Barely a contrast: Yet another Gandhi hagiography

In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia, associate professor at a business school in Ahmedabad, retraced in reverse the route MK Gandhi took during his Dandi March of 1930.

During her walk from Dandi to Ahmedabad, Siganporia travelled roughly the same distance the march covered every day, tried to stop at the same places where the march halted, and talked to people to find out how the march is remembered and thought about today.

Walking from Dandi: In Search of Vikas is her account of that journey. The book, however, has turned out to be yet another hagiography of Gandhi that romanticises and mythologises the historical figure.

Let me give an example. The author says, “Gandhi lived his life more keenly aware of context and the need to adapt to it than most.” But she forgets to mention the dark side of this “adaptation”.

In Africa, the context was anti-black and so Gandhi took that stance, arguing it was necessary for the success of his fight for the rights of Indian nationals. In India, the context was pro-caste (or pro-varna, as Gandhi might say) and so Gandhi took that stance “in the greater interest” of the movement.

Discussing the context in which the Dandi March took place, BR Ambedkar, in his book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), says that while on the one hand Gandhi and his fellow “Congressmen were engaged in fighting for Swaraj which they said they wanted to win in the name and for the masses, on the other hand and in the very year they were committing the worst outrages, upon the very masses by exhibiting them publicly as objects of contempt to be shunned and avoided.”

On the face of it, the book contrasts Gandhi’s vision of India with the country’s current developmental vision.

The author even goes so far as to claim that “The sort of structural oppression symbolized by the neo-bonded labour epidemic could not have come to pass under Gandhi’s watch.”

Sure, but the book never stops to ask what would have come to pass under Gandhi’s watch if not this? Had she asked this question, she would not have been able to escape the inevitable conclusion that what Gandhi wanted was Gram Swaraj or a return to those very villages that Ambedkar called “sinks of localism, dens of ignorance, narrowmindedness and communalism” and from which he bid his fellow untouchables to escape to the cities.

Another contrast the book uncritically employs is between Gandhi’s imagination of Gujarat and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s imagination of Gujarat.

Instead of exploring, analysing and justifying this through empirical research or theoretical discussion, the book begins from the assumption that the contrast is obvious and does not need further examination.

Instead of assuming that Gandhi’s vision was different, maybe the book could have explored how Gandhi set up Gujarat in a way that it could so easily become, what she calls after Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Praveen Togadia, a “laboratory of Hindutva”.

After all, according to her own admission, almost all of Gandhi’s speeches during the Dandi March employed the rhetoric of dharma and holy war to rouse people against the British.

Late Bojja Tharakam, an Andhra Pradesh-based human rights activist, advocate and poet, in his book Mahad: The March That’s Launched Every Day (2018), compared Gandhi’s Dandi March and the attendant salt satyagraha with Ambedkar’s Mahad March and the water satyagraha of 1927.

While Gandhi broke laws because it was his dharma to reject laws that his inner voice of truth (How is former US President George Bush forming opinions based on his gut feeling any different?) found unjust, Ambedkar did the exact opposite and upheld laws precisely as a weapon to annihilate dharma.

This is the real opposition to Gandhi, which Siganporia does not even hint towards. The “apposite opposite” of Dandi is not vikas but Mahad, and that of Gandhi is not Modi but Ambedkar.

Gandhi pretends that it is possible to have a dharmic society without caste, but Ambedkar outright rejects the possibility.

While Gandhi’s saintliness has been used in the book to justify Hinduism by relegating its excesses to Hindutva, which is called an aberration of “real” Hinduism, Ambedkarites clearly state that Hindutva is the political core of Hinduism and there is no difference between the two.

That is why while Siganporia exclusively focuses on the need to reform bad Hindus, anti-caste activists demand unconditional annihilation of caste.

Throughout her book, Siganporia talks about the urgent need to normalise the sight of women in the public sphere but gives Gandhi a pass for not including women in his march, and that too for the inanest of reasons — Gandhi claimed he did not include women because he did not want to dissuade the British from using force against the marchers; as if the British did not use force against women and children.

At the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, the British authorities opened fire on unarmed men, women and children.

Women were indeed included in the Mahad Satyagraha and upper caste Hindus still beat them up.

Gandhi’s logic of the British being too civil to beat up women and children makes upper caste Hindus appear worse than the British.

And if that is the case, then what moral right did they have to conduct a satyagraha against the British?

Finally, Gandhi, the saint of Sabarmati, has sanctified rebellion with such impossible moral standards that actual rebellion seems impossible to justify. How can a Bhagat Singh or a Bhimrao Ambedkar or a Kanshi Ram possibly live up to the standards of rebellion made de rigueur by Gandhi?

They can be dismissed as impure rebels since they do not have the extreme privilege required to wage a “pure” rebellion like Gandhi’s. Sarojini Naidu famously quipped that it cost the nation a lot to keep Gandhi in poverty. We can also say that it costs the nation a lot to keep Gandhi in sanctity.

Read more:

• Gandhi Jayanti 2022: DTE’s coverage over the years on various facets of the Mahatma

This was first published in the 1-15 January, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth