On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invades Poland. Two days later France and Britain declare war on Germany. Lord Linlithgow, British Viceroy from April 1936 to October 1943, announces India’s entry into the war without consulting any of the Congress leaders, who are understandably offended. During the war more than 2.5 million Indian troops fight on the side of the Allies.
Indian reactions to the British war effort are mixed. On the one hand, Gandhi, Azad, Patel and other Congress leaders are very opposed to German fascism, and Gandhi initially favours ‘nonviolent moral support’ for the British. On the other hand, as Nehru and others point out, there’s a basic hypocrisy between enlisting Indians in the struggle for freedom from Nazi aggression, while at the same time denying India its basic freedom. Gandhi agrees, and in contrast to his positions in South Africa and in the First World War, he declares that India cannot support the British war effort as long as it is denied its freedom and independence.
British war policies greatly shape the lives of Gandhi, other Indian leaders and the future of India. Britain intensifies its ruthless and repressive polices, with many thousands of Indians killed and arrested, including Gandhi and the other Congress leaders. Relations between the Indian National Congress and the British Raj become increasingly strained and this opens up opportunities for Jinnah and the Muslim League to rapidly increase their influence and power with the British rulers and with the Muslim masses.
Gandhi’s position on the British war effort and the need for India’s complete independence satisfies neither pro-British nor anti-British Indians. On the one hand, there is widespread opposition in India to fascist aggression and sympathy for helping Britain in its perilous time of need. On the other hand, there is anti-colonial opposition in India that views Gandhi’s nonviolent position as insufficient for exploiting Britain’s weakness in this time of need.
After attempts at negotiations with the British over steps leading toward independence fail, Congress, at its annual session in March 1940, assigns full authority to Gandhi for conducting a new campaign of civil disobedience. Gandhi, assessing that India is not prepared for national mass satyagraha, focuses on individual civil disobedience. He decides on a narrow focus: to defy the British rule prohibiting free speech by promoting the position that one should uphold nonviolent resistance to all war and should not help the British war effort. With sole authority and careful control Gandhi rejects most of the volunteers as unqualified to participate as satyagrahis. Although many thousands of Indians are arrested during the war, neither this nor later campaigns ever capture the national imagination and loyalty of earlier nonviolent civil disobedi ence, as in the Salt March Satyagraha. As influenced by larger contextual events, especially German aggression in Europe and Japanese aggression in other parts of Asia, Gandhi’s appeals to nonviolence and nonviolent resistance now strike most Indians, even Congress leaders, as rather weak and out of touch with reality.
By 1942 Gandhi realizes that India’s campaign for independence must be greatly intensified and he drafts his famous ‘Quit India Resolution’ for the Congress Working Committee. At the 7 August 1942 gathering in Bombay, after dramatic speeches by Azad, Nehru, Patel and others, Congress representatives overwhelmingly pass the Quit India Resolution. Gandhi speaks for two hours and concludes with his famous dictum for the nonviolent soldier of freedom: ‘Do or Die’.
Quit India is India’s clearest and most forceful struggle determined to end British rule. Gandhi and other Indian leaders make clear that they will not support the British war effort unless India is granted complete independence. Over 100,000 are immediately arrested and thousands killed or injured. There are many examples of violence on the part of resisting Indians. There is also a significant change in Gandhi’s approach. Although he still affirms his total faith in nonviolence, he now lets it be known that this is a ‘do or die’ Quit India struggle to the end and he will not call off the campaign if individual Indians commit violent acts. Even taking into account that Gandhi no longer enjoys the authority, influence and control that he had in his earlier campaigns, this is one of many significant examples showing how Gandhi is often surprisingly flexible and changes earlier positions in response to new contextual situations.
Two days after the Quit India proclamation Gandhi and the entire Congress Working Committee are arrested in Bombay. Gandhi is imprisoned from 9 August 1942 to 6 May 1944 at the Aga Khan Palace near Poona. Here he experiences two terrible personal blows. On 15 August, after only six days of imprisonment, Gandhi’s personal secretary Mahadev Desai dies of a heart attack. For many years Gandhi has depended on Desai as one of his most trusted and closest associates. On 22 February 1944, after eighteen months of imprisonment, Kasturba dies. This shared time of imprisonment is when Gandhi draws closest to his wife. He tries to teach her, greatly appreciates what a strong, admirable, loving companion she has been, realizes how dependent he has been on her and is devastated by her death. Six weeks later, already in a weakened state, Gandhi suffers a bout of malaria and the government, fearing that he will die a martyr in prison, grants his unconditional release on medical grounds.
This period of imprisonment can be viewed in mixed terms. Well into his seventies, with larger developments in India and in the world outside his authority and influence, Gandhi is isolated, plagued by self-doubt and depression, suffers personal loss and is in a state of weakened health. In 1943 he undertakes a 21-day fast, and others, including the government, are fearful that he will die. However, as he had before, Gandhi welcomes imprisonment as a joyful time of voluntary suffering, reading and writing, spinning and constructive work, prayer and self-reflection, personal growth and inner peace. In many ways he emerges from his ordeal ready for the last inspirational years of his life, with a strengthened clarity of purpose. In a period that still astounds his greatest admirers Gandhi now focuses on what must be done, formulates some of his most insightful analysis and discovers an unexpected source of moral energy and rededication in pursuing truth and nonviolence.
After his release and for the rest of his life Gandhi works tirelessly against all odds to restore Hindu–Muslim unity and to avert the division of India into two nations based on irreconcilable religious differences. In September 1944 he visits Jinnah for 18-day talks on Muslim–Hindu unity that prove fruitless. He keeps reaching out to Jinnah and other Muslims, trying to allay their fears of Hindu domination and repression. At one point he desperately proposes that Jinnah be selected as prime minister with the power to appoint his own Muslim Cabinet. By the time of the provincial elections of December 1945 more than 90 per cent of Hindus vote for Congress and more than 90 per cent of Muslims vote for the Muslim League. Gandhi’s proposals for religious unity, while inflaming Hindu nationalist anger that he is giving too much away to Muslims, are ignored or dismissed by both Congress and Muslim League as unworkable.
After the war the new Labour Party Government and Lord Wavell, Viceroy from October 1943 to February 1947, realize that India’s independence is imminent, and they begin to work for transfer of power. Gandhi is often consulted and has many meetings with Sir Stafford Cripps, Wavell and other British administrators, the British Cabinet Mission discussing transition during 1946, and the last Viceroy Mountbatten (February to August 1947). He continues to interact with Indian leaders in Congress, the Muslim League and others. He agrees to participate as advisor to the Cabinet Mission at the May 1946 Simla Conference at which Congress and the League cannot reach agreement. When the Cabinet Mission proposes a united India with an Interim Government the League calls for a ‘Direct Action Day’ of protests and this unleashes terrible violence in Calcutta and then elsewhere. Although millions still hold Gandhi in awe as an exemplary moral and spiritual figure and many Indian and British officials still admire him personally, it seems that events have passed him by. No one seems to be listening any more to his advice based on his philosophy of truth and nonviolence.
Two specific issues involve Gandhi controversies and have become the source of debate and major attacks on Gandhi, his philosophy and advocated practices: his advice to Jews facing Nazi genocide and his brahmacharya sexual experiments with young Indian women.
Although there are Gandhi defenders, critics and most admirers are disturbed, even appalled, by Gandhi’s advice to European Jews facing the Holocaust: that they act like his satyagrahis in India, reach out lovingly and nonviolently to Hitler and the Nazis, be willing to sacrifice and suffer without violent resistance and voluntarily and courageously face death. Gandhi’s closest associates in South Africa were frequently Jews, and he has great sympathy for the Jews.1 He describes them historically as the untouchables of Christianity and he sympathizes with them as victims of Nazi genocide. However, most commentators conclude that Gandhi’s advice is insensitive, ill informed, naive, out of touch, immoral and suicidal. In their correspondence the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, who lived in Germany until 1938 and greatly admires Gandhi, points out that Gandhi’s satyagraha advice ignores how the situation facing Jews in Germany is not comparable to that facing Indians in South Africa or India. It only has a chance of working when there is a witness. As with some other examples, one can wonder how the exemplary moral Gandhi can give such particular advice that can be seen as irrelevant and immoral.2
Gandhi’s advice to the Jews, and even to Hitler in a letter of 23 July 1939, is especially significant since it is often used by critics to illustrate how Gandhi is completely irrelevant at best and complicit and enabling at worst.3 As a way of dismissing Gandhi, critics most frequently refer to Hitler and the Nazis, to September 11, 2001 terrorists in New York or to 26 November 2008 terrorists in Mumbai. First, it is evident that Gandhi in the 1930s and 1940s is very isolated and insulated – focusing on constructive work, untouchability, Hindu–Muslim harmony, Quit India and other India issues. Therefore he is very ill informed and uninformed about what is happening internationally in general and to European Jews in particular. Second, although Gandhi’s short-term advice may be seen as naive and immoral, this need not undermine his major strength in raising the basic need for long-term, transformative, preventative nonviolent education, socialization and mobilization. One can analyse many ways that Gandhi’s approach, if it had been embraced by the victorious Allies after the First World War or by the German people in the 1920s, could have prevented Hitler and the Nazis from coming to power. Third, as will be demonstrated, Gandhi, while upholding the absolute ideal of ahimsa, sometimes allows for the necessary use of violence when there are no nonviolent options that have a real possibility of being effective in countering the violence. In short, one can submit that a reformulated Gandhi approach today could view his advice to the European Jews as another ‘Himalayan miscalculation’.4
The other source of controversy and numerous attacks focuses on Gandhi’s approach to brahmacharya and his ‘test’ of chastity and purity.5 While in Noakhali District in East Bengal Gandhi openly shares his intentions of sleeping with naked young women, especially with his grandniece Manu. Close associates, including Nirmal Kumar Bose, author of My Days with Gandhi, express disagreement and warn him that this will be scandalous. Several feel the need to withdraw from him in protest.6 Although these experiments can be analysed in different ways, it is clear that Gandhi is not interested in sexual conquests or pleasure. For Gandhi these are not ‘experiments’ but more of a ‘yagna’ (‘yajna’), a sacrifice of his sexuality to God, which serves as a test of his chastity.
This ‘sacrifice’ of sexuality is a particular illustration of the central role of ‘sacrifice’ in Gandhi overall philosophy, practices and way of being in the world. Gandhi’s essential use of ‘sacrifice’ is frequently misunderstood and his celebration of personal sacrifice is seen as bizarre and masochistic. For Gandhi, one must ‘sacrifice’ illusory, egotistic and violent passions, desires, attachments and goals in order to experience truth, real nonviolence and peace, true happiness and self-realization. Thus ‘sacrifice’ is essential for self-purification and moral and spiritual development that includes action-oriented transformative selfless service.
At this late date Gandhi is full of self-doubt and despair about the violence, hatred, communal disharmony and untruths all around him. What does this reveal about him? He has consistently upheld the position that a pure exemplary figure has a moral and spiritual potency. If others are acting so violently, Gandhi questions whether this is a reflection of own lack of sexual purity. In addition he embraces a traditional Indian position, shared by other spiritual approaches, that disciplined, perfected self-restraint, including sexual restraint, leads to self-purification and overcoming karmic, illusory, ego-directed blockages. This self-restraint taps into remarkable moral and spiritual energy that allows for focused selfless service, self-realization and freedom. In this sense, Gandhi repeatedly affirms that the perfected forces of nonviolence and truth are infallible and will always be victorious regardless of short-term defeats.
Therefore, for Gandhi, sleeping with the young women is really a test of his own purity and perfection. He disregards prudent advice, listening only to his own inner view or conscience and seems to conclude that he has maintained self-restraint and passed his purity test. This renews his confidence and faith in nonviolence as the only means for ending the raging communal violence in Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta and Delhi. However, even if one gives Gandhi the benefit of the doubt, what remains troubling is that, as with some of his relations with his family and with others, Gandhi seems very self-centred in his individual experiments with truth, purity and nonviolence. He seems oblivious to the relational effects these have on others. In this case he does not seem sensitive to the fact that he is the revered Mahatma, that he has an authoritarian power relation with these young Gandhi devotees and that his personal experiments deeply affect the lives of other individuals. Once again, a reformulated Gandhi approach today could easily critique some of the positions he took on sexual tests and other matters.
Despite his diminished influence, the last period, when Gandhi is 77 and 78, from his visit to Noakhali toward the end of 1946 to his last fast in Delhi in January 1948, represents the most heroic stage of his entire life. In response to the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day protest in August 1946 there are Muslim uprisings in Calcutta with riots and many killings. The communal rioting, death and suffering spread to other parts of India during the year before India’s independence, especially to the Noakhali District of East Bengal, now in Bangladesh. In reaction to the Noakhali Genocide riots break out in Bihar toward the end of 1946. Rioting spreads to Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province in late 1946 and early 1947. Where there is a Muslim majority, as in Bengal and Punjab, Hindus and often Sikhs suffer most from the rioting and massacres. Where there is a Hindu majority, as in Bihar, Muslims suffer most.
Some of the most heroic images are of the determined Gandhi, often walking barefooted 18 hours a day, from village to village in Noakhali, under the most difficult physical conditions, in hostile environments and with threats to his life. From October 1946 to February 1947 he visits 47 villages, listening patiently to the stories of atrocities and comforting victims. He skilfully intervenes to calm violent passions, spreads his message of love and reconciliation, organizes prayer sessions, gets villagers to take pledges to stop the killing and gradually restores some level of communal peace and harmony. He then spends several months in Hindu-dominated Bihar attempting once again, under very difficult and threatening conditions, to end the rioting and killings and to restore communal peace. It is astounding that Gandhi, often as one isolated individual against all odds, could be so successful in ending violence, riots, calls for reprisals and genocidal killings and in restoring so much communal understanding, peace and harmony.
Yet Gandhi’s heroic efforts cannot prevent the bloodbath in the period before and after India’s Partition and Independence on 15 August 1947. Pakistan is created from the two regions with clear Muslim majorities: the northwest that becomes West Pakistan, now all of Pakistan, and the northeast that becomes East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Although figures vary widely, it is estimated that at least one million people are slaughtered. Several million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are turned into refugees. There are many debates over whether the Partition and one of the worst genocides in modern history could have been avoided. What is not debatable is how devastating the overwhelming hatred, violence and killings are to Gandhi, since they seem to refute his lifelong faith and commitment to truth and nonviolence. In late 1946 and 1947 he keeps making statements to the effect that he is ‘being tested through and through’ and he feels ‘totally lost’. He states: ‘All around me is utter darkness.’ As he attempts to stop the killings, especially through fasts that bring him close to death, he states that he even welcomes death, since he can’t bear to experience the killings and suffering all around him.
The Partition of India into two nations is a devastating blow to Gandhi. Having worked for over forty years for Muslim–Hindu unity, he never favours Partition, frequently stating that he will not be party to India’s ‘vivisection’. Finally, he concludes that he no longer has any influence with the British rulers, Jinnah and the majority of Muslims, and even Nehru and Patel, his closest associates in Congress. In June 1947 the Congress Working Committee reluctantly accepts the Viceroy Mountbatten Partition Plan as the only way to avoid Hindu–Muslim civil war. Gandhi, feeling helpless, does not oppose the plan, but this is far from real approval. This is evident when India’s independence is proclaimed on 15 August in Delhi and Gandhi refuses to send the requested message of good wishes, feels no reason to celebrate and is far away doing the constructive work of trying to stop the killings and restore communal peace. For Gandhi, what India achieves in 1947 is not real independence in the sense of true swaraj. The new India exemplifies the limitations and evils of the violent modern nation state, simply substituting Indian for British rulers and power relations. It lacks the commitment to nonviolence and truth that is necessary for true self-reliance, the basis for individual and national freedom and independence.
At the time of India’s independence, Gandhi is in Calcutta. He and the nation are shocked by the death and destruction in the city. The Muslim League and Bengal premier H. S. Suhrawardy urge Muslims to rise up. Hindus retaliate, and starting with the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ on 16 August, many thousands are killed. Gandhi proposes to Suhrawardy that they share a Muslim house as a symbol of Hindu–Muslim unity. In the atmosphere of extreme communal hatred and violence Gandhi is verbally attacked as an enemy of Hindus, even physically attacked, and his life is seriously threatened. On the evening of 1 September Gandhi decides that he will fast until peace returns to Calcutta. The fast has an immediate effect with violence dying down, interreligious peace marches, others fasting, some turning in their weapons, and students and others questioning how Gandhi could die for their crimes. On 4 September Hindu Mahasabha, Sikh and Muslim League leaders come to Gandhi and ask him to end his fast. When they agree to Gandhi’s condition that they pledge to risk their lives to prevent another recurrence of the killings and violence, he breaks his fast.
What Gandhi achieves in Calcutta, as chronicled by Pyarelel, Manu, N. K. Bose and others, is described as the ‘Calcutta miracle’. Congress leader and close associate Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (C. R.) states that ‘Gandhiji has achieved many things, but in my considered opinion, there has been nothing, not even independence, which is so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.’7 Viceroy Mountbatten writes to Gandhi: ‘In the Punjab we have 55 thousand soldiers and large scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.’8
On the way to the Punjab, to try to stop the killings and violence, Gandhi decides to stop in Delhi where communal rioting is also raging. Under very dangerous conditions he visits terrified Muslims, distraught Hindu refugees from Pakistan and angry Hindu nationalist gatherings. Once again, in a dramatic move in desperate times, Gandhi decides on 13 January 1948 to undergo a fast unto death in order to restore Hindu–Muslim–Sikh unity and harmony. As he states: ‘Death for me would be a glorious deliverance rather than that I should be a helpless witness to the destruction of India, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam.’ In a very weakened state and suffering from ill health, Gandhi is close to death. Concerned Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders visit Gandhi at the Birla House and reassure him that they renounce violence and will work for peace.
During the Indo-Pakistani state of war, including the Pakistan-supported invasion of the princely State of Jammu and Kashmir in September, followed by the State’s accession to the Indian Union and the deployment of Indian troops, the Government of India decided not to pay Pakistan the 55 crores (550 million Indian rupees) due as part of the Partition Council agreement. The Indian Government now reverses its decision and meets Gandhi’s demand that it make the payment.9
On 18 January Gandhi breaks his fast. As in Noakhali, Bihar and Calcutta, Gandhi, through fasting and other efforts, works another ‘miracle’ as thousands stop the rioting and killing. Even people in Pakistan are moved by his sacrifice and suffering during the Delhi fast. Nevertheless, the situation in Delhi, the Punjab and elsewhere remains explosive and dangerous. Mobs have been chanting ‘Death to Gandhi’. He receives death threats and a bomb explodes at his prayer meeting on 20 January. Gandhi senses that he may be killed but he refuses additional security measures.
Although in a weakened state of health after the fast and facing such threatening conditions, Gandhi somehow manages to tap into new energy with a determined will, and remains not only active but also experimentally creative during the last days of his life. He tentatively plans a bold visit to Pakistan set for February. On 29 January he writes about his radical ideas in a ‘Constitutional Draft’ for the Indian National Congress. Gandhi proposes that Congress dissolve itself as a political parliamentary organization and be reconstituted as a Lok Sevak Sangh (People’s Servants’ Association), working in every village on communal harmony, eradicating untouchability, improving employment and health care and realizing other aspects of the Constructive Programme. Such ‘social, moral and economic independence’ is the goal of true swaraj, real self-reliance and independence.
On 30 January Gandhi has a full day of visitors at the Birla House, including a meeting with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to discuss tensions between Nehru and Patel, the two strongest leaders in the government. After 5:00 p.m. he leaves, a little late, for the short walk to his daily prayer meeting. In the crowd is Nathuram Godse, an educated modern Hindu and editor of a Marathi journal in Poona, who earlier had been an admirer of Gandhi. He becomes a follower of Savarkar and identifies at different times with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), two of the militant, Hindu nationalist groups that regard Gandhi as pro-Muslim and as an enemy of Hindu India. Gandhi’s insistence on the payment to enemy Pakistan is the last straw. Godse participates in a carefully planned conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi. He greets Gandhi, bows in reverence and then fires three pistol shots at close range. Gandhi’s final words are reported as ‘Hey Ram’ (‘Oh Ram’, sometimes translated as ‘Oh God’), although this account has been questioned. Gandhi dies instantly.
Gandhi’s assassination shocks India and the world and has the immediate effect of stopping much of the madness, rioting and killing and bringing India back from the brink of disaster. On 31 January Gandhi’s body is cremated at Raj Ghat in New Delhi, site of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial (or Samadhi). Later Godse and co-conspirator Narayan Apte are tried and convicted; they are executed on 15 November 1949.
Thus ends the extraordinary life of one of history’s most remark able human beings, so widely admired, even revered, and at the same time so controversial. On a personal level Gandhi has a fascinating personality and is an influential figure engaged in so many dramatic struggles and in shaping so many historical developments. But what is his greater lasting significance and relevance? What are his assumptions and theories, his model for exemplary character development and a life of integrity and the basis for his action-oriented transformative practices? How can we account for so much courage and perseverance, for ongoing experiments with truth and nonviolence and for his meaningful and significant way of being in the world? To answer these questions, we must go beyond Gandhi the particular individual and examine his basic moral and spiritual philosophy.