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Aditya Narayan Sharma on how the Hindu right distorted Gandhi…

Even outside India, it can be difficult to escape the cult of Mohandas Gandhi, the lawyer, thinker, and politician who helped liberate the nation from British colonial rule in 1947. The praise ranges from the anodyne (Gandhi is a “hero not just to India but to the world,” per Barack Obama) to the ironic (“really phenomenal,” according to Burmese political prisoner turned genocide defender Aung San Suu Kyi) to the surreal (“I am Gandhi-like. I think like Gandhi. I act like Gandhi,” declared New York City Mayor Eric Adams). Seventy-six years after his death, Gandhi is not only an icon of Indian independence, but a uniquely potent international symbol of peace and nonviolence. Gandhi has been, at one point or another, as historian Vinay Lal puts it, the “patron saint” of “environmentalists, pacifists, conscientious objectors, non-violent activists, nudists, naturopaths, vegetarians, prohibitionists, social reformers, internationalists, moralists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, hunger strikers, anarchists, luddites, celibates, anti-globalisation activists, pluralists, ecumenists, walkers, and many others.” Everyone, it seems, has endorsed the honorific coined for him more than a century ago: Mahatma, Sanskrit for “great soul.”

Within India, Gandhi graces every banknote and is plastered on billboards and painted on walls alongside busy thoroughfares. His bespectacled face looms over big cities and small towns alike. Countless schools, universities, roads, and public spaces are named after him. In 2013, the government of Bihar, India’s poorest state, spent several million dollars building the world’s tallest Gandhi statue, casting him in a shimmering tower of bronze with two grateful children by his side. Public figures fight to outperform one another at Mahatma-loving, something of a national sport: in 2021, one representative viral video captured a regional party leader clinging to a bust of Gandhi and sobbing. But Gandhi’s ubiquity masks the fact that among political actors, commentators, intellectuals, and a growing swath of the general public, his reputation is far from settled. 

The lead-up to a general election this spring — in which the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is likely to beat out the centrist Indian National Congress Party and be reelected for a third straight term — has brought dueling visions of Gandhi to the fore. Congress, which was helmed by Gandhi himself on the road to independence, still hopes to capitalize on its historic connections to the Mahatma, but the efforts of its increasingly ossified leadership are falling flat. Meanwhile, the BJP pays lip service to Gandhi’s brand while vigorously working to counter his core values, including, most crucially, his lifelong pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity. The far-right fringes go even further than the official party line: in some circles, Gandhi is belittled, mocked, burned in effigy. This confused state of affairs suggests that a reckoning with the competing narratives swirling around Gandhi is long overdue. Even as he has been flattened into an ill-defined figurehead by liberals and centrists, his complex legacy is being appropriated — and at times desecrated — by India’s seemingly unstoppable right…

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It is dangerous, ultimately, to cede criticism of Gandhi to the Hindu right. Many Indians, myself included, admire our founding fathers for their grand, if imperfect and patchily implemented, vision of a secular and pluralist country. Nevertheless, the kernel of truth behind the right-wing critique of Gandhi is that the republic was founded by patrician Anglophone elites, and its core institutions do reflect the worldview of a small, affluent group who were, in many crucial ways, disconnected from the material and spiritual realities of the people they governed. Contemporary India has severe socioeconomic, caste, gender, and regional inequalities, in part as a legacy of this paternalistic cohort’s work. But that’s a starting point for politics, not a dead end. Look a little deeper, and opponents of the BJP will find not only flaws but also invaluable resources in Gandhi’s writings, particularly his distinctively Indian formulation of secularism that stands a real chance of resisting Hindutva. And in an era of rising religious violence, Gandhian pacifism itself may be more relevant than ever: it’s no longer a set of bland phrases from history books, but an urgent directive. Beyond shallow paeans to the forgotten values, Gandhi’s message could be deployed against his killer’s ideological heirs, if only someone were willing to do it. No one — politician, citizen, or intellectual — can seriously claim to inherit Gandhi’s values until they take him down from his pedestal, rescue him from both the glibness of liberal idol worship and the humiliation of Hindutva slander, and re-engage with the great thinker himself. That is surely the only fate befitting the man we once called Bapu, or Dad…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Character Assassination,” from @AdityaNSharma in @thedrift_mag.

See also: “Prime Minister Modi Is Disarming the Opposition Ahead of India’s National Elections.”

* “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.” – Mahatma Gandhi

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As we resist self-rewarding revisionism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1602 that an ur-engine of the colonialization from which Gandhi led India was born: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or The Dutch East India Company, as it’s known in the Anglophone world) was incorporated. It was a response to the English (later, British) East India company, on which it was modeled, up to a point.

Generally considered the world’s first trans-national corporation and the first publicly to issue stocks and bonds (and the first company to be ever actually listed on an official stock exchange), it began with a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade.  The VOC also prefigured the mega-corporation of today in that it had quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies.  Considered by many to be the largest and most powerful corporation in history, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals (including the British) in international trade (and many nations in power) for almost 200 years.

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