The seventh part pf our exclusive serialisation of a new book on the history of class struggles in India, written by a long-time supporter of the Workers’ International Network. Previous chapters can be found HERE.
It is one of the most widespread modern fairy-tales that India won independence because Gandhi’s campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience somehow “shamed” the British Empire into withdrawal. Not only British but even Indian historians sometimes suggest that the rulers of India relinquished power out of a sudden rush of altruism or an expression of benevolent liberal enlightenment. Bipan Chandra, for instance, argues that “the peaceful and negotiated nature of the transfer of power in 1947” represented “the culmination of a war of position where the British recognised that the Indian people were no longer willing to be ruled by them“, and that “the British decision to transfer power was not merely a response to the immediate situation… but a result of their realisation that their legitimacy to rule had been irrevocably eroded over the years“.
The truth is that British rule had never been based on any misunderstandings about either the “willingness” of the Indian people to be enslaved or about their own “legitimacy”, but mainly on plain brute force.
In his prophetic novel The Iron Heel, in which he foresaw the coming of fascism, Jack London’s revolutionary hero Ernest Everhard was preparing to address a meeting of American millionaires. “I’ll make them snarl like wolves,” he predicts. “When their morality is questioned, they grow only the more complacent and superior. But I shall menace their moneybags. That will shake them to the roots of their primitive natures…. You will see the caveman in evening dress, snarling and snapping over a bone.”
The otherwise bizarre appeal of the Gandhi cult in the West can be explained only on the basis that here was a barefoot and loincloth-clad prophet who, far from threatening their profits, merely appeals to the capitalists’ consciences, allowing them to dab their eyes and glow righteously. The heirs of those who jailed Gandhi now not only canonise but mercilessly exploit him. The investors who financed the lucrative film epic had shrewdly totted up the vast aggregate cinema markets of the entire English-speaking world, plus those of India with its booming cinema halls in every village. Indira Gandhi had personally vetted the script. And the Congress government of the time, eager to resuscitate the old flagging myths, specially exempted the film from entertainment tax to reduce ticket prices.
Salman Rushdie observed that the film “sanctified” Gandhi and “turned him into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer… (It) omits Gandhi’s fondness for Indian billionaire industrialists… It shows us a saint who vanquished an empire. This is a fiction… It is as if Gandhi, years after his death, has found in Attenborough the last in his series of billionaire patrons… And rich men, like emperors, have always had a weakness. for tame holy men.“
Gandhi was undoubtedly a major historical figure and a formidable front man for Congress – perhaps the only leader of Congress capable of mobilising and inspiring the masses. He had a genius for devising symbolic protests that caught the popular imagination; for inspiring mass movements that could serve as effective bargaining counters; for preaching moral appeals against local particularism, antiMuslim communalism and “untouchability”. These were the elementary democratic foundations for unity, without which there could obviously be no independence struggle.
But his main historical accomplishment was to derail and suppress, again and again, mass struggles which threatened to overstep the arbitrary limits which he himself sought to impose on them.
Gandhi harnessed the rebellion of the masses not as a battering-ram against their oppressors, but as just one of so many useful bargaining chips. His principal function, again and again, was to derail mass struggles whenever they threatened to overstep the arbitrary limits which Congress sought to impose upon them. Even for such purposes, however, what was required was a united mass struggle. It was necessary to imbue the population with an Indian national consciousness, to resist provincialism and particularism, the vested interests of the princes, and the religious, caste and linguistic divisions so sedulously fostered by the British pastmasters of “divide and rule”. The poor and downtrodden constituted a reserve army to be deployed occasionally for intermittent warning protests, only to be hastily demobilised once their purpose had been served.
Whenever the momentum of the mass movement was gathering pace – this was demonstrated above all in 1922, 1930 and 1946 – Gandhi used his own spellbinding charisma to cut it short. On each occasion he would divert their energies into impotent passive substitutes: khadi spinning, salt mining, the boycott of foreign cloth, and other such stunts. He had a genius for devising symbolic protests that caught the popular imagination, for inspiring mass movements that could be used as leverage to induce concessions in negotiations with the authorities.
Gandhi and the caste system
Gandhi went further than his urbane colleagues in transcending the cramped barriers of local particularism, caste superstition and communal bigotry; this was an indispensable condition if concessions were to be won. But even Gandhi’s famous “crusade against untouchability” – something which was an indispensable precondition for any kind of mass campaign – was really limited only to a call for social reform among Hindus. Against the irrefutable logic of the campaigner against casteism Ambedkar, who argued that “there will be outcastes as long as there are castes; and nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system“, Gandhi – in reality a passionate supporter of the principles of the caste system – replied:
“Varna fulfils nature ‘s law of conservation of human energy and true economics… It is the best possible adjustment of social stability and progress… It trusts to the principle of heredity… It is difficult to imagine a more harmonious adjustment. Caste does not connote superiority or inferiority. It simply recognises different outlooks and corresponding modes of life… It is not a human invention but an immutable law of nature.” (Quoted by J. Ram in Caste Challenge in India.)
Gandhi’s denunciations of communalism and “untouchability” were indispensable prerequisites for unity, without which there could be no viable independence struggle. It was necessary to imbue the population with an Indian national consciousness; to resist provincialism and particularism, the vested interests of the princes and maharajas, and the religious, caste and linguistic divisions so cynically fostered by the British pastmasters of “divide and rule”. He recognised that the fighting forces could only come from the ranks of the poor and downtrodden, even if only for intermittent warning protests.
Actually, how sincere was Gandhi’s ostensible rejection of untouchability? Ambedkar, the real champion of the dalits (“untouchables”) exposed the fact that Gandhi “was all the time double-dealing. He conducted two papers. One in English…. In Gujarati, he conducted another paper…. If you read the two papers, you will see how Mr Gandhi was deceiving the people. In the English paper, he posed himself as an opponent of the caste system, and of untouchability, and that he was a Democrat. But if you read his Gujarati magazine… he has been supporting the caste system and all the orthodox dogmas which have been keeping us down all through the ages.”
A brake on the masses
Nevertheless, the Congress leaders would inevitably come into collision with the feudal Muslim League and the arch-collaborationist communal RSS, which between them were soon to ravage the infant nation in its cradle, partition India… and assassinate Gandhi. But it was neither Gandhi’s pacifist saintliness nor any paternal benevolence on Mountbatten’s part that ended British rule. That needed a revolutionary mass struggle.
While Gandhi sat in confinement penning plaintive letters to the Viceroy, the Indian masses launched campaigns of strikes, demonstrations, occupations, mutinies, guerrilla actions, sabotage, armed revolts and popular uprisings which paralysed the administration.
But for a unique conjuncture of circumstances, combining the collapse of imperial power on the one hand and the betrayal by the Communist Party on the other, Gandhi would appear today as a mere marginal footnote in the history of the liberation struggle, an obscure historical phenomenon but nothing more – comparable perhaps to South Africa’s Chief Luthuli, the early figurehead of the African National Congress. It is a historical paradox that the very intensity and maturity of India’s revolutionary crisis brought to the threshold of power a figure who actually belongs to the most primitive and impotent phase of a liberation struggle.
Gandhi owed his pacifist outlook not to “the wisdom of the East” but to the heritage of Western writers like Ruskin, Emerson, Mazzini and Thoreau. He even corresponded personally with Count Tolstoy in Russia, who was by now himself wearing a peasant smock. What linked these dreamers of America, Europe and Russia to the Indian political leader?
“Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-resistance to evil by violence was a generalisation of the first stages of the muzhik revolution,” wrote Trotsky. “Gandhi is now fulfilling the same mission in India, only in more practical form.“
Lacking as yet any confidence in their own collective power, the peasants as a doomed class and the very first generations of workers look for salvation to those enlightened representatives of the ruling classes who make impassioned appeals to the rulers to curb their appetites, for fear of provoking a violent response from below. Tolstoy the feudal lord; Gandhi the heir to a provincial dynasty; Luthuli the chief of an African tribe… all preached passivity to the exploited and restraint to the exploiters. A similar role was played at the outset of Russia’s revolution of 1905 by the Orthodox priest father Gapon.
Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi: “The same struggle of the soft against the harsh, of meekness and love against pride and violence, is making itself felt every year.” A similar message came from the early radical English poet Shelley, another source from which Gandhi liked to quote:
“And if then the tyrants dare/ Let them ride among you there,/ Slash and stab and maim and hew,/ What they like, that let them do…/ Look upon them as they slay/ Till their rage has died away./ Then they will return with shame/ To the place from which they came.“
Moving words, no doubt; but historically, such tactics have usually proved to be very bad advice. The delusion that “meekness” can “shame” the ruling classes belongs to the very earliest stage in the awakenings of the masses, who do not as yet feel a sense of their power to shape their own destiny. It is a philosophy of impotence. What effect did Tolstoy have in ridding Russia of Tsarism? How many people today have even heard of Chief Luthuli? The Gapons and Gandhis and Tutus were all soon bypassed by the workers once their pacifist appeals were answered by bullets.
Louis Fischer offered an improbable description in gushing tones of Gandhi’s hunger strike on behalf of the millhands: “The mill-owners were intimidated because they had a deep affection for Gandhi, and when they saw his selfless sacrifice they may have felt ashamed of their own selfishness.“
The working class listened to such fairy tales at their own peril. It is almost embarrassing to have to point out that neither affection, selflessness, shame, nor any other such noble attributes can bridge the gap between the actual material conflicts of class interests.
On coming to power, the Indian capitalists for their part paid no heed to Gandhi’s homespun homilies, but spoke in their own unmistakable language: police massacres of striking workers, communal pogroms, horrific atrocities against entire villages who rebelled against “untouchability”, and bloody colonial wars of conquest. The workers, too, could therefore be forgiven a certain scepticism. Noble gestures – hunger strikes, self-immolation, even mass suicide – played a pitifully futile role in their time, and were soon abandoned for more combative methods.
Trotsky and Gandhi
In conditions of social passivity and fatalism, the philosophy of Gandhi might seem a harmless and quaint relic; in the turbulent conditions of a mass movement in full flow, however, it was a curse. Trotsky was soon pointing to the reactionary effect of grafting the earliest strivings of peasant ideals on to a liberation struggle in full flow: an effect of counter-revolutionary diversion:
“Millions of people have begun to stir. They demonstrated such spontaneous power that the national bourgeoisie was forced into action in order to blunt its revolutionary edge. Gandhi’s passive resistance movement is the tactical knot that ties the naivete and self-denying blindness of the dispersed petty-bourgeois masses to the treacherous manoeuvres of the liberal bourgeoisie…. The more ‘sincere’ Gandhi is personally, the more useful he is to the masters as an instrument for the disciplining of the masses.” (1930).
Trotsky further hardened his attitude towards Gandhi: “We denounce before the colonial masses the treacherous aspects of Gandhism, whose mission is to retard the fight of the revolutionary masses and to exploit it in the interest of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie… The Indian bourgeoisie are incapable of leading a revolutionary struggle. They are closely bound up with and dependent on British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British imperialism no matter what the price, and lull the masses with hopes of reforms from above. The leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false prophet!” (1934).
In case this description should seem too harsh, let us examine Gandhi’s ideas more closely. Gandhi explicitly confirmed Trotsky’s description of the role of Congress as an instrument to “blunt the masses’ revolutionary edge”. He wrote: “I think the growing generation will not be satisfied with petitions. We must give them something effective. Satyagraha is the only way… to stop terrorism… It is all well as long as you hold the peasants in check. But Nehru’s presence must now ease the situation. He has no difficulty in dealing with the peasants and restraining them.“
Churchill mocked the “naked fakir” Gandhi, but India’s domestic profiteers were perfectly content to hide behind this token icon and his anodyne package: sackcloth, spinning wheel, fasting, pacifism and all. Only such a mascot – emaciated, austere, ascetic, in every respect their antithesis – could rally the masses. In preaching “passive resistance”, Gandhi expressed their fear of a violent mass movement that might otherwise have blasted them into oblivion.
“On your side against red ruin…”
Gandhi regarded it as his mission to lead the right wing of Congress and protect capitalist and, yes, feudal property too. A sharp lawyer with messianic delusions, Gandhi’s writings express with breathtaking frankness the striving of the capitalists to manipulate and subdue the storm of mass revolt.
His outlook was initially moulded not by Oriental wisdom, but by the prejudices of British imperialism. For instance, his agitation against the authorities in South Africa began with the difficulties he encountered in boarding first-class railway carriages and staying in luxury hotels. “They treat us like beasts,” he complained, “they class us with the kaffir” (a deeply racist word for African). The man who was later to be celebrated as a pacifist and an agitator against untouchability actually called for the recruitment of an Indian army to fight in the “Kaffir Wars” – and in the front line at that!
He later confessed that “the British Empire has certain ideals with which I have fallen in love“, and aspired to prove the “worthiness” of the Indian people to be “trusted” with independence. On the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, he confided to the Viceroy that “the very thought of the possible destruction of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey produced a strong emotional reaction in him and that he was for full and unquestioning co-operation with Britain”.
Again and again, Gandhi made clear his class loyalties. He denounced the Bombay textile strikes in the 1920s, and later expressed horror at finding in Gujarat “utter lawlessness bordering on Bolshevism“, rejecting the call for a general strike with these words: “I hope I am not expected knowingly to undertake a fight that must end in anarchy and red ruin“.
Gandhi insisted above all on the property rights of the capitalists and landlords. In 1934 he assured Birla and other rich patrons: “I shall be no party to dispossessing the propertied classes of their private property without just cause… You may be sure that I shall throw the whole weight of my influence in preventing a class war… Supposing there is an attempt unjustly to deprive you of your property, you will find me fighting on your side.“
Gandhi justified his stance with the ingenious theory that the capitalist (and even the landlord) is the “trustee” of the workers’ interest, informing the Ahmedabad textile workers for whom they laboured at starvation wages: “You are the real masters of the mills“. His ally Kripalani used the most contorted sophistry to argue that “the trustee by the very term used means that he is not the owner“. Chandra comments: “Gandhiji’s philosophy for labour, with its emphasis on arbitration and trusteeship, also reflected the needs of the anti-imperialist movement, which could ill-afford an all-out class war between the constituent classes of the emerging nation.“
Sycophancy
Gandhi’s deferential attitude towards imperialism is indicated by the fact that no less than two entire volumes of his Collected Works are devoted to his correspondence with the Viceroy. Some extracts from these express an attitude of the utmost sycophancy.
“It would be unwise on my part not to listen to the warning given by the Government… A civil resister never seeks to embarrass the Government. I feel that I shall better serve the country and the Government by suspension of civil resistance for the time being.“
“I confess that it is a delicate situation. I need hardly assure you that the whole of my weight will be thrown absolutely on the side of preserving internal peace. The Viceroy has the right to rely upon my doing nothing less.“
“I do not know whether… friendly relations between us are closed, or whether you expect me still to see you and receive guidance from you as to the course I am to pursue in advising the Congress.“
With each new manifestation of militancy, Gandhi acted, systematically and consistently, to bring it to an abrupt end. This led time and again to demoralisation and the danger of communal fragmentation.
In December 1919 – just after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar and the imposition of martial law in Punjab – Gandhi suspended passive resistance and guaranteed “the intention of the British people to do justice to India“.
When a no-tax campaign was launched in Guntur district, Gandhi insisted that all government dues be paid. While at one time Congress staged a formal and symbolic breach of the salt law and forest law, it stopped well short of calling for a refusal to pay land rent or tax. When the peasants overstepped this limit, Gandhi insisted on the adoption of a special resolution “advising Congress workers and organisations to influence the ryots (peasants) that the withdrawing of rent payments to the zamindars (landlords) is contrary to the Congress resolutions and injurious to the best interests of the country“. He went on to “assure the zamindars that the Congress movement is in no way intended to attack their legal rights“.
Even more significant was Gandhi’s response to the courageous movement of the peasants of Chauri Chaura (in Uttar Pradesh) in 1922, who had responded to a police massacre of unarmed demonstrators by storming and burning the village police station, killing several policemen. In a panic, the Congress Working Committee resolved that “in view of the inhuman conduct of the mob, not only mass civil disobedience but… the whole campaign of processions, public meetings, etc. must end, to be replaced by a constructive programme of spinning, temperance, reform and educational activities.“
The abrupt suspension of the entire nationwide campaign led to “utter bewilderment”, according to Nehru and others. Chandra reports that it led to “disintegration. disorganisation and demoralisation“.
Gandhi’s lifelong refusal to countenance popular resistance to oppression was perfectly consistent; he was later even to urge Jewish victims of Nazi genocide to “accept their fate with forbearance“.
A rare admission
Most breathtaking of all in its treachery was Gandhi’s reaction to the heroic mutiny of the Hindu soldiers of the Garhwal Rifles in 1930, who were jailed for refusing to open fire upon a crowd of unarmed Muslims demonstrating against imperial rule in Peshawar. These martyrs might justifiably have expected praise from Gandhi for their solidarity in the struggle against imperialism, their decisive blow against communal divisions, or at the very least for their practice of “non-violence”. Instead, they were brusquely disowned by Gandhi, who once again suspended the entire nationwide non-cooperation. Incidentally exposing the hypocrisy of his alleged “pacifism”, Gandhi commented: “A soldier who disobeys an order to fire breaks the oath which he has taken. I cannot ask officials and soldiers to disobey, for when I am in power I shall in all likelihood make use of these same officials and soldiers. If I taught them to disobey, I shall be afraid that they might do the same when I am in power.“
No less an authority than the Viceroy Mountbatten confirms that “Gandhi was not against soldiers and sailors, because controlled force as used by armies and navies was at least preferable to the uncontrolled violence of the mob“.
In March 1931, simultaneously with the cessation of the civil disobedience campaign, Gandhi signed the notorious Gandhi-Irwin pact. This provided for only the most limited concessions regarding the release of some prisoners, the remission of some fines, and the return of some confiscated lands. No inquiry was to be established into police excesses. There was not even a demand for the commutation of the impending death sentences on the heroic revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his comrades. This pact led to widespread despair. As Gandhi made his way towards Karachi, site of the 1931 conference of Congress, which convened six days after their executions, all along his route he was met by black flag demonstrations.
Yet what was the response of the British Government to the conciliatory tactics of Gandhism? All appeals to reason were met by silence, all non-violent campaigns of civil disobedience repressed with the utmost ferocity. Gandhi himself on one occasion complained: “The Congress asked for bread and it has got a stone.“
Yet again, this time Gandhi was to obtain not the smallest crumb of concessions as a reward for his forbearance. Churchill denounced the admission to the Second Round Table Conference, held later in 1931, of the “seditious fakir“, and the Daily Mail warned that any concessions to Congress would constitute “the worst treason“. It was hardly a triumph for Gandhian tactics. Gandhi himself was mortified: “There is nothing wanting to fill me with utter despair… There is every chance of my returning empty-handed.”
The officials of the British administration resolved that there would be no pact, no truce, no Gandhi-Viceroy meetings, and no quarter for the enemy. A virtual state of martial law was imposed. In January 1932, Gandhi and all the other Congress leaders were arrested.
And yet the Indian people were still to salvage something of their honour; they responded with anger. Even though Congress was dragged into the battle rather unprepared, the popular response was massive. Hundreds of thousands joined the campaign. 80,000 satyagrahis, mostly urban and rural poor, were jailed. This non-violent movement was met by relentless repression: by confiscations of land, torture, whippings, and all manner of atrocities.
When in 1942, Gandhi initiated a limited satyagraha on an individual basis by a few selected individuals in every locality – what Gopal termed satyagraha “at a low temperature and in very small doses“, an act which despite Gandhi’s efforts evoked a massive popular response – the administration reacted with brutal repression. Linlithgow resolved to “crush the organisation as a whole“.
As always, meek deference to the oppressor only invites a retaliation all the more ferocious. In February 1943, Gandhi began a 21-day fast. Hartals, demonstrations and strikes followed. Did the administration soften in the face of this selfless display of supplication?
On the contrary. Churchill commented: “This our hour of triumph everywhere in the world is not the time to crawl before a miserable old man who has always been our enemy.” The Viceroy simply proceeded to make the necessary funeral arrangements, predicting that the outcome of Gandhi’s death would amount to nothing more serious than “six months’ unpleasantness, steadily declining in volume, little or nothing at the end of it“. He even anticipated the overall advantages of his death: “India would be far more reliable as a base for operations. Moreover the prospect of a settlement will be greatly enhanced by the disappearance of Gandhi.“
The next section of our series is Part 8: THE ROLE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY