Gandhi, Mahatma

(1869-1948) Gandhi sold out his nation, India, and was fundamentally the British “pimp” of India according to an analysis Dr Shiva. He provides historical evidence in the video (below) that Gandhi was a racist, casteist, reactionary, who served to ensure India never had a much-needed revolution to oust the vestiges of feudalism and oppression. Gandhi has been variously described as an anti-colonial protester, a religious thinker, a pragmatist, a radical who used non-violence effectively to fight for causes, a canny politician and a whimsical Hindu patriarch.

South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed spent seven years exploring the complex story of a man who lived in their country for more than two decades – 1893 to 1914 – and campaigned for the rights of Indian people there.

In The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, Desai and Vahed write that during his stay in Africa, Gandhi kept the Indian struggle “separate from that of Africans and coloureds even though the latter were also denied political rights on the basis of colour and could also lay claim to being British subjects”.

They write that Gandhi’s political strategies – fighting to repeal unjust laws or freedom of movement or trade – carved out an exclusivist Indian identity “that relied on him taking up ‘Indian’ issues in ways that cut Indians off from Africans, while his attitudes paralleled those of whites in the early years”. Gandhi, the authors write, was indifferent to the plight of the indentured, and believed that state power should remain in white hands, and called Africans Kaffirs, a derogatory term, for a larger part of his stay in the country.

Racial Segregation

In 1893, Gandhi wrote to the Natal parliament saying that a “general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are a little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa”.

In 1904, he wrote to a health officer in Johannesburg that the council “must withdraw Kaffirs” from an unsanitary slum called the “Coolie Location” where a large number of Africans lived alongside Indians. “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.”

The same year he wrote that unlike the African, the Indian had no “war-dances, nor does he drink Kaffir beer”. When Durban was hit by a plague in 1905, Gandhi wrote that the problem would persist as long as Indians and Africans were being “herded together indiscriminately at the hospital”.

This, in itself, say historians, is not entirely new and revelatory. Also, some South Africans have always accused the man who led India to independence of working with the British colonial government to promote racial segregation. In April, a man was arrested in connection with vandalising a statue of Gandhi. A hashtag #Ghandimustfall (sic) has gained circulation on social media.

Gandhi’s biographer and grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, says the younger Gandhi – he arrived in South Africa as a 24-year-old briefless lawyer – was undoubtedly “at times ignorant and prejudiced about South Africa’s Blacks”. He believes Gandhi’s “struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way for the struggle of Black rights”. He argues that “Gandhi too was an imperfect human being”, but the “imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots”.

Ramachandra Guha, writer of the magisterial Gandhi Before India, writes that “to speak of comprehensive equality for coloured people was premature in early 20th Century South Africa”. Attacking Gandhi for racism, wrote another commentator, “takes a simplistic view of a complex life”.

The authors of the new book disagree.

“Gandhi believed in the Aryan brotherhood. This involved whites and Indians higher up than Africans on the civilised scale. To that extent he was a racist. To the extent that he wrote Africans out of history or was keen to join with whites in their subjugation he was a racist,” Ashwin Desai told me.

“To the extent that he accepted white minority power but was keen to be a junior partner, he was a racist. Thank God he did not succeed in this as we would have been culpable in the horrors of apartheid.

“But if Gandhi was part of the racist common sense of the time then how does this qualify him to be a person that is seen as part of the pantheon of South African liberation heroes? You cannot have Gandhi as an accomplice of colonial subjugation in South Africa and then also defend his liberation credentials in South Africa.”

‘Blind Eye’

Desai also rejects the assertion that Gandhi paved the way for the local struggle for Black rights – “in one sentence,” he says, “you are writing out the history of African resistance to colonialism that unfolded much before Gandhi even arrived”.

In his book, Guha writes what a friend in Cape Town once told him about Gandhi. “You gave us a lawyer, we gave you back a Mahatma [Great Soul]”. Ashwin Desai thinks this is a “ridiculous assertion” about a man who “supported more taxes on impoverished African people and turned a blind eye to the brutality of the Empire on Africans”.

The authors of the new book are not the first to challenge the conventional Indian historiography on Gandhi. Historian Patrick French wrote tellingly in 2013 that “Gandhi’s blanking of Africans is the black hole at the heart of his saintly mythology”.

More than a century after he left Africa, there has been a resurrection of Gandhi in South Africa. Despite their reservations about the ‘man of Empire’, Desai and Vahed acknowledge that Gandhi “did raise universal demands for equality and dignity”.

His alleged poverty was just a myth, the result of a great communication campaign. One remembers, by the way, the famous remark of one of his assistants, Sarojini Naidu: “It takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”
It has always been practically impossible to touch his image. When we learned that he was “allowing” teenage girls, including his own nieces both separately and at the same time (Manu and Abha – 18 and 13 respectively), from his ashram to sleep naked with him (and thousands of them vying for this privilege), his devout followers explained that this was a way of “putting his vow of chastity to the test.”
In the name of his cause, he also had to endure naked massages given to him by these same girls for an hour every day, in addition to daily saltwater enemas.
According to his close associates, it was tough to work with him. He dictated their every move, including what and when to eat. The word “compromise” did not exist in his dictionary.
In 1920, at an Indian National Congress meeting, he said: “So long as you choose to keep me as your leader, you must accept my conditions, you must accept dictatorship and the discipline of martial law.”

Gandhi, the imperialist

Pacifism only appeared late in Gandhi’s philosophy. During his younger years in South Africa, he volunteered to raise an Indian brigade to serve the British Army in the Boer War.
The British authorities didn’t see any value in this plan. But after Gandhi insisted, they nevertheless eventually gave in and trained them as stretcher-bearers.
As a sergeant major, Gandhi won medals in the Boer War and, four years later, in the Anglo-Zulu War. As Gandhi approved and legitimized India’s caste system, he understood and accepted the racist logic of South African apartheid.
For example, he sought to deny Africans access to the Indian district of Johannesburg. And all this while showing an overflowing sympathy concerning the colonial power, as oppressive as it was. He writes in his autobiography, in the chapter entitled Two Passions:

“Hardly ever have I known anybody to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution. I can see now that my love of truth was at the root of this loyalty. It has never been possible for me to simulate loyalty, or for that matter, any other virtue. The National Anthem (God Save the King) used to be sung at every meeting that I attended in Natal. I then felt that I must also join in the singing. Not that I was unaware of the defects in British rule, but I thought it was on the whole acceptable.”

Until the last days of the anti-British campaign, he endorsed conflict. He supported terrible riots in Calcutta (current Kolkata) under the pretext that it was “a use of violence for a moral cause.”
He gave his blessing to a sort of prince, the nawab of Malerkotla, who had ordered the shooting of ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his territory. And, in a prayer meeting in June 1947, a few months before his death, he said: “If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Gandhi, the hungry

Gandhi was the pioneer of the hunger strike as a form of political protest. He later used it successfully against the British, but the first time he used it in 1932 was remarkably unpleasant.
Belonging to a higher caste, he opposed a proposal by the British authorities to grant the “Untouchables” (the lowest social class) a separate electoral status so that their interests could be better represented. His fast was supposed to last until death. It lasted five days until the Hindu rulers pressured the leader of the Untouchables to refuse British reforms.
In 2008, reports of conversations that took place in the British Cabinet at the time resurfaced. They show us how Churchill reacted to Gandhi’s threats of hunger strikes: “We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.”
When the Cabinet found out that glucose was added to the Mahatma’s orange juice and that he was massaged with nutritious oils, the Prime Minister commented: “It is apparently not a fast, merely a change of diet.”
Poverty and opposition to anything modern were the backbones of Gandhi’s philosophy. He hated the industry and the media of his time; he lamented the invention of the telegraph, the radio, and the telephone.
This did not prevent him from spending a lot of time on the national antennas during his significant hunger strikes, at the height of his fight for independence. In his biographer Judith Brown’s words, he advocated a way of life “clearly and consciously based on poverty.”
He was also against modern medicine and refused to have his wife injected with penicillin when she contracted pneumonia. She died of it. (He later found it quite acceptable to take quinine for his malaria.)

Gandhi, the bourgeois

Gandhi is often presented as the father of independence, the friend of the poor, the savior of the Indian people. But in reality, he especially saved the ruling classes from a social revolution which, by overthrowing colonial domination, could also attack the whole caste system, which neither England nor the Indian bourgeoisie had any interest in seeing accomplished.

Indeed, since 1906 in India (and elsewhere) reigns a vigorous social agitation, where the workers chain strikes and blockades and where the peasants revolt against their exploiters, the landowners. As always, political parties are light years away from the concerns of the poorest.

These rich indigenous people want India’s independence and the creation of a great nation-state that they could finally rule. They worked to disseminate nationalist ideals through propagandist, parliamentary, or even terrorist channels. But they failed to reach the popular masses, which were too busy trying to survive and fight against their direct oppressors: the bosses, the landlords, and the police.

The Indian bourgeoisie and its ambitions were organized mainly within a political party called the “Congress Party,” which brought together progressive and liberal tendencies. Thanks to its financial support and the aura of Gandhi, who in 1915 became one of its leading figures, it gathered more and more voters until it became the most important party in India.

The Congress, which had its eyes riveted on power, had only India’s independence as an insurmountable horizon. To reach his goal without offending the British (who are essential to the future of the nation), Gandhi needed to do it with the consent of the colonial master; by pleading gently, without ever raising the tone, and by containing the emancipatory outbursts of the people who refused to be oppressed any longer.