Gandhi, Godse and Geeta

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Pankaj, hope to get an opportunity soon to know what you had to say.
roohi, I`m curious about what you said on another thread, `a blind beggar in Bihar singing Bhojpuri bhajans`. Someday if you would care to elaborate..?

Meanwhile since this thread is dormant, here is one of the episodes related to avarnas in the Mahabharata.

The story of Utanga quoted largely from C Rajagopalachari( the full text of his Mahabharata in English is available online on a number of websites)

`when the battle was over, Krishna bade farewell to the Pandavas. On his way to Dwaraka, he met his old brahmana friend Utanga. The innocent recluse asked ` do your cousins the Pandavas and the Kauravas love one another as brothers should? Are they well and flourishing?`

Krishna was astounded at this question and explained. Uttanga got angry ` Were you standing by and did you let all this happen? You have indeed failed in your duty. You have surely practiced deceit and led them to destruction. Prepare now to receive my curse!`

Krishna smiled and tried to pacify him, showing him his Vishwarupa. `In whatever body I am born I must act in conformity with the nature of that body. I begged hard of the ignorant Kauravas. They were arrogant and intoxicated by power and paid no heed to my advice. I tried to intimidate them. Therein also I failed. I was in wrath and showed them even my Vishwarupa. Even that failed. They persisted in wrong-doing. They waged war and perished`.

Uttanga recovered his calm. Krishna offered him a boon. Utanga said he didnot desire any boon after seeing him in Vishwarupa, but finally the desert-wandering simple brahmana said `let me find water to drink whenever I might feel thirsty`. Krishna said `Is that all? Have it then` and continued on his journey.

One day when Utanga was very thirsty and unable to find water anywhere in the desert, he thought of his boon. Immediately, there appeared a nishada, clothed in filthy rags; he had five hunting hounds in leash and a water-skin wrapped to his shoulder.

The nishada grinned at Utanga saying `You seem to be thirsty. Here is water for you` and offered the bamboo spout of his water-skin to the brahmana to drink from.

Utanga looking at the man and his dogs and his water skin, said in disgust, `Friend I donot need it, thank you`. Saying this he thought of Krishna and reproached him in his mind `Indeed was this all the boon you gave me?`.

The outcaste nishada pressed Utanga over and over to quench his thirst but it only made Utanga more and more angry. The hunter and his dogs disappeared.

Seeing the sudden disappearance, Utanga reflected `Who was this? He couldnot have been a real nishada. It was certainly a test and I have blundered miserably. My philosophy deserted me. I rejected the water offered to me by the nishada and proved myself to be an arrogant fool`.

While he was pondering thus, Krishna appeared. Utanga said `O Krishna, was it right of you to try me thus - make an untouchable offer unclean water to me, a brahmana, to drink? Was it kind?`

Krishna said ` O Utanga, for your sake, when you put my boon into action, I asked Indra to take amrita[the nector of immortality] to you and give it to you as water. He said he couldnot give a mortal what would give him immortality, while he was willing to do anything else. But I prevailed upon him and he agreed to take amrita and give it to you as water, provided I let him do it as a chandala and tested your understanding and found you willing to take water from a chandala. I accepted the challenge believing you had attained jnana[knowledge] and transcended externals. But you have done this and made me suffer defeat at Indra`s hands.`

Utanga saw his mistake and was ashamed.

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Well-written article. But I have a problem with your premise that there is one particular message inscribed in the Geeta or for that matter any religious/cultural text, which is subject to a singular interpretation. In fact, the Geeta has been interpreted in various different ways, towards divergent ends. During the Independence struggle it worked as a handbook for legitimising any kind of action.

Further, ethics and morals are context-sensitive. What is right in one context may not be right in another.

REVIEWS: Gandhi’s still alive in Gujarat




Reviewed by Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

In Gandhi’s hometown, Gujarat, three years after the religious violence, the Muslim community is still squandering for justice and freedom from fear of Hindu retaliation. The pogrom that left 110,000 Muslims homeless and killed over 2,000, according to the Human Rights Watch still have their violators roaming free. Recently the BBC reported that mass graves were dug out to hide evidence of the depravity. Women and children, physiologists say, are unable to get over the trauma and violence they witnessed.

Despite this, Dalits and other untouchables in Gujarat are “far worse than the Muslims.”

About eight decades ago, it was this alliance of common interest between the Muslims and the untouchables that frightened Gandhi, fictitiously known as the Mahatma, into a series of political manoeuvres to protect not only his adherence to orthodox Hinduism, but also the Congress party’s capitalist interests. If Kamran Shahid, author of Gandhi and the Partition of India: A New Perspective, is to be believed, the alliance of the lower caste Hindus and Muslims (who were themselves converts from lower-caste Hindus, escaping the drudgery and humiliation of class), formed a majority of Indian vote bank.

The British planned to leave the colonies and intended to implant the traditions of democracy and fraternity in Indian politics before they did. Recklessly abandoning his spiritual face to the world, Gandhi articulated his worst fears in reaction to safeguards granted to Muslims and untouchables granted by the British Communal Award of 1931, “the Untouchable hooligans would make alliance with the Muslim hooligans and kill upper-caste Hindus.”

As a failed lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had fought tooth and nail against perceived discrimination against Indians, but not as popularly believed in the interest of equality. It was for the more privileged treatment of Indians in South Africa as compared to black Africans. He fought to separate and segregate the Indians from the subhuman “savage kafirs” who were not “equal to the Indians”. It is because of this fact, outlined in his volumes of Collected Works and his own personal diaries that prompted countless South Africans to protest his statue in Johannesburg in 2002.

When he returned to India, he did so to restore the traditionalism and social conservatism of status quo. He rejected British plans to distribute power evenly amongst all parties and interests, because it would severely undermine the Congress and its leading upper-caste Hindu interests. He formulated a plan to ensure no power sharing deal with the Muslims and he broke the threat of a lower-caste Hindu and Muslim alliance by reinventing a religiously inspired revolution against the British. He claimed to blur the lines of caste by verbally restoring dignity to the lower caste Hindus or Harijans as he called them, and calling them to unite with all Indians to fight for their independence through satyagraha, however, he never forgot to spell out that their place belonged as servants to the upper caste Brahmins.

On numerous occasions he articulated that the peasant must serve his master at all costs, even if he “suffers in his person” and this usually meant exploitative labour rates. He prohibited inter-dining and intermarriage across castes.

Much to the distaste of the long-term champion of lower-caste Hindu rights, Dr Ambedkar, who is also the principal author of the Indian constitution, Gandhi continued to manipulate the lower caste into overriding any realpolitik plans to broker rights for themselves in the new independent India. Gandhi, instead, marched them to salt fields, made facades of ashrams for them, made their women spin yarn to champion self-rule, coerced the British into imprisoning him and gained mass sympathies in the process.

Winston Churchill refused to give into Gandhi’s hunger strikes, and would rather that Gandhi starve to death but his associates feared that because he has asserted himself as India’s spiritual leader, his death would turn him into a martyr. True to Dr Ambedkar’s prediction, Gandhi’s much flaunted spiritual emancipation of the lower-caste Hindus did not secure them a better future and, even today, they stand as the most marginalized lot of India, a notch below the Muslims.

Having shattered any possibility of a collective vote bank of Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, Gandhi shifted his focus to manufacturing an illusion of poverty. He successfully bought the Congress party a golden choice to back away from any power-sharing deal with the Muslims rejecting the prescience of the Lucknow Pact which secular politicians like Jinnah and Gokhale worked hard to secure the co-existence of Hindu and Muslim communities.

When Gandhi split the movement by his cleverly crafted plan of rallying a majority into religious fervour for independence, politicians like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, at first sidelined and shunned, realized that the only way they will not find themselves in the same trap shared by lower-caste Hindus is by demanding a separate state. Used as a bargaining chip, historians such as Ayesha Jalal say that Jinnah till the end tried to give Indian Muslims the best constitutional protection they could get, but at the end, for Gandhi, it had to be all or nothing.

Under no circumstances was the Congress party negotiating, nor did they see any need to, because the British were hastily retreating and the Congress was turning out to be the one with the bigger pie and the more visible forces.

Seeing that the blame would fall on him for being unable to keep the country united, Gandhi made alliances with Islamic religious leadership, distracting Indian Muslims from interest based politics into religious euphoria. This only widened the rift between the Hindus and Muslims. Ironically, his own orientation remained completely Hindu centric — “I am a Hindu and therefore a true Indian”, he declared.

Jinnah was willing to go as far as accepting the Cabinet Mission plan in 1946, favouring united India rather than Partition. Pakistan came to be because Gandhi and the Congress party found it unpalatable for Muslims to have full autonomy in the majority provinces.

The “new perspective” that Kamran Shahid has articulated in his book is not new, it is one that the Muslim League articulated and that H.M. Seervai, Asiananda and Patrick French wrote in their books. In fact, recently two fascinating books dealing with contradictions of the “great soul” who once was held by Einstein as the greatest man to walk the earth were published. These are Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity (2001) and the Ungandhian Gandhi (2004).

Certainly established as fact, this perspective the academic circles have now accepted, but where it is new, however, is in the psyche of non-serious activists and upstarts who would rather believe in the myth of Gandhi than read what he wrote and did. Will this myth persevere with time or will a more honest understanding of Gandhi emerge that will give a balanced perspective on the man held by millions as the very icon of non-violence and pluralism that Gandhi’s own actions negated?

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Gandhi and the Partition of India: A New Perspective
By Kamran Shahid
Ferozsons, 60
Shahrah-i-Quaid-i-Azam, Lahore.
Tel: (042) 630 1196-8
UAN 111-62-62-62
ISBN 969-0-02011-0
124pp. Rs250