Few things
never age out. Similar is the case with the ideology of Gandhiji -
an emblem of non-violence or as he popularly called it-ahimsa. His principles can be followed
by anyone and in any age for achieving what one wishes to. Even he practiced it
rigorously, but wasn’t born with those traits. His experiences taught him the
values of satya and ahimsa. Gandhiji explains his philosophy and way of
life in his autobiography ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’.
Early
life: In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old
Kasturbai Makhanji in an arranged child marriage, according to the
custom of the region. In the process, he lost a year at school. Recalling the
day of their marriage, he once said: "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only
wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives."
However,
as was the prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at
her parents' house, and away from her husband. In 1885, when Gandhi was 15, the
couple's first child was born, but survived only a few days. He further says,
“I
have still to relate some of my failings during this meat-eating period and
also previous to it, which date from before my marriage or soon after. A
relative and I became fond of smoking. Not that we saw any good in smoking, or
were enamored of the smell of a cigarette. I realized that it was not as
easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have
heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect
on me.”[1]
It
was these experiments, if we can call them thus, which made him vegetarian,
celibate, follower of satya and ahimsa and a
statue of resistance.
His
ideologies were not in-born but cultivated and enhanced through the experiments
life conducted on him. They showed him the truth.Returning
to India from South Africa, where he had enjoyed a successful
legal practice; he gave up wearing Western-style clothing, which he associated
with wealth and success. He dressed to be accepted by the poorest person
in India. He advocated the use of homespun cloth (khadi). Gandhi and his
followers adopted the practice of weaving their own clothes from thread they
themselves spun, and encouraged others to do so.[2,3]
Beginning
of the movement: In March 1942 Cripps came
to India with an offer repeating the promise of a constitution making
body after the war and till then demanding effective execution of the war
against the threat of mounting disaster in Asia - consequent upon Japan's
entry into the arena. Gandhiji described the offer as a postdated cheque;
appealed to the British to withdraw from every Asiatic and African possession,
at least from India. In other words: "Quit India". Gandhiji
appealed to Chiang-Kai Shek, President Roosevelt to see the truth behind his
"Quit India" call to the British. In August first week, he groomed
the historic "Quit India" resolution at the Bombay A I C C.:
"The
freedom of India must be the symbol of and prelude to the freedom of all
other Asiatic Nations…" Gandhiji's call was "Do or
Die"
‘Quit
India,’ ‘Bharat Choro’.
This
simple yet powerful slogan launched “the legendary struggle which also became
famous by the name of the ‘August Revolution.” In this struggle, the common
people of the country demonstrated an unparalleled heroism and militancy.
The Agenda: Gandhiji’s
speech also contained specific instructions for different sections of the
people. Government servants would not yet be asked to resign, but they should
openly declare their allegiance to the Congress, soldiers were also not to
leave their posts, but they were to ‘refuse to fire on our own people. The
Princes were asked to ‘accept the sovereignty of your own people, instead of
paying homage to a foreign power.’ And the people of the Princely States were
asked to declare that they ‘(were) part of the Indian nation and that they (would)
accept the leadership of the Princes, if the latter cast their lot with the
People, but not otherwise.’ Students were to give up studies if they were sure
they could continue to remain firm independence was achieved.
Government
had been constantly exhorting him to condemn the violence of the people during
the Quit India Movement. Gandhiji not only refused to condemn the people’s
resort to violence but unequivocally held the Government responsible for it. It
was the ‘leonine violence’ of the state which had provoked the people, he said.
Gandhiji
was not condemning violence!!! Did he give in? Did he leave behind his
principles of satya and ahimsa? What happened to
his ideologies, what made him say this? Numerous questions popped up one after
another, and nobody seemed to have no reason to believe these facts.
Let
us take a few steps back to see the trail of incidents which led Gandhiji to
say and make such a decision.
On
7 August, Gandhiji had placed the instructions he had drafted before the
Working Committee, and in these he had proposed that peasants ‘who have the
courage, and are prepared to risk their all’ should refuse to pay the land revenue.
The
Government, however, was in no mood to either negotiate with the Congress or
wait for the movement to be formally launched. In the early hours of 9 August,
in a single sweep, all the top leaders of the congress were arrested and taken
to unknown destinations. In anticipation of the AICC’s passing the Quit India
resolution, instructions for arrests and suppression had gone out to the
provinces. The sudden attack by the Government produced an instantaneous
reaction among the people. Meanwhile, many provincial and local level leaders
who had evaded arrest returned to their homes through devious routes and set
about organizing resistance. As the news spread further in the rural areas, the
villagers joined the townsmen in recording their protest.
The
‘Violent’ Protest: For the first six or seven weeks after
9 August, there was a tremendous mass upsurge all over the country. People
devised variety of ways of expressing their anger. In some places huge crowds
attacked police stations, post offices, kutcheries (courts),
railway stations and other symbols of Government authority. National flags were
forcibly hoisted on public buildings in defiance of the police. At other
places, groups of satyagrahis offered arrest in tehsil or
district headquarters. Crowds of villagers, often numbering a few hundreds or
even a couple of thousand, physically removed railway tracks.
Elsewhere,
small groups of individuals blew up bridges and removed tracks, and cut
telephone and telegraph wires. Students of the Banaras Hindu University decided
to go to the villages to spread the message of Quit India. They raised slogans
of ‘Thana jalao’ (Burn police station), ‘Station phoonk do’ (Burn the railway
stations) ‘Angrez Bhag Gaya’ (Englishmen have fled). They hijacked
trains and draped them in national flags.
In
rural areas, the pattern was of large crowds of peasants descending on the
nearest tehsil or district town and attacking all symbols of
government authority. There was strong government repression, but the rebellion
only gathered momentum. According
to official estimates, in the first week after the arrests of the leaders, 250
railway stations were damaged or destroyed, and over 500 post offices and 150
police stations were attacked. The movement of trains in Bihar
and Eastern U.P. was disrupted for many weeks. In Karnataka alone, there
were 1600 incidents of cutting of telegraph lines, and twenty- six railway
stations and thirty-two post offices were attacked.
This
doesn’t sound non-violence yet Gandhiji was not ready to condemn it? That
definitely leaves us clueless but the other side of the story is yet to be
said. The brutality with which the rebellion was crushed was no less than
martial law.
British Action: Unarmed
crowds faced police and military firing on 538 occasions and they
were also machine-gunned by low-flying aircraft. Repression also took the form
of taking hostages from the villages, imposing collective fines running to a
total of Rs 90 lakhs (which were often realized on the spot by looting the people’s
belongings), whipping of suspects and burning of entire villages whose
inhabitants had run away and could not be caught. By the end of 1942, over 60,
000 persons had been arrested. Twenty-six thousand people were convicted and
18,000 detained under the Defence of India Rules. Martial law had not been
proclaimed, but the army, though nominally working under the orders of the
civilian authorities, often did what it wanted to without any reference to the
direct officers. The brutal and all-out repression succeeded within a period of
six or seven weeks in bringing about a cessation of the mass phase of the
struggle.
Gandhiji’s
Stance: It doesn’t need a microscopic analysis to find out which side
was brutal and who committed the excesses and the ‘real’ violence. But is there
anything called real and unreal violence. Well there definitely is one, if not
Gandhiji would have condemned it, but he did not. This was what he did. In
February 1943, a striking new development provided a new burst of political
activity. Gandhiji commenced a fast on 10 February in jail. He declared the
fast would last for twenty-one days. This was his answer to the Government
which had been constantly exhorting him to condemn the violence of the people
in the Quit India Movement. Gandhiji not only refused to condemn the people’s
resort to violence but unequivocally held the Government responsible for it. It
was the ‘leonine violence’ of the state which had provoked the people, he said.
The
popular response to the news of the fast was immediate and overwhelming. All
over the country, there were hartals, demonstrations and strikes.
Calcutta and Ahmedabad were particularly active. Prisoners in jails and those
outside went on sympathetic fasts. Groups of people secretly reached Poona to
offer Satyagraha outside the Aga Khan Palace where Gandhiji was being held in
detention.
He
was again successful in bringing back the non-violent character of the movement
back. Gandhiji, as always, got the better of his opponents, and refused to
oblige the British by dying. The fast had done exactly what it had
intended to achieve. The public morale was raised, the
anti-British feeling heightened, and an opportunity for political activity
provided. A symbolic gesture of resistance had sparked off widespread
resistance and exposed the Government’s high-handedness to the whole world. The
moral justification that the Government had been trying to provide for its
brutal suppression of 1942 was denied to it and it was placed clearly
in the wrong.[4]
Unanswered
Questions: But the question that still haunts us: Did gandhiji for a moment
budge from his opposition to violence and embrace it or his sympathy towards
the Indians at the hands of brutal British soldiers made him see a greater
violence dominating over the smaller one? Did the cause justify it? Had the
British not been overwhelmingly brutal, would Gandhiji still have endorsed it?
The
matter of the fact is Gandhiji had indeed moved along his own trajectory of
non-violence and quite far, this time around. From 1920, the Non-Cooperation
Movement, when Gandhiji was staunch, and may be obstinate in his endurance of
oppression – so much so that the heavy lathicharge by the
police at Chauri-Chaura was to be accepted not as a humiliation but part of the
struggle towards ‘imbibing’ satyagraha – to Civil Disobedience in 1930 where
upon he was a bit more militant; that is – overlooking sporadic violence by
masses in the territorial periphery of the struggle. Finally, ten years down
the lane – in 1942, Gandhiji seemingly had enough of the British, his faith in
British-like attitude petering out towards the tangential touch of any form of
reaction by the masses.
With
Gandhiji remaining tight-lipped towards condemnation of violence in 1942, the
countless forms of struggle that India was harbouring since 1757 found the
oceanic assimilation. And with Subhash Chandra Bose punching in from North-East
– India was progressing towards the dawn of freedom – without factually knowing
it as soothsayers, yet confidently believing in the same.
References:
1. My
experiments with truth-M.K. Gandhi
2. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi
4. India’s
Struggle for Indepedence-Bipan Chandra
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Rajan Agarwal is a student of History and wishes to draw
comparison between ahimsa and its Gandhian version. You may write to him at indianpolicy2010@gmail.com
