor with who he struck a life-long friendship and correspondence that ended only with the latter’s death. Kallenbach wrote him “charming love notes”, “ratified by love and yet more love” between them, “such love, as I hope, the world has not yet seen” (Gandhi’s words). Gandhi destroyed these letters as he felt sure that Kallenbach would not want them read by anyone else (page 100). Gandhi did not show any such discretion when he revealed the correspondence that he had with numerous others, who were seriously inconvenienced, embarrassed even, at the breach of confidence.

(3)   Gandhi developed in 1920, an infatuation for Saraladevi Chaudhurani. She was a Congress veteran of robust intellect, charm, and sexuality. Gandhi called her his “spiritual wife”, and spoke of an “intellectual wedding”. He even discussed the possibility of bigamy, and writes, “It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography” (page 168, Gandhi’s words). Unfortunately for him, his adherents printed over 100 volumes of his writings, including a three volume index. Desai wrote a 9 volume biography, and Pyarelal and Sushila wrote a 10 volume biography. With such prolific biographers, Gandhi was not able to hide anything!

Gandhi and Lenin. Lenin was of the view that the working class can at most make a trade union. They cannot possibly bring about a revolution. It was therefore necessary to have a cadre of trained, professional revolutionaries to lead and inspire the working class. Gandhi shared similar views and went about setting Ashrams, which trained Satyagrahis at a centralized base. Like Lenin, he was uncomfortable with a democratic system, in which voters’ opinions could swing the society away from his own ideas of the ascendency of individual conscience.

To put matters in simple words, Gandhi was not a democrat.

(1)   He was incapable of dialogue, intolerant of criticism, and his response to dissent was to simply restate his argument with increased force. He frequently went on threatening fasts to force his adversary’s hand. Ambedkar on more than one occasion had to give in, in fear that Gandhi’s possible death in a fast may end in a massacre of the Untouchables, a constituency he represented. Ambedkar was prescient about the Congress party’s capacity to wreak communal violence, which were later witnessed in the 1948 massacre of Chitpavan Brahmins, and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs.

(2)   Gandhi envisioned dictatorship and martial law, albeit of the nonviolent variety, where he would dictate and the satyagrahis submit themselves to the violence unleashed by the colonial Government. They would all fall one by one on his commend, until at the very end, he would step in and also fall (page 138).

(3)   At the Second Round Table Conference, the Congress was allotted 16 places. Gandhi convinced the Congress to permit him to participate as the sole representative of the Congress on the specious plea that there was no unity within Congress, thereby conceding fifteen places. At the Conference he did everything to enhance his own image among the public in Britain and on the continent. “He had no mastery over details: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones which did not vary whatever the theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist and often made little connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the Conference.” (page 200)

(4)   He favoured Nehru over Bose. When Bose was elevated to the Presidency of the Congress by a free and fair election, Gandhi worked vigorously behind the scenes to undermine Bose until the latter resigned in disgust. Again in 1945-46, he ensured that Nehru would be elected President of the Congress without an election, by working over Patel and Kriplani to withdraw their candidatures.  

(5)   Gandhi’s was a mind that resisted receiving information inconvenient to his prejudices. On being informed of the Armenian massacre by the Ottoman Turks, he refused to believe it possible. He supported the imperialism of the Ottoman Empire by launching the Khilafat Movement simply because he felt obliged to the Ali brothers. To say the least, it was a hare-brained idea, doomed to failure. And fail it did, but not before triggering Hindu-Muslim riots and a dispute with the Ali brothers about the expense of the movement that had been underwritten by the Ali brothers. In the final irony, the word ‘Khilafat’ itself was a uniquely Indian mispronunciation of the word ‘Caliphate’, and simply meant ‘Opposition’. Most rural Indians speaking Hindi, blissfully ignorant of the whole issue, took the movement to mean ‘Opposition to the British Empire’!  

 

Distaste for Modern Education. Although Gandhi advanced his career, and grew his financial resources considerably by modern education (acquired at great expense borne by his family), he denied the same not only to his own children, but the other children in the Ashram.

 

(1)   He took upon himself the task of teaching the children not only Gujarati, but also Urdu and Tamil. In the latter two languages, he was himself not adequately literate. And this teaching was carried out as he walked to work. Much later Gokhale found Gandhi’s writing crude and devoid of grammar! (page 134)

(2)   On numerous occasions, Gandhi himself said that he had no interest in History. Indeed he had no interest in Geography either. He introduced the spinning wheel in regions of the country which had no history or tradition of making cloth, spreading nation-wide, in Tagore’s words, a “spider mentality doomed to a perpetual conformity in its production of web”, calling it an “outrage upon human nature to force it through a mill and reduce it to some standardized commodity of uniform size and shape and purpose” (Tagore’s words, page 167).

(3)   On a visit to Benares Hindu University, he exhorted the students to leave their classes and work in the kitchen (page 165). Before imparting this piece of revolutionary advise, he had had the cooks dismissed! 

(4)   On the voyage to England from South Africa, Gandhi unceremoniously threw away Kallenbach’s sophisticated and expensive binoculars into the sea, on the specious plea of reducing one’s possessions (page 130). Given an opportunity, there is no doubt he would have thrown away telescopes, microscopes and spectroscopes, disclaiming the need of any knowledge that these gadgets may provide to humankind.  

Ashram Life, Health and Dieting. The Ashram was set up to train professional Satyagrahis. Who were the inmates? These were mostly drawn from single parent families and orphans. Hardly the material for the arduous life of the Ashram. Impossible vows were forced on this disempowered bunch in the garb of training; vows which were frequently broken. The Ashram had become a hotbed of gossip (page 182). When for instance, an unmarried couple had an affair, they were betrayed and denounced by their own comrades. 22 members of the Ashram including Gandhi went on a penitential fast and took to eating only uncooked food. All of them came down with ‘intestinal problems’, and Gandhi came down with dysentery (page 207). It is not known if the offending couple were also forced into this bizarre penitence.

Gandhi had this delusion of being a healer, and often took to doctoring the sick in the Ashram. Inmates wanting his attention deliberately reported themselves sick. On one occasion he prescribed the same remedy- a mud pack and fasting, to all the patients irrespective of their symptoms and ailment. He took great pride in this claiming that all sickness had a common origin. Fortunately for the Ashramites, at some point of time he appointed Pyarelal’s sister Sushila Nayar, a trained doctor, to the Ashram.

One of the most unsavoury incidents centred around the way Gandhi treated Chaganlal, one of his close and long standing associates and relative. Chaganlal was accused of thieving petty amounts from the Ashram’s supplies. There were many reasonable ways of dealing with this case.

(1)   He could have been pardoned after a warning- action that is in keeping with the spirit of forgiveness and nonviolence.

(2)   He could have been asked to leave the Ashram, and his deposit of Rs. 10,000, kept with the Ashram returned to him with or without deducting the loss caused by his petty theft.

(3)   A complaint could have been filed with the local police- a legally valid though unimaginative way of dealing with a long term associate.

Gandhi would have none of these ways. He summarily threw Chaganlal and his family out of the Ashram and refused to return his deposit- a princely sum. He did not yield to appeals that the return of his money was crucial to his restarting his life outside the Ashram (page 184). Gandhi was such- he was complainant, prosecutor and judge rolled into one. He was insensitive to the immorality of his actions.

The most compelling criticism of the Ashram came from Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal. “Petty regulations” on diet, such as the use of salt or milk “or any of the other things he [Gandhi] would rule on- these had no bearing on character. There were more desirable aspects of character to be encouraged: unselfishness, charity, courage. Instead of promoting these, Gandhi, fostered acolytes who paid lip-service to the high principles of the ashram while in fact pleasing him merely by keeping to the minutiae of the dietary rule book and obeying his every word without question.” (page 183)

How did his more compliant son, Ramdas behave? Ramdas married Nirmala, an orphan in the Ashram. He immediately waded into a most opulent life style spending all his monthly salary of Rs. 40 from the Ashram. He took a large house and filled it with expensive English things, and frequently gifted his wife with new clothes. He once roundly admonished her when he caught her reading one of Gandhi’s articles on celibacy within marriage!

Does anything more need to be said on the effect of the Ashram discipline on the inmates?

Gandhi and Celibacy. Celibacy, in simple terms, denying oneself sexual pleasure, is a well-established tradition in most religions. Those accepting vows of celibacy eschew contacts with individuals of the opposite gender. This avoidance may take different forms and different degrees. In an Institutional context such as a school or a hospital, individuals of different gender could work together but eschew personal relationships. In more extreme forms, such as in religious institutions, vows of celibacy could exclude members of the opposite gender entirely from one’s social circles.

Gandhi viewed celibacy in his own very unique and perverse way. He interpreted celibacy to mean the ability to resist sexual temptation. In his world view, there were no gender neutral relationships. All contacts between members of different genders were presumed to have an element of sexual temptation. How this temptation was overcome became the core of his concept of celibacy. The root to this interpretation was his own over-sexed personality. In promoting his concept of celibacy, he asked the rhetorical question: Of what use is celibacy in an impotent person? He therefore artificially created situations of sexual temptation among members of the Ashram, and demanded that the Ashramites, bound by the vows of celibacy resist the temptations by self-restraint.

As a proto-Mahatma in South Africa, he encouraged young adults of both genders to bathe together, and indeed, had them sleep next to each other to test their ability to resist temptation. On one occasion, when there was a little incident involving a boy and a girl (sexual intercourse as suggested by Ved Mehta in ‘Gandhi and His Apostles’; mere sexual banter as suggested in the present book), Gandhi wanted to punish the girl by cutting off her hair. When the spirited girl refused to accept such a punishment, “Gandhi worked on the elderly women on the farm and got their support and finally the girls came round and he cut off their hair himself” (page 111-112, emphasis added).

Prior to this incident, he had begun to practice celibacy in his marriage for a very practical reason: he had already had four children, and he could ill afford to have anymore. His wife had become an invalid, thanks to the punishing discipline and life of the Farm. He had no access to birth control measures. It never occurred to him that others on his farm, and least of all the young adults living there, had no such predilections and his vows had no value for them.

After he was anointed ‘Mahatma’, he took these experiments to new highs. He slept in the nude with young girls testing his restraint, and this in his late seventies. On at least one occasion, Sushila and he ‘were alone and shouting excitedly at each other at about 3:20 am, some forty minutes before normal waking time” (page 255). The author remarks in passing that these experiments may have involved something more than just lying beside each other. At this stage, so late in his life (1945-46), he seems to have further refined his concept of celibacy to mean avoidance of penetrative sex. There are hints to suggest that all matters of sexual stimulation were acceptable if one could only hold back ejaculation (page 245). This led to numerous unsavoury practices with ever younger women. In one particular case of an eighteen year old married girl, he advised the young husband to practice celibacy in marriage and then went about sleeping next to her. This particular young woman did not take off all her clothes despite being commanded to do so, and kept her “petticoat and choli (bodice) on” (page 263). By conflating his particular brand of celibacy with spiritual strength and nonviolence, he was able to continue his experiments even in the midst of the most horrific Hindu-Muslim riots in Naokhali and elsewhere. Pyarelal, his secretary, who was asked to print the results of these experiments, “reports Gandhi’s activities with Manu, but not with his own sister Sushila” (page 258). Poor Pyarelal was obsessed with Manu and wanted to marry her, but Gandhi played his usual psychological games with Manu, and worked on her to reject Pyarelal’s suit.

Fortunately for his own sake and those of his coworkers he was assassinated. The author remarks: “It is hard to imagine what sexual experiment he might have thought of next.”

To conclude this section, Gandhi, while advocating celibacy for all, explored the fullest range of sexual experiences that his advanced age could permit, and this, right up to the end of his life.

Gandhi and nonviolence. Gandhi plied the myth that India is a land of peace and nonviolence. A myth that was eagerly received and widely broadcast by his Western admirers such as Romain Rolland. Parallely, Gandhi believed that Indians were effete and cowardly. He again asked the rhetorical question: Of what use is nonviolence in a cowardly man incapable of committing violence? To solve this conundrum, he first wanted Indians to bear arms and prove themselves capable of violence (page 152-153). Subsequently, the Indian after receiving military training would eschew violence by exercise of self-restraint! At the same time, as the British were already a militant people he would convert them directly to nonviolence. This kind of perversity was unique to his thinking. Given the staggering illogic of such arguments, he failed to convince anyone outside his closed circles about the supposed superiority of nonviolence.

Gandhi’s views on his countrymen were shaped by those who cohabited his closed inner circles. When in 1918, he went about enlisting volunteers to help the Empire in the Great War, he could gather a paltry 100, of which, Patel and he, were the top two (Turner, Catching Up with Gandhi). This Reviewer can think of three reasons for his disappointing show.

(1)   By then, with the War in its fourth year, every Indian who had even the remotest inclination to fight had already enlisted. The number was a staggering 1.5 million. That Gandhi was unaware of this simple statistic, exhibited his disdain not only to History, but also to current events.

(2)   Gandhi’s appeal to enlist, coming as it did soon after his campaign in favour of nonviolent resistance to British rule, revolted the public, and in a few places they demonstrated against him.

(3)   He was also carrying out this campaign in Gujarat, which was historically not a catchment for military recruitment.

But providence saved him from serving the in the military. He simply fell sick. His sickness was brought on by his unique diet of peanut butter and lemons. He complicated matters by fasting to recover. In the process he almost died! (page 154) The British Empire presumably sighed in relief, as with such soldiers, it would need no enemies to lose a war.

Hindu-Muslim Discord, Partition, and Genocide. With his characteristic disdain for evidence that went against his pet beliefs, he insisted that Hindus and Muslims could live in amity in an undivided India. Despite the horror of recurring communal riots, he believed that unarmed men would not be able to kill each other! The author perceptively writes: “For all his words about Hindu-Muslim unity, the common people refuse to acquiesce, instead acting out their ancestral hatreds.” In this matter, Ambedkar had a superior understanding. He recognized that the Hindus and Muslims comprise two nations locked together. If partition was to be accepted as a concept, then for it to succeed in practice, there is an imperative for an exchange of population between the two countries.

Gandhi refused to see what was so evident to Ambedkar. Finally, partition became a fiat accompli in the backdrop of massive communal riots fueled by Jinnah’s call for direct action- a thinly veiled call for the genocide of Hindus and Sikhs by Muslim mobs. The latter reacted with equal ferocity. Gandhi went from one place to another to stop the violence and bring peace- so goes the narrative. But in actual fact, it took so long for him to move from one place to another, that in most places he reached only when the perpetrators of violence had been fatigued by their efforts, and the victims obliterated. In all these journeys he was accompanied by his usual entourage carrying all the paraphernalia of his daily use such as “the buckets, the bathtubs, the commode, the syringes and whatnot” (page 254), not to mention his travelling library of 20 books, local police and armed guards provided by the Government.  

The Judgment. Gandhi’s contribution to the freedom struggle is widely known, extensively written about and intensely studied. This book highlights facts that escape popular narration. In the light of the totality of Gandhi’s legacy we ask the following questions and attempt to answer them:

(1)   But for Gandhi, could we have achieved independence sooner than we actually did? Possibly. With skillful political negotiation, rather than rhetorical propaganda, the second round table conference could have opened a path for early independence, even if it was in an altered form from what was finally achieved. By careful self-governance the model could have been refined. But for this to be achieved, Gandhi would have had to put the nation before self. It was a pity that he failed in this, his most crucial test.

(2)   Could partition have been avoided? Most certainly, if skillful political negotiations had yielded a comforting degree of autonomy in running the country before the Muslim demand for a separate homeland hardened into a non-negotiable position.

(3)   Could the partition have been done better? Once partition was accepted as unavoidable, all the parties involved started negotiations over the geography, as though the people did not matter. The date for independence was decided leaving large numbers of people religiously divided on the wrong side of the boundaries on the map.

(4)   Was the mass migration of 11 million people and genocide avoidable? Yes. If the necessity of the exchange of populations had been accepted, an organized exchange of population could have been affected, at the very least in the border states of Punjab and Bengal. A five year delay in the grant of independence would have mattered little, if it could save lives and trauma for millions. In fact a single year’s delay would have seen not only the demise of Jinnah, but also of the impetus for partition.

In conclusion, Gandhi’s unrealistic, rigid, and illogical positions on many political issues led to a genocide, which continues even today, with daily abductions and forced conversions of non-muslims in Pakistan, and growing stridency against non-muslims in Bangladesh. This has seen the proportion of non-muslim population in both countries decline precipitously- a sort of tail end result of Jinnah’s call for direct action.