Mahatma Gandhi Repudiated in His Own Land
By Syed Amir, PhD
Bethesda, MD

On a triangle at the edge of Washington’s busy Massachusetts Avenue and in front of the Indian Embassy stands a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, portraying him as a frail, old man walking with a stick, presumably leading the famed march of March 1930 defying the British ban on the manufacture and sale of salt.
October 2, 2019, marked the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi, the iconic leader of India’s freedom movement. The day was observed in many countries of the world. Both the Washington Post and New York Times, the two leading US newspapers, published special articles to mark the occasion. The United Nations and almost hundred countries issued special postage stamps to commemorate Gandhi’s birthday.
The current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, also contributed an op ed to the New York Times, highlighting Gandhi’s message of pluralism, peaceful coexistence, and nonviolence. He spotlighted the fact that Gandhi had been an inspiration to world leaders Dr Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who adopted and practiced nonviolence as a guiding principle in their own struggles against injustice and racial discrimination. Modi gave the clarion call: “Let us work shoulder to shoulder to make our world prosperous and free from hate, violence and suffering. That is when we will fulfill Mahatma Gandhi’s dream, summed up in his favorite hymn, ‘Vaishnava Jana To,’ which says that a true human is one who feels the pain of others, removes misery and is never arrogant.”
It is ironic that Modi, a life-long member of the militant Hindu organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and leader of the Bhartiya Junta Party (BJP), while capitalizing on the universal admiration for Gandhi, pursues domestic policies that are the antithesis of everything that the revered Indian leader stood for and gave his life for. In today’s India, teachings of Gandhi and, to a greater extent, contributions of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, the two founding fathers and stalwarts of the freedom movement, are being systematically dissembled and erased.
Since the advent of the Modi era and dominance of BJP, the political landscape of the country has been radically transformed, and not for the good. In a meeting in Gujrat state held to pay tribute to Gandhi, the only aspect of Gandhi’s message that Modi could emphasize was his appeal about cleanliness which coincided with his own campaign to build latrines in rural India. Thus, Gandhi was cleverly reduced to the cleanliness icon, vastly overshadowing his other seminal message.
Gandhi’s grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, 84-years old, is a research professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is cited in an article by Joanna Slater in the Washington Post expressing the optimism that, despite all the efforts of contemporary Hindutva nationalists, ‘There is a stubborn core of people who have understood him (Gandhi) and know that Gandhi represents the better angels of the Indian nature. Gandhi is not finished in India.”
In the aftermath of partition and the communal strife that followed, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948 by a Hindu extremist, Nathuram Godsey. He was captured at the scene by a young American Council officer, Herbert Reiner Jr, who was present at the prayer meeting at Birla House, New Delhi. Godse had long been a member of the militant RSS and its political wing, Mahasabha. He regarded Gandhi anti-national and found his preaching of religious tolerance and harmony, especially towards Muslims abhorrent. Godse was tried and hanged on 15 November 1949.
A wave of revulsion, following Gandhi’s assassination, swept the country and RSS was briefly banned. But it soon reemerged after lying low for a while. Nehru’s towering personality and uncompromising dedication to the ideals of secularism and syncretism kept the poison of populism under some degree of control during his lifetime and for some decades later. However, the political environment in India radically changed following the election victory in 2014 of the Hindu Nationalist Bhartiya BJP. The deluge of Hindutva and empowerment of Hindu supremacists has led to the renunciation of Gandhian principles and undermining of his lasting message.
Furthermore, some segments of the BJP have lately been striving to rewrite history and present Gandhi’s assassin in a favorable light, even transmuting him into a patriot. What would have been inconceivable only a few years ago, petitions have been sent to Modi to install a statue of Godse and build a temple to celebrate and honor his misdeed. A BJP candidate from Bhopal pronounced Godse a "patriot." Her comments were later officially condemned; but disciplinary action against her, promised by the leadership, came to nothing.
India’s transformative prime minister, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, has also been targeted by the Hindu supremacists. While Gandhi’s international stature shields him from more egregious attempts to erase his legacy, no such constraints operate in case of Pandit Nehru, who was a staunch, unabashed secularist, and is largely responsible for putting India on the path of democracy, industrialization and modernization. The BJP and RSS are currently attempting to undermine and trivialize the contributions of Nehru and his associate. Nehru was educated in England and lived there at an impressionable age, imbibing much of the humanitarianism philosophy and ideals of enlightenment in vogue during the early twentieth century. Driven by a youthful passion for democracy, he travelled to Spain during the civil war in 1936 to lend moral support to the beleaguered democratic government of that country against the fascist forces of General Franco.
While pluralism and democracy in India appear under siege at the moment, it would be a mistake to assume that forces of regression will triumph, and the message of Gandhi and the sublime teachings of the Hindu religion, essentially accommodating, peaceful and inclusive, will be erased from India. Holding the Hindu religion responsible for the conduct of the members of BJP would be analogous to conflating terrorism with Islam and its teachings. In fact, there are many intellectuals, liberals and visionaries who view the current situation in India with some level of alarm and frequently voice their opposition to the current course the country is following. However, as long as the BJP is able to provoke divisive and inflammatory issues, such as the Babri Mosque demolition and cow slaughter, they will successfully override the existential issues facing the masses—poverty, sickness and unemployment--and keep winning elections.
(The writer is a former assistant professor, Harvard Medical School and retired health scientist-administrator, US National Institutes of Health)