Author M.J. Akbar offers some fresh insights about M.K. Gandhi and surprises common readers and seasoned historians.
“Gandhi: A Life In Three Campaigns” by my favourite editor M.J. Akbar has started gaining traction among India’s sensitive readers who are always keen to seek some fresh insights about what India’s independence leader—a man of bespectacled face and slight frame—achieved for India. Gandhi is synonymous with peaceful resistance and civil rights movements around the world. He can never be off the bookshelves, and headlines.
The book, which has an interesting foreword by former External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, also an accomplished diplomat and author, dissects Gandhi’s works into three lives and his real service to India and its people, and also his flaws and complexities.
Natwar Singh sets the tone of the book by explaining why Gandhi has survived among his followers not entirely accurately, not entirely faithfully, but perhaps still with a modicum of respect. And then he said why he felt there was an immediate need to resurrect Gandhi for the current generation (read, the millennials) because a significant part of Gandhi’s narrative after 1920 is not known to Indians.
Akbar starts his journey in the book with Gandhi’s political philosophy that challenged the Indian school of violence. “Gandhi accepted the valour of these extremists but suggested that they were foolhardy and counterproductive. His path of ahimsa or non-violence demanded a much higher degree of courage,” argues Akbar. The author says Gandhi’s fortitude was anchored in unwavering conditions, and the implications were profound, particularly for an age in which the British empire seemed invincible. Akbar says in as many words that “Gandhi, however, was certain that the Raj would collapse once Indians lost their fear of the white man, rediscovered unity and revived the skills that had created demand for their products across Asia, Africa and Europe.”
The author meticulously explains the way Gandhi charted his course for India’s freedom. He wanted an India where Hindus, Mahomedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country, to live in unity for their own interest. In fact, he had said it in 1908. I remember how Gandhi fell into his darkest despair on the eve of India’s independence in August, 1947, when savage fighting spread from Punjab and the North-West Frontier to Eastern Bengal and Bihar. I read in the New York Times: “Brutal violence unleashed a year earlier by Muslim thugs in Calcutta had triggered Hindu counterattacks and the murder of more Muslims in Bihar. Mayhem, rape, and murder spread to the villages of Bengal as well, each report inciting more massacres of innocents as communal hatred raged across most of South Asia’s subcontinent.”
And it is here the book explains how Gandhi struggled with Jinnah and his divisive ways. Gandhi even suggested Jinnah be the Prime Minister of an undivided India to Lord Mountbatten. Gandhi repeatedly told Jinnah that he would not agree to break India on religious grounds, it was something unthinkable to him, especially when he had in the past gone out of his way to forge a good relationship with India’s Muslims. And then, by linking his non-cooperation movement to the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924) Gandhi sought to forge a Hindu-Muslim unity that he recognised was central for India’s survival. Gandhi’s vision of a secular India was pitted against Jinnah and his machinations. But eventually, it did not work.
The book explains in detail Gandhi’s fast to do away with communal representation of the depressed classes in provincial and central legislatures. The author says the Poona Pact (24th September 1932) arrived at between Gandhi and Ambedkar resulted in a wider and better affirmative action programme. It is important to highlight here that the Poona Pact ensured that the Hindu community stayed together mostly under Gandhi. This, in turn, gave Gandhi the de facto leadership of most Hindus.
And it is here Akbar scores with his brilliance, because not many historians explicitly acknowledge the importance of the Poona Pact. It needs to be mentioned here that without the Poona Pact, Gandhi could not have taken on Jinnah with his hold on India’s Muslims. The Poona Pact gave confidence to Gandhi and the Congress Party that it could launch a Quit India movement, and reject the offer made by the Cripps mission for a post-war deal.
The book explains how in 1920, Gandhi launched the unprecedented mass mobilisation for non-cooperation movement and in a decade’s time, turned a pinch of salt into a metaphor for the punitive, heartless colonial exploitation of the impoverished. The 1942 call to “Quit India” sent a final message to foreign overlords: Indians would prefer to die rather than live in British fetters. “The mass ferment and individual protest that swept across the subcontinent, making ‘Gandhi in Three Campaigns’ a fresh portrait of an icon,” writes Akbar.
In breathtaking speed, Akbar writes about Gandhi’s tryst with khadi, and how the leader had started to weave what he called the thread of destiny. The book goes into detail to explain how the frail leader transformed the simple cloth from the compulsion of poverty to the dress code of nationalism. Obviously, Gandhi practised before he preached; he had asked members of his Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati to wear self-made handspun. The book details conversations between one Gangabehn Majmudar, who led the khadi run at Sabarmati, including producing a khadi dhoti 45 inches wide for Gandhi and not 30 inches as many wanted. It was interesting to read how Gandhi had sent Gangaben an ultimatum: if the right size was not spun, he would wear the short cloth baring even more of his body. Horrified, says the book, Gangaben sent him what he needed.
The book, interestingly, touches on Gandhi’s model for eradicating poverty and how it found support from the Indian Left. The latter believed that this could only be achieved after driving out the British through the power of a national government. But Akbar says Gandhi refused to wait. “He sought to alleviate the economic havoc perpetrated by British rule even while he aroused millions to challenge imperialism. He offered practical solutions rather than theory; he created both the product, yarn from a spinning wheel, and its market, the Indian consumer, through public mobilisation to supplement the income of the deprived. Liberty and God were meaningless words for the starving; their messiah would be the one who brought them a crust of bread.” Writes Akbar: “Gandhi, never shy of claiming a personal link with the Almighty, always maintained that the charkha revolution was not his invention. God had whispered into his ear: ‘If you want to work through non-violence, you have to proceed with small things, not big’.”
At the heart of Gandhi’s philosophy, explains the book, was a unique form of mass regeneration (read satyagraha) or roughly translated as “truth-force”. Slowly, yet steadily, the spinning wheel became the weapon of the weak with its implications of submission. More importantly, it was driven by love, not hatred.
The book makes some interesting observations about Gandhi, especially around the summer of 1918 when he was accosted by angry Indians who protested Gandhi’s efforts to recruit Indians for the British Army. The protesters wondered how a votary of ahimsa could ask them to take up arms. Annoyed and angry, they refused Gandhi food and a famished Gandhi walked for another twenty miles in search of a meagre meal.
“Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns” is well-researched, written with a fine journalist’s flair and a historian’s eye. The book corrects some of the stereotypes that are linked to Gandhi. What makes the book interesting is that it delves deep in Gandhi’s life and explains why Gandhi is all too flawed a human—one, who almost leaves his wife for another woman, prevents his son from marrying a Muslim, and has a deeply troubled and sometimes bizarre sexuality. Yet, Gandhi remains one of the greatest Indians known for his non-violent freedom movement that, in many ways, totally marginalised leaders like Subash Chandra Bose who preferred an armed struggle. Gandhi’s freedom struggle, explains the book, was non-violent and without hate but with great guile and cunningness. The book explains why Gandhi was able to steer a fifth of mankind to freedom with so little violence. And even one remembers those murderous post-partition mayhem, it was far less bloody than Lenin’s takeover of Russia or Mao of China.
The book is about Gandhi’s tactical moves, Akbar has picked three of the most important of Gandhi’s many campaigns. The first was the resistance Gandhi mounted against the unjustness of the 1919 Rowlatt Act through the non-cooperation movement. Gandhi was in total control of the movement, but he was shocked when his followers killed 23 policemen in Chauri Choura on 4 February 1922. In the trial that followed Gandhi not only pleaded guilty but famously called out the British for the unjustness of their rule while establishing the centrality of non-violence in the freedom struggle he led.
The famous Salt March (12 March to 5 April 1930) was the second of his campaigns, a simple yet very effective act that showed the British as tyrannical and inconsiderate for taxing salt, the most basic of commodities. One must remember it happened almost a hundred years ago and it is only because of Akbar’s brilliant coverage of the Salt March and developments preceding it gives us a real time feel.
Akbar highlights the Quit India movement (8 August 1942) that Gandhi launched during the Second World War as the third and last of the campaigns. The author builds a lovely, dramatical narrative of the events associated with the movement with some detailed developments, including a lucid account of the failed Cripps mission in March 1942.
Akbar, once again, displays his total grip on his subjects. The book is undoubtedly a very credible and comprehensive account of Gandhi.