Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (8 page)

Like Shiva in the myth, who swallowed poison to save the world in the story of the Samudra Manthan—the churning of
the Ocean of Milk—Gandhi stood foremost among his peers and fellow-churners, and tried to swallow the poison that rose up from the depths as he helped to roil the new nation into existence. Unfortunately, Gandhi was not Shiva, and the poison eventually overwhelmed him. The greater the Congress party’s impulse to hegemony, the more violently things blew apart.

The three main constituencies it had to win over were the conservative, privileged-caste Hindus, the Untouchables and the Muslims.

For the conservative Hindus, the Congress party’s natural constituency, Gandhi held aloft the
utopia of Ram Rajya and the
Bhagvad
Gita
, his “spiritual dictionary”. (It’s the book most Gandhi statues hold.) He called himself a “Sanatani Hindu”.
Sanatan dharma, by virtue of being ‘eternal law’, positions itself as the origin of all things, the ‘container’ of everything. Spiritually, it is a generous and beautiful idea, the very epitome of tolerance and pluralism. Politically, it is used in the opposite way, for the very narrow purpose of
assimilation and domination, in which all religions—
Islam,
Buddhism,
Jainism, Sikhism,
Christianity—are sought to be absorbed. They’re expected to function like small concerns under the umbrella of a larger holding company.

To woo its second major constituency, the Untouchables, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution in 1917 abolishing untouchability.
Annie Besant of the
Theosophical Society, a founding member of the Congress, presided over the meeting. Ambedkar called it “a strange event”.
⁹⁹
He republished Besant’s essay published in the
Indian Review
in 1909, in which she had made a case for segregating Untouchable children from the children of ‘purer’ castes in schools:

The third big constituency the Congress party needed to address was the Muslims (who, for caste Hindus, counted on the purity–pollution scale as
mleccha
—impure; sharing food and water with them was forbidden). In 1920, the Congress decided to ally with conservative Indian Muslims who were leading the pan-Islamist a
gitation against the partitioning of the Ottoman territories by the Allies after the
First World War. The Sultan of the defeated Ottomans was the
Caliph, the spiritual head of
Sunni Islam. Sunni Muslims equated the partition of the
Ottoman Empire with a threat to the Islamic Caliphate itself. Led by Gandhi, the Congress party leapt into the fray and included the Khilafat (Caliphate) agitation in its first national satyagraha. The satyagraha had been planned to protest the Rowlatt Act passed in 1919 to extend the British government’s wartime emergency powers.

Whether or not Gandhi’s support for the
Khilafat Movement was just ordinary political opportunism is a subject that has been debated endlessly. The historian
Faisal Devji argues convincingly that at this point Gandhi was acting with a certain internationalism; as a responsible ‘imperial subject’ (which was how he saw himself in his years in South Africa), he was attempting to morally transform Empire and hold it accountable to all its subjects.
¹⁰¹
Gandhi called Khilafat an “ideal” and asked that the struggle of “Non-cooperation be recognised as a struggle of ‘religion against irreligion’ ”.
¹⁰²
By this he meant that Hinduism and Islam should join forces to transform a
Christianity that, as Gandhi saw it, was losing its moral core. It was during the first
Non-Cooperation Movement that Gandhi made religion and religious symbolism the central tenet of his politics. Perhaps he thought he was lighting a wayside fire for pilgrims to warm their souls. But it ended in a blaze that has still not been put out.

By expressing solidarity with a pan-Islamic movement, Gandhi was throwing his turban into a much larger ring. Though he went to great lengths to underline his ‘Hinduness’, he was staking his claim to be more than just a Hindu or even an Indian leader—he was aspiring to be the leader of all the subjects of the British Empire. Gandhi’s support for Khilafat, however, played straight into the hands of Hindu extremists, who had by then begun to claim that Muslims were not ‘true’ Indians because the centre of gravity of Muslim fealty lay outside of India. The Congress party’s alliance with conservative Muslims angered conservative Hindus as well as moderate Muslims.

In 1922, when the Non-Cooperation Movement was at its peak, things went out of control. A mob killed twenty-two policemen and burnt down a police station in
Chauri Chaura in the
United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh). Gandhi saw this violence as a sign that people had not yet evolved into true satyagrahis, that they were not ready for non-violence and non-cooperation. Without consulting any other leaders, Gandhi unilaterally called off the satyagraha. Since the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Khilafat Movement were conjoined, it meant an end to the Khilafat Movement too. Infuriated by this arbitrariness, the leaders of the Khilafat Movement parted ways with the Congress. Things began to unravel.

By 1925, Dr
K.B. Hedgewar had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation.
B.S. Moonje, one of the early ideologues of the RSS, travelled to Italy in 1931 and met
Mussolini. Inspired by European fascism, the RSS began to create its own squads of storm troopers. (Today they number in the millions. RSS members include former
Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former Home Minister
L.K. Advani, and four-time Chief Minister of Gujarat
Narendra Modi.) By the time the
Second World War broke out, Hitler and Mussolini were the RSS’s spiritual and political leaders (and so they still remain). The RSS subsequently declared that India was a Hindu nation and that Muslims in India were the equivalent of the
Jews in Germany. In 1939,
M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Hedgewar as the head of the RSS, wrote in what is regarded as the RSS bible,
We, or Our Nationhood Defined
:

By 1940, the
Muslim League, led by
M.A. Jinnah, had passed the
Pakistan Resolution.

In 1947, in what must surely count as one of the most callous, iniquitous acts in history, the British government drew a hurried border through the country that cut through communities and people, villages and homes, with less care than it might have taken to slice up a leg of lamb.

Gandhi, the Apostle of Peace and Non-violence, lived to see the movement he thought he led dissolve into a paroxysm of
genocidal violence in which half a million people (a million, according to
Stanley Wolpert in
A New History of India
) lost their lives and almost twelve million lost their homes, their past and everything they had ever known. Through the horror of partition, Gandhi did all he could to still the madness and bloodlust. He travelled deep into the very heart of the violence. He prayed, he pleaded, he fasted, but the incubus had been unleashed and could not be recalled. The hatred spilled over and consumed everything that came in its path. It continues to branch out, over-ground and underground. It has bequeathed
the subcontinent a dangerous, deeply wounded psyche.

Amidst the frenzy of killing, ethnic cleansing and chest-thumping religious fundamentalism on both sides, the Government of
Pakistan kept its head about one thing: it declared that Untouchable municipal
sweepers were part of the country’s ‘essential services’ and impounded them, refusing them permission to move to India. (Who else was going to clean people’s shit in the Land of the Pure?) Ambedkar raised the matter with Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru in a letter in December 1947.
¹⁰⁴
With great difficulty Ambedkar managed to help at least a section of the ‘essential services’ get across the border. Even today in Pakistan, while various Islamist sects slaughter each other over who is the better, more correct, more faithful Muslim, there does not seem to be much heartache over the very un-Islamic practice of
untouchability.

Five months after partition, in January 1948, Gandhi was shot dead at a prayer meeting on the lawns of
Birla House, where he usually lived when he visited Delhi. His assassin was
Nathuram Godse, a
Brahmin, and a former activist of the
Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Godse was, if such a thing is possible, a most respectful assassin. First he saluted Gandhi for the work he had done to ‘awaken’ people, and then he shot him. After pulling the trigger, he stood his ground. He made no attempt to escape or to kill himself. In his book,
Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
, he said:

Gandhi’s assassin seemed to feel that he was saving the Mahatma from himself. Godse and his accomplice,
Narayan Apte, climbed the gallows carrying a saffron flag, a map of undivided India and, ironically, a copy of the
Bhagvad Gita
, Gandhi’s “spiritual dictionary”.

The
Gita
, essentially Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna during the battle of the
Mahabharata (in which brothers fought brothers), is a philosophical and theological treatise on devotion and
ethical practice on a battlefield. Ambedkar wasn’t enamoured of the
Bhagvad Gita
. His view was that the
Gita
contained “an unheard of defence of murder”. He called it a book that “offers a philosophic basis to the theory of
Chaturvarna by linking it to the theory of innate, inborn qualities in men”.
¹⁰⁶

Mahatma Gandhi died a sad and defeated man. Ambedkar was devastated. He wanted his adversary exposed, not killed. The country went into shock.

All that came later. We’re getting ahead of the story.

For more than thirty-five years before that, Gandhi’s Mahatmahood had billowed like a sail in the winds of the national movement. He captured the world’s imagination. He roused hundreds of thousands of people into direct political action. He was the cynosure of all eyes, the voice of the nation. In 1931, at the Second Round Table Conference in London, Gandhi claimed—with complete equanimity—that he represented all of India. In his first public confrontation with Ambedkar (over Ambedkar’s proposal for a separate electorate for Untouchables),
Gandhi felt able to say, “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of Untouchables.”
¹⁰⁷

How could a privileged-caste
Bania claim that he, in his own person, represented forty-five million Indian Untouchables unless he believed he actually was a Mahatma? Mahatmahood provided Gandhi with an amplitude that was not available to ordinary mortals. It allowed him to use his ‘inner voice’ affectively, effectively, and often. It allowed him the bandwidth to make daily broadcasts on the state of his hygiene, his diet, his bowel movements, his enemas and his sex life, and to draw the public into a net of prurient intimacy that he could then use and manipulate when he embarked on his fasts and other public acts of self-punishment. It permitted him to contradict himself constantly and then say: “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself to me in a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”
¹⁰⁸

Ordinary politicians oscillate from political expediency to political expediency. A Mahatma can grow from truth to truth.

How did Gandhi come to be called a Mahatma? Did he begin with the compassion and egalitarian instincts of a saint? Did they come to him along the way?

In his recent biography of Gandhi, the historian
Ramachandra Guha argues that it was the two decades he spent working in
South Africa that made Gandhi a Mahatma.
¹⁰⁹
His canonisation—the first time he was publicly called Mahatma—was in 1915, soon after he returned from South Africa to begin work in India, at a meeting in Gondal, close to his hometown, Porbandar, in Gujarat.
¹¹⁰
At the time, few in India knew more than some very sketchy, rather inaccurate accounts of the struggles he had been engaged in. These need to be examined in some detail because whether or not they made him a Mahatma, they certainly shaped and defined his views on caste,
race and
imperialism. His views on
race presaged his views on caste. What happened in South Africa continues to have serious implications for the Indian community there. Fortunately, we have the Mahatma’s own words (and inconsistencies) to give us the detail and texture of those years.
¹¹¹
To generations who have been raised on a diet of
Gandhi hagiographies (including myself), to learn of what happened in South Africa is not just disturbing, it is almost stupefying.