Unable to grapple with the present, old men often relive their past. Mr Charan Singh and Mr Raj Narain are doing precisely that. Else they would not be blaming Mr Nehru for the country’s ills more than 15 years after his death. It would have been a different matter if it enhanced their electoral prospects. But it does not. On the contrary, it annoys and alienates their Congress (U) ally and gives Mrs. Gandhi an additional stick to beat them with.
Like other old men, the two Lok Dal leaders are quite selective about the past. Charan Singh would not like to recall that in Nehru’s life-time, he voiced differences of opinion with the deceased leader only on the issue of co-operative farming which the latter never seriously tried to push through and that he held various ministerial offices in subsequent Congress governments in UP. And neither would like to admit that in that period the differences between them were far sharper than those of either of them with Mr Nehru. For, while broadly speaking Mr Charan Singh was even then a spokesman of the peasant lobby (in ideological terms a right-winger), Mr Raj Narain was an ardent follower of Dr Rammanohar Lohia who poured venom on the late Prime Minister because he was convinced that the latter was not socialist enough in his actions.
To the past
It is also characteristic of old men that they look to the past for solutions to the problems of today. Mr Charan Singh harks back to Gandhiji little realising that his personal “experiments with truth” (his struggle for his own moral and spiritual uplift) apart, the Mahatma was very much the product of 19th century India, that he was successful as a political leader precisely because he answered to the psychological needs of the Indian people in that period and that India and its psychological needs have greatly changed since.
Gandhiji, like other truly great men, was a multi-faceted, complex and even a contradictory personality. As such it is dangerous to make general statements about him. Even so it can be said that in cultural terms he was a pessimist. Man, he was convinced, was essentially full of evil passions which needed to be tamed.
Influenced as he was by the austere facet of the Jain-Hindu and the Christian tradition, he did not believe that moral life was compatible with affluence. As such, he could not be seriously interested in economic growth as we understand it, though he was concerned over the hardships of the very poor. This is not a matter of deduction. For he condemned modern Western civilisation precisely because, according to him, it emphasised material well-being at the cost of moral and spiritual growth. His views on the economy have to be analysed in that light. Certainly these cannot be quoted to advance the cause of modern agriculture.
The historical aspect of the problem also requires more attention than it generally receives. Despite all his concern for and emphasis on morality and spirituality, Gandhiji was not timeless. He was very much the product of his times. This does not refer only to the political struggle he led but also to his basic views.
Indians, especially the Hindus, had been under fierce attack by Western Christian missionaries and other bearers of the “white man’s burden”. The victims responded in several ways. They sought to reform their social practices to make them conform as far as possible to the Western-Christian ideals and to reinterpret their scriptures in order to make out that these were not incompatible with Christian precepts and the requirements of French enlightenment. In course of time they also began to assert their “spiritual” superiority over the “materialist” West. Gandhism was an expression of this claim. Gandhiji emphasised the need for drastic social reforms (the uplift of the Harijans); he reinterpreted the Gita; and he condemned Western industrialism, if not Western civilisation itself, as the work of Satan.
It will be ridiculous to suggest that Gandhiji deliberately set out to shape his life to fit the role or that he became a Mahatma because he felt that this was the most effective method of mobilising the people. He was too genuine an individual to do that. Indeed, he tortured himself a great deal to be able to live by the moral standards he had set for himself. Prof RC Zaehner rightly titled his chapter on Gandhiji in his book on Hinduism as “Return of Yudhishthira” (the eldest of the Pandava brothers who pursued truth in all its aspects). All this had an extraordinary appeal for ordinary Indians. For them his life was a vindication of their claim to spiritual superiority which incidentally was an eloquent expression of their inferiority complex. All in all, neither Gandhiji’s greatness nor his limitations can be understood outside the framework of that phase in our national life.
An Apostle
Gandhiji was an apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity not only because he knew that a rapprochement between the two communities was a necessary precondition of India’s independence without the risk of civil war and partition, but also because he sincerely believed in the essential unity of all religions. For him, the Koran and the Bible were as holy as the Gita. But he was not a secularist in his orientation and in social and cultural terms his preoccupation was with Hinduism and Hindu society, although he was deeply influenced by Christianity as interpreted by Tolstoy and Thoreau. As it happened, in the last quarter of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, British antipathy was also directed towards the Hindus. Thus, the needs of the national struggle on the one hand and of Hindu cultural revival and social reforms on the other converged to a substantial extent.
It is still an open question whether Gandhiji’s religiosity was a major factor in Mr Jinnah’s alienation from the nationalist movement and conversion to the cause of Muslim “nationalism” and the demand for partition. But even 32 years after independence and partition it is not an irrelevant question in that it is obvious that a polity which emphasises religion (in India it must mean Hinduism or more accurately neo-Hinduism) would cause concern among the minorities, especially the Muslims, and sow the seeds of enormous troubles. And that is not all. For it is doubtful whether even the Hindus can equip themselves to cope with the problems of the modern world on the strength of a religion-based outlook and polity.
Mr Charan Singh and Mr Raj Narain and other self-proclaimed adherents of the Gandhian way can legitimately claim that they, like Gandhiji himself, are non-communal in that they do not believe in discriminating against the minorities. And, unlike Gandhiji, some of them can also claim that they are secular in the larger and original meaning of the term which is that they wish to conduct politics and affairs of the state on a non-religious basis. But most of them are not even aware that implicit in their simultaneous assertion of the second claim and profession of adherence to Gandhism is the proposition that it is possible to separate Gandhian economics from the overall Gandhian outlook with its strong emphasis on contentment, limitation of want, austerity, prohibition and brahmcharya.
Untenable
Clearly this is an untenable proposition. The Gandhian concept of a subsistence economy can make sense, if at all, in the context of a culturally and educationally stagnant India and of an India with a more or less stable population. Traditional agriculture and handicrafts cannot possibly provide for a population which has almost doubled in 30 years and continues to rise by about 15 million a year.
Gandhiji, it has often been said, was a dynamic individual who, had he lived long enough after independence, would have modified his views to suit the requirements of an India steadily recovering its health and confidence and overcoming the social and economic stagnation of centuries. This is a hypothetical proposition which one can accept or reject, depending on one’s predilection. It is not conclusive. Moreover, Gandhi’s was a total system. Modification of one aspect – to provide for modern agriculture and the so-called appropriate technology, for instance – would have necessitated an overhauling of the entire system.
But speculation apart, it is indisputable that as the educated Hindus have recovered their self-confidence, they have ceased to be on the defensive vis-à-vis the West in social and cultural terms (the process is by no means complete and may not be complete for decades but it is well advanced). Simultaneously they have become less and less strident in their claim to moral and spiritual superiority over the West. In their own lives also the role of religion has steadily declined. With these revolutionary changes, Gandhiji’s appeal has inevitably declined and nothing can revive it. By any reckoning Mr Nehru is a more appropriate spokesman of this class of Hindus though Gandhiji’s place is secure in history as the father of Indian independence.
(To be concluded …)
The Times of India, 14 November 1979