Gandhi and a writer’s block

Thus Jawaharlal Nehru was a success, overtaken only by Indira Gandhi’s success, which was matched by Rajiv Gandhi’s success, which is being sustained by Sonia Gandhi, which will surely be strengthened by Priyanka Gandhi and so on ad infinitum.

By that yardstick Mohandas Gandhi was a miserable failure right here in India, not to speak of South Africa. He systematically destroyed his older sons, Harilal and Manilal, in the name of shaping their character.

He denied them professional education even as he sent his nephews to England for higher studies. Kasturba bitterly complained about her husband ‘‘trying to make monks out of my boys.’’ Manilal survived punishments. But Harilal was shattered, turned alcoholic, wrote scandalous things about his father, became a Muslim and did everything he could to wreak vengeance.

As a father, Gandhi was a flop. But was Nehru, going to the other extreme, a success? Was Indira a success — the mother who went looking frantically for her son’s keys and watch in the debris of the air crash that killed him? Indira was less cultured than her father. She crossed the lines Jawaharlal had drawn and unabashedly established a personality cult and a culture of sycophancy.

She implanted it with such ruthless tenacity that even today, two decades after she left the scene, no leader in the party dare utter a word critical of any member of the Indira family. Indeed, there is a competitive eagerness to sing the dynasty’s praises. Is that a yardstick of success?

We cannot be sure of the yardstick Naipaul used. But he did say that Gandhi’s ‘‘twenty years in South Africa ended in nothing’’ — an astonishingly unprofound assessment from the author of the perceptive A House for Mr Biswas and the politically sharp Beyond Belief. Those 20 years in South Africa were in fact the foundation of Gandhism and the source from which African nationalism drew its inspiration.

Louis Fischer understood this. That’s why he said that ‘‘only when it was touched by the magic wand of action in South Africa did the personality of Gandhi burgeon.’’ Calling Gandhi a self-remade man, he wrote: ‘‘Using the clay that was there (South Africa), he turned himself into another person. His was a remarkable case of second birth in one life time.’’ South Africa is what made Gandhi larger than India.

Why is Gandhi attracting more and more world attention as the years pass — and Nehru less and less? Gandhi dealt with ideas and values relevant to all mankind. Novelist Raja Rao caught this point when he said that ‘‘for Gandhi India was only the symbol of a universal principle. All countries were, for Gandhi, India.’’ How could Naipaul miss such a fundamental point? There would have been no Gandhi without South Africa.

Mohandas, that is. Of course we would have had the other Gandhis. Only the other Gandhis.