Flowers that torment the Mahatma

                                            Sukumaran C. V.

And then Gandhi came. … He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths;… He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition. Get off the backs of these peasants and workers, he told us, all you who live by their exploitation; get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery.—Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)


“Everybody agreed to follow the ways of Mahatma Gandhi. But one man didn’t give up his old habit…he went mad…when he offered Rs. 5 in the name of Mahatmaji he quieted down.”
“…a sadhu came to Godhbal village and began puffing at his gunja pipe. People tried to reason with him, but he started abusing Mahatmaji. In the morning his entire body was seen covered with shit.”
“The water of a well in Bikramajit Bazar had very foul smell. Two mahajans took a manauti of the Mahatmaji. By morning the water had become pure.”

All the three anecdotes are quoted from Shahid Amin's paper ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2’ (Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajith Guha)

Gandhi was seen by the peasants as a deity or mahatma who performs miracles on behalf of them and for them. Stories as the above quoted ones gave them strength. All over India, especially in the North, the peasantry followed Gandhi because he was against reforming their age-old means of production and introducing that of ‘modern civilization’. As far as Gandhi is concerned, machinery, the chief symbol of modern civilization, represents a great sin (See Gandhi's Hind Swaraj or the Indian Home Rule).

He wanted India to do what the country had done before the machine-made articles and the machinery were introduced. His vision of development was sustainable. But if we look at his idea of development through the Marxist or capitalist paradigm, certainly it will look like an absurd and quixotic notion, which was/is bound to be a failure. But  look at the problem through the necessities and demands of the National Movement and from the angle of sustainable development (a term that is unheard at that time), then, we can see that the very base and foundation which made Gandhi a mass leader and the Mahatma is his negation of modernity and everything associated with it—the railways, the lawyers, the doctors, the machinery etc. (Chapters 9, 11, 12 and 19 of Hind Swaraj).
Therefore, unlike any other Indian leader, he could talk a language that the illiterate mass and the peasantry could understand. He approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ (Hind Swaraj). How prophetic the Mahatma was!!

The sustainable economy of Gandhi which is anti-western and anti-machinery can be interpreted as the genuine concern of a leader to the welfare of millions and millions of the poor in his country. And this is the factor that enabled Gandhi to bring the vast majority of the people into the whirlpool of the freedom struggle. India’s tragedy is that the sustainable vision of development was also assassinated with Gandhi on January 30, 1948.

                                 The light has gone out of our lives...

Actually, the bigot Nathuram Vinayak Godse had done a good deed for the Indian elites. What they wanted was to usurp the power to exploit the resources of the vast country from the hands of the British and to continue the exploitation. Gandhi and his sustainable vision of development would have certainly come across their way of ‘development’ as an insurmountable hurdle, had he been alive.

Nehru tells us that Gandhi told them to ‘get off the backs of these peasants and workers’ and to ‘get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery’. But did our politicians in independent India get off the backs of the peasants? Did they get rid of the system that produces poverty and misery?

In his opening remarks at the interaction with newspaper editors (on June 29, 2011) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that ‘we must not bring back the licence permit raj which we sought to abolish in 1991. …our nation has prospered as a result of that. If you look at the list of top 100 firms today you will find a sea change in that list today. New entrepreneurs have come into the list. These are some of the gains of liberalization which we must cherish, we must nurse and we must develop.’

And look at the real gains of liberalization of which P. Sainath speaks: “…over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide.” (Of luxury cars and lowly tractors, The Hindu, Dec. 28, 2010)

Our neo-liberal rulers ask us to look at the list of the top 100 firms and not to look at the millions of farmers who kill themselves. And these people pay floral tribute to the Mahatma at the Rajghat on the day of his martyrdom. Won't that flowers torment the Mahatma?

                                         'The light has gone out of our lives...'
                               Nehru adresses the nation on January 30, 1948