Cong should focus on need for mass struggle

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

THE Bharat Jodo Yatra is a valiant effort by the Congress to return to its roots: mass mobilisation initiated by Gandhi. The similarity between the political context of the Non-Cooperation movement in 1920 and today’s India is remarkable. Separate electorates and the divisive politics of religious organisations had divided Indians. The Congress was an elitist party, unable to appeal to the masses except in the idiom of English liberalism. Gandhi set about forging a massive coalition of religious groups, castes and classes to counter communalism, and to institute a dialogue among the people. Coalition politics can only succeed when people are persuaded to speak to each other, transact with each other, deliberate with each other, and in short, recognise everyone as partners in a community of fate.

The rationale of the Bharat Jodo Yatra is evident — to bring together people who have been divided by the politics of hate and fear. Yet how exactly is this going to be accomplished? It is not entirely clear what the philosophy of the party that has embarked upon the yatra is. I presume the leaders want to continue their attack on the machinations of a ruling class that manipulates emotions through demagoguery. If the leadership of the Congress believes that formal and informal exchanges with people across the geographical swathe which the yatra will traverse will change hearts, it may be fated to disappointment. For people might well ask — what do you offer us in return — the same tired clichés of saving ‘the idea of India’. Face it — there is no one idea of India.

Yet political miracles do happen and the party may figure out during the yatra what it stands for. As leaders of the party reflect on what they should say to persuade people to reject the politics of hate and divisiveness, the manifesto of the party might well take shape. It might do so not in air-conditioned conference rooms but in drought-prone areas, in regions wracked by floods, in cities where little children are forced to beg, in the dismal shanty town where people live cheek-by-jowl with luxury apartments, amidst hunger, malnutrition, domestic violence, violence against the vulnerable, and sweatshops in which our working class churns out bare life.

The Congress should learn from its own history. The launch of Gandhi’s satyagrahas was preceded by a period of intense reflection on why the issue was politically significant, and why it demanded collective action. Satyagrahis can only inspire people and transform individual consciousness when they go through the rigorous experience of thinking through the issue. They appear in the public sphere as political agents who knew that the precondition of political transformation is mass mobilisation. It is not as if people do not have the capacity to struggle and speak back to a history not of their own making. But it is the job of satyagrahis to bring together isolated struggles, pool energies, and spark off political imaginations through an ideology that gives to the people an alternative, a vision and an objective. We have to go, Gandhi suggested, beyond reason to appeal to people who have settled views. Their eyes are opened not only by rational argument, but by the readiness of satyagrahis to accept the consequences of their politics.

The success of the satyagraha depended on convincing others that the matter at hand was of supreme importance, and on the awakening of the political consciousness of a large number of people. Much like the Marxist Vanguardist party, satyagrahis had to tap and mobilise public opinion by clarifying the wider philosophy they were fighting for. They had to spark off political imaginations that there is an alternative way of being, and that it can be attained. They had to persuade people that injustice is a violation of what human beings are owed. They had to highlight the need for mass struggle.

Despite all these preconditions, Gandhi’s satyagrahas often went wrong. He had to call them off or modify them. Historian Shahid Amin, in a perceptive essay, argues that for the peasantry of Chauri Chaura, the meaning of Swaraj was very different from the one Gandhi propagated. For the peasants, it meant limited taxation and nominal land rent. Peasants rent the air with shouts of Gandhi Ki Jai. They continued to do so when they turned violent. When a crowd of 4,000 men attacked a police post and burnt alive 22 policemen, the crowd chanted ‘Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai’. Gandhi was aghast at the spectacle of violence being committed in his name. The hailing of Gandhi as the Mahatma became a militant avowal of the organised strength of peasant volunteers. “While such action sought to justify itself by a reference to the Mahatma, the Gandhi of its rustic protagonist was not as he really was, but as they had thought him up.”

We learn from history, but history also warns us that things can go wrong. Therefore, there is even more need for reflection on the wider philosophy that supports the Bharat Jodo Yatra and its objectives. The objective should be to make people think and reflect. When people begin to think, we might see political transformation. For, thinking is primarily a subversive act. The act of thinking enables us to ask questions about why things are what they are, and how they should be.

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