I say 90 per cent of Indian are idiots. You people don’t have brains in your
heads.... It is so easy to take you for a ride.
You mad people will start fighting amongst yourself (sic), not realizing
that some agent provocateur is behind a mischievous gesture of disrespect to a
place of worship. Today 80 per cent Hindus are communal and 80 per cent Muslims
are communal. This is the harsh truth,
bitter truth that I am telling you. In 150
years, you have gone backwards instead of moving forward because the English
kept injecting poison.
Justice Katju |
Justice Markandey Katju,
retired judge of the Supreme Court of India, said those words in a seminar
organised by the South Asia Media Commission on 8 Dec 2012 in Delhi.
Now he tells us in his blog
that Mahatma Gandhi was “an agent of the British.” He lists three reasons.
1. By injecting religion into
politics, Gandhi helped the British policy of ‘divide and rule.’
2. Gandhi’s satyagraha
diverted the revolutionary freedom movement into “a harmless nonsensical
channel.”
3. Gandhi’s economic ideas were
“nonsense” and deception of people.
Gandhi and religion
Gandhi was a deeply
religious person. He was a devout Hindu
and, as Justice Katju points out in his latest (as of now) blog,
he sometimes waxed poetic like most deeply religious people: he went to the
extent of calling the cow “a poem of pity”
and demanded the protection of the animal.
In spite of such facts,
Katju’s allegations against Gandhi reveal a partial or selective understanding
of the Mahatma. When Gandhi demanded the
protection of the cow, he was using the cow as a convenient symbol, a symbol
that would be easily understood and accepted by a large majority of
Indians. “The cow to me means the entire
sub-human world,” said Gandhi (and Justice Katju has quoted
that too). “Man through the cow is
enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives.” What Gandhi wanted Indians to learn was
profound respect for all creatures. All that exists is sacred – that’s what
Gandhi meant, in other words. It is
unfortunate that Justice Katju could not rise to that level of understanding
and chose to interpret Gandhi literally. Justice Katju misleads his readers with
selective quotes and interpretations.
Gandhi did not consider
even the scriptures as the ultimate truths.
How would he then expect us to take his words as the final truths? Scriptures are like poetry (even as the cow
was to Gandhi). They are not to be
interpreted literally. Gandhi did not
accept the Rama of the Ramayana and
the Krishna of the Mahabharata as
gods. “My Rama,” said Gandhi, “the Rama
of my prayers is not the historical Rama, the son of Dasharatha, the King of
Ayodhya. He is the eternal, the unborn, the one without a second….” [Harijan:
April 28, 1946]. “I have no knowledge
that the Krishna of Mahabharata ever lived. My Krishna
has nothing to do with any historical person,” wrote Gandhi. [Young
India: Jan 1, 1925]
In a 1942 article Gandhi
wrote, “Rama is not known by only a thousand names. His names are
innumerable, and He is the same whether we call Him Allah, Khuda, Rahim,
Razzak, the Bread-giver, or any name that comes from the heart of a true
devotee.” [Harijan: Feb 15, 1942]
Gandhi defined God as
Truth. The pursuit of God was religion,
for him. The pursuit of the ultimate
truth is a perilous adventure. That’s
why Gandhi called his autobiography his “experiments with truth.” His entire life was an experiment. He was a learner till the end of his
life. That spirit of enquiry is the real
religion. Cows and idols as well as
other religions and their scriptures, anything at all, can be means of arriving
at one’s religious truths.
The failure to understand
this is what misleads people like Justice Katju as well as quite many other
critics of Gandhi. A similar failure is
what produces religious fanatics and extremists and contemporary India’s
cultural-nationalists. They fail to see
the wood for the trees. They are incapable of perceiving the vision of the
mystic or the saint or the prophet or whatever.
And Gandhi belonged to the category of the saint and the mystic –
despite the shrewdly calculative and political acumen he possessed.
Revolution and Non-Violence
A simple logical question
that demolishes Justice Katju’s entire argument in this regard is: why should
revolutions be necessarily violent? If
we can achieve the goal without using violence, isn’t that far better and far
desirable? Gandhi was shrewd enough to
understand the logic of the British and hence use the same logic against
them. It was a battle of wits instead of
battle with deadly weapons.
The British perceived
themselves as the most civilised race on the earth. They viewed it as their “burden” to civilise
the world: “the white man’s burden.”
What Gandhi showed to the British was that they were not so civilised,
after all. They were using violence like
the savages while the Indians were non-violent.
It is that logic which the British had no answer for. They could have answered weapons with
weapons, violence with more violence.
But how could they afford to counter civilisation with savagery? Gandhi used their weapon against
themselves. Shrewdly. Wisely, may I say, Justice Katju?
Gandhian economics
Gandhi’s economics was
based on the simple understanding that the earth has enough to meet the need of everyone but not the greed of anyone. True, many of Gandhi’s views in this regard
were not practical in a world with rising populations and complexities of
needs. Hence I’m willing to grant
certain space to Justice Katju in this regard.
But, once again, what’s required is a proper understanding of Gandhi’s
vision rather than condemnation of his views.
Gandhi envisaged a simple world, a utopia of sorts. His was a romantic dream not much different
from the Biblical Eden. It was an
impractical dream. But it was neither “nonsense”
nor “deceiving the people” if we are able to rise to the level of Gandhi’s
thinking and world-vision.
The world chose to follow
the diktats of human greed rather than the poetry of simple needs. What have we made of the world with that
choice? A planet that is being plundered
and raped over and again, mercilessly...
Conclusion
Justice Katju argues
that Akbar is more fit to be the father of the nation than Gandhi because of the
former’s religious tolerance. I don’t
want to discuss Akbar here lest this post becomes a book rather than a
blog. But the Justice should remember
that distance always tends to lend enchantment to the view. The farther back we go in history, the easier
it is to glorify people since their feet of clay would have been replaced with
legends more precious than the costliest metals. Gandhi’s feet were indeed made of clay. He would not have wished legends to replace
them. That was one of the aspects that
made Gandhi great. There were many other
aspects too. He deserves deeper study
than the eminent Justice has bothered to do hitherto.
Brilliant write! Thought provoking, logical, impartial..!
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you back.
DeleteYes,Gandhi had many angles to understand..!
ReplyDeletePerhaps Gandhi will remain far beyond the grasp of contemporary India though England has just honoured him with a nine-foot bronze statue in Parliament Square!
DeletePerhaps Gandhi will remain far beyond the grasp of contemporary India though England has just honoured him with a nine-foot bronze statue in Parliament Square!
DeleteBrilliantly written with a nuanced understanding of the whole controversy.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Subroto.
DeleteDear blogger, have you read "Annihilation of caste" by Ambedkar. If not I would request you.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it though I'm aware of the arguments vaguely. Hope to read it. At any rate I don't think the kind of reform that Ambedkar envisaged is practical.
Delete