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Politics and Play- Ramachandra Guha
I have spent much of the past year reading The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. This has been hard work, but always enjoyable, because of the range of themes that Gandhi wrote about, and the clarity of his ideas and his prose. Some remarks that Gandhi made were of their time, and place; relevant only to historians and biographers. Other things he said or wrote were of more enduring relevance.
One such, so to say 'timeless', article was published in the first issue of Gandhi's journalYoung India for 1930. It was called "The Cult of the Bomb". In 1928 and 1929, there had been a series of assassination attempts on British officials. The most spectacular of these attempts took place on December 23, 1929, when a special train carrying the viceroy, Lord Irwin, was derailed by bombs just outside New Delhi. Two bogies were detached from the train as a result of the explosion. The viceroy escaped unhurt.
As it turned out, Irwin was returning to New Delhi to meet with Gandhi and some other nationalists. When they met that same afternoon (December 23), Gandhi expressed his 'horror' at the attempt on the viceroy's train. From New Delhi, Gandhi proceeded to Lahore for the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress. Lahore was the home town of Bhagat Singh, then in jail for his part in a bomb attack on the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that past April. Lahore was also a stronghold of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, of which Bhagat Singh and several other Punjabi revolutionaries were members.
While in Lahore for the Congress, Gandhi declared: "Freedom can never be attained by exploding bombs on an innocent man. I regard it as a most outrageous crime." Later, on the train back to his ashram in Ahmedabad, he drafted his essay, "The Cult of the Bomb." This was a major statement/restatement of the case for non-violence, in the light of the recent terror attacks in India. The article began by saying that "there is so much violence in the atmosphere immediately surrounding us, politically minded part of India, that a bomb thrown here and a bomb thrown there causes little perturbation and probably there is even joy over such an event in the hearts of some". But, remarked Gandhi, in his travels around India he had come to be convinced that the "vast masses who have become conscious of the fact that they must have freedom are untouched by the spirit of violence". Because of his own faith in the efficacy of non-violence, he now proposed "to reason with those who may not be so much saturated with violence as to be beyond the pale of reason".
Gandhi then put forward two key practical, rather than moral, arguments against the use of violence by freedom fighters. First, it led to increased repression by the rulers. Thus "every time violence has occurred we have lost heavily, that is to say, military expenditure has risen". Second, a culture or cult of violence ultimately turned on the society that breeds it. For "from violence done to the foreign ruler, violence to our own people whom we may consider to be obstructing the country's progress is an easy natural step". Therefore, said Gandhi, "it does not require much intellectual effort to see that if we resort to violence for ridding society of the many abuses which impede our progress, we shall but add to our difficulties and postpone the day of freedom".
Seeking to drive out Englishmen through violence, would, in Gandhi's view, "lead not to independence but to utter confusion. We can establish independence only by adjusting our differences through an appeal to the head and the heart, by evolving organic unity amongst ourselves, not by terrorizing or killing those who, we fancy, may impede our march, but by patient and gentle handling, by converting the opponent..."
Gandhi offered, as an alternative to the "cult of the bomb", a programme of mass civil disobedience, for which one had to cultivate an ethic of non-violence. He ended by asking those who "are not past reason" to openly condemn the recent bomb attacks, "so that our deluded patriots may for want of nourishment to their violent spirit realize the futility of violence and the great harm that violent activity has every time done".
Gandhi's essay was read by the hot-headed young men of Punjab. They drafted a combative reply, printed it as a pamphlet, and posted a copy to the Sabarmati Ashram. The pamphlet began with a stirring evocation of the revolutionary credo. Independence, it claimed, could come only through armed struggle against the occupying power. These men already saw "the advent of the revolution in the restlessness of the youth"; and, as the "insatiable desire for freedom" grew, "the infuriated youth will begin to kill the oppressors". Armed struggle, said the members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, "instills fear in the hearts of the oppressors, it brings hopes of revenge and redemption to the oppressed masses, it gives courage and self confidence to the wavering, it shatters the spell of the superiority of the ruling class and raises the status of the subject race in the eyes of the world..."
The pamphlet then turned to Gandhi and his beliefs. "No man," it said, "can claim to know a people's mind by seeing them from the public platform and giving them Darshan and Updesh... Has Gandhi during recent years mixed in the social life of the masses? Has he sat with the peasant round the evening fire and tried to know what he thinks? Has he passed a single evening in the company of a factory labourer and shared with him his vows?"
These charges were, of course, unfounded. Gandhi had more than 20 years of experience of working with Indians of all classes in South Africa. And he had, by this time, a full 15 years of experience of travelling and working with Indians in India. In fact, his first struggles on home soil had been with the peasants of Champaran and the mill-hands of Ahmedabad.
Their own youth and inexperience did not deter the revolutionaries from claiming that they knew how the masses lived and what they thought. As they saw it, "the average human being" understood "little of the fine theological niceties of 'Ahimsa' and 'loving one's enemy'". The pamphlet continued: "The way of the world is like this. You have a friend: you love him, sometimes so much that you even die for him. You have an enemy: you shun him, you fight against him and, if possible, kill him... It is what has been since the days of Adam and Eve, and no man has any difficulty about understanding it. We affirm that the masses of India are solidly with us because we know it from personal experience. The day is not far off when they will flock in their thousands to work the will of the Revolution."
That Gandhi received this pamphlet is certain; for it lies among his private papers for this period, now held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. That he read it is likely. But he did not choose to respond to it, perhaps because he felt the HSRA pamphlet did not make an effective case for violence, or perhaps because he was then preoccupied with planning his own next non-violent campaign, the Salt March.
Reading this exchange 86 years after it occurred, it seems that Gandhi was more prescient than his younger adversaries. Consider thus the two most important armed struggles in India today. These are of the militants in Kashmir and of the Maoists in Central India. Both exalt violence, seeing it as necessary and indispensable. Both have contempt for Gandhi's ideas and methods.
It must be acknowledged at once that both the militants and the Maoists tap into real sources of popular disaffection. The inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley have been treated with condescension and contempt by successive governments in New Delhi. So also the tribals in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra among whom the Maoists work.
The grievances of Kashmiris and adivasis are real and substantial. But has armed struggle led to their redressal? Very clearly not. One consequence of armed struggle, in both cases, is that (as Gandhi had predicted) repression has increased, with thousands of army jawansand policemen being sent in to quell the rebellion. A second consequence, again predicted by Gandhi, has been that the violence of the insurgents has turned inwards, with the targeted killings of people on their own side who do not agree with their methods. The Maoists have savagely treated alleged 'informers', chopping off their limbs or killing them, while militants in Kashmir have murdered 'moderates' who believe in dialogue and debate rather than bombs and guns.
The armed struggle of militants in Kashmir goes back to the late 1980s. The armed struggle of Maoists goes back even further, to the late 1960s. In both cases success remains as elusive as ever. Violence has not brought an end to, or even a diminution of, exploitation and discrimination. It is time, or even past time, for these rebels to try other methods. Reading Gandhi may help them in this regard. They do not, of course, have to read the entireCollected Works; merely those essays that make the philosophical and political case for non-violence. "The Cult of the Bomb" may be a good place to start.
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