Independence Thinker

This article is a red flag for Manto... :-)

Let the games begin!!

Dalrymple bhai:

Another excellent article. A must read for those who wish to try and make Gandhi into some sort of a hero he was not.

By emphasising Gandhi's racist casteist fascist views, my own objective has been to bring objectivity to the study of Gandhi... not to demonise him ... Now that William Dalrymple has taken up the cause ... I can sleep easy.

I wish to quote the following for people :

Both books argue in different ways that the scale of the man's achievement in effectively bringing the colonial period to an end has masked, to a certain extent, the extreme weirdness of his ideas. A decade ago Patrick French wrote a book called Liberty or Death which for the first time highlighted some of Gandhi's more unusual practices. "If Gandhi is your hero," he wrote, "it can be a deflating experience to read what he actually did and said... The authorized version of the Mahatma is very different from the real one. Far from being a wise and balanced saint, Gandhi was an emotionally troubled social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator."

Among the odder practices which French highlighted were Gandhi's many dietary fads, his enthusiasm for personally giving his friends and acquaintances saline enemas, and particularly his habit of sleeping with nubile young women, including his great-niece, in order to test his vows of celibacy. He was also "a great believer in the increment of human excrement," writes French, "and had elaborate theories about its use in the cultivation of crops, a passion that must have been aided by his having no sense of smell. "

French's fine book got excellent reviews, but when it was serialised in the Indian magazine Outlook his irreverence to the Father of the Nation generated a tidal wave of patriotic outrage which filled the letter column for weeks. It is a good job that Kathryn Tidrick's new biography, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual life has not been serialised in India, as its findings are much more damaging. Tidrick is the author of two witty studies of British Orientalism. In this latest book, which is both highly original and remarkably convincing, she locates the roots of Gandhi's thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of late Victorian England, among the occultists, high fibreists and mediums who flourished in late 19th-century London. "Mohandas Gandhi entered politics, not to liberate his country in the sense understood by other Indian leaders," she writes, but to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The principal feature of this belief system was that he, Gandhi, was the pre-ordained and potentially divine world saviour whose coming was implicit in the 'Eastern' religious writings to which so many of his English acquaintances had turned.. [He came to believe that] it was his destiny to lead a troubled world along the path of salvation."

This strange man "who announced his wet dreams to the world and kept millions informed of the state of his digestive apparatus" aimed not just at liberating India, but "the universal transcendence of the body and the absorption of all souls into the divine essence." There is something almost too good to be true in the idea of the huge, pompous Curzonian edifice of the Raj being undermined by ideas emanating from such wonderfully dotty sources. Yet in the process of tracing the development of Gandhi's thought, Tidrick makes her case very persuasively.

Thanks for the reviews. The tragedy is that his message of spirituality and non-violence is losing relevance in modern South Asia which likes to politicize religion. Quite likely these books will be used to validate the claim that Gandhi's political ideas were flawed.

His political ideas were flawed... and his "non-violence" philosophy was a farce.

... and Gandhi is the father of politicized religion mind you... not just Hinduism (read Farzana Versey's "Mahatma's Progeny") but also the deobandi Islam really which came into the forefront of South Asia's religious politics because of Gandhi:



Achyuth Patwardhan, one of the Socialist stalwarts in the Congress, has given a remarkably candid and self critical analysis of the Congress Party vis-a-vis Khilafat: ’It is, however, useful to recognise our share of this error of misdirection. To begin with, I am convinced that looking back upon the course of development of the freedom movement, THE ’HIMALAYAN ERROR’ of Gandhiji’s leadership was the support he extended on behalf of the Congress and the Indian people to the Khilafat Movement at the end of the World War I. This has proved to be a disastrous error which has brought in its wake a series of harmful consequences. On merits, it was a thoroughly reactionary step. The Khilafat was totally unworthy of support of the Progressive Muslims. Kemel Pasha established this solid fact by abolition of the Khilafat. The abolition of the Khilafat was widely welcomed by enlightened Muslim opinion the world over and Kemel was an undoubted hero of all young Muslims straining against Imperialist domination. But apart from the fact that Khilafat was an unworthy reactionary cause, Mahatma Gandhi had to align himself with a sectarian revivalist Muslim Leadership of clerics and maulvis. He was thus unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon the Indian Muslims a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis. Maulana Mohammed Ali’s speeches read today appear strangely incoherent and out of tune with the spirit of secular political freedom. The Congress Movement which released the forces of religious liberalism and reform among the Hindus, and evoked a rational scientific outlook, placed the Muslims of India under the spell of orthodoxy and religious superstition by their support to the Khilafat leadership. Rationalist leaders like Jinnah were rebuffed by this attitude of Congress and Gandhi. This is the background of the psychological rift between Congress and the Muslim League’.

and

’Since the Khilafat agitation, things have changed and it has been one of the many injuries inflicted on India by the encouragement of the Khilafat crusade, that the inner Muslim feeling of hatred against ’unbelievers’ has sprung up, naked and unashamed, as in years gone by’.

and

A terrible and gruesome fallout of the disastrous Khilafat experiment of Mahatma Gandhi was the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar District in 1921. According to the Report of the ENQUIRY COMMITTEE OF SERVANTS OF INDIA SOCIETY, the number of Hindus murdered by Moplah Muslims was 1500, the number of Hindus forcibly converted 20,000 and the value of property looted about Rs three crore. When the national and local leaders appealed to the virulently anti-Hindu Moplah Muslims in the name of Mahatma Gandhi to follow the ways of peace and non-violence, they replied bluntly with Islamic fervour: ’GANDHI IS A KAFIR, HOW CAN HE BE OUR LEADER?’ Dr Anne Besant declared: ’The Moplah Muslim marauders murdered and plundered abundantly, killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatize. Somewhere about 100,000 people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything’. She also accused all the Khilafat religious preachers for all this terrible atrocities. J Campbell, chief of the Intelligence Department, Government of India, held the Khilafat leaders squarely responsible for inciting racial hatred resulting in Moplah carnage.

http://www.newstodaynet.com/2006sud/06aug/2208ss1.htm

Mahatma Gandhi’s attempt to harness the feeling for the cause of national independence backfired and led to the uprising in Kerala known as the Moplah Rebellion. It took the British several months to put it down at the cost of thousands of lives.



Moplahs were very much part of the grand Khilafat Movement that Gandhi was spearheading and Gandhi kept apologising for them


The Dravidian Moplahs had directed their revolt with class venom against some Aryan high-caste Hindus with property as well as Britishers: Brahmanical elements tried to use that to spark a crisis in Hindu-Muslim relations all over India. Gandhi tried to hold a balance: like the U.S. press and the Negro nationalists who read it he stressed that the Moplah uprising could be made part of a united drive for independence by Indians of all sects.But he was also aware of the pan-Islamic dimension: in a December 1921 call to the British to suspend their attacks against the Moplahs, he was to observe that the Moplahs saw themselves as fighting for a religion with methods they considered religious: Yogesh Chadha, Rediscovering Gandhi (London: Century 1997) p. 254.


And lets not forget the Tehreek-e-Hijrat Fatwa that Gandhi’s right hand man Azad gave to Muslims which gave Muslims two options "JEHAD" or "HIJRAT".

The Muslim Ulema, thinkers and activists called for the boycott of foreign goods and non-cooperation with the British government. Meetings were organised in order to rally the masses to support these issues. The meetings were organised under the banner of Mo’tamar al-Ansar (The Workers Conference) and various newspapers such as Al-Hilal of Maualana Abul Kalam Azad and The Comrade of Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar. Both Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad and Maulana Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar were put behind bars for publishing anti-British articles in their newspapers. The latter spent four years in prison between 1911 and 1915CE.


The allegiance of the Muslim intelligentsia of India at that to the Khilafah is unquestionable. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad summed up their view when he wrote in his newspaper al-Hilal on 6th November 1912 that the Ottoman Sultans possessed the only sword which Muslims had for their protection. Insofar as the “caliphate was essentially a religious integration of the shari’a”, it became “necessary by revelation, is of God’s institution and that obedience to its authority is farz, or positively commanded”.


The Khilafat Movement


In September 1919, Maulana Muhammad Ali and his brother Shaukat Ali, together with Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, and Hasrat Mohani, started a new organization, the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924). Their avowed aim was to use whatever leverage they had to protect the Khilafah. They organized Khilafat Conferences in several northern Indian cities. It is noticeable that the scholars and activists that were part of the Khilafat movement came from different schools of thought and backgrounds, for example Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was known to be a ‘ghayr taqleedi’ (non-taqleedi – who believed Taqleed to Mazahib is prohibited) and Maulana Mahmood Hasan was Deobandi who are followers of the Hanafi Mazhab yet they were united in the objective of working for the maintenance of the Khilafah.


In 1919, the Bombay Khilafat Committee agreed on two important organisational goals: “first, to urge the retention of the temporal powers of the Sultan of Turkey as Caliph, and second to ensure his continued suzerainty over the Islamic holy places.”

Delivering the presidential address at the Calcutta meeting of the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference in 1920, Maulana Azad discussed the importance of Khilafah he declared, “the purpose of this institution was to organise and lead the Muslim community in the right path, to establish justice, to bring about peace, and to spread God’s word in the world. For all this it was absolutely necessary for the caliph to possess temporal power”. Maulana Azad had no doubt that “without an Imam, their lives were un-Islamic and that they would be damned after death”.


Maulana Azad published a book in 1920 called Masla-e-Khilafat (The Issue of Khilafah), he stated: “Without the Khilafah the existence of Islam is not possible, the Muslims of India with all their effort and power need to work for this”.

In the same book page 176 Maulana Azad said, “There are two types of ahkam shariah, the first is related to the individual like the commands and prohibitions, the fara’id (obligations) and wajibat in order to perfect oneself. The second is not related to the individual but is related to the Ummah, nation, collective obligations and state politics like the conquering of lands, political and economic laws”.

According to Peter Hardy, Maulana Azad believed that, “The Muslim who would separate religion and politics for Muslims is an apostate who works silently”.


The loss of political power in India and the threat posed by a combination of forces to the temporal authority of the caliph, was so worrisome for the leaders of the Muslim community that some of them felt compelled to issue fatwas ‘in favour of migration (hijra)’ from India.


Maulana Abul Kalam Azad issued a fatwa which was published in the daily Ahl-e-Hadith of Amritsar on 30 July 1920. In his fatwa he urged Hijrat from India as an alternative to non-cooperation with the British. (YLH’s note: Was the Hijaz Born Azad a "Wahabi"... note "Ahle-Hadith)

Maulana Abdul Bari’s fatwa said, “every Muslim residing here should adopt non-cooperation but if (that is) impossible, should proceed for hijrat”. Maulana Shaukat Ali issued a statement on behalf of the Central Khilafat Committee, “expressing the hope that all dedicated Muslims would stay in India and work for the non-cooperation. Only if it did not succeed would they consider resorting to hijrat”. The impact of the fatwa was electrifying and thousands of Muslims preferred to leave the Dar al harb of India where their religious rights symbolized in the position of the Turkish Caliph was being infringed.


And most amazing was the fact that Gandhi’s encouragement led to Deobandi ulema creating the Jamiat ulema Hind ... which in its numerous forms and heads plagues South Asia even today... and all these groups are spin offs of the same.

Saima Shah, let's hope that happens. Many of us have no interest in what Gandhi ate, how many enemas he took, or whether he made efforts to have children from his mother and his sisters while simultaneously worshipping white and upper caste cows.

We oppose, exclusively, his vision of the world, and his advocated methods of people living together. His ideas for the future community of peoples are what are anathema.

If that cause is helped by the efforts of people obsessed with goats, cows, enemas, and the vigilant watch over Gandhi's old crotch, well, that's great!

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a remarkable man period.

Even the Muslims of South Asia owe him a great deal.

He was as imperfect as they come, but he did make

both the powerful and the ruled think about what they

were doing.

He did not have all the answers for a peaceful universe.

Some of his ideas misfired badly, but they were well

intentioned.

That he was murdered by a Hindu speaks volumes of the

turbulent times that he lived in.


Ras

He was murdered by someone who considered him his father. Nathuram Godse was very much a Gandhi-devotee...

The "patricide" that Godse committed was telling. The dark forces unleashed by Gandhi in the end overwhelmed him.

Gandhi was not a lackey of the West like MAJ, that is what interests me, and the related notions of the little democracy that exists in India,(little because the people are suffereing and suffering immenselfy while the "democratic" government remains unaffected) because of just that reason, personifying the social voice of the people, and that was to get rid of the colonials and their lackeys...where the lackeys ruled, democracy could not establish roots...unfortunately that is what happened in Pakistan.

Manto needs to understand that there is a world and a life beyond glorifying Jinnah day and night and dumping mud on Gandhi- an abnormal obsession, to say the least....Get over it

masadi,

Your ignorance is appalling.

Gandhi was the recruiter in chief of the British Army in the first world war (for which he won the title Qaiser-e-Hind)... while Jinnah it is well known was against it. Not only that Jinnah the lackey wanted the British to give Indians officer status... Gandhi wanted the Indians to be Britain's cannon fodder.

And then suddenly he became the Mahatma... He was like the vaccine introduced in the body politic of India by its British rulers. And while he was incarcerated... another section of the same masters would glorify him by dedicated statues to him.

Abusing Jinnah without reading up on him is a rather unique way of arguing. However while MAJ the lackey was thundering against the British rulers in their assemblies for violating the rights of Bhagat Singh as a political prisoner.... Gandhi the "freedom fighter" was busy signing pacts with Lord Irwing selling out Bhagat Singh.

And somebody needs to tell this idiot Masadi... donning the clothes of a Hindu peasant does not make one a freedom fighter and wearing European clothes does not make one a lackey.

And while Gandhi was doing his monkey dance Jinnah was hitting the imperialists where it hurts... just one of the many pieces of legislation that Jinnah introduced:


In February 1924, he (Jinnah) introduced a legislation that called for the Government of India to buy its stores through “Rupee tenders” instead of Pound sterling which had proved costly for India and had blatantly favored the British. In introducing this measure, Jinnah recounted 75 different British imperial purchases that had inhibited India’s economic development. Jinnah's resolution passed and has been held by many historians as the single most important event in India’s pre-partition history that had stimulated indigenous Economic growth and development

People like Masadi and Gandhi can only scream and yell and prolong imperialism... while others like Jinnah fight it on its own turf. That is the difference... Masadi and Gandhi are the real lackeys for they perpetuate the misery of the people who are stupid enough to listen to them.

PS: Twice the British government tried to exile Jinnah according Ian Bryant Wells' "Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity" and failed because Jinnah was always so legally within the bounds.

The toothless old man Mahatma Gandhi was quite a man-I must say! Once the President of Sri Lanka said that the greatest son of India was Gautama Buddha. Gandhi was the second. I agree with that statement.
Any thoughts ?

Kamath
1746 Aug18

Here's the difference between how j-man is treated in Pakiland and how g-man is treated in India...

g-man is revered by a lot of people in India but that's about it...If you managed to find a recording of g-man saying india should give up kashmir to pureland, most indians would shrug it off..

OTOH, paki "moderates" and islamists both treat j-man as god and try to use his words to further their agenda... because the j-man's word is the final word and if he didn't use the word secular in his aug 11th speech at godforakenabad, the country can't be secular...

most indians don't know what g-man said on aug 11th..or sept 14th...and neither do they care...