Article By Murzban Jal
“Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”
B.R. Ambedkar.
“A soldier who disobeys an order to fire breaks the oath which he has taken and renders himself guilty of criminal disobedience. I cannot ask officials and soldiers to disobey; for when I am in power, I shall in all likelihood make use of those same officials and those same soldiers. If I taught them to disobey I shall be afraid that they might do the same when I am in power.”
M.K. Gandhi.
The Ridiculous State of Affairs
In Indian history there cannot be more contrasting figures than those of B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. The first was a passionate realist, socialist and humanist; the latter was at best a romantic conservative, idealist and mystic. Ambedkar was very clear that amongst all the leaders that modern India could produce there could be no bigger reactionary than Gandhi. Yet history that was taught to us by the Nehruvian ideologues put them both on the same pedestal as if both represented the same ends, albeit having different means. Now with the end of the Nehruvian era and the setting of a distinct masculine type of politics we have more figures added to represent a different idea of India, different from at least what Ambedkar championed. Let us have a look at this whereby one is able to see a certain type of crisis—nay crises—gripping the Indian nation, crises that were born on the one hand well back into Indian history and also those which emerged in the last century.
The 1920s was an age of great ferment when workers and peasants rose against the British Empire. The colonial government saw this now distinct shift taking place in Indian anti-colonial politics. Consequently, “the most prominent leaders of the rising working-class movement were arrested from all parts of India and brought to the remote court of Meerut for trial (where they could be tried without jury)….”[I]
More often than not we were taught that in 1947 Indian got independence and Nehru and Gandhi were the two most outstanding leaders responsible for India’s independence. At the surface level, this indeed seems true. But digging deeper one gets quite another story, a story that the communists and Ambedkar repeatedly narrated, namely what was sought by the stalwarts of the freedom movement especially from the Indian National Congress (hitherto, the Congress party) was merely Dominion Status within the British Empire.
Besides the communists and Ambedkar having (albeit from different perspectives) an extremely critical reading of the Congress party—namely that it was basically a party of upper caste leaders mainly from well to do families—there were also many, many revolutionaries, some from within the Congress like Subhas Chandra Bose who argued for a revolutionary alternative that was completely different from those of Nehru and Gandhi. In 1930 Bose as leader of the left-wing of the Congress proposed “setting up a parallel Government in the country” to organize workers, peasants and youth[ii]. “This resolution”, as he went on, “was defeated”.[iii] For him, “no plan was laid down for reaching this goal[iv].” Bose concluded: “A more ridiculous state of affairs could not be imagined”.[v]
Bose was spot on. Truly a more ridiculous state of affairs could not be imagined. But this ridiculous state of affairs was no mere accident in the history of the Indian freedom movement and the history of the Congress party; it was the very essence at least for the Congress. What was expected from the Congress was to plan an alternative anti-colonial movement with an alternative political economy and authentic participatory democratic governance spearheaded by the workers, peasants, Dalits and women. What was expected was to educate Indians on what were colonialism, capitalism and imperialism and how India was turned into an agrarian colony by British imperialism and made economically, politically, culturally and ideologically dependent on colonialism. This of course never happened.
The Brits after all did not believe that they were colonialists. Their belief was that they were bestowed by what they thought was the “grand civilizing mission” whereby they imagined that they would educate the “lazy Indian natives” on what true civilization means.[vi] But then 1857 happened and the Brits changed gears. Besides shooting the revolutionaries, they took to educating Indians very, very seriously. They started three universities—Bombay, Madras and Calcutta—in the very same year when they were mass murdering Indian revolutionaries. They decided to teach Indians the fine art of “good governance”.
The British Parliament consequently passed the Government of India Act the following year (announced by Lord Canning), whereby the rights and administrative authority of the East India Company was transferred to the British Crown. “Generosity” and “benevolence” not to forget “religious tolerance” were mentioned, not to forget recognizing the “customs of India”. This Act was applauded by the Indian elites, at that time and even later, Gandhi not excluded. The Brits would carry the “white man’s burden”. They would educate Indians on development, hygiene and good governance (besides many other subjects), while the Indian elites would educate the Brits on “Indian spiritualism and mysticism”. “Good governance” and “Indian idealism” would meet. Nehru and Gandhi charged with “Indian spiritualism” were waiting in the wings of “good governance”. For Bose, this was indeed a “ridiculous state of affairs”.
And this continued.
In order to give more rights to the “lazy natives” the Morley-Minto Reforms were initiated in 1909 (as the Indian Councils Act, 1909), followed by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (the Government of India Act, 1919) to involve Indians in governance. For the Brits, India was composed of “Hindus”, “Muslims”, Sikhs”, etc and good governance would be based on these colonially-charged religious grounds. The Brits could not look beyond religion and religious communities. For them, there was no going beyond religion.
1909 thus saw the introduction of separate electorates, separate for “Hindus”, “Muslims”, Sikhs”; but not for the subalterns and the Untouchables, not for those who had to carry the burden of India’s imagined spiritual heritage. But since there was no one “spirit” in India, but at least two spirits (the “Hindu spirit” and the “Muslims spirit”), the Balkanization of India was waiting in the wings. The ridiculeous state of affairs led to this. But more was to follow. While Pakistan jumped onto the American bandwagon where garrison type of feudalism was thrust onto the helpless people and parliamentary democracy run as per the dictates of the army, in India the ethno-nationalists with their supremacist programme of Hindutva (or making the “Hindu nation”) were waiting for their time to come. And the time came. This all emanated from the ridiculous state of affairs which had possessed the mind, body and soul of the Congress.
The Gandhi quote with which this chapter began when Gandhi was replying to the French journalist Charles Petrasch on February 20, 1932 in Monde represents this ridiculous state of affairs. It meant loyalty to the British Empire, despite all the Civil Disobedience movements called by Gandhi and the Congress and the all the announcements for “Purna Swaraj”. In this melodrama of Civil Disobedience and Purna Swaraj Gandhi introduced “non-violence” and “ahimsa” as both his personal creed and that of the Congress, not to forget celibacy as a path to achieve Purna Swaraj. For Gandhi: Even if only one brahmachari of my conception comes into being, the world will be redeemed….[vii]
And this would not lead to the “…….extinction of the human species, but the transference of it to a higher plane.[viii]
The role that Gandhi played thus was not of that of a freedom fighter, but as a savior, some sort of an Oriental version of Christ, acting the role of the second coming of Christ, but as Christ in modified form, Christ with his belief in the Varna (caste) system. This version of Christ would not be anything like the ones found in Tolstoy’s Resurrection or Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. It was not Christ arousing one’s conscience and directed against the propertied classes. Gandhi’s Christ was in defense of property, most of all the defense of the British Empire. Gandhi’s Christ-like figure was, as Perry Anderson reminds us, a “cross between a Jain-infected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union. The two were not connected, as garbled ideas from the former—karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine—found occult form in the latter”[ix]. Besides these garbled ideas whereby he could announce his divine entry into Indian politics, he was also the Indian version of Lawrence of Arabia.
And Gandhi did indeed take up the role of the messiah very seriously. He being bestowed with the title “Mahatma” was in line with this messianic logic. But what this messianic type of history posited was not real history constructed in real time, but as what Walter Benjamin called “homogenous, empty time”.[x] Gandhi as the messiah stood outside history. Like other messiahs he wanted to “blast open the continuum of history”.[xi] And this is precisely what British authorities needed, not revolutionaries, but messiahs. His rhetoric of Swaraj was constituted within this messianic ideology. And just as no one ever knew what the messiahs of days gone by were saying, but only blindly obeying, the same was the case with Gandhi as the messiah.
Consequently all his rhetoric of Purna Swaraj, non-violence and celibacy, not to forget moksha, in actually what he meant was loyalty to authority (primarily his own authority in service to the British mediated through his messianic self) and at best arguing for Dominion Status within the Empire. The sun would never set on the British Empire. The loyal servants saw to that. It was Ambedkar who saw through the hypocrisy of Gandhi and the Congress:
That notwithstanding the resolution of 1927, the Congress continued to believe in Dominion Status and did not believe in independence, is amply borne out by the pronouncements made from time to time by Mr. Gandhi who is the oracle of the Congress. Anyone, who studies Mr. Gandhi’s pronouncements on this subject from 1929 onwards, cannot help feeling that Mr. Gandhi has not been happy about the resolution on Independence and that he has even since felt necessary to wheel the Congress back to Dominion Status.[xii]
Further, Gandhi “openly declared that in “Purna Swaraj” there was no place for severance of the British connection…..(and) by making a secret pact with Lord Irwin he definitely adopted the ideal of Dominion Status under the British crown.[xiii] And when the Viceroy’s train was bombed, Gandhi in his loyalty to the British crown “congratulated”, as Bose noted in his The Indian Struggle. 1920-1934, “the Viceroy on his providential escape.”[xiv] It was at the Lahore Congress that Gandhi defeated the left-wing within the Congress, whereby he won over Nehru and exclude all the other leftists who opposed him. Gandhi could, as Bose went on: “…henceforth proceed with his own plans without fear of the opposition within his own Cabinet, and whenever any opposition was raised outside the Cabinet, he could always coerce the public by threatening to retire from the Congress or fast unto death. From his personal point of view, it was the cleverest move”[xv].
Gandhi thus got a “subservient Cabinet” whereby he could do deals with the British crown and “conclude the pact with Lord Irwin in March, 1931, to have himself appointed as the sole representation of the Round Table Conference, to conclude the Poona Agreement in September, 1932—and do other acts which have done considerable disservice to the public cause.”[xvi] Even well after Gandhi, the subservient Cabinet remained. First it worked through the figure of Gandhi, later it worked through the ghost of Gandhi. Gandhi’s “disservice to the public cause” became permanent. The ethno-nationalists were waiting for their time to come so as to continue this “disservice to the public cause”, but in magnified and unimaginable form. Unlike the Congress, the ethno-nationalists have a belief system far stronger than theirs, foot soldiers ready for battle, and now a messiah far greater than Gandhi.
Consequently in 2014, the right-wing religious conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), came to power with its sole aim of making a “Hindu nation”. This was repeated in 2019. “We the people of India”, the credo of the Indian Constitution, would now have to change to “we the Hindus or to be precise the upper caste elites of India as against Muslims, Christians and communists”. Now citizenship and the regime of rights would not matter. What would matter would be cows, for the cow would be declared the “mother of India and all Indians” just as Gandhi was earlier declared as the “father of the nation”. India had a father. It needed a mother and got one.
The ridiculous state of affairs continued, continued in such a way that caste and communal divisions would multiply, but the real apartheid structure of caste would be brushed under the magical Indian carpet of “Indian spiritualism”. Besides, with the coming of the mother to join the father, one would be made to bow before Sabala the cow and Hanuman the monkey, a spectacle that Marx saw as far back as the 1853.[xvii] For the first time in history would animals be placed above humanity and humanity be divided in such a grotesque way, where fear and hatred, riots and war would replace democracy and the ideas of secularism and socialism. Both secularism and socialism became curse words in India, just as these had become curse words in Pakistan and Iran, at least since 1979. In 1979 Iran got the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs. In 2014 the same would happen to India.
What Bose thought to be the ridiculous state of affairs has now become the ridiculous state of fascist affairs. In early April 2022 the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) a semi-fascist party gave orders for its members to recite the Hindu Hanuman Chalisa (the fourty verses of Hanuman composed by the poet Tulsidas) outside mosques in order to create communal divisions and hostilities leading to organized riots. What was poetry once in India has become a weapon in the hands of the Indian fascists. Meanwhile the banning of the hijab in schools of the southern state of Karnataka was implemented (both for Muslim students and teachers) so as to erase all traces of Muslim identity in India, followed by the banning of non-vegetarian food in parts of India, not to forge regular lynching of Muslims and now (April 2022) bulldozing of houses and shops of Muslims in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
A few months before this a Dharma Sansad (religious parliament) was held in Haridwar, organized by Yati Narasighanand (an obscure priest) for over three days (17–19 December 2021). The topic of this religious parliament was on what they called Islamic Bharat mein Sanatan ka Bhavishya (“The Future of the Sanatana (Dharma) in Islamic India”). Calls for genocide against Muslims were issued where it was told (rather “ordered”) that Hindus should emulate the genocide against Rohingyas in Myanmar. These are not isolated incidents done by some loony periphery. The demonization and harassment of Muslims has now become state policy—from the myth of love jihad (where the BJP propagates the lie that Muslims delude Hindu girls into love and then force them cunningly into marriage, thus converting them) which became the political programme of the BJP in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in 2013 which then propelled them into power in the 2014 National Elections to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019 where Muslims would be erased from the domain of Indian citizenship, an act reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which legally institutionalized the anti-Jewish pogrom followed by the holocaust, culminating in the banning of food sold by Muslims and hijab in schools. Now state policy would be not based on democratic citizenship, but on blood descendent (again reminiscent of the Nazis) where an Indian could only be a “Hindu”, since only Hindus consider India as their “Fatherland” and “Holy Land”.[xviii] As V.D. Savarkar the founder of the ideology of Hindutva (literally the “essence of Hinduism” or political Hinduism akin to political Islam of Sayeed Qutub and founder of the right-wing Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) said: Muslims have their own Holy Land, Jews have theirs, the same with Christians and all look at their so-called “Holy Lands” with reverence and not to the modern nation that they are born into.[xix] India, for Savarkar, was not Fatherland and Holy Land for Muslims and Christians.
The fact that now a party that truly believes in these anti-democratic norms is in power is indeed troublesome. Also the fact that an accused in terrorism charges like Pragya Singh Thakur could win the 2019 elections on a BJP ticket with a margin of 364,822 votes defeating the once upon a time Chief Minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh Digvijaya Singh shows extremely disturbing course of events taking place in India, not in any way different than what was happening in Weimer Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s which propelled the Nazis into power. The question is: “Why is this so?” To answer this one goes back to Bose’s reading of the ridiculous situation—the national movement led by the Congress especially under the leadership of Gandhi who led not the Indian masses, but the “Hindus”. This fact must be mentioned, a fact that repeatedly the communists used to mention, namely that Gandhi was the leader of the Hindus only.[xx] This was also the core of Ambedkar’s understanding of Gandhi and the Congress party. And this fact Gandhi would not deny. For him, the myth of Hinduism sanatana dharma (eternal religion) was central and he was politically active only in these terms. As he said in 1921 writing in Young India, his principle beliefs were belief in the Vedas, the Puranas and as he said “all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avtars and re-birth”. [xxi] But what is shocking is his strong belief in the morality of the caste system, or Varnashrama Dharma.[xxii] Along with these was his belief in “protecting of cows in its much larger sense than the popular”, as also his belief in “idol-worship”.[xxiii]
Consequently to understand the rise of the Hindutva rightists in India, it is best to understand the milieu from which it emerged and the petty bourgeois leadership that the Congress threw up right from the beginning of the 20th century which crystallized in the figure of Gandhi. For Nehru, Gandhi was the “great and unique man and a glorious leader”[xxiv], but also someone who “was a very difficult person to understand, sometimes his language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern”[xxv]. Yet despite this, for Nehru, Gandhi’s idea of “spiritualization of politics” was a “fine idea”.[xxvi]
In the Service of the Empire
But what Nehru did not say was that this chosen leader of the Congress was in actuality the “active leader of Hinduism and of Hindu revival.”[xxvii] What Palme Dutt calls the “principle crime” in turning the Indian freedom movement into a Hindu revivalist movement went to Gandhi. He thus became the “Principle Criminal” in the terrible saga. What he and the Congress wanted was Swaraj, a Swaraj defined as a “Hindu movement”.[xxviii] Communal divisions—especially those between the “Muslims” and “Hindus—would be evident. The British weaponized communal division:
The British Government, in its exploitation of communal divisions undoubtedly used as an infamous weapon against people’s movement. But Tilak and Gandhi helped put that weapon in its hands.[xxix]
But Gandhi could come onto the scene of Indian politics only because revolutionary leadership—whether the leadership of the revolutionary communists, Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, or Bose—was never allowed to be cultivated. What one has to understand—and once again this was time and again told by both the communists and Ambedkar, that the Congress politics even in its hey days—were merely extensions of the requirement of British imperial policies. One here recalls how the Congress leadership at the time of the First Imperialist World War swore loyalty to the British crown and in 1918 also passed a resolution proclaiming loyalty to the King, congratulating him for the “successful termination of the war”.[xxx]
And if the Congress which was supposed to be an anti-colonial party, then why on earth in each of the Congress sessions at the time of the war, were British imperial politicians invited? Note how Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras attended the 1914 session, Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay the 1915 session, Sir James Meston, Governor of the United provinces in 1916. This is indeed befalling and the Congress will have to explain as to not only why these imperialist politicians were invited, but also why they were received with ovations.[xxxi] But this was not all. In London, the Congress delegation of Lajpat Rai, Jinnah and Sinha sent a letter to the Secretary of State saying that:
The Princes and people of India will readily and willingly cooperate to the best of their ability and afford opportunities of securing that end by placing the resources of their country at his Majesty’s disposal (for) a speedily victory of the Empire[xxxii].
Gandhi also did not think any differently. At a reception at the Hotel Cecil, he urged his nationalist friends to “think imperially” and do their duty to the Empire.[xxxiii] As he said: ….we beg to offer our services to the Authorities.[xxxiv].
One here recalls Savarkar offering service likewise to the Empire. What then was the difference between Gandhi and Savarkar? It must be noted that just as Savarkar kept his services for the British Empire, so too did Gandhi. The fact at Gandhi at the time of the First Imperialist World war also offered his services to raise a voluntary ambulance corps for the British in London and then became the stretcher bearer of the Empire must also be noted. Not only this, in July 1918 he mobilized the peasants of Gujarat by extorting them to join the imperial army.[xxxv]
So how did Gandhi become the “Mahatma” and the “Great Soul” who is supposed to have spearheaded the freedom movement? What happened to his idea of “satanic western civilization” that he brings up in his Hind Swaraj when at the same time he was acting as stretcher bearer to the Empire?
Further, how did he become the apostle of non-violence when he said that “all killing is not himsa”[xxxvi] and he “alone can practice ahimsa who knows how to kill”[xxxvii]? How does one understand this statement of Gandhi who said that: “You cannot teach ahimsa to a man who cannot kill. You cannot make a dumb man appreciate the beauty and the merit of silence”[xxxviii] 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”[xxxix]?
Was he really and honestly an apostle of non-violence? If this is the case then why did he say: “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”[xl] and that “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”?[xli]
Or was his non-violence only “for the Indian masses, but not for imperialism, which practiced violence to its heart’s content”?[xlii] Was then Gandhi’s idea of non-violence only and solely at the service of imperialism, besides not in its even most vague sense having anything to do with non-violence, but everything to do with brutal violence of imperialism?
While today, one finds the decline of the Congress party at least since they hammered the nail on their own coffin, especially after Manmohan Singh as the then Finance Minster in the early 1990s welcomed Monsieur Finance Capital into India just as centuries earlier the East India Company was welcomed by the “lazy natives”, the seeds of destruction were sown by Gandhi and the subservient politics to the British Empire.
The fact that Monsieur Finance Capital was also accompanied in the early 1990s by the rise of the communal-fascists must also be mentioned. Neoliberal capitalism and communal-fascism came hand in hand. And both did not need either the Congress or Purna Swaraj, non-violence and celibacy. The seeds were sown by the Congress who remained subservient in every possible way to the British Empire, the politics of imperialism and who refused to cultivate revolutionary forces.
Then is it not the case, that one stretcher bearer of the Empire (Gandhism) is replaced by another (the fascist politics of Hindutva)? Was it not merely what Bose had said about the “ridiculous situation”, but also of the complete vagueness of Swaraj and the independence movement? One recalls here Nehru who also noted this vagueness, a vagueness that neither he nor Gandhi could get out from:
It was obvious that to most of our leaders Swaraj meant something much less than independence. Gandhiji was delightfully vague on the subject, and he did not encourage clear thinking about it either.[xliii]
Further, for Nehru, “Gandhji’s stress was never on the intellectual approach to a problem but on character and piety”[xliv]. No wonder Ambedkar said that “the Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking”.[xlv] This book on the other hand, is on thinking, philosophical thinking and thus deeply critical and humanistic thinking, thinking that frees itself from the clutches of the capitalist and imperialist order, thinking that does not succumb to the captive mind, thinking that also transcends the discourses of liberalism, Stalinism and other despotic systems created.
Hero-worship and the Demoralization of Politics
What capitalism has done is that it has converted liberty into a statue where liberty, equality and fraternity are at stake, along with this statue of liberty becoming a statue of clay, in fact multiplying as statues of clay. India needed revolutionaries, not “heroes”. What it got were not revolutionaries but “heroes”. India needed Phule and Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh and revolutionary communism. Instead, what it got were Gandhi, Nehru, Savarkar and Jinnah. Nehru became “Pandit”, while Gandhi and Jinnah became the fathers of their respective nations, nations built on the corpses of the partition and balkanization of the Indian subcontinent. This partition and balkanization was the end logic of the colonial idea of religious communities of India, a logic that was inbuilt in the DNA of the colonialists and which then was injected into the veins of the Congress which the communal Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League cunningly exploited. The colonialists did not need to inject communalism into the veins of the Hindu Sabha and the Muslim League for even before their respective births they had this in their DNA. Both the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League were, and are, communal fascist type organizations no matter how much they may deny this and however much they may dress themselves as liberal democrats.
There was clearly an alternative to this colonial-communal mess that we now find ourselves into, an alternative that Phule had outlined as the politics of the “Bahujan” (literally the “multitude”) as the politics of what Gramsci called the moral bloc and the unity of the popular classes. This was of course erased and the terrible “heroes” stamped their authority onto South Asian history. Never before, so Ambedkar stated has, “the interests of the country been sacrificed so senselessly for the propagation of hero-worship. Never has hero-worship become as blind as we see it in India today.”[xlvi] His words are indeed prophetic. For him, both Gandhi and Jinnah exhibited “the spirit of domination” where they have “demoralized their followers and demoralized politics”.[xlvii] “Half their followers (have become) fools”, so he continues and “the other half hypocrites”.[xlviii] Consequently:
In establishing their supremacy they have taken the aid of “big business” and money magnates. For the first time in our country money is taking the field as an organized power. The question (that one needs to pose is): Who shall rule—wealth or man? Which shall lead money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic free men or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?[xlix]
As we noted, Gandhi stood for reaction in Ambedkar. Alongside this reactionary character, he kept the figure of Jinnah as a narcissist reactionary. “They are”, so he said, “the idols and heroes of the hour”.[l] For them politics was a “personal feud”.[li] They suffer from “colossal egotism” and “stand on the pedestal of splendid isolation”, walling “themselves from their equals”.[lii] And while Gandhi imagined that he was spiritualizing politics, he was in actuality commercializing it thus rendering politics in India—“at any rate the Hindu part of it”—extremely corrupt.[liii] Both Gandhi and Jinnah (as almost all politicians in South Asia) were, and are, not “patriotic free men”, but “feudal serfs of corporate capital”.[liv]
Modern India meanwhile, totally oblivious of Ambedkar’s understanding of hero-worship, created statues of Gandhi; while Pakistan made statues and portraits of Jinnah. Both were anointed as “fathers of their respective nations” and we the unfortunate sons and daughters have to bear the burden of having such fathers.
Reference –
[i] See R. Palme Dutt, India Today (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 2008), p. 360.
[ii] Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle. 1920-1934 (London: Wishart & Company Limited, 1935), p. 200. Also see Ibid., p. 363.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] For the myth of the “lazy native” see Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century and its Functions in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Frank Cass, 1977).
[vii] See M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Manilal Gandhi’ (July 16, 1947), in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 88 (Ahmedabad: The Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1983), p. 348. Also see M.K. Gandhi on his general idea of celibacy, ‘In Confidence’ (October 13, 1920), in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 18 (Ahmedabad: The Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1965), pp. 345-8. Also see Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2012), p. 20.
[viii] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Discussion with G. Ramachandran’ (October 21-22, 1924), in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 25 (Ahmedabad: The Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1967). Also see Perry Anderson, op. cit.
[ix] Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, p. 19
[x] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1970), pp. 263-4.
[xi] Ibid., p. 264.
[xii] B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’, in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 8 (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1990), p. 286.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle. 1920-1934, p. 199.
[xv] Ibid., pp. 200-1.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 201
[xvii] See Karl Marx, ‘British Rule in India’, in On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 41.
[xviii] See V.D. Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva (1923), p. 52.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] R.Palme Dutt, India Today, pp. 471-2.
[xxi] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Hinduism’, Young India, 6 October, 1921, in What is Hinduism? (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2011), p. 6. See also R. Palme Dutt, op. cit., p.471.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii]Ibid.
[xxiv] Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 73. Also see R. Palme Dutt, op. cit., p. 343.
[xxv] Jawaharlal Nehru, op. cit.
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] R. Palme Dutt, op. cit., p. 472.
[xxviii] Ibid.
[xxix] Ibid.
[xxx] Ibid., p. 333.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii] See ibid.
[xxxiii] Ibid.
[xxxiv] Ibid.
[xxxv] Ibid
[xxxvi] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Hanumantrao’, July 17, 1918, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14 (Ahmedabad: The Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1965), p. 485.
[xxxvii] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Ras’, June 26, 1918 in The Bombay Chronicle, July 2, 1918, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, p. 454
[xxxviii] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to C.F. Andrews’ 23 June, 1918, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, p. 444.
[xxxix] M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Hanumantrao’, July 17, 1918, in ibid., p. 485
[xl] M.K. Gandhi, The Bhagavad Gita (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2017), p. 6.
[xli] Ibid., p. 360.
[xlii] R. Palme Dutt, op. cit., p. 365.
[xliii] Nehru, op. cit, p. 76; R. Palme Dutt, op. cit., p. 343.
[xliv] Nehru, op. cit.
[xlv] B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Reply to the Mahatma’, The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 318
[xlvi] B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah’, in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1 (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), pp. 227.
[xlvii] Ibid.
[xlviii] Ibid.
[xlix] Ibid.
[l] Ibid., p. 226.
[li] Ibid.
[lii] Ibid.
[liii] Ibid., p. 227.
[liv] Ibid.
(Murzban Jal, Director, Centre for Educational Studies Indian Institute of Education. 128/2, J.P. Naik Path, Kothrud, Pune- 411038)
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