Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Congress and Our Independence

After 150 years, the people of India are still groping in the dark to pinpoint the exact legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi thanks to reams of propaganda that has managed to obfuscate several important truths that would provide us a clear picture about the man.

Any honest attempt at this exercise will be rewarding if it proceeds to examine the said legacy based on Mohandas Gandhi the committed freedom fighter, the shrewd mass leader, the crafty politician, and the vacuous, Christian moralist. This exercise necessarily involves studying Gandhi’s life-work: his writing, speeches and deeds. After all, Gandhi himself famously declared, ‘my life is my message’.Gandhi would live to lament the fate of the same Indian National Congress that he had steered and monopolised by the force his saintly spiritual power.

By the mid-1940s, when it became evident that freedom was near in sight, the same Congressmen who had fawned over him and had been subservient all along, simply abandoned him. Here is the indubitable RC Majumdar describing the situation, in an eyewitness-like fashion.

…. [prominent Congressmen] under Gandhi’s leadership…made no secret of the fact that they adopted Non-violent Non-cooperation as a political expedient but not like, Gandhi, as a creed … Gandhi himself admitted … late in life … that none of his followers believed in Satyagraha as a creed … and admitted, ‘even 14 years of trial have failed to yield the anticipated result’.

[Gandhi] placed the cult of non-violence above everything else – even above the Independence of India … to him the Congress was a humanitarian association … for the moral and spiritual regeneration of the world … but his followers looked upon the Congress as a purely political body …

The tragedy of Gandhi’s life was that [the] members of his inner council, who followed him for more than twenty years with unquestioned obedience, took the fatal steps leading to the partition of India without his knowledge, not to speak of his consent.

In fact, the tragic fate of RC Majumdar’s scholarly career after India attained Independence in itself is eminent testimony to the spectacular failure and the logical conclusion of Gandhi’s misunderstood espousal of Satya (Truth), Ahimsa (Non-violence) and Satyagraha (Passive resistance of injustice).

This towering scholar, respected across the world, was all but banished from the academia by Gandhi’s pet disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister. Majumdar’s crime : Daring to write an objective and unbiased history of the Indian freedom struggle of which he was both a participant and a contributor.

But how else would it turn out ? Mohandas Gandhi had after all, shown the way by equating the Congress party with his own personality, and defined Indian nationalism by holding up ‘his own life and commitment as the only example to be followed’. His disciple, Nehru, merely followed in Mahatma’s path.

In the final assessment, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi continues to evoke our admiration for his justifiably numerous traits and accomplishments but singlehandedly getting India her freedom is definitely not one of them.

(Courtesy : Excerpts from an Article titled ‘Did Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Really get India her Freedom ?’ written by Mr Sandeep Balakrishna for dharmadispatch.in)