Gandhi’s praxis of absolving the other and assuming responsibility for one’s own ill-deeds was tested on 16 September 1947 when he addressed a rally of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 380–382). The venue was the Bhangi (Sweepers) Colony, where Gandhi himself used to stay. A report of this visit was carried in the Harijan of 28 September 1947 (see also Pyarelal 1958, Vol. II: 441). RSS, a Hindu right-wing organization, was active at that time in the protection of the Hindus and, some say, in retaliating against the Muslims. Earlier, Gandhi and Dr Dinshaw Mehta had met M.S. Golwalkar, the chief of the RSS. Gandhi had heard that the RSS had been responsible for killings and violence. Golwalkar, however, had ‘assured him that this was untrue. Their organization was enemy to no man. It did not stand for the killing of Muslims. All it wanted to do was to protect Hindustan to the best of its ability’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 365). Gandhi went to the RSS rally, perhaps to find out the facts for himself.
Gandhi began his talk by recalling his visit to an RSS camp several years back at Wardha where he had been taken by his associate and prominent businessman, Jamnalal Bajaj.1 He said he had been ‘impressed by their discipline, complete absence of untouchability and rigorous simplicity’ (ibid.: 380). He was also ‘convinced that any organization which was inspired by the ideal of service and self-sacrifice was bound to grow in strength’ (ibid.). But now came the characteristic Gandhian turn, at once moral and pragmatic: he said that ‘in order to be truly useful, self-sacrifice had to be combined with purity of motive and true knowledge’ (ibid.). Note that he said ‘useful’, not ‘successful’. Success might come through other means, but of what ultimate use could it be? Did the RSS have these qualities, self-sacrifice combined with purity of motive and true knowledge? Certainly, it did not when came to one of their co-ideologists, Nathu ram, whose purity of motive was at best doubtful and true knowledge almost certainly absent. The result, as Gandhi said, was ‘known to prove ruinous to society’ (ibid.).
A crucial admission on Gandhi’s part during this speech was that his methods might not be applicable to the newly formed state of India: ‘If he had his way, he would have no military; not even police. But all this was tall talk. He was not the Government’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 380). This is a crucial distinction between his own views and those of the government. Gandhi admits that the kind of state that he wanted had not been realized. It is also a prelude to Gandhi’s later confession of the failure of his ideal of ahimsa or non-violence. When Gandhi says ‘All this was tall talk’ he is, in effect, conceding that his sort of state and polity had not been realized anywhere else in the world; even India, despite all his experiments in satyagraha, is not really a state based on higher spiritual principles. But within the bounds of what was practical and feasible, Gandhi would always push for adherence to the highest possible moral principles rather than a cynical disregard for them in the interests of expediency or selfish gain. Furthermore, by distancing himself from the government, he was trying to carve out a space where the sort of ‘saintliness’ that he wished to practice could also work in the public sphere. In effect, it was also an admission that the two could not go hand-in-hand; politics and saintliness had to be bifurcated after all. They might have gone well together during the struggle for independence but now their split was all too evident once again.
Gandhi tells the RSS that Hinduism, which they were striving so hard to protect, would die if it did not eradicate untouchability: ‘One thing was certain, and he had been proclaiming it from house-tops, that if untouchability lived, Hinduism must die’ (ibid.). However, this the RSS had already accepted, even if most of their top functionaries were upper-caste and Brahmin, their official ideology was for Hindu, not caste identities. Similarly, Gandhi told them that if ‘Hindus felt that in India there was no place for anyone else except the Hindus and if non-Hindus, especially Muslims, wished to live here, they had to live as the slaves of the Hindus, they would kill Hinduism’ (ibid.). The allusion here was to the RSS ideology of Hindutva, derived from V. D. Savarkar’s pamphlet of the same name first published in 1923. In it Savarkar had asserted that India could only belong to those who regarded India as their pitribhumi and punyabhumi – fatherland and a holy land – i.e., the Hindus; those who did not accept India as both their fatherland and holy land could only live in it as second-class citizens. Golwalkar in We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938) goes even further:
in Hindusthan exists and must needs exist the ancient Hindu nation and nought else but the Hindu Nation. All those not belonging to the national i.e. Hindu Race, Religion, Culture and Language, naturally fall out of the pale of real ‘National’ life.
(cited in Jaffrelot 2007: 117)
Gandhi warns against the harm that such a doctrine might produce, even to the destruction of the very religion that the RSS was professedly safeguarding. Gandhi was also quick to point out, in the very next sentence, that the same logic held true for Pakistan: ‘Similarly if Pakistan believed that in Pakistan only the Muslims had a rightful place and the non-Muslims had to live there on sufferance and as their slaves, it would be the death-knell of Islam in India’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 380). This even-handedness of Gandhi was always suppressed and denied by Godse and right-wing Hindus who claimed that Gandhi was partial to Muslims. Actually, Gandhi was partial to truth, something that none of his opponents could quite stomach.
Gandhi once again referred to his meeting with Guruji Golwalkar. He repeated what he had said at the end of his prayer meeting on 12 September 1947, though it was reported slightly differently. There Gandhi was reported to have said that Golwalkar told him that the RSS ‘stood for peace’ (ibid.: 365), but here Gandhi clearly says, the RSS ‘did not believe in ahimsa’ (ibid.: 381). However, Golwalkar had assured Gandhi that the RSS ‘did not believe in aggression. … It taught the art of self-defence. It never taught retaliation’ (ibid.: 380–381). Gandhi reminds his audience of this conversation of just a few days ago with their chief. When Gandhi had told Golwalkar that he had received ‘various complaints about the Sangh’ both in Calcutta and Delhi,
The Guruji had assured him that though he could not vouchsafe for the correct behaviour of every member of the Sangh, the policy of the Sangh was purely service of the Hindus and Hinduism and that too not at the cost of anyone else.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 380–381)
Gandhi clarified his stance to the members of the RSS, repeating once again that though he was a friend of the Muslims, he was no enemy of the Hindus and Sikhs: ‘It was true that he was a friend of the Muslims’, as he was of the ‘Parsis and others’, that too ‘since the age of twelve’ (ibid.: 381). But this did not mean that he was not a friend of the Hindus and Sikhs too: ‘those who called him the enemy of the Hindus and the Sikhs did not know him. He could be enemy of none, much less of the Hindus and Sikhs’ (ibid.). The instrumental phrase is that those who called him so ‘did not know him’. This was Nathuram’s tragedy; he did not know the man he killed. This, indeed, is our tragedy too – we do not know the man we either adore or hate. When Gandhi said ‘much less’ in the above sentence it actually meant that though he was everyone’s friend and the enemy of none, his investment and involvement in the moral well-being of Hindus and Sikhs was perhaps the greater given that he was not only born unto them but that he also espoused and considered himself a practitioner of Sanantan Dharma.
The RSS is often fond of considering this visit of Gandhi as giving them a ‘clean chit’, a certificate endorsing their innocence and absolving them of any wrong-doing in fomenting communal violence. Actually Gandhi said something different: ‘He did not know whether there was any truth in the allegations made against the Sangh. It was for the Sangh to show by their uniform behaviour that the allegations were baseless’ (ibid.). As Gandhi does not wish to judge others, he is also withholding his verdict on the RSS. This does not mean that he endorses their stance or pronounces them innocent of charges of carrying out attacks against the Muslims. What he said is that they would have to counter such charges by their ‘uniform behaviour’ to the contrary; only then would such ‘allegations’ against them be proven as ‘baseless’.
This exchange with the Sangh was not a one-way street; Gandhi invited questions at the end of his speech. Didn’t Hinduism permit the ‘killing of an evil-doer’, asked a member of the audience, citing the Gita. Didn’t Krishna urge Arjuna to kill the Kaurvas? Gandhi replied that ‘One had to be an infallible judge as to who was the evil-doer before the question of killing could arise’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 381). It was almost as if he was adding Christ’s injunction to Krishna’s: ‘one had to be completely faultless before such a right could accrue to one. How could a sinner claim the right to judge or execute another sinner?’ (ibid.). As to whether the ‘right to punish the evil-doer was recognized by the Gita’, Gandhi parried the question by suggesting that such a right could ‘be exercised by the properly constituted Government only’ (ibid.: 382). He urged the RSS to have faith in Government, not to ‘become judge and executioner in one’ (ibid.). Mentioning Nehru and Patel by name, he said ‘They are tried servants of the nation. Give them a chance to serve you. Do not sabotage their efforts by taking the law into your own hands’ (ibid.).
Gandhi did not want India to imitate Pakistan, especially when the latter was deviating from its stated principles and also from the tenets of Islam:
Has not the Qaid-e-Azam proclaimed that Pakistan is not a theocratic State and religion would not be imposed by law? But, unfortunately, it is true that this claim is not always put into practice. Would India become a theocratic State and would the principles of Hinduism be imposed on non-Hindus? I hope not. If that happens India would cease to be land of hope and promise. Then it would not be a country to which not only all the races of Asia and Africa but the whole world would look with hope. The world does not expect from Hindustan whether as Indian Union or Pakistan meanness and fanaticism. It expects greatness, goodness and generosity from Hindustan so that the whole world can learn a lesson and find light in the midst of the prevailing darkness.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 231)
Gandhi considers ‘Hindustan’ the larger entity of which both the Indian Union and Pakistan are members. Both nations, therefore, would no longer serve as examples to the rest of Asia if they became theocratic or authoritarian. Imposing one’s beliefs on others just because one has the power to do so was not the right way, according to Gandhi. Thus, the majoritarianism of the Hindu right held no appeal to him.
Gandhi had made his views clear to the leaders of the ruling Congress party in a speech to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) on 15 November 1947:
I have always held that if Pakistan belongs to Muslims alone, then it is a sin which will destroy Islam. You may blame the Muslim League for what has happened and say that the two-nation theory is at the root of all this evil and that it was the Muslim League that sowed the seed of this poison; nevertheless I say that we would be betraying the Hindu religion if we did evil because others had done it. Ever since my childhood I have known that Hinduism teaches us to return good for evil. The wicked sink under the weight of their own evil. Must we also sink with them?
(Ibid.: 320)
That the wicked will be brought down by their own misdeeds is a doctrine that requires immense faith in the justness of the cosmic order. Members of the Hindu right, as indeed many of their counterparts in the Congress, lacked such conviction. Instead, they thought that the more pragmatic alternative was to pay back in the same coin, something Gandhi rescinded, especially when it meant descending to the barbarism of one’s adversaries.
But going back to Gandhi’s assassination, it is not only a fact that Godse belonged to the Mahasabha and edited a Hindu extremist newspaper whose masthead had Savarkar’s photo in the inset, but that the two organizations, the RSS and the Mahasabha, then shared a common ideology. When Gandhi ended his fast on 18 January 1948, both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha had signed the Declaration pledging communal harmony and the end of sectarian strife. One representative, Ganesh Datt, had signed on behalf of both the RSS and the Mahasabha (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 256). That Nathuram went on to murder Gandhi indicates that either he did not consider himself bound by this pledge or that the pledge itself was not sincere in the first place. What seems likely is that while Delhi was deeply touched, even transformed by Gandhi’s presence, speeches, and, finally, his fast, hard-
line members of the Hindu right elsewhere were unmoved and unaffected.
Gandhi, however, was not unaware of this mistrust and hatred. Godse, Apte and their team of assassins exploded a bomb on 20 January 1948 on the premises of Birla House. Gandhi was unhurt. In his prayer meeting the following evening, he addressed what had happened. Quoting his favourite scripture, he asked, ‘Is it not said in chapter IV of the Gita that whenever the wicked become too powerful and harm dharma God sends someone to destroy them?’ (ibid.: 281). This was a telling allusion because Nathuram would also use the same scripture to justify his action. But Gandhi had already anticipated, and, trained lawyer that he was, refuted such an appeal:
The man who exploded the bomb obviously thinks that he has been sent by God to destroy me. I have not seen him. But I am told that is what he said when questioned by the police. When he says he was doing the bidding of God he is only making God an accomplice in a wicked deed. But it cannot be so.
(Ibid.)
Gandhi minces no words here: killing anyone in the name of religion or as a religious duty is wicked, especially killing a man like him. God cannot be an accomplice to murder; we humans alone will have to answer for it.
Moreover, the claim that killing Gandhi would save Hinduism, he points out, is so specious, so self-delusive, so mistaken, so ultimately false:
Therefore those who are behind him or whose tool he is, should know that this sort of thing will not save Hinduism. If Hinduism has to be saved it will be saved through such work as I am doing. I have been imbibing Hindu dharma right from my childhood. … Therefore having passed all the tests I am as staunch a Hindu today as intuitively I was at the age of five or six. If God deems it fit to make anyone the instrument for saving Hindu dharma, it could be none but me. Do you want to annihilate Hindu dharma by killing a devout Hindu like me?
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 282)
Gandhi lays claim to being a ‘staunch’ and ‘devout’ Hindu, much more so, in fact, than those who want to represent Hindus. Hindu dharma can only be saved by him – ‘none but me’, he asserts. This is indeed a very tall claim. Gandhi deliberately puts himself at the very centre of what Hinduism in our times is. This is his way of challenging us all, Hindus and non-Hindus alike, to choose between him and his opponents. Choose we must; we cannot be on both sides at once. No wonder earlier in his prayer meeting of 14 January 1947, the day of Makarsankranti that is sacred to most Hindus, Gandhi had rejected the other common allegation, that he wanted to make Hindus weak: ‘I want everyone to become strong’ (ibid.: 233), which is a totally different model to becoming strong at the expense of someone else. He thus puts himself and his version of Hinduism on trial, not shying away from the contest that had been thrust upon him.
In his prayer meeting on 27 September 1947 Gandhi openly rejected his adversaries’ accusation that he was ‘ruining Hinduism’:
I tell them that what they call my mistake is not a mistake. The real thing is that we are all possessed by a madness today and talk all sorts of things. When we get over that madness, we shall talk sense. That is why I say that what I am saying cannot be a mistake. Those who think I am making a mistake are themselves mistaken. … Because Pakistan is not following its religion should I start teaching the Hindus that they should also give up their religion? I have never learnt such a thing. If we protect our Muslim brethren and remain pure ourselves, it would have its own effect on Pakistan.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 4)
The greatness of Hinduism would lie not in imitating Islam, especially when it was being most un-Islamic as in Pakistan after the Partition, but in maintaining the fundamental humanistic principles of Hinduism even in the face of severe odds. That would be its true test. If it became a mirror image of a distorted version of Islam, how would it remain itself, remain Hindu, remain worthy of its own name?
No doubt, Gandhi’s idea of Hinduism was also quite different from that of the RSS or the Hindu Mahasabha. Very modestly, this is how Gandhi advanced his own definition:
Once a friend who was an eminent advocate asked me to define Hinduism. I told him I was neither a lawyer like him nor a religious leader and was really unable to define Hinduism, but I would suggest that a Hindu was one who had equal respect for all religions.
(Ibid.: 293)
But while Gandhi is tentative in his definition, he is categorical in asserting that killing a devout Hindu like himself would only lead to the annihilation of Hinduism. The radical and far-reaching import of Gandhi’s assertion should not be lost on us: those who claimed to save Hinduism were actually destroying it. That religious zealots and fanatics are usually the destroyers of religion has now come home to us in the most unsavoury and costly ways. It is as if the very enemies of religion champion religion to achieve their ends. If they declared themselves to be brutal, barbaric, bloodthirsty and power-hungry killers, who would support them? But if they describe themselves as true defenders of the faith then they will have many adherents. If Nathuram was not saving Hinduism what was he doing? He, like many other Hindu nationalists, was actually misled by a heady and powerful ideology that promised a better version of the nation, one in which the Muslim ‘problem’ would be solved once and for all. Such a vision continues to appeal to many Hindus despite the adverse results of the policy to purge Pakistan of Hindus and other religious minorities, including Christians and Ahmediyas. Ethnic purging and genocides in other parts of the world, too, have usually had disastrous repercussions on those nations. Removing or subduing ethnic minorities or adherents of other religions does not help the majority. The violence does not end with the removal of the Other. The so-called self now splits to create other Others. The violence directed at Others returns directed at the self. This we see being played out in Pakistan where the Taliban, a creature of the Pakistani government, army and intelligence agencies is now killing, threatening and destroying Pakistanis themselves.
The blame for Gandhi’s murder continues to be laid at the doorstep of the RSS, while the RSS has consistently denied any involvement. Since Nathuram had once been a member of the RSS, the organization came under a cloud. Many prominent leaders were arrested and Government banned the RSS on 4 February 1948. The ban was only lifted in July 1949, after protracted negotiations on a new constitution for the organization, which Golwalkar framed in March 1949 and submitted to the Home Ministry for its approval.
Later, when the Kapur Commission conducted an inquiry into Gandhi’s murder, it found no material evidence to show the involvement of the RSS in the conspiracy:
RSS as such were not responsible for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, meaning thereby that one could not name the organization as such as being responsible for that most diabolical crime, the murder of the apostle of peace. It has not been proved that they (the accused) were members of the RSS.
(Kapur 1970–1971, Vol. 1: 165)
However, with unfailing regularity the Sangh continues to be charged with killing Gandhi for reasons which may best be described as political.
The accusers, for the most part avowed leftists, secularists, or supporters of the Congress, are by no means entirely innocent themselves. The Hindu Mahasabha, whose involvement was more direct, was itself after all once a part of the Congress, acquiring a separate identity only after Savarkar took over its reins in the late 1930s (Gordon 1975: 145–204). The RSS, though sympathetic to the Mahasabha, refused to support its political ambitions (Jeffrelot 2007: 175–177), and would float its own party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, in 1951. What Gandhi’s visit to the RSS rally makes perfectly clear is that though the two had different views on what the Indian nation should be like, the latter was not interested in annihilating the former. As to Savarkar, the leading Hindu nationalist ideologue and author of Hindutva, he and Gandhi were old adversaries, having faced off with each other as early as 1909. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj was a response to the Savarkarite ideology of using violence instrumentally to achieve political ends, including the independence of India and later a Hindu state. Gandhi’s murder was a direct outcome of this clash between two versions of Indian nationalism or, to put it even more specifically, two versions of Hinduism. In using violence to achieve political ends Nathuram was true to his brand of Hindu nationalism. What he didn’t realize, perhaps, was that at the precise moment that he succeeded in murdering Gandhi, he had also shown the inferiority of his brand of both nationalism and Hinduism. Gandhi’s murder put paid to any ambition that the Mahasabha and its followers may have had of using Indian independence as a pretext to turn India into a Hindu nation. When another Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the successor of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, and thus a grandchild, so to speak, of the RSS, did get the opportunity to come to power in Delhi, it could only do so in 1998, 50 years after Gandhi’s murder, and then as the leading member of a coalition of a wide range of parties, many of whom were not supporters of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism. Unlike the RSS, which is still deeply ambivalent about Gandhi, the BJP has no qualms in officially embracing him. Several of its leaders are self-professed Gandhians or admirers of Gandhi, the most recent example being the on-off BJP ideologue Sudheendra Kulkarni, who authored a massive tome called Music of the Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi’s Manifesto for the Internet Age (2012). Savarkar’s and Nathuram’s politics, let alone their brand of Hinduism, have had few takers. It is only when Hindu nationalists started treating Gandhi as less of an untouchable that they found favour with the Indian masses.
The Hindu right is still uncertain and ambivalent about Gandhi’s Hinduism, as they are about his politics. Hindu nationalists, in so far as they still strive to create a Hindu nation, are totally at odds with Gandhi’s politics and his notion of the nation. As to Gandhi’s Hinduism, it would appear that Hindu nationalists are unable to digest it, if they understand it in the first place. Like the Ambedkarites, they don’t quite know what to do with the Mahatma; to reject him totally is not only politically inexpedient but also morally untenable, but to accept him fully is also terribly difficult, if not impossible. The attraction–repulsion thus continues, turning into a continuous, contentious and unresolved ambivalence.
Note
1 According to M. G. Chitkara Gandhi visited the RSS camp near Wardha on Christmas Day, 25 December 1934 (Chitkara 2004: 254) He arrived at 6:00 a.m. and spent an hour-and-a-half there. Volume 66 of the Collected Works of Gandhi, which covers this period, has no record of this meeting.
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