Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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 sexua...

The other day a student asked me who my role model was. It’s a dangerous question if it comes from an intelligent person and this student is indeed intelligent. Donkey years ago, when someone hurled this question at me – with a lot of malice – my answer was Mahatma Gandhi. The questioner laughed uproariously. He had reasons to. I was a clownish alcoholic at that time. The questioner was trying to be my well-wisher. Those were days when the entire town of Shillong became my collective well-wisher. One of the best things that people love is to see you as a patient etherized upon their counselling chair. Almost everyone I know in my life is a counsellor. They tell you what to do and what not to. They tell you what a catastrophe you are and how you can be much better with their help. They have all the answers to the rigmarole that you are to yourself. I was not really joking when I foisted Mahatma Gandhi upon that well-wisher as my role model though I was an alcoholic and I ate all ki...

From Pinterest As we are on the eve of yet another Gandhi Jayanti, it is appropriate to look at how far India has come from the Mahatma’s vision. Gandhi envisaged an India in which every citizen is free to think, speak and act according to his conscience. And today nearly six lakh Indians are in the country’s prisons most of whom (80%) are undertrials of whom many were arrested for thinking freely. You may not be entitled to think, speak and act according to your conscience in today’s India unless your conscience has been dyed in saffron. When you realise that 21% of the prisoners in the country are SCs, 9% STs, and 18% Muslims, you may begin to wonder why half of the prisoners belong to the marginalised communities. You look further into the stats and realise with a touch of chagrin that the country’s prisons are overcrowded. The occupancy rate in 2021 was 120% while it rose to 130% in the next year. Now it must be still more with the recent arrests related to the PFI affair. Go f...

Mahatma Gandhi has not been rendered obsolete yet.  Hence his birth anniversary is sure to get some attention.  The Congress Party is sure to remember him.  The ruling BJP may pay lip service unless it can conjure up the lexicon that can create a new discourse on the palimpsest of the country’s history and thus absorb Gandhi into its crowded pantheon. Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin and a member of the RSS, said in his defence during the trial that what he could not stomach was Gandhi’s “infallibility” to which the Congress had capitulated helplessly.  Godse went on to describe that infallibility as “eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision.” And Godse was right!  Gandhi was on a relentless pursuit of the truth.  The more he pursued it, the more convinced he became of the correctness of his approach.  Hence he imposed his will on many people.  Didn’t every prophet, every messiah, impose his will on his followe...

It was a cold morning on 30 Jan 1948.  Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare met together once again in Retiring Room number 6 at Old Delhi Railway Station. Godse had failed in his two earlier attempts to kill Gandhi.  He did not want to fail again.  “Third time success,” he said half jokingly to his friends. “There will be heavy police guard for Gandhi especially because of the murder attempt just ten days back,” said Godse.  Godse suggested they should buy an old camera which needed a tripod and a black hood.  He would pose as a photographer and conceal the pistol inside the base of the camera. “Nobody uses that sort of a camera nowadays,” said Apte.  He dismissed it as “a bad idea.” “Disguise yourself as a Muslim woman wearing a burqa,” suggested Karkare.  “There are many Muslim women who attend Gandhi’s prayers.  After all, he is their saviour, isn’t he?”  He spat out his hatred.   “No,” said Go...

Mahatma Gandhi was a radical thinker with an idealistic vision.  He strove utmost to put that vision into practice in his life.  He was no less than the Buddha or Jesus in his aspirations as well as materialisation of those aspirations.  Jesus was crucified by the religious people whose vested interests were at stake.  Gandhi was shot dead by a person who represented vested religious interests. Gandhi was a Hindu in the sense he followed the religious practices of Hinduism.  But his religion surpassed the straitjackets of any organised religion.  He internalised religion to the highest degree possible for an ordinary human being.  He interpreted the  Gita  in his own unique way just as he did with the other scriptures. According to Gandhi’s interpretation, the  Mahabharata  is not the history of an actual war.  “It [the  Mahabharata ] is not a history of war between two families,” wrote Gandhi, “but the history of ma...

Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste Author: Christophe Jaffrelot Publisher: Permanent Black, Delhi, (2005) Pages: 205 Price: Rs250 [2009 edition] There’s an idiom in Malayalam which may be translated as: Unable to swallow because it’s bitter and unable to spit out because it’s sweet .   Dr B R Ambedkar was one such man in Indian history.   Right from Gandhi through Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Madan Mohan Malaviya down to Arun Shourie, quite many people had serious problems with Ambedkar.   Shourie even went to the extent of writing a book, Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar and the Facts which have been Erased (1997).   On the other hand, even right wing organizations and political parties such as RSS and BJP have tried to co-opt Ambedkar into the Hindu pantheon of great leaders. As Christophe Jaffrelot says in his book under review, “On the one hand it [BJP] praises Ambedkar, the symbol of the Dalit movement because it...