INDIAN LEADERS

        MAHATHMA GANDHI

Naming the makers of India, one of the world's largest and most complex societies, is an exercise both daunting and futile: many will be called, and a hundred will be chosen.
But Mahatma Gandhi must head any such list, not out of meaningless piety for the Father of the Nation, but to assess his contribution to India today. Charismatic saint or astute politician, social reformer and, in Edwin Montagu's words, "pure visionary" or the greatest force for conservatism, as G.D. Birla described him: these remain questions not for recondite research but of vast contemporary importance.
In January 1915, Gandhi, the son of a petty functionary in Gujarat, returned to India after 21 years in South Africa. Before going there, Gandhi had failed to find direction, whether at home where he married early, in London where, after an improbable and short-lived metamorphosis into a young man about town, he scraped through the Bar examinations, or back in Bombay where he did not do well as a lawyer.
It was in South Africa that Gandhi grew in stature. There, he built up a lucrative legal practice only to renounce it; became the unquestioned leader of a heterogeneous Indian community of despised traders and indentured labourers; displayed his genius for organisation in the protest against its disabilities; and evolved his doctrine of non-violence or Ahimsa, his tactic of passive resistance or Satyagraha and a philosophy which rejected the industrial and material civilisation of the West and envisaged a moral regeneration of the Indian peoples. In Hind Swaraj (1908) Gandhi wrote revealingly: "India's salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the last 50 years, the railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go -- and the so-called upper classes have to learn consciously, religiously and deliberately the simple peasant life By patriotism, I mean the welfare of the whole people."

Swaraj for Gandhi meant self-rule, as much a moral and personal ethic, the self-rule of an individual over his own impulses and weaknesses, as the political objective of a people struggling rightfully to be free -- an ambiguity which Gandhi was repeatedly to exploit during his Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements.

However unformed his political tactics, by the time Gandhi returned to India his strategy was clear. As he candidly admitted, "At my time of life and with views firmly formed on several matters, I could only join an organisation to affect its policy and not be affected by it." From the moment he returned, Gandhi planned to win leadership of those organisations which fitted his grand purpose, the achievement of Swaraj. This meant capturing the Indian National Congress.
Founded in 1885, initially a three-day wonder dominated by the old Presidency capitals, mendicant and peripatetic, the Congress' moderation had only recently been tinged with extremism. In September 1920 the Congress was taken over at its Calcutta session by Gandhi. This he achieved by steering clear of the old leadership, creating local networks of support in regions outside the ken of all-India politics and among groups as yet untouched by them -- whether in Champaran where he championed an "abjectively helpless tenantry", in Kaira where he campaigned for peasants hit by poor harvests, high prices and plague, or in Ahmedabad where he backed striking mill workers while forging friendly links with rich mill-owners who rewarded him to the end of his life with their support.

In these ways, Gandhi, who aimed to penetrate "all strata of Indian life", took the educated into the village and the workplace where previously they had never been.
Two years after asserting that "the easiest way of winning Swaraj is to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Britishers in defence of the Empire" and claiming that his bent was "not political but religious", Gandhi, with supreme tactical opportunism, deployed three well-chosen issues to prepare for his takeover of the Congress.

These were the Rowlatt Bills (by which the government wanted to keep in peace its draconian war-time powers), the "Punjab Wrong"after General Dyer and his rifles shot dead 379 people peacefully attending a meeting in Jallianwala Bagh and injured a thousand more, and the Khilafat Movement of Muslim pilgrims, alims and politicians alike, excited by the fate of the holy places in the post-war settlement.

But, significantly, Gandhi waited until June 1920 when the precise rules under the new reforms were published, and the Uttar Pradesh and Punjab Congress leaders had calculated that they could not win the elections, before successfully launching an assault upon the old guard. At the Calcutta session in September, the Congress committed itself to the triple boycott of councils, courts and schools and declared its goal to be Swaraj within one year.

But Gandhi's rise to power did not bring about a transformation in India's politics. The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921-22 was in many respects a debacle. Such successes as it had depended less upon Khilafat Muslims, fanatical Moplahs, Akali Sikhs, Assam coolies, Uttar Pradesh kisans, Guntur village officers, or southern liquor barons and cattle drivers and their localised agitations, and more upon the political bosses who deployed them as canon fodder in their own interests.
In November 1920, before the ratification in December of non-cooperation by the Nagpur Congress, the elections had come and gone. In all the main provinces Indian ministers went about their dyarchical business and the boycott of courts and schools and the bonfires of Lancashire cotton never added up to much. Those who gave licence to these movements were primarily concerned with consolidating their capacity to win elections. This can be seen by the rise of the Swarajya Party within the Congress; despite the rearguard efforts of the Gandhian no-changers, it voted at Cocanada in 1923 to contest the next round of elections.

However much it may have given the Congress a compulsive ideology under a charismatic leader and raised vague millennial hopes, non-cooperation's main achievement was to put a little more substance into the Congress organisation.
Significantly non-cooperation had shown itself incapable of being brought under effective central control. Calling off the movement after Chauri Chaura, Gandhi remained on the margins until the Congress, too weak, too disorganised and too divided to speak with one voice in the next round of constitutional negotiations, sought to paper over the cracks by getting Gandhi to launch civil disobedience.

But by the same token the Congress was ill-prepared to control a mass campaign in India without the violence that had marred non-cooperation. Civil disobedience, the salt march to Dandi (an astute move by Gandhi to play for time and to test opinion), his programme tailored to achieve the widest appeal (whether temperance, khadi, enlisting women or social uplift, especially of the Harijans) and the 60,000 or more who went to jail notwithstanding, failed to mobilise India's millions.
Except here and there in Gujarat and the Godavari delta and in a part of Midnapore, civil disobedience was not a mass movement. Deploying full-time political workers, it enlisted more of the literate in the towns and cities and more of the prosperous in the countryside than before. But industrial workers, poor peasants and the untouchables whose cause Gandhi championed (to Ambedkar's lasting dismay), remained outside the effective zone of politics. Their time had not come. It has yet to come. Perhaps it will never come.
So what was the real importance of Gandhi's civil disobedience movements? They had merely scratched the surface of Indian society. They had not shaken the British raj; and by 1933 they had in reality been defeated. Indeed, the second Civil Disobedience Movement (just as the Quit India Movement of 1942) was less a dress rehearsal for Independence than the curtain call for techniques which had had their day. The bitter conclusion must be that Gandhi's love affair with the India of his dreams had left him jilted.
The true significance of the agitations which Gandhi led was to fortify the hands of the constitutionalists, in particular of the high command and of the turncoat politicians who now flocked under the Congress banner to battle for the votes of a much larger, but still uncommitted, electorate.

The new constitution adopted by the Congress in 1934 gave it a structure of control from the top to the base, and was of critical utility in the Congress' electoral strategy of putting its imprimatur only upon those candidates who accepted its whip. So too was Gandhi's help, behind the scenes, in disciplining the Congress' more radical wing when the high command expelled Subhas Chandra Bose and effectively neutered Jawaharlal Nehru by making him president of the Congress, an ornament, not one of the inner group which took charge, a strategy which paid off when the Congress swept the polls in the Hindu-majority provinces in 1937.

Without Gandhi's unique capacity to keep the lid on the pressure cooker of India's aspirations, his charismatic appeal, his determination, even by the threat to fast to death, to keep untouchables within the Hindu fold, India's politicians representing its urban bigwigs and rural notables might well have been overwhelmed by the myriad grievances and stirrings within Indian society.

After World War II, the Congress unquestionably called the shots and the British, bankrupted by war and anxious to quit, could see that Jinnah, the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan, conveniences while they wished to hold on to India, were now huge obstacles to the speedy transfer of power to their only plausible successors, the Congress.

So it was the high command, reluctantly recognising that Mother India's seamless unity would have to be torn asunder, which called for Partition and accepted Pakistan, albeit a "truncated and moth-eaten" version. This was the price they had to pay for a strong unitary centre capable of controlling their followers in provinces which might otherwise have gone their own particularist way.

In the high politics of the end game, Partition and the transfer of power, Gandhi, sidelined by his erstwhile lieutenants, wandered about the country to Calcutta and Noakhali, like some latter-day Lear, deploying the remnants of his moral authority in a vain attempt to quell the communal furies which Partition had unleashed.

The uncovenanted legatees of Gandhi's agitational movements, and of his life's work, were the politicians who have benefited from India's Independence. Perhaps the supreme irony is that those who have professed to lead a free India have turned their backs on the Gandhian vision of promoting "the welfare of the whole people".

Gandhi's own brand of social conservatism, which sought change through personal reformation rather than popular revolution, his project to uplift the Harijans while keeping them within the Hindu straight-jacket, the very cause of their degradation, his desire to take India back to its traditional, non-industrial and rural roots, with support from many captains of industry, his commitment to harmony between Hindus and Muslims while stressing Hinduism as a distinctive force, and his hopes, through Satyagraha, of curbing the violence which lies just under the fragile crust of order in Indian society, all suggest that Gandhi's contribution has been as ambiguous as India's chequered past and its uncertain future.

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