LEADER ARTICLE: Death Of The Mahatma

On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the ambivalence towards him in India's modernising middle classes. Gandhi was not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft, progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, as Nehru alleged, but by one who represented 'normality' and 'sanity'.

The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of globalisation in India.

The fear of Gandhi has been consistent in India and it has never been confined to the expensively educated Indians now flourishing in the global knowledge industry. This fear is the fear of ordinary Indian citizens suffering from that incurable disease called Indianness and suspicion of the open politics that empowers them and allows them to bring into public life their strange, alien categories. It was this fear that Nathuram Godse took to logical conclusion on January 30, 1948. His was the third attempt on Gandhi's life by the Hindu nationalists, the first of which was made in 1930s. They made no such attempt against any other key secular leader in India or against Muslim leaders seen as enemies of Hindus.

Godse thought he was executing Gandhi on behalf of a majority. Exactly as Mayawati and, before her, E M S Namboodiripad felt that they were speaking on behalf of a majority - the bahujan samaj, the proletariat, the Shudras and the Dalits - when they attacked Gandhi. However, once the movement to which Godse belonged began to falter as an ideological formation and succeed as a political party dreaming of capturing power, it began singing a different tune. The RSS included Gandhi's name in the daily prayers of its branches and, in the 1980s, the BJP even adopted 'Gandhian socialism' as its official party ideology. May be Mayawati's hostility to Gandhi had not waned when she spoke out because she was yet to make a bid for pan-Indian presence.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Leninist hacks have always considered Gandhi a menace to progress, modernity and rationality. The respect to Gandhi that some of the retired Stalinists have begun to show in recent years is a consequence of their political demise. The vendors of secular salvation now find that Gandhi has survived our times better than they have.

M N Roy, who broke away from Marxism, disagreed with the Leninists on many counts but not on Gandhi. His three essays on Gandhi, read chronologically, show a declining hostility towards the Mahatma. The first is dismissive, the second ambivalent, the third mildly positive. As his confidence in being able to mobilise people for his version of revolution faltered, he came to grudgingly appreciate Gandhi's ability to touch the ordinary Indians despite his 'irrational' credo. Indian Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s were no less hostile to Gandhi. He with his toothless smile seemed to them a sly, scheming warhorse brainwashing rural India with his bogus ideology, whereas they, despite their direct communion with objective, scientific history and theoretical guidance from the great witch doctor at Beijing, had been exiled to urban India to survive as an ordinary terrorist outfit. As Gandhi was dead by then, they took out their anger against him by breaking his statues.

Within a decade though, from within the ranks of Indian Maoists emerged some who drew heavily, often creatively, upon Gandhi. Pushed to the margins of politics, with their dreams of an early revolution in tatters, the ageing lions began to ruminate over their failures and take Gandhi seriously. Two steps backward and one step forward, as the great helmsman might have said! The liberals have never found Gandhi digestible either. Shankaran Nair, an early Congress leader, said that Gandhi was against everything that the great sons of 19th century India stood for. Gopal Krishna Gokhale was even more forthright. He declared Gandhi's Hind Swaraj to be "the work of a fool" and prophesied that "Gandhi would destroy it after he spent a year in India". Such honest estimates are now rare, because the liberals in the meanwhile have produced their own house-broken Gandhi - modern, nationalistic, progressive, statist and secular. There is nothing left of the politically incorrect, intellectual maverick who took on the imperious Enlightenment vision and refused to accept that its dominance was proof of its finality.

It is possible that Gandhi sensed his growing isolation in public life. The 200 years of western domination had done its job and the definition of normal politics had changed in India. Gandhi chose death, using as his accomplice the naive, lost ideologue, Godse, to sharpen the contra-diction that had arisen between the Indian civilisation and the newborn Indian nation-state. Robert Payne understands this when he says, "For Gandhi this death was a triumph. He died as the kings do, felled at the height of their powers". And Sarojini Naidu was right when she said: "What is all this snivelling about? ...Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion?"