Was Gandhi a Conservative?

Let us examine some of Gandhi’s radical departures that conservatives objected to. He called for mass action. Conservatives argued that in a largely illiterate country, this would lead to mindless violence — a prediction that came true. Gandhi sponsored hartals. His conservative opponents pointed out that halting economic activity was doubly hurtful to the country’s poor. Now every party calls for hartals. They hurt poor daily-wage earners most of whom are not unionised. Salaried workers and their unions can afford to support hartals for they lose nothing, and gain some leisure!

One can argue that this type of “political” activity is an enduring legacy of Gandhi. He was warned that measures like fasting were not appropriate acts of political protest. Speeches, petitions, discussions, delegations, debates, however boring and slow, have no substitute and additionally have the benefits of being constitutional and orderly. Today everyone and his brother goes on a “fast” and holds civic society to ransom. Gandhi’s disciple, Nehru, had contempt for the “debating society” tactics of the conservative politicians who Gandhi sidelined. Mass action was Nehru’s mantra, something he must have rued when his political opponent demonstrated the power of mass “direct” action and its potential for disaster.

When Gandhi backed the Khilafat movement, numerous conservatives, Hindu and Muslim, pleaded with him that mobilising Muslim masses on the basis of religion would lead to violence against “unbelievers”. This predictably happened in Malabar. Khilafat represented an attempt to encourage extra-territorial loyalty — once again anathema to conservatives. The legitimacy given to Muslims putting the issue of rulership in Arabia above their civic interests, has had baneful consequences. One can argue that this would have happened anyway. That does not justify legitimising it.

But on some matters, Gandhi was a conservative in the best sense of the term. He knew that caste was a perverse institution. He could have attacked caste by attacking Hinduism. This would have caused a backlash if unsuccessful. If successful, we might have lost the finer legacies of Hinduism. Gandhi acted intelligently. He attacked untouchability directly and caste indirectly by arguing that they were not central to Hinduism or that they represented incorrect interpretations of Hinduism. He used what must be acknowledged as Hindu vocabulary (Harijans as ‘‘children of God’’) to fight Hinduism’s obnoxious features. His success has not been total, but it is substantial.

Gandhi started his political career in South Africa where the heterogeneous mosaic of India was revealed to him. He became the leader of a group of people “loosely” known as Indians. They spoke different languages, professed different faiths, dressed differently — and yet away from their homeland, they all acknowledged a common Indian-ness. It was this experience in South Africa that sensitised him to the fact that India was a heterogeneous imperial state, with much in common with the Austro-Hungarian empire. India was not a homogeneous nation state like the states of western Europe. Nehru also understood this instinctively. It is to the credit of both of them that they built a political culture that manages the creative tension between central authority and decentralised pluralism in a constructive way. While sometimes we get pessimistic about the political violence in contemporary India, let us not underestimate the value of “simply surviving” 57 years as a state and of having a system of changing governments without coups and allowing for opposing parties to govern relatively freely in different states. If imperial India had split like the failed imperial states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in recent times, the violence and anarchy could make Bosnia look like a tea-party. A cacophonic but united India is a gift that British rule and Gandhian politics have together bequeathed to us.

Another area where Gandhi acted as a conservative and made a permanent contribution to our country was in his unequivocal condemnation of terrorist violence. Terrorist traditions were very much there in India in places as far apart as Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab. Gandhi was totally opposed to this. Random attacks on British civilians were mindless, ineffective and, in Gandhi’s language, fundamentally immoral. Gandhi was heavily criticised for not doing enough to save Bhagat Singh. He dealt with this criticism stoically. His opposition to Bose was for a complex set of reasons including the fact that Bose was a potential rival to Gandhi’s chosen heir, Nehru. But it is quite likely that Gandhi did detect a flamboyant militaristic streak in Bose. Maybe Gandhi had a premonition of Bose’s faustian bargain with the Axis powers!

It is Gandhi’s legacy that modern India has avoided the violence that prevails in Ireland, Israel and the Middle East where leaders connived at terrorism which came back to haunt their people. For this, if for nothing else, Gandhi goes down as one of the greats of conservatism in the company of Pericles and Akbar, Elizabeth I, Pitt and Lincoln, Burke and de Gaulle.

The writer is chairman/CEO of MphasiS. He is also, currently, chairman of NASSCOM. This is the first of a fortnightly series