Gandhi yet again

Book Review

 

Title: Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

Author: M J Akbar

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023

Pages: 250

You can love this man or hate him, but you cannot ignore him. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the man, aka the Mahatma. The amount of hatred that is spewed on social media day after day, after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister of India, is simply stounding. Right now there is a social media campaign going on to get Mahatma Gandhi’s picture removed from the country’s currency notes. It is possible that Narendra Modi’s picture will replace the Mahatma’s sooner than any sane Indian would expect. In such a context, yet another biography of the Mahatma is not out of place.

This biography is written by a man who was inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by no less a personage than Narendra Modi himself. M J Akbar was an eminent journalist before he chose to join Modi’s cabinet for reasons known only to him. The regal association ended when a charge of sexual harassment was raised against him by a fellow journalist in those farcically entertaining Me-Too days.

Politics aside, Akbar is a good writer, though journalistic, and this new book on Mahatma Gandhi is well-written. It is required too at a time when the Mahatma is under attack from too many quarters, ignorant quarters. Evil quarters, should I add? Today’s youth in India have frighteningly distorted notions about Gandhi. When I mention the name of Gandhi in class, my students think of Rahul Gandhi. Most youngsters don’t even seem to have heard of Mahatma Gandhi! If they have, it is from Mr Narendra Modi or his political party. No good.

Hence a book on Gandhi is welcome. And I must say that Akbar has done a fairly good job with it. He has divided the book into three sections, three campaigns: Nonviolence, Untouchability, and Do-or-Die. But these are nothing more than journalistic labels that become convenient to construct a narrative.

It's good that Akbar, a BJP man, thought about writing a book on Mahatma Gandhi. The BJP is a party whose prime leader will gladly garland both the Mahatma and his killer if the media were totally under his control.

The entire right-wing in India is convinced that Mahatma Gandhi was responsible for the partition of India. A lot more sins are heaped on the head of the great visionary Mahatma by Modi’s right wing. All the obeisance displayed by Modi on occasions like Gandhi Jayanti is mere sham. Modi hates the Mahatma. Modi is a personification of hatred even as Hitler was. India is becoming a country whose soul is suffused with that hatred. Alas!

In such a time, it is great that a BJP man thought of writing a book on Mahatma Gandhi’s greatness. For those who are familiar with the history of India’s freedom struggle, this book has little new to offer. But the youngsters who think of Gandhi as a villain just because of Narendra Modi’s dubiousness may find this book useful. After all, it is written by a BJP man. So, go ahead and read it, young friend, if you want to know India and its Mahatma better.

I’m driven to quote a few lines from the book.

Nehru … wrote from Dehra Dun jail on 5 May 1933: ‘Religion is not familiar ground for me, and as I have grown older I have definitely drifted away from it. I suppose I have something else in its place, something other than just intellect, reason, which gives me strength and hope…. Religion seems to me to lead to emotion and sentimentality and they are still more unreliable guides.’ [p.140]

Gandhi’s deep sympathy for Jews did not blind him to any injustice against Arabs in Palestine under British rule. ‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French… The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred.’  [Gandhi wrote.] [p.148]

Nehru could not accept the centrality of religion in Gandhi’s weltanschauung, or view of life, and Gandhi looked askance at notions like class war, the fashionable shorthand solution of leftists. For Gandhi, the village was the centre and source of India’s regeneration, while Nehru the moderniser’s answers lay in urban industrialisation. In Gandhi’s India, villagers would not be dull, nor would they ‘live like an animal in filth and darkness’…. Every village would be a republic with a panchayat exercising full powers, linked in ever-widening but never-ascending circles. Life would be an ocean, not a pyramid. [p.203]