Gandhism And Marxism | Murzban Jal

by Murzban Jal

There is a belief abroad that Gandhi is against capitalism. This misplaced belief is obviously the result of his fanatic tirades against the “satanic civilization of the west”. The antics of his economic theories must also have contributed to this belief. You need not be told his groundless his belief is.
— ‘Mahatma and Capitalism’, in Masses, Vol. I, No. 10, October 1925.

Titanic and terrible events are approaching with implacable force. Mankind lives in expectation of war, which will, of course, also draw into its maelstrom the colonial countries and which is of vital significance for their destiny. Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war will be waged for principles of “democracy” which must be saved from fascism. All classes and peoples must rally around the “peaceful” “democratic” governments so as to repel the fascist aggressors. Then “democracy” will be saved and peace stabilized forever. This gospel rests on a deliberate lie.
— Leon Trotsky, ‘An Open Letter to the Workers of India’, (July 1939).

Why Gandhi?

In the era of late imperialism in permanent crisis, instead of understanding the crisis of global capital accumulation and the havoc that it creates, especially when it is chocking on the very surplus that it has created, we are told to be “tolerant” and believe in “universal humanism” and “moral idealism” of Gandhi [1]. Since capitalism that has become violent needs new images and new icons, Savarkar has been re-created from the netherworld to save the Indic capitalists to fight against the alleged “violent” Muslims and Christians, both who seek to convert India after their own images.

Yes, it is true that capitalism needs crusaders to defend itself, not to forget fascists and counterrevolutionaries many who emerge from the cranium of western imperialism. The crusaders are usually male and the ideologies that they propagate are extremely reactionary, many a times theological and ethno-religious. To counter this phantasmatic image of the male ethno-religious crusader, we find another image being manufactured by the elites, the image of Gandhi. We are then confronted by the binary—Savarkar and Gandhi. It seems that entire India and political discourse must be submerged by this New Image. The masses must choose—Savarkar or Gandhi?

What is alarming is that we see that at almost at regular intervals the capitalist media while extolling the virtues of totalitarian capitalism, a section of the liberal media along with their liberal friends (accompanied now by the army of academic socialists) has also been propagating that India needs a Gandhi to lead India, where tolerance and not hate would rule. In this liberal democratic setting, while it is said that fascism and right-wing forces have taken monopoly on violence, the narrative that capitalism is the master signifier in this entire discourse seems almost forgotten.

In this rather repetitive scene of history to fight Savarkar we are told to search for Gandhi and to fight Donald Trump and company it is Joe Biden and the corporate democrats who are recalled to fight this menace. Consequently in India to counter the BJP it is Gandhi, sanctified as the “father of the nation” who is recalled by our universal humanitarians and moral idealists. To speak against the nation is sedition (so we learn from the right-wing), likewise to speak against its rather strange father-figure would mean treason and sedition. We are thus told that that sedition charges would be put on those who speak against fathers and sons of the nation.

What happens in this narrative that the entire revolutionary and critical discourse critical of Gandhi and Gandhism are obliterated. Gandhi is always the saint, the Mahatma not forgetting that in the critical discourse of B.R. Ambedkar he always appears as “Mr. Gandhi” this “Mr. Gandhi” who was not merely wrong in his understanding of Indian society and the political course of action to be taken, but a counterrevolutionary avant la lettre. His elevation as “Mahatma” was early an invention of Nehru and the new elites, just as his elevation as the “father of the nation” is nothing but a form of not mere paternalism, but mainly a form of sadomasochism. This is because even after decades of independence and the transfer of power from the British to the Indian elites, an extremely large part of the population lives in desperate poverty. The cries of sadomasochism would thus not be unjustified. What this literally means that Mr. Gandhi literally sodomized the entire nation and we are all the unfortunate children of this sodomy. After all, if he is the father, then we are all his unfortunate children.
And since the liberals frighten us that if one does not resurrect the image of Gandhi then India will become totally fascistic, one needs to turn to Leon Trotsky:

Consider Trotsky:

Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war will be waged for principles of “democracy” which must be saved from fascism. All classes and peoples must rally around the “peaceful” “democratic” governments so as to repel the fascist aggressors. Then “democracy” will be saved and peace stabilized forever. This gospel rests on a deliberate lie. If the British government were really concerned with the flowering of democracy then a very simple opportunity to demonstrate this exists: let the government give complete freedom to India. The right of national independence is one of the elementary democratic rights. But actually, the London government is ready to hand over all the democracies in the world in return for one tenth of its colonies. If the Indian people do not wish to remain as slaves for all eternity, then they must expose and reject those false preachers who assert that the sole enemy of the people is fascism. Hitler and Mussolini are, beyond doubt, the bitterest enemies of the toilers and oppressed. They are gory executioners, deserving of the greatest hatred from the toilers and oppressed of the world. But they are, before everything, the enemies of the German and Italian peoples on whose backs they sit. The oppressed classes and peoples—as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Liebknecht have taught us—must always seek out their main enemy at home, cast in the role of their own immediate oppressors and exploiters. In India that enemy above all is the British bourgeoisie. The overthrow of British imperialism would deliver a terrible blow at all the oppressors, including the fascist dictators. In the long run the imperialists are distinguished from one another in form—not in essence. German imperialism, deprived of colonies, puts on the fearful mask of fascism with its saber teeth protruding. British imperialism, gorged, because it possesses immense colonies, hides its saber teeth behind a mask of democracy. But this democracy exists only for the metropolitan center, for the 45,000,000 souls—or more correctly, for the ruling bourgeoisie—in the metropolitan center. India is deprived not only of democracy but of the most elementary right of national independence. Imperialist democracy is thus the democracy of slave owners fed by the lifeblood of the colonies. But India seeks her own democracy, and not to serve as fertilizer for the slave owners. Those who desire to end fascism, reaction and all forms of oppression must overthrow imperialism. There is no other road. This task cannot, however, be accomplished by peaceful methods, by negotiations and pledges. Never before in history have slave owners voluntarily freed their slaves. Only a bold, resolute struggle of the Indian people for their economic and national emancipation can free India. [2]

While it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of fascism and its direct relation to capitalism (liberalism not excluded) and that Gandhi could never understand fascism, forget fighting it, let is turn to a few examples of Gandhi on fascism:

1. “Ahimsa was born with man. Hitler does not kill his own people”. [3]
2. “If we wish to win Swaraj through ahimsa, this is the only way. If, however, we wish to use force, then Hitler would point the way”. [4]
3. “Hitler is a scourge sent by God to punish men for their inequities”. [5]
4. “Hitler is said to be self-sacrificing....Anyway, his is said to be a life of self-sacrifice. He has no vices. He has not married. His character is said to be clean. He is always alert”. [6]
5. “I have no hatred even for Adolf Hitler”. [7]
6. I do not consider Hitler as bad as he is depicted”. [8]
7. “We have to bring to bear the same single-mindedness and perseverance in evoking ahimsa. Hitler is awake all the 24 hours of the day in perfecting his sadhna”. [9]

It must be noted that Gandhi had not only highly infantile understanding of politics in general and fascism in particular, he romanticized both politics in general and fascism in particular. Therein lies the danger of Gandhi, for metaphysics, universal humanism and moral politics cannot fight fascism. It did not fight fascism and Nazism in Europe. It was real anti-fascist struggle fought in the carnage of the Second Imperialist World War that toppled fascist regimes.

Now turn to our liberals who are threatened by the evoking of the image of Savarkar. They do not at all talk of fascism. All that they evoke is the romantic version of Gandhi as anti-colonial leader of the Indian masses. But was this indeed true? And if indeed it was why did Ambedkar oppose him tooth and nail at every step and why did Gandhi actively sabotage every progressive move that Ambedkar proposed?

But the most important question is that why has the left and the communist parties which had complete disdain for Gandhi; suddenly found the “genius of Gandhi” as Irfan Habib recently put it? [10] Why when revolutionary communism noted that Gandhi was not the leader of the Indian masses, but a religious preacher who mixed religion and politics [11] is suddenly a Gandhian renaissance within the communist parties taking place, especially in the CPI under D. Raja? It must be noted that even during the non-corporation movement (1920-22) when Gandhi should have actively politicized the masses was he “publically proclaiming himself “as Sanatist Hindu” (a kind of extremist, as it were “ultra-montane” Hindu”? [12] What Gandhi did (and this was his completely unpardonable act of actively prorogating religion in the public space) was a giving consent to a reactionary and backward worldview.

Turn to Gandhi in 1921 writing in Young India:

1. “I call myself a Sanatani Hindu, because—
2. I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avtars and re-birth,
3. In believe in Varnashrama Dharma in a sense in my opinion strictly Vedic, but not in its present and crude sense,
4. I believer in protecting of cows in its much larger sense than the popular,
5. I do not disbelieve in idol-worship”. [13]

The fact that Ambedkar though having no love for revolutionary communism did see, and that too very clearly, that Gandhi as the head of the primordial nativists with their imagined phantasmagoria of nationalism headed by the caste oligarchs was the biggest counterrevolutionary. Mere liberal rhetoric is not sufficient to fight fascism. Unlike Gandhi who sought to rehabilitate religion and caste, for Ambedkar:

When the bottom-most stone in the structure was shifted from its place, those above it were bound to be shaken out of their positions. [14]

For Ambedkar, along with the necessary shaking of the elites from their position of power, he also noted that the early caste oligarchs were landlords living off from rent and money-lending and now the caste oligarchs have become landlords of the whole of India. The republic of India, under Gandhi and Nehru for him, would be the republic of the upper caste elites sans all morality. For him a moral regeneration was necessary to create a democratic society. One recalls him, “Hindu society seems to stand in need of a moral regeneration which it is dangerous to postpone”. [15] He also said that these leaders must be “honest enough to have the courage of their convictions born of intellectual emancipation” [16]. Ambedkar did not see any reform taking place. Nor did he see that the liberals having capacity for intellectual emancipation. He saw “the crumbling state of Hindu society”, yet along with this crumbling state he saw that the leaders refused to see the ruins and merely appealed to the “ideals of the past”. [17] Hindutva after all has emerged from these ruins. Further for Ambedkar:

Hindu religion does not recognize the principle of equality of social status; on the other hand it fosters inequality by insisting upon grading people as Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras which now stands towards one another in an ascending scale of hatred and descending scale of contempt. [18]

The question is that when Ambedkar saw that Indian liberalism with their pantheon of leaders led by Gandhi had failed, then why is there a return to this form of romanticism and liberalism? And if Ambedkar said that a democratic alternative had to be based on real thinking and that “the Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking” [19], then why is this sudden turn to Gandhism? According to Ambedkar, Gandhi:

.......prefers to follow the saints. Like a conservative with his reverence for consecrated notions, he is afraid that if he once starts thinking, many ideals and institutions to which he clings will be doomed. One must sympathize with him. For every act of independent thinking puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. But it is equally true that dependence on saints cannot lead us to know the truth. The saints are after all only human beings, and as Lord Balfour said, "the human mind is no more a truth-finding apparatus than the snout of a pig." Insofar as he does think, to me he really appears to be prostituting his intelligence to find reasons for supporting this archaic social structure of the Hindus. He is the most influential apologist of it, and therefore the worst enemy of the Hindus.

The problem is that the hegemonic part of the Indian national movement led by the Congress was an upper caste movement where the subalterns were used for this nationalist project. Now a new nationalist project is being re-invented and being put into practice by the BJP. Ambedkar had warned of the phantasmagoria of Swaraj. “There is no use of Swaraj”, so Ambedkar so prophetically warned, “if you cannot defend it”. [20] For, “Swaraj of Hindus may turn out to be only a step towards slavery”. [21]

Indeed, the role that the Congress was to play in history, namely carrying on the project of secularism and at least trying to create the possibilities of the annihilation of the terrible caste system, along with the carrying on the project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has totally failed. Indeed the shameful role of the Congress in competing with the BJP in trying to create some sort of the other of soft Hindutva is proof that nothing progressive can be left of this so-called grand old party of India.

What is largely expected is a real a democratic alternative founded on a new vision of society in which the transcendence of caste, patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism are articulated. It is expected that this transcendence will be heralded by the organized and unorganized workers, Dalits, women and the rural poor. This will be the real Swaraj, the Swaraj that all citizens of India would defend.

It is necessary to note that this narrative of India being divided into two neat halves: fascism which threatens and kills and liberalism which loves and promotes tolerance is complete fiction. We have to become liberals with moral politics. We have to evoke the imagined narrative of Gandhi as the apostle of tolerance and democracy.

What I would also like to say is that liberalism and Gandhism are not answers to India’s problems. What I would also say is that Gandhi is more of a myth created by the Congress party to leave the masses disempowered. Ambedkar knew this. For him the epitome of reaction and counterrevolution in India was Gandhi and that the Congress represented a counterrevolution. For him there was no main difference between the Congress and the Hindutva right.

It needs to be noted that there is a deep intertwining of liberalism and fascism and that liberalism besides squashing all desire for revolutionary resistance also represses radical politics by immersing the masses in conspicuous consumption. Fascism symbolizes the end of capitalism and that different methods need to be invented to fight fascism. One cannot evoke the spirit of Gandhi, for this spirit is bathed in vanity and narcissism:

In Gandhi’s case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?... (It must be noted that, my insertion, M.J.) inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman. ....The things that one associated with him—home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism—were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. [22]

Rethinking Gandhi:

Since I have said that Gandhi cannot be evoked to fight fascism, l now put Gandhi’s ideology in point form in order to understand his understanding of caste, capitalism and minorities (here Muslims) since many a times he is seen as the apostle of “Hindu—Muslim unity”:

1. “Today castes have become mongrelized. Varnas have disappeared”. [23]
2. “The beauty of the caste system is that it does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth possessions. Caste is but an extension of the principle of the family. Both are governed by blood and heredity”.  [24]
3. “The caste system has saved Hinduism from disintegration”. [25]
4. A Dalit is a “person without moral education, without sense, and without knowledge.” [26]
5. “Brahmanism owes its unrivalled position to its self-abnegation, its inward purity, its severe austerity—all these illumined by knowledge.” [27]
6. “I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity. That dining together creates friendship is contrary to experience. If this was true there would have been no war in Europe... Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature. The only difference is that after answering call of nature we get peace while after eating food we get discomfort. Just as we perform the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking food must also be done in seclusion. [28]
7. “One of my correspondents suggests that we should abolish the caste [system] but adopt the class system of Europe—meaning thereby I suppose that the idea of heredity in caste should be rejected. I am inclined to think that the law of heredity is an eternal law and any attempt to alter the law must lead us, as it has before led, to utter confusion. I can see very great use in considering Brahman to be always a Brahman through his life. If he does not behave himself as a Brahman, he will naturally cease to command the respect that is due to the real Brahman”. [29]
8. “All killing is not himsa” [30] and he “alone can practice ahimsa who knows how to kill” [31].
9. “You cannot teach ahimsa to a man who cannot kill. You cannot make a dumb man appreciate the beauty and the merit of silence” [32] and the “practice of ahimsa may even necessitate killing and that we as a nation have lost the true power of killing. It is clear that he who has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing. Ahimsa is a renunciation of the highest type.” [33]
10. “You have already committed violence. By talking now like a wise-man, you will not learn non-violence. Having started on this course, you must finish the job.” [34]
11. “Breathing involves killing, which is unavoidable violence and is, therefore forgiven. Without such unavoidable violence we cannot keep alive the body for its sacred pilgrimage.” [35]
12.  “The Mussulman being generally in a minority has as a class developed into a bully.....(where) thirteen thousand years of imperialistic expansion has made the Mussulmans fighters as a body. They are therefore aggressive. Bullying is the natural excrescence of an aggressive spirit.” [36]
13. “The Hindu has an ages-old civilization. He is essentially non-violent. His civilization has passed through the experiences that the two recent ones are still passing through. If Hinduism was ever imperialistic in the modern sense of the term, it has outlived its imperialism and has either deliberately or as a matter of course given it up. Pre-dominance of the non-violent spirit has restricted the use of arms to a small minority which must always be subordinate to a civil power highly spiritual, learned and selfless. The Hindus as a body are therefore not equipped for fighting. But not having retained their spiritual training, they have forgotten the use of an effective substitute for arms, and not knowing their use nor having an aptitude for them, they have become docile to the point of timidity or cowardice. This vice is therefore a natural excrescence of gentleness. Holding this view, I do not think that the Hindu exclusiveness, bad as it undoubtedly is, has much to do with the Hindu timidity. Hence also my disbelief in akhadas as a means of self-defence. I prize them for physical culture but, for self-defence, I would restore the spiritual culture. The best and most lasting self-defence is self-purification.” [37]
14. To the landlords: “I shall be no party to dispossessing propertied classes of their private property without just cause... But supposing that there is an attempt unjustly to deprive you of your property, you will find me fighting on your side.” [38]
15. “I am working for the co-operation and co-ordination of capital and labour and of landlords and tenants....You may be sure that I shall throw the whole weight of my influence in preventing class war...No member will talk of expropriation or extinction of private property......That is the fundamental conception of Hinduism, which has years of penance and austerity at the back of the discovery of their truth. That is why whilst we had the saints who have burnt out their bodies and laid down their lives in order to explore the secrets of the soul, we have none as in the West who have laid down their lives in exploring the remotest or highest regions of earth”. [39]
16. “Let us consider what the workers are likely to gain by breaking their oath. These days, any honest person in India can earn twenty to twenty-five rupees a month by intelligent work. The worst that can happen to a worker is that his employees may dismiss him and he may have to look for other work. A thoughtful worker should realize that he will get work anywhere after a few day’s search”. [40]

Looking at the above one thinks that why is the real Gandhi not brought out and why is this very simple opposition brought out in present day politics—tolerance vs. hatred, Hinduism vs. Hindutva? And since the liberal recallers of Gandhi evoke parliamentary democracy to struggle against the votaries of Hindutva one needs recalling Gandhi:

That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliament is like a sterile woman and a prostitute.......The Parliament has not yet, of its own accord, done a single good thing. Hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition of the Parliament is such that, without pressure, it can do nothing. It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time......Parliament is without a real master. Under the Prime Minister, its movement is not steady but it is buffeted about like a prostitute. [41]

One wonders what both the votaries of liberalism and conservatism (both who love evoking Gandhi) may think of, if not only all the above points, at least the last one.