(on the occasion of the birth centenary of Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948)

Footloose and Fancy-Free: The Killers of Gandhi in Modern India

India is once again poised to celebrate the birthday of Mohandas Gandhi today, on October 2nd as, it has done so over the previous seven decades. The official importance of Gandhi Jayanti is underscored by the fact that it is one of only three national holidays, alongside Independence Day and Republic Day. The President and Prime Minister set the example for the prescribed set of rituals on this auspicious day. We can be certain that wreaths of flowers will be laid at Rajghat, the simple yet elegant and moving memorial to the architect of Indian independence, and dignitaries will bow in reverence to the ‘Father of the Nation’. There will be the usual speeches pointing to the sacrifices made by Bapu, as Gandhi was known in his lifetime to fellow Indians, and exhortations, especially to the young, to take some lessons from Gandhi’s life and dedicate themselves to the task of nation-building.

Since the high and the mighty in this ancient land of ours will use the opportunity of Gandhi Jayanti to garland the statues of the Mahatma and spin the usual homilies about the eternal values of truth and non-violence, values which are being shredded to pieces in India, I can turn to the more humble work of attempting to layout briefly what remains of Gandhi in an India that is increasingly taking the turn towards becoming a Hindu nation. The attacks on Gandhi are coming fast and furious from every corner. His assassin, Nathuram Godse, is being hailed by some Indians as a martyr, a true shaheed. Reportedly, Godse is trending at #1 on Twitter in India. Gandhi’s statues are vandalized and in social media, he is accused of the worst atrocities that can be imagined. Yet Gandhi was in his lifetime synonymous with India. When Nehru was once asked what is India, he replied with this short sentence:

“Gandhi is India.”

One might put it differently: any serious discussion of ideas in the public sphere is becoming increasingly difficult, and in this respect, it is not Gandhi alone who has suffered—and similarly, it is not in India alone that a frightening ethnonationalism is now unabashedly on display. Some days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to read that India’s Minister of External Affairs had said publicly that the Buddha and Gandhi were “the two greatest Indians” in the country’s history. That could have been the subject of a substantive discussion and serious intellectual disagreement; rather, the most notable reaction came from Nepal, where they pounced upon the minister for claiming the Buddha for India. The Buddha was, of course, born in Lumbini, which is now in Nepal—but such a reaction, steeped in mind-numbing identitarianism, is befitting the proverbial frog in the well. I suppose that the thousands of books on Indian philosophy that feature long discussions of the Buddha’s sayings, or extracts from the various canons of Buddhist thought, should now be censored since the Buddha cannot be claimed as an Indian. Or perhaps these books should now be classified as works of “Nepali philosophy”. Just as unfortunately, in an act of craven submission, and no doubt with the intention of maintaining friendly relations with a “neighbour”, India’s Ministry of External Affairs at once tendered an apology and admitted that the Buddha is “Nepali”.

Gandhi was adverting to the ideal of advaita in invoking the multiple roads that lead to God. It is at the same time a characterization of “cultural democracy”. The alert reader may object that, thus far, nothing that has been cited from Gandhi’s writings so much as mentions the word “secularism”, although the same reader may discern the spirit of secularism in Gandhi’s frequent pronouncements on the “liberty of religious profession to every single individual.” But Gandhi did in fact emphatically speak of, and for, secularism: indeed, the preceding passage from the Harijan article of 31 August 1947 says this: “The state is bound to be wholly secular. I go so far as to say that no denominational educational institution in it should enjoy patronage” emphasis added. Secularism was the very essence of the “cultural democracy” that, in his reading, characterized the Indian past and perhaps rendered it distinct from other nations. Thus, when Gandhi is calling for a “wholly secular” state, he is calling for the renewal of cultural democracy—a renewal that is perforce necessary at every turn. If contemporary India is finding it so difficult and even offensive to swallow the idea of secularism, supposing it to be a foreign import from the West that colonized the country and still colonizes our imagination, might it find some succour in the idea of “cultural democracy”? It is perhaps time that we started thinking about how the language of “cultural democracy” could be harnessed to furnish all Indians, and especially aggrieved Hindus, with the assurance there is another way of forging a nation without shedding the past.

The country’s Prime Ministers have in the past spent a few minutes at the spinning wheel on Gandhi Jayanti, once again in a show of leading the country and in an effort to demonstrate that their understanding of Gandhi is not entirely hollow. Narendra Modi will doubtless do the same; however, as he is given to theatrics and gifted the country the slogan of ‘Swachh Bharat’, it is very likely that he will also pick up a broom. (As an aside, one can say that the leaders of India are very much in need of brooms to sweep the cobwebs that have cluttered their minds.) A touch of humility, even if for a few minutes, is always calculated to make the powerful feel invincible. Outside the capital, elsewhere in India, the same protocols will be followed with some variations: Governors and Chief Ministers will place garlands around Gandhi’s statues, homilies will be sung to the great man, and Bapu’s favorite bhajans may be sung by choirs of young women and women dressed in khaddar.

In speaking of the “killers of Gandhi”, I do not advert even remotely to Nathuram Godse and his friends and associates who had sworn their allegiance to the idea of an undivided India in which the Hindu would reign supreme. One of Gandhi’s more perceptive biographers, Robert Payne, wrote about the killing of Gandhi as a “permissive assassination”. His submission, quite simply, was that though Nathuram Godse fired the fatal shots, a great many among the middle class desired Gandhi’s death. Some viewed Gandhi as authoritarian, though that was scarcely their objection: more importantly, he struck the aspiring middle and upper classes, who saw the independence of India as an opportunity to advance their careers and create economic opportunities and wealth for themselves, as an obstructionist who was out of sorts in the modern world. The old man had already become obsolete and dispensable, and Nathuram was not mincing words when, at his trial, he spoke bitterly and mockingly of Gandhi’s fasts, spinning, his ‘inner voice’, and the Mahatma’s other mannerisms which, in Nathuram’s view, had effeminized Indian politics and would have made India incapable of a muscular response to attacks in a world where nations vie for advantage and supremacy. Gandhi had to die if India were to survive.

What Nathuram did not at all understand was that men such as Gandhi have to be shot dead repeatedly. It is not only that a Gandhi can be killed in the flesh but not in the spirit. That is only one, and the more predictable, part of the story. The spectre of Gandhi is everywhere and October 2nd is not the only day when he looms large, except of course to those who are unpleasantly reminded by his birth anniversary of the fact that there is much work still to be done in eviscerating Gandhi from the public sphere. Even those who do not care an iota for him have to invoke his name; love him or hate him, he is inescapable. He is everywhere, on billboards, mugs, tee-shirts, car stickers, murals, graffiti, television ads, cartoons, and much else. The present-day killers of Gandhi can, however, live with the merchandizing of Gandhi, and nearly all of them, even as they despise him, would have no reluctance in capitalizing on his name. The idea of cultural capital may be a conceptual black hole to them, but they instinctively understand that the invocation of Gandhi’s name can open many doors in the right places.

One could go in this vein, but this much is clear: Nathuram botched the assassination. This is why the killers of Gandhi are still on the loose, making hay while the sun shines. The official pieties surrounding Gandhi Jayanti may be nauseating to behold, but October 2nd is a necessary provocation.