A month after his salt civil disobedience Gandhi comes up with the idea of raiding the government salt depot in Dharasana, 25 miles from Dandi. Before that can take place he is arrested and taken to the Yeravda jail in Poona (Pune), and his sixth imprisonment lasts from 5 May 1930 to 26 January 1931. On 21 May, under the leadership of Sarojini Naidu (freedom fighter, poet and close Gandhi associate) and others, and as vividly reported by American correspondent Webb Miller and portrayed in the movie Gandhi, hundreds of disciplined nonviolent satyagrahis are savagely beaten. Other forms of nonviolent resistance spread throughout India against importing foreign cloth and paying land revenues. Many village officials submit their resignations as part of the resistance. At the instructions of Lord Irwin (Viceroy, April 1926 to April 1931) Gandhi is released from jail and the two participate in a series of meetings. This results in the Irwin–Gandhi Pact by which thousands of prisoners are released, and Gandhi terminates the civil disobedience. The Pact does not grant India Dominion Status or Independence. Instead, Irwin invites Gandhi to come to London for the Second Round Table Conference to discuss India’s future status.
Gandhi’s fascinating visit to England is widely publicized. Well known are the images of Gandhi in a loincloth meeting with King George v at Buckingham Palace and later being contemptuously dismissed by Churchill as the ‘half-naked fakir’. When asked about being so underdressed, Gandhi, with typical humour, responds that ‘the King had enough on for both of us’. Asked about Churchill’s condemnation, Gandhi responds that he takes this as a ‘compliment’, but he is far too modest and unworthy to be a half-naked fakir. Also well known are the images of Gandhi happily interacting with the poor of London’s East End and with Lancashire cotton weavers.
As sole Congress Party representative, Gandhi, always uncomfort able with such formal political negotiations and without flexibility and authority to negotiate for all of India, has limited expectations. Nevertheless, he and other Indians are dismayed by how the British conduct the conference and are disappointed with the absence of any productive results. Using their typical colonial divide-and-rule approach, the British emphasize their responsibility to protect the rights of India’s minorities. In this way they disempower the potential for a unified, anti-colonial, Indian nationalist presence. They limit Gandhi’s voice and authority by inviting the participation of Muslim, untouchable and princely state representatives who have their own conflicting interests and agendas. Most troubling to Gandhi is the promotion of untouchables as a separate electorate, similar to the separate Muslim electorate, or separate Sikh and European electorates, and not as an integral part of majority Hindu society.
Indian leaders, both within and outside the Congress Party, use Gandhi’s failure to achieve results to raise doubts about the effectiveness of his approach. They promote non-Gandhi and anti-Gandhi anti-colonial approaches and goals. This pattern of contested alternative leadership and approaches continues to grow during the 1930s and 1940s and in many ways Gandhi’s authority, control and influence have peaked and will now gradually decline.
Far more interesting and enjoyable for Gandhi is what he does outside the conference. He is most at home living at Muriel Lester’s Kingsley Hall in the slums of London and interacting with the English working-class poor, including children. In a difficult situation he is persuasive and able to win over the goodwill and support of mill workers, who have encountered extreme hardships exacerbated by Gandhi’s swadeshi boycott of foreign cloth. Gandhi has enjoyable meetings with George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin and other noted personalities. He has several rewarding experiences on the return trip. These include conversations in Geneva with the novelist and pacifist Romain Rolland, who had written a book about Gandhi in 1924 and made him known in Europe.1 Gandhi also visits the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, where he is impressed by a crucifix by the altar, a symbol of voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice that he often cites as expressing his philosophy of truth and nonviolence.
Gandhi returns to Bombay on 28 December, two days after Nehru is arrested, and he finds a very different, much more repres sive environment. On 4 January he is arrested at Mani Bhavan in Bombay and imprisoned at Yeravda jail. Lord Willingdon, who serves as Viceroy from April 1931 to April 1936, has no desire to negotiate with Gandhi and is determined to crush Indian anti-colonial resistance.
Gandhi now rededicates himself to eliminating the blot of untouchability. The traditional hierarchical Hindu caste system codification assigns the ‘untouchables’ or ‘outcastes’, also classified as belonging to the ‘Depressed’ or ‘Suppressed’ Classes, to the bottom rung, doing the most menial and karmically polluting tasks. From 1932 Gandhi uses the term Harijans (‘children of God’ or ‘people of God’) instead of ‘untouchables’ and in February 1933, he launches his weekly, Harijan. Some untouchables, especially those identified with Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, find Gandhi’s term paternalistic, and they prefer Dalits (‘the broken’ and ‘oppressed’), a term used by many scholars and activists today.2
Gandhi’s greatest fear from the Round Table conference proves true, and in the Communal Award of 17 August 1932 the British grant the separate electorate for ‘untouchables’. Ambedkar, who strongly condemns the caste system and distrusts hierarchical Hinduism, favours this kind of ‘identity politics’ in which Dalits can represent themselves. Gandhi, who is more careful in his criticism of the Vedic authoritarian scriptures and caste Hinduism, strongly opposes the separate electorate. For him Harijans are equal integral members of Hindu society, and unless Hinduism can radically reform itself and abolish untouchability it has no right to exist. Consistent with his inclusive philosophy of privileging the needs of the least fortunate, Gandhi favours a greater number of ‘reserved seats’ for untouchables for which all Hindus can vote.
On 20 September 1932 Gandhi begins a fast unto death unless the British revoke the special electorate for untouchables. Ambedkar regards this as a ‘political stunt’, coercively forcing him to choose between saving the Mahatma’s life or the rights of his people. Gandhi sees his fast as noncoercive. He hopes to ‘sting the Hindu conscience’ into right action, but he must do what his conscience instructs him to do, even if it results in his death. After hard bargaining, Gandhi and Ambedkar, along with leaders of caste Hindus and untouchables, agree to the Poona Pact. In this compromise the untouchables are not classified as a separate electorate but they are to receive 148 reserved legislative seats instead of the 78 previously granted under the British award. No Hindu will be treated as an untouchable, caste Hindus will remove restrictions and the demeaning ways they have oppressed Harijans, and there will be greater support for the education of untouchables. Gandhi breaks his fast on 25 September.
In late April 1933 Gandhi announces his intention to undergo an anti-untouchability 21-day fast. On 8 May, after considerable publicity and concern by others, he commences his fast. He is released from prison later that day. With renewed dedication Gandhi focuses on untouchability. From Wardha, on 7 November 1933, he launches his all-India tour for the uplift of Harijans. The tour includes speeches, fundraising and the entry of temples and wells, and ends in Banaras on 29 July 1934.
This begins a period, lasting until the early 1940s, when Gandhi, as he did in the 1920s, tends to withdraw from public political life, although not always successfully. He now focuses on village work and the Constructive Programme with an emphasis on education, eradicating untouchability, establishing Hindu–Muslim and gender and other harmonious relations, and working in other ways to create models for exemplary moral and spiritual village life.
On 27 October 1934 Gandhi inaugurates the All-India Village Industries Association and several days later, at the session of the Congress held in Bombay under the presidency of Rajendra Prasad, later the first president of independent India, Gandhi formally resigns from the Indian National Congress. Although he is still revered and the Congress leadership reluctantly accepts his resignation, Gandhi feels that there are growing significant differences between his priorities and those of the other leaders, and that they should now be free to lead Congress and the independence movements in ways they deem best.
Gandhi moves to Wardha in central India and in 1936 establishes the Sevagram Ashram five miles away in a very undeveloped village. For Gandhi, this allows him to greatly simplify his life and to engage in experiments with truth in creating an exemplary model of village living for India’s future. After many decades of experiments with truth involving the theory and practice of ‘constructive work’, Gandhi formulates the fundamental features of his programme for poorna swaraj, or complete independence. As formulated in Gandhi’s Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, published in 1941, these experiments in uplifting village life are grounded in his philosophy and practices of truth and nonviolence and selfless service to meet the needs of others. This is Gandhi’s outline of a programme for unifying the haves and have-nots, radically transforming human relations, overcoming the violent and unjust structures of domination and allowing individuals and society to develop in ways that express everyone’s highest moral and spiritual potentialities.3
In his Constructive Programme Gandhi begins with communal and religious unity. Other priorities include the removal of untouch ability, the prohibition of alcohol and other intoxicants, the development of khadi and other village industries, village sanitation and education in health and hygiene. He promotes New or Basic Education and adult education, the uplift of women, the focus on provincial languages and making Hindi (or Hindi–Urdu) the national language. Additional priorities include the uplift of peasants and other workers and economic equality, the uplift of adivasis (‘original peoples’, ‘indigenous peoples’, tribals), meeting the needs of lepers, granting an important role for students and recognizing the very limited use of civil disobedience.
A major aspect of Gandhi’s constructive work in his ‘whole village work’ focuses on economic relations that are nonviolent, truthful, decentralized and egalitarian. They involve self-restraint and the simplification of needs, emphasize economic self-sufficient independence (swadeshi), allow the individual to develop toward greater self-reliance and freedom (swaraj) and further the economic philosophy of the welfare of all (sarvodaya). For Gandhi such economic relations are sustainable, provide for the harmonious integration of body, mind and heart or soul, and are grounded in virtuous selfless service. This moral economy is often identified as ‘Gandhian socialism’ with its essential commitment to truth and nonviolence. Gandhi is very critical of ‘modern’ economics with its profit and money-oriented ‘machine craze’ and exploitation of labour. He emphasizes the spinning-wheel, khadi, simple human-centric labour-intensive work with limited use of technology, and crafts and vocational work as most appropriate for the contextual conditions and needs of India’s villages, which, for Gandhi, is usually seen as ‘the real India’.4
Much of this is controversial during Gandhi’s life and is rejected by Nehru and others as anti-modern and no model for India’s future. It is even more controversial today as those with economic power in India and in the world find such an anti-modern economy backward and irrelevant for dealing with contexts of present technology, corporate and financial capitalism and globalization. Gandhi’s economic programme seems hopelessly irrelevant if one takes it literally, applies it rigidly and then focuses on khadi, the spinning-wheel and the primacy of vocational and craft production instead of focusing on the basic moral and spiritual priorities and regulative ideals underlying Gandhi’s economic philosophy and practices.
In this regard, Gandhi repeatedly tells us that he is not against the machine or technology if it enables greater human development and liberation. But he is against the modern worship of the machine that marginalizes real human needs and concerns, displaces humans when there is a surplus of labour that needs to be employed, and expresses technological relations that involve inequality, objectification, alienation and domination. When one examines Gandhi’s basic economic priorities in a selective and reformulated way – his emphasis on decentralized more egalitarian democratic relations that empower the individual and the community, on relations that reflect human dignity, integrity and well-being, and on alternative technologies and relations that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable – then much of his economic constructive work may be very relevant to our contemporary contexts.
A related significant aspect of Gandhi’s village constructive work focuses on a radically different model of education. In October 1937 he inaugurates the New Education Conference at Wardha, where he formulates his Nai Talim (‘New Education’). As a moral and spiritual visionary, who considers himself a pragmatic idealist, Gandhi focuses on educational transformative practices. Educate students and others in specific ways, based on proper values, and this will lead to individuals and social groupings that are moral, express character and virtue, are nonviolent and loving and truthful, and avoid the violence and untruthfulness of educational approaches that are part of ‘modern civilization’.5
For Gandhi, modern Western education, as evidenced in the education of privileged Indians under the Raj, is violent, untruthful, immoral, egotistical and adversarial. It miseducates students to ‘succeed’ in economic, political, social, cultural and civilizational relations of domination, injustice, oppression and exploitation. By way of extreme contrast, Gandhi’s approach to education emphasizes character and moral development, rather than ‘book learning’ and ‘formal education’. Truly educated students have exemplary moral character, express the ‘higher’ human forces of love and nonviolence, are fearless and courageous and in all ways virtuous. They have let go of ego needs for wealth and power, and are motivated to fulfil their dharma of social and moral duty through selfless service. Responding to the contextual conditions and needs of village India, Gandhi proposes decentralized village education free of state support and controls, using local or regional languages instead of English, giving priorities to crafts and vocational education with the development of small-scale village industries and emphasizing the harmonious development of mind, body and heart or spirit in each student through the integration of knowledge and work.
As with his Constructive Programme of economics, Gandhi’s philosophy and practices of education were controversial during his lifetime and are even more controversial today. The failure of Gandhi’s educational vision and practices may be illustrated by what happens in the ashram education of his children, especially the tragic life of his oldest son, Harilal. Although there are other determining factors, it is significant that Gandhi repeatedly denies his oldest son his desire for a modern education, including Harilal’s desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. Harilal’s rigidly controlled education and socialization contribute to his development as a resentful, angry, conflicted person, never at peace with himself and estranged from his father, with many addictions, including alcoholism and wasteful financial expenditure. His troubled life includes a temporary, highly publicized conversion to Islam, and ends with a sad death, several months after Gandhi’s assassination, in the most impoverished conditions of degeneration.6
Taken literally and applied rigidly, Gandhi’s pronouncements on education, with his focus on vocational training and village crafts, often seem hopelessly reactionary and irrelevant. It is easy to conclude that Gandhi’s educational constructive work is out of date and completely irrelevant for the needs and priorities of today’s world, including a modern Indian education that focuses on the most advanced scientific, technological, engineering, medical, business, media, state and military developments.
Once again, the insights and relevance of Gandhi’s Constructive Programme of education depend on not only discarding what is hopelessly reactionary and irrelevant to present contexts, but also on focusing on and reinterpreting Gandhi’s basic ethical and spiritual priorities. One of Gandhi’s famous ‘Seven Social Sins’ is ‘knowledge without character’, sometimes presented as ‘education without character’.7 Educators today are increasingly disturbed by the fact that they are turning out students with scientific, technological, business and other skills, who can often gain money and power, but who lack character or any worthy human values and commitments. As Gandhi repeatedly warns, such power without character and values is very dangerous and leads to conflict, violence, suffering and an unhappy and unsustainable way of life.
In this regard Gandhi’s basic education focuses on taking each individual student as a unique valuable person, with the need to develop harmonious relations of mind, body and heart. Truly educated students are those who know how to live worthy moral and truthful lives with character, virtues and nonegoistic service. They live lives of empathy, compassion, love, self-restraint and a willingness to sacrifice and suffer without sacrificing others and inflicting suffering on them. Such an approach to education may be not only relevant but also urgently needed to meet our educational crises, which are part of our human civilizational crises.
As noted, Gandhi addresses the first section of his published Constructive Programme to communal and religious unity and harmony. In terms of family upbringing, experiences in England and South Africa and other formative influences, Gandhi gives this topic one of his highest priorities in India. He develops a dynamic, contextualized, complex and nuanced theory and practice of religion and culture, of interreligious and intercultural dialogue and relations, that often place him at odds with those who uphold conservative traditional religious and cultural authority. Gandhi maintains that no religion or culture has the absolute truth, that all scriptures and other foundational texts are transmitted through and constructed by imperfect human beings and that, while upholding what is best in our own religion and culture, we can learn from truths that others have experienced. For Gandhi, only such a dynamic and open-ended developmental approach of humility, empathy, tolerance and mutual respect can deal with the root causes and major causal determinants of so much religious and cultural misunderstanding, intolerance, disunity, disharmony, conflict, violence and war.
In this regard Gandhi’s major focus is on Hindu–Muslim unity and harmonious relations. This is an earlier priority in his life and the so-called ‘Muslim question’ and Muslim–Hindu relations now consume much of Gandhi’s time for the remainder of the 1930s and until his assassination in January 1948. There are certainly many encouraging and mixed experiences and Gandhi continues to enjoy the deep respect of and close friendship with many influential Muslim leaders. These include Abdul Kalam Azad, popularly known as Maulana Azad, who is elected as Indian National Congress President in 1923 and 1940 and is India’s first Minister of Education, and the remarkable Pashtun leader of nonviolent resistance and follower of Mahatma Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (or Badshah Khan), known as the ‘frontier Gandhi’. Nevertheless, at least from the late 1930s Muslim–Hindu relations keep deteriorating, and Gandhi winds up at the time of Partition, with the overwhelming violence and suffering of communal riots and savage killings, in a state of deep despair, feeling that no one listens to him and that he is a failure.
Much of this deterioration in communal religious relations can be traced back to Britain’s Government of India Act of 1935 that greatly enlarges the Indian electorate and establishes a provincial political system that has considerable freedom. In the subsequent provincial elections of 1937 the Indian National Congress gains significant political power by winning in seven of the eleven provinces. However, it does not poll well among Indian Muslims, although the Indian Muslim League under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah does not enjoy great support from the Muslim population either. During 1937–9 Congress attempts to win over Indian Muslims but Jinnah and the Muslim League effectively counter this by arousing Muslims’ fears and insecurities and moving Muslims in a separate, communal, religious nationalist direction.
Gandhi’s failure in achieving Hindu–Muslim unity and harmony is usually analysed in terms of his ‘adversary’ M. A. Jinnah’s personality and approach and their strained relations. Jinnah has a very complex and often contradictory personality and orientation. In many respects he has more in common with Gandhi than does Subhas Chandra Bose and many other Hindu Congress leaders. Jinnah and Gandhi come from the same part of India, speak the same Gujarati language, are trained as lawyers in London and are leaders in the Indian National Congress working for Muslim–Hindu unity in one independent India.
Ironically, considering his later determined commitment to a separate Islamic religious nation of Pakistan, Jinnah is a very modern, nonreligious Indian, enjoying expensive Western clothes, alcohol and even pork. Jinnah is what Gandhi classifies under ‘the moderates’: elite, privileged, highly educated, Westernized, ‘modern’ Indians who negotiate with the British for formal, legal, constitutional reforms. Jinnah is always uncomfortable and distrustful of Gandhi, his philosophy and his practices. Gandhi seems repeatedly to critique, subvert and mobilize against what Jinnah proposes and takes to be rational, modern and progressive. Jinnah distrusts Gandhi’s charming personality and charisma and how he can use his authority to mobilize the forces of millions of illiterate, premodern, ‘backward’ peasants.
Although Gandhi reaches out repeatedly to Jinnah and Indian Muslims, relations with Jinnah, Congress–Muslim League relations and Hindu–Muslim relations keep deteriorating. Scholars present many reasons for the escalating tensions and antagonistic con tradictions that result in so much violence and suffering and that continue to the present. There is certainly considerable evidence to present Jinnah as the villain, an unattractive, stubborn, egotistical, hypocritical opportunist, who exacerbates communal fears and tensions and works against Hindu–Muslim unity. This portrayal is even more vivid when Jinnah is contrasted with the moral and spiritual Gandhi, who is willing to sacrifice his life for Hindu–Muslim harmony. However, contextual conditions and alternatives are much more complex than this simple portrayal.
The most fundamental cause for the deteriorating Hindu–Muslim relations involves the basic difference between Gandhi and Jinnah, and his Muslim League, in how they finally view the status of Indian Muslims and the future of a Hindu-majority India. Jinnah and the Muslim League develop a communal view that Muslims and Hindus are two separate ‘nations’. Gandhi can empathize with other points of view and can offer concessions and compromises but he can never accept this ‘two-nation’ theory. For Gandhi, with his commitment to communal and religious unity and harmony, Muslims and Hindus may have different paths to the truth, but in terms of their shared history, culture, language and underlying ethical and spiritual truths, they are part of one glorious Indian civilization. Without Gandhi’s essential commitment to interreligious and intercultural unity and harmony Jinnah and the Muslim League reject his philosophy and his proposals. They increasingly develop the view that a unified India will be a Hindu ‘nation’, under the rule of a tyranny of the majority, who will subject the separate minority Muslim ‘nation’ to discrimination, second-class citizenship, violation of what is required for their separate religious identity and possible reprisals as a reaction to India’s history of violent Muslim invasions and rule.
It is open to debate to what extent Gandhi is responsible for this failure. Does he make serious errors and miscalculations in his formulations and approaches to different Muslim leaders? To what extent do the real contextual forces, leading personalities and historical conditions, including the outbreak of the Second World War and British colonial policies, prevent a well-intentioned Gandhi from being able to control Hindu–Muslim relations? What is clear is that he is largely unsuccessful in this important aim of his constructive work.
Looking back to the 1930s, with Gandhi’s major focus on his Constructive Programme, it is evident that his constructive work has some impressive but often mixed results. This assessment includes the importance he places on his new headquarters in developing his model ashram at Sevagram. Unlike many other leaders, who withdraw from society and establish small, alternative communities of followers, Gandhi is a moral and spiritual pragmatist, who wants his constructive work at the ashram to serve as an exemplary moral transformative model. He is engaged in constructive work experiments with truth with the aim of radically changing the dominant economic, social and cultural priorities and relations of village life, of India and even of the world.
Even in evaluating Sevagram, Gandhi regretfully reflects that seemingly committed followers are often primarily motivated by their desire to be in the presence of the Mahatma, and never accept the philosophy of the Constructive Programme as a total way of life. And since he remains the most revered national leader, with frequent demands from Congress and others, Gandhi cannot devote the time and effort necessary for dealing with the conflicts and tensions around the formulation and implementation of the Constructive Programme.
Gandhi’s rueful reflections are similar to those about the lack of true commitment to ahimsa and satyagraha, as seen in the early 1920s and especially late in his life. He realizes that his millions of followers, even many of the more dedicated ashramites and satyagrahis, only seem to accept ahimsa, satyagraha and the Constructive Programme. They really accept these because of their admiration for Bapu, their Father, the exalted Mahatma, and on tactical and strategic grounds, as practical options that can work. However, most never accept nonviolence, truth-force and constructive work as creeds, philosophies and committed total ways of life. That is why, under different contextual situations, they change their priorities and tactics and violate the basic values and teachings of these philosophies. And that is why Gandhi and India repeatedly experience so much violence, hatred, untruthfulness, replication of the evils of modern civilization and religious and communal disharmony.
As Gandhi often expresses it, in our common non-Gandhian tactical approach we experience ‘nonviolence’ that is really multidimensional and structural violence, ‘peace’ that really expresses a state of war, ‘truth’ that is deeply untruthful, professions of love and unity and harmony that are always short lived and often turn into their opposites. For example, as Gandhi sadly reflects, what we usually call the nonviolent resistance of ‘satyagraha’ lacks the moral and spiritual development of courage, fearlessness and selfless sacrifice. It is therefore a false ‘satyagraha of the weak’, and not the true ‘satyagraha of the strong’. Without the creed and philosophy of the morally and spiritually strong, of those who are virtuous and courageous, are willing to suffer and sacrifice and to act according to their duty of nonegoistic selfless service, the transformative efforts to realize truth and nonviolence through satyagraha and the Constructive Programme will be temporary, limited and full of failures.