Thank you, Gandhi

MAHATMA Gandhi had imagined that he would dissolve the Hindu mind’s Muslim complex. His benign attitude towards Muslims proved to be a terrible provocation for the venom stored up in several regions.

Thickening this venom provided good employment to the organisational energies of Gandhi’s enemies. They turned the venom into a vaccine — against sanity and peace — for future generations. It is injected at an early age. Permanent prejudice works miracles; it packages hatred as legitimate energy. Gandhi had become an object of hatred long before he was killed.

The hate-Gandhi industry had come into motion almost as soon as he had started to acquire political stature after returning from South Africa. At the heart of the hate mission was Gandhi’s message, that Hindus and Muslims were essentially one, that true faith in God’s authority can never create gaps between human beings.

Although a devout Vaishnav Hindu himself, he publicly sought inspiration from Jesus Christ, and his personal daily life included features of Lord Mahavir’s philosophy popularly known as Jainism. But the purity of his conduct served no practical purpose.

His detractors remained resolute in staying clear of his ideas, especially the idea of bringing Hinduism and Islam closer, relieving the burden of antipathy towards Muslims weighing on the upper-caste Hindu public mind.

Muslim society and some of its tall leaders played into the anything-but-Gandhi agenda. The common Muslim paid a heavy price, and so did the nation as a whole, for ignoring Gandhi’s mission and hope.

His choice of non-violence as one of the two foundation stones of his creed seems like a personal choice. It was made in the face of the considerable weight of evidence that suggested the necessity of violence for success in political conflict. More than half the world was under colonial rule. It is hard to say how wide Gandhi’s awareness in his youth was about Europe’s colonising powers although he knew about colonial rule outside India.

His life and struggle in South Africa indicate that his concerns were focused on Indians, although he had friends among people of many different backgrounds. That many fighters for India’s freedom at that time were committed to violent methods is well documented. Gandhi’s awareness of these fighters and their methods is copiously reflected in Hind Swaraj.

In this book, his rejection of violent aggression comes across as a matter of logic, not emotion. But it seems wrong to claim that there was no emotion in his commitment to nonviolence. How can a political choice sustained for so long be without emotion?

Naming the emotion would be hard. In the case of a commitment to violence, it is easy to name the emotion that sustains the commitment. It is hate. It has no contestants. In personal life too, hate serves better than any other emotion to consistently oppose someone we are angry with. If a justification is needed for staying opposed to a person, hate provides plenty.

In personal life, hate permits you to entertain images of physical aggression and violence even if you cannot translate them into reality. These images provide a special kind of solace to the mind, especially when it is tired of feeling helpless and is close to risking hopelessness.

Hate does not ask you nagging questions about good vs bad. Both sides can benefit from hate in a personal conflict. Things can, of course, get out of hand if the images invoked by hate end up playing an enabling role in a moment of opportunity. Hate can have a blinding effect in such moments, and the consequences will be tough.

In a collective or social conflict, hate plays a similar role. The big difference is that hate combined with power can have disastrous consequences, as the history of Nazi Germany shows.

But hate without power can also have terrible outcomes once violence breaks out. This is what happened in the Partition.

These historical instances indicate how dangerous hate can be as an emotion sustained for long. Its solace-giving effect weakens with time because stored-up hate makes control of anger increasingly difficult. This may be the reason why Gandhi kept insisting on loving the enemy, an idea that must be among his least appreciated demands from people who otherwise respected him for his political stature and work.

Gandhi’s advice in this matter was undoubtedly rooted in Christianity. Had Gandhi not been impressed with the Sermon on the Mount and with Tolstoy, he might not have insisted on enemy-love as a worthwhile accompaniment to politics against a collective enemy.

It seems highly plausible that the Christian roots of Gandhi’s advocacy of love for one’s enemy in a collective sense made his appeal less convincing to a lot of people in certain regions where the history of resistance was inseparable from aggressive violence.

Punjab was one such region. Its greatest martyr Bhagat Singh had far greater appeal than Gandhi at the time the British hung him. This has not changed with time.

Time has, however, wrought a miracle that only time can. It has created an amalgam of Bhagat Singh’s emotional resolve to win and Gandhi’s determination to remain non-violent to win.

Excerpted from the author’s 2024 book Thank You, Gandhi (Penguin Viking)

Krishna Kumar is former Director, NCERT.