[Imc-cleveland] IMHO: Fuck Gandhi

[jesse]

I agree that this is not the venue for debate, but I
wanted convey my position for process purposes.  I
agree with Andy and Kris, that Gandhi was NOT the
"saint" portrayed by Western media, and committed
terrible, oppressive, counter-revolutionary acts.

I'm trying to understand Abigail's pov, but it's
difficult because her statement did not have any
substance to it.  An argument has two basic parts, a
claim and a warrant.  For example, Andy's claim was
that Gandhi was counter-revolutionary, and his warrant
was the worker's strike that Gandhi broke.  Abigail's
statement, however, had no warrant.  It simply said,
"Gandhi's a good guy, and pacifism does great things".
 No warrant for either of these claims.  In fact, I
believe Abigail would be hard pressed to find ONE
example of pacifism leading to the overthrow of an
oppressive despot or government.  Keep in mind,
Gandhi's nonviolence did NOT lead to the independence
of India.  The uprise against the British was VERY
violent.  The idea that "pacifism led the way to
Indian independence" is absolute bullshit. 
Independence didn't come until the oppressed Indian
masses said, "Fuck pacifism", and took up violence to
oust the British.  Gandhi's pacifist philosophy only
delayed this VIOLENT revolution, causing greater
difficulty and more death.  

Yes, Ben Kingsley is a good actor.  But you shouldn't
form your opinions of political figures via pop
culture.  The movie's portrayal of Indian independence
is pure garbage, and is insulting to the intelligence
of anyone who is familiar with Indian hystory.  

Unlike Kris, I do not think this is opinion, I believe
it is fact.  It is a fact that pacifism demobilizes
revolutionary movements.  It is a fact that Gandhi
betrayed workers movements, as well as huge portions
of the Indian population.  It is a fact that violence
was necessary to expel the British.   

I agree that the picture of Gandhi doesn't clearly
violate any kind of universal Indymedia "ethic", but I
also think it is up to the Cleveland collective to
decide what "is" or "isn't" appropriate for the
website.  

If anyone wants to know a little more substance about
Gandhi's political life, here's a decent article. 
Otherwise, don't buy the mainstream portrayal of
Gandhi.  It's hype and cliche rhetoric that has been
manipulated by the powers-that-be.  Do independent
research.  Think for yourself.  
--------
Gandhi and the Politics of Nonviolence

By Meneejeh Moradian and David Whitehouse


THE IDEAS of Mahatma Gandhi have had a lasting impact
on the left, from the civil rights movement of the
1960s right through to the movements against corporate
greed and racism that are developing today. Many see
Gandhi as the embodiment of politically-effective
pacifism.

The success of his nonviolent strategy, however, is
largely a myth.

The most common version of the Gandhi myth is the
simple assertion that a struggle based on pacifism
forced the British out of India. Martin Luther King
Jr. expressed this view many times when explaining the
methods of the Civil Rights movement he led:

    This method was made famous in our generation by
Gandhi, who used it to free his country from the
domination of the British Empire.1

King believed that

    Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress,
Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted,
inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a
world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at
our own risk.2

This view of Gandhi's contributions has lent
credibility to the principle of nonviolence in the
fights against injustice around the world since then.

But the Indian revolt against British rule was
anything but nonviolent. Gandhi's tactical ideas,
moreover, had serious limitations as a guide to
struggle. Movements that began under Gandhi's
sponsorship often ended in premature retreats or
escalated into physical confrontations. And the final
ouster of the British in 1947 can't be counted as a
victory for Gandhi's methods, since India's
independence came as the movement was shoving Gandhi
and his nonviolent philosophy to the political
margins.

Gandhi, nevertheless, did make major contributions to
the movement. Most crucial was his success in leading
masses of people into struggle against British
rule--something he did better than any other Indian
leader. But while Gandhi's political leadership was
the spark for these struggles, it was not their cause.
The struggles arose from real, deep grievances against
British rule, and the masses, once mobilized, showed
repeatedly that they were willing to adopt militant
tactics when nonviolent ones didn't work.

To understand the grievances and the struggles they
inspired, we have to look at the background of British
colonial rule.

"India must be bled"

To the British conquerors, India was a source of
profits and a base for military operations--using
Indian troops--from Africa to Indonesia. From the
early stages of conquest in the late eighteenth
century, the British began setting up taxation to
finance their presence and to send money home.3 As
early as 1765, the British East India Company also set
up monopolies on common necessities like salt in the
lands it controlled.4

These monopolies bred resentment and rebellion in the
next two centuries. But the British innovation that
brought misery to millions was the imposition of
market relations--the cash economy--in agriculture.

The first step in introducing cash relations was to
tax all the land. As the British replaced the
crumbling Mughal empire, they took over and greatly
expanded the Mughal system of land-revenue, which had
been based on local tax collectors known as zamindars.
The British generalized the system where it existed
and allowed zamindars to help themselves to ten
percent of the revenues. Elsewhere, the British
instituted direct taxation.5

Peasants now needed to sell a portion of their produce
on the market to raise cash to pay the taxes. By 1860,
this market began to spread throughout British India,
facilitated by a new railway system that carried
cotton, food grains, and indigo out of the country to
Britain and other markets.6

The effect on the villages was to shift power to the
moneyed classes, including zamindars and moneylenders
who, backed by British legal guarantees of their
property rights, began to buy up large tracts of land.
Ownership allowed them to charge rent to peasant
cultivators on top of the taxes they extracted.7

Dispossessed peasants became agricultural day
laborers, a class that grew from almost nothing in
1852 to 18 percent of the rural population in 1872.8
By the mid-twentieth century, agricultural
proletarians--those who owned no land, or so little
land that they had to work for others to
survive--constituted half of the rural population.9

So market relations shuffled wealth into the hands of
Indian landowners, a process that Marx had dubbed the
"primitive [i.e., initial] accumulation of capital"
when it happened in England. But dispossessed Indian
peasants could not seek out industrial jobs as English
peasants had. England's head start in industry was
allowing it to flood the Indian market with factory
goods, and these imports began to crush India's
skilled handicraft industries, including metalworking
and, especially, cloth production.10

The result was to trap the peasants into rural misery
and to further expand the rural proletariat with
unemployed spinners and weavers.

British rule thus marked a dramatic setback in the
material welfare of most Indians. Before conquest,
India suffered an average of one major famine every 50
years, but famines or scarcity gripped some part of
India for 20 out of the 49 years in the period
1860-1908.11 The reserves that peasants formerly held
to tide themselves over through periods of low
rainfall were now routinely being sold to pay rent and
taxes--and shipped out to be consumed overseas.

Lord Robert Salisbury, British Secretary of State for
India, summed up British aims in this period by
declaring that "India must be bled."12 Karl Marx put
some numbers to it:

    What the English take from them annually in the
form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the
Hindoos, pensions for military and civil servicemen,
for Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc.--what they
take from them without any equivalent and quite apart
from what they appropriate to themselves annually
within India, speaking only of the value of the
commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually
to send over to England, it amounts to more than the
total sum of income of the 60 millions of agricultural
and industrial laborers of India! This is a bleeding
process, with a vengeance!13 [Marx's emphasis.]

Resistance before Gandhi

Indians did not merely accept this situation. The
history of the British raj (that is, British rule) is
marked by different forms of resistance, including
local uprisings of peasants and "tribal" groups.

Up until 1857, however, no movement connected local
grievances into an all-India effort to expel the
British. Indians were divided from each other by
caste, class, religion, language, and region. At the
time, the only all-India force that could stand up *o
the British were the soldiers--known as sepoys--in the
army. When the sepoys rebelled in 1857 against racial
and religious abuse, they sparked and linked up to
peasant rebellions in north, central, and western
India.14

The revolt was nearly national in scope, but it was
not nationalist in consciousness. The revolt's demands
were to expel the British and to return power to local
princes--the only legitimate authority the rebels
could conceive.15

The rebellion broke down in the face of British
repression. As a spontaneous uprising, it lacked
planning and coordination. What's more, the nearer the
movement got to the goals of "local control," the
weaker and more divided it was bound to become against
British terror.

Thus, although the Sepoy Mutiny was anti-imperial, it
was backward-looking. The classes and the
consciousness that could carry a truly nationalist
movement in the future were only in embryonic stages
at the time.

Nationalist politicians arose in the following decades
from a new middle class of Indian lawyers and civil
servants. To the extent that this class existed in
1857, its members stood aside from the Sepoy Mutiny.
They saw their own future connected to modernization,
and thus would sooner strive for acceptance as equals
in the British raj than put their fate back into the
hands of the princes.

But the nationalist middle class was motivated by more
than ambition. In the first place, they saw that the
racism that held them back professionally fell even
more brutally on other Indians:

    For the less fortunate, racism took cruder forms
of kicks and blows and shooting "accidents" as the
"sahib" disciplined his punkha coolie or bagged a
native by mistake [while hunting]... No less than 81
shooting "accidents" were recorded in the years
between 1880 and 1900. White-dominated courts
regularly awarded ridiculously light sentences for
such incidents, and a glance at contemporary Indian
journals or private papers immediately reveals how
important such things were for the rise of
nationalism.16

The middle class could also see the poverty inflicted
by British rule--in contrast to the prosperity of
England, where many Indian lawyers and civil servants
went to school. Many of the students became attracted
to the ideas of the nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, who
was living in England and is best known for promoting
the "drain of wealth" theory of Indian poverty--the
anti-imperialist complement to Salisbury's "India must
be bled."

In 1885, many of these former students founded the
Indian National Congress to press the interests of
Indians under the British raj.17

Congress' methods in its first decades were confined
almost entirely to petitioning the administration
behind closed doors. Even as some nationalists became
radicalized enough to demand swaraj (home rule),
Congress remained an elite affair--a yearly conference
dominated by lawyers and professionals. Although
Congress became known for increasingly radical
speeches, it did not have roots in other classes--or
much concrete achievement to show for itself. In fact,
it barely existed between its annual conferences.

By the time Gandhi arrived in 1915, Congress was
moving in two directions. One faction kept up the
usual method of petitioning. Others who had become
impatient with this ineffective "mendicant" (begging)
method became known as "Extremists" and moved toward
individual terrorism. But both were still elite
strategies, separated from popular movements of
resistance.

One important breakthrough did occur in this period to
connect the official national movement to popular
struggle. In 1908, when Congress "Extremist"
Balgangadhar Tilak was sentenced to prison for
publishing an article sympathetic to Bengal
terrorists, workers in Bombay struck in protest. They
mounted a six-day strike, one day for each year of
Tilak's sentence. The strike affected 76 of 85 Bombay
textile mills and a railway workshop.18

This strike marked the appearance of the working class
as a force in politics. Only at this time was India's
trend toward de-industrialization beginning to turn
around, with the appearance of major Indian-owned
enterprises. By 1921, the working class in industry
and on big plantations would reach 2.7 million and
exercise disproportionate influence in a country of
300 million.19

Just as important was the growth of the Indian
bourgeoisie, segments of which became solidly
nationalist as they chafed under British control of
currencies and tariffs.

Practically every class had grievances against British
rule: lower and middle peasants, workers, the
professional middle class, and the bourgeoisie. It was
a matter of time before enough of these sections of
society would unite to throw off British rule. The
real question was which sections would coalesce into
an alliance to lead the rest--and with what ideas
about the shape of post-independence India.

Gandhi, more than anyone else, would pull together the
leading alliance of forces. His political vision put a
stamp on the direction of the movement at crucial
turns. Ultimately, though, social forces stronger than
Gandhi's personality were to shape the outcome.

Gandhi's approach to politics

Mohandas K. Gandhi was born in 1869 in the Indian
province of Gujarat. His family was in the commercial
bania caste that produced, along with the Brahmins,
much of the middle class. As a young man he went to
England to receive legal training. He would end up
abandoning his profession, however, and adopting the
lifestyle and dress of the Hindu peasantry, using
traditional Hindu symbolism to relate to villagers.

His deep religious convictions, however, did not come
from orthodox training in childhood but from adult
studies that he began as a political activist in South
Africa. Upon his return to India from England, he had
had a rough start as a lawyer and accepted an offer in
1893 to work on a commercial case in South Africa. He
ended up staying, with brief returns to India, for
more than 20 years.20

In South Africa, racism was even more intense than in
India, and Gandhi became an advocate and leader of the
Indian immigrant population. Struggles for Indian
rights escalated over his stay in South Africa, and
Gandhi had to teach himself skills that would make him
unique upon his return to India, including how to
overcome caste, class, and religious divisions to
build a base for dramatic mass actions. Far from being
unworldly, Gandhi also learned the fundraising and
accounting skills necessary to sustaining mass
politics.21

In the process, Gandhi's religious development
increasingly influenced his politics. In the writings
of Leo Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and the
writings of social theorist Robert Ruskin, Gandhi
found a philosophy that--along with an idiosyncratic
reading of Hindu scripture--diagnosed modern
oppression as arising from industrialism and proposed
nonviolent political action as a cure.22

He believed that the search for truth was the goal of
human life, and since "no one could ever be sure of
having attained the ultimate truth, use of violence to
enforce one's own necessarily partial understanding of
it was sinful."23

By 1907 he had worked out the basic strategy of
nonviolent resistance, which he called satyagraha. It
consisted of training a core of volunteers who helped
to lead mass marches and mass violations of specific
laws that resulted in intentional mass arrests.24
Three satyagraha campaigns in the next seven years,
along with a growing body of articles and pamphlets,
made him famous in India even before he returned.

While still in South Africa, Gandhi wrote about India
in his 1909 pamphlet, "Hind Swaraj" (Indian
Self-Rule), and targeted what he thought was the real
enemy, industrial civilization:

    It would be folly to assume that an Indian
Rockefeller would be better than the American
Rockefeller.... India's salvation consists in
unlearning what she has learnt during the past 50
years or so. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals,
lawyers, doctors and such like have all to go, and the
so-called upper class have to learn to live
consciously and religiously and deliberately the
simple life of a peasant.25

This vision of Indian society going backwards in time
was, of course, unrealistic, especially given the new
growth of an Indian working class and bourgeoisie, and
it found no real support among the leading elements of
the national movement--Indian intellectuals and
industrialists.

It was utopian particularly in upholding the idea that
the "so-called upper class" would willingly give up
its privileged position to live like peasants. Far
from this scenario, the Indian upper class
increasingly wanted the British out of the way
precisely to become the new "Indian Rockefellers."

Although Gandhi's anti-industrial vision had little
appeal for India's rising urban classes, it struck a
chord among India's larger masses--especially the poor
peasants and unemployed weavers and spinners--who had
been crushed by their connection to Britain's
industrial system.

Gandhi was to put the anti-modern current of his
thought into practice through the village social
workers who organized self-help among the rural
poor.26 Although this "constructive work" made little
real headway against poverty, it was later to create
mass support for the Congress Party--and mass bases
from which to launch future campaigns.27

Despite the evident oddities of Gandhi's philosophy,
his strategy of mass nonviolent action seemed to
provide a way forward for the resistance movement at
both the elite and popular levels. When Gandhi arrived
in India in 1915, Congress militants had been
committing individual terrorist acts which didn't
really change anything, and the masses had mounted
local uprisings that were brutally suppressed--to be
followed by everyday submission to oppression.
Gandhi's ideas presented an alternative to these
unhappy options.

The appeal of Gandhi's strategy was two-fold. It
appealed to masses of villagers because it was a
collective way to resist, to try to rise above all the
violence and show the dignity of their cause. It also
appealed to the wealthy merchants, landlords, and
small-holding peasants who supported Gandhi because it
offered the hope of getting rid of the British while
not threatening to destroy their property or endanger
their economic and social position.28 Gandhi pitched
his methods of struggle to the more conservative
Congress leaders as a way to win leadership back from
the militants:

    The growing generation will not be satisfied with
petitions... Satyagraha is the only way, it seems to
me, to stop terrorism.29

India finds a mass leader

Gandhi returned to India and joined the Indian
National Congress in the midst of the First World War.
The war was bringing an economic and political crisis
for the British, and space opened up for Indian
textile bosses to get a greater share of the home
market. A growing section of them was impatient with
British control of the market, and many became fervent
supporters of the nationalist movement.30

They were particularly drawn to Gandhi's promises of a
nonviolent removal of British rule. Through Gandhi's
appeal, Congress began to receive funding from many of
the biggest industrial concerns, including the
Sarabhais textile magnates in Gujarat and the Birlas,
the second largest industrial group in India. They
became Gandhi's regular consultants throughout his
political career.31

For ordinary people in India, the war also awoke new
aspirations. Indian soldiers fought for the British in
a war they had no stake in and returned home wanting
to be treated as equals. As Eqbal Ahmad described the
situation,

    On the battlefield they were every day recognizing
that they were equals, but they were also experiencing
patterns of racial discrimination. Therefore they came
back from World War I burning with anger. They and
their relatives gave the push to the nationalist
movement.32

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a radicalizing
impact on oppressed people throughout the world, and
India was no exception. Wrote one historian:

    In the post-war years--what is repeatedly evident
is a combination of multiplying grievances with new
moods of strength or hope: the classic historical
formula for a potentially revolutionary situation.33

The aftermath of the Russian Revolution saw a growing
militancy among workers and peasants that erupted into
massive struggles. Gandhi tried to play the role of
mediator and acted as a restraint on the movement.

In 1918, a dispute broke out at a textile factory in
Ahmedabad when the owner tried to end a system of
bonuses that he had introduced during a devastating
plague. The mill owner was actually a contributor of
Gandhi's, and his sister was a Gandhian disciple who
set up night schools for mill workers. Gandhi
intervened to convince the workers to drop their
demand for a 50 percent wage hike down to 35 percent
and forbade militant picketing in favor of a hunger
strike.

He advocated a labor philosophy of peaceful
arbitration of disputes and argued that bosses were
"trustees" for the workers.34 This message of class
collaboration cloaked in the language of nonviolence
would be Gandhi's continued approach as the class
struggle intensified. His position on strikes was
clear:

    In India we want no political strikes... We must
gain control over all the unruly and disturbing
elements... We seek not to destroy capital or
capitalists, but to regulate the relations between
capital and labor. We want to harness capital to our
side. It would be folly to encourage sympathetic
strikes.35

This was an unfortunate position, since the power of
the strike, in factories and on the railroads, could
economically cripple the British in India--and permit
workers to pose a concrete alternative to the
exploitation over which the British presided.

The potential exploded in 1919. Mass agitation against
repressive British legislation, the Rowlatt Act, which
sought to extend war-time restrictions on civil
rights, coincided with a strike wave by mill workers.

Gandhi's approach to the Rowlatt Act was to launch a
satyagraha to channel people's anger in a nonviolent
direction. He called for mass demonstrations
nationwide, but called them for a Sunday so as not to
encourage work stoppages.

Gandhi made special efforts to include Muslim groups
in the campaign. In the province of Amritsar, for
example, there were massive peaceful marches of
Muslims and Hindus. The British officials were
particularly alarmed by the breakdown of divisions
they worked so hard to maintain. Scenes of Muslims and
Hindus drinking from the same cups in public
frightened them terribly.36

The British resorted to sheer savagery to put down the
movement. The massacre known as Jallianwallabagh was
an assault on unarmed villagers in an enclosed area,
not to disperse the crowd but to produce a "moral
effect," as General Dyer put it.37 At least 400 people
were murdered, and a wave of repression followed,
including random arrests, torture, and public
flogging.

In the city of Lahore, peaceful demonstrations of
Hindus and Muslims escalated into clashes with police
as news of the Amritsar events spread. Factory and
railway workers struck, and the British withdrew their
forces from the city. A mass rally elected a People's
Committee that ran the city for four days. Middle
class members of the committee tried to call things
off unsuccessfully until the British attacked and
imposed martial law.38

Mass marches and strikes broke out in many other
cities, and the middle class started to fear the
militancy of workers and peasants. Gandhi expressed
this concern by condemning the violence that had
broken out on both sides, though it was far from
equal. The Rowlatt disturbances left 4 whites dead and
at least 1,200 Indians dead and another 3,600
wounded.39

Gandhi said he had committed a "Himalayan blunder" in
calling for mass civil disobedience without enough
organizational and ideological control over the
movement.40

But the next mass movement, the Non-Cooperation
Movement of 1921-22, also unleashed forces beyond
Gandhi's control, and he called the campaign off when
a crowd in Chauri-Chaura responded to police beatings
and gunfire by killing 22 cops. The Congress Party
later raised no protest when 19 Indians were hanged
for their act of retaliation.41

The fact that Gandhi could call an all-India
movement--and then call it off when it got too
militant for his taste--shows how crucial he had
become to the national movement. It also exposes the
lack of an alternative revolutionary leadership in the
potentially revolutionary situation of 1919-22.42

It was clear by the early 1920s that Gandhi brought
two elements to the anti-imperial struggle that had
been missing since the Sepoy Mutiny. His political
skills, plans, and charisma drew a mass base into the
first all-India struggles since 1857, and the
struggles themselves connected popular grievances
against aspects of British rule to the final goal of
ending British rule. Neither the "mendicant" or
terrorist traditions in Congress had been able to do
these things, and Gandhi's success made him into the
Congress Party's preeminent--and
indispensible--leader.

In the course of these struggles, Gandhi remolded
Congress from an organization of intermittently-active
nationalist clerks and lawyers into a genuine mass
party. Although to the mass of peasants he was known
as a Mahatma (a "great soul" or holy man), Gandhi was
also a shrewd political organizer and infighter. In
1920, he insisted on reorganizing Congress into a
hierarchy of committees built up from the villages to
the district level, reworking provincial committees on
a linguistic basis, and creating a 15-member Working
Committee as an ongoing executive to oversee the whole
party's work.43

Leading and limiting the struggle

Despite his skills and the powerful influence of his
personality, Gandhi kept igniting forces that got
beyond his control. The basic pattern could be seen
again in the Civil Disobedience Movements of the early
1930s, which began with the famous campaign to violate
the British salt monopoly.

The salt satyagraha escalated quickly. Mass marches to
the coast to break the British salt monopoly led to
mass arrests. News of Gandhi's arrest sparked a strike
by textile workers in Maharashtra who attacked police
outposts, law courts and other official buildings. In
the Central Provinces, a satyagraha to violate
restrictions on the use of forests escalated into
attacks on police pickets and mass illegal cutting of
wood. And throughout the country, peasants who had
refused to pay their land taxes physically resisted
police attempts to seize their property.44

Though he emphasized the plight of peasants, Gandhi's
attitude towards their class demands was not unlike
his attitude towards workers' struggles. When the
Moplah uprising in Malabar occurred back in 1921,
Congress was downright hostile. Some of the peasant
strikes hit tea plantations owned by Congress members,
who did everything possible to stop the revolt. Gandhi
gave a speech in which he declared that the objective
was to "turn zamindars into friends."45 He made it
clear that he

    deprecated all attempts to create discord between
landlords and tenants and advised all the tenants to
suffer rather than fight, for they had to join forces
against the most powerful zamindar, namely the
Government.46

He went so far as to reassure the landlords that,

    I shall be no party to dispossessing propertied
classes of their private property without just cause.
My objective is to reach your hearts and convert you
so that you may hold all your private property in
trust for your tenants and use it primarily for their
welfare. But supposing that there is an attempt
unjustly to deprive you of your property, you will
find me fighting on your side.47

Peasants, who were becoming increasingly radical, felt
betrayed. In one village, the same people who had
showered him with garlands later refused him food.

Gandhi was always trying to reconcile class divisions,
and his commitment to nonviolence was one way to keep
the struggle reigned in. The refusal to endorse
selective use of physical force virtually ruled out
strikes as a method of struggle. As one Bombay mill
owner remarked about strikes in 1929, "peaceful
picketing does not really exist," since the point of
picketing is to prevent scab workers from getting into
the mill.48

Despite Gandhi's efforts, class divisions could not be
smoothed over, and Gandhi's campaigns would
continually move beyond the boundaries he tried to
impose. This was because, in order to build up a mass
base, he would deliberately tap into people's real
grievances, which often had a class aspect.

When those he mobilized met with repression, they felt
justified in using any means necessary to get what
they felt they deserved. What's more, civil
disobedience campaigns led their participants to draw
natural conclusions about resisting all unjust laws,
such as those laws that defended the landlords' rights
to crushing rents.

Gandhi, who in 1930 had promised a "fight to the
finish" for Indian self-rule, wound up the massive
Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-31 after
extracting only token concessions--disappointing even
close collaborators like Jawaharlal Nehru, who
remarked in T.S. Eliot's words, "This is the way the
world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."49

Then, in May 1933, when Gandhi abruptly suspended a
second Civil Disobedience Movement that he had begun
the year before, his party comrades were furious. Said
Nehru:

    After so much sacrifice and brave endeavor, was
our movement to tail off into something insignificant?
I felt angry with him [Gandhi] at his religious and
sentimental approach to a political question and his
frequent references to God in connection with it.50

Subhas Chandra Bose, a Congress militant, was scathing
about Gandhi's retreat:

    Today our condition is analogous to that of an
army that has suddenly surrendered to the enemy in the
midst of a protracted and strenuous campaign. And the
surrender has taken place, not because the nation
demanded it, not because the national army rose in
revolt against its leaders and refused to fight...but
either because the commander in chief was exhausted as
a result of repeated fasting or because his mind and
judgment were clouded owing to subjective causes which
it is impossible for an outsider to understand.51

Class struggle vs. communal strife

Gandhi refused to take up class demands on moral
grounds, and his party's bourgeois backers certainly
weren't interested in supporting class struggle. As a
result, the Congress Party, the main force for India's
national liberation, passed up the chance to forge a
bond of common class interests among Hindu and Muslim
peasants and workers. Such a bond would have
counteracted India's second most powerful political
trend after nationalism: communal politics.

Communalism, the politics that posed religion as
India's key division, led Hindus and Muslims to attack
each other in bloody riots. Communalism tended to grow
in the years of nationalist ebb tide, as in late
1920s, when people's grievances did not get channeled
into mass campaigns. Thus communal struggle is not
built on rising expectations, but instead taps into
disappointed hopes--and channels people's bitterness
toward scapegoats. Although their professed enemies
are those who belong to a different religion, communal
organizations actually serve to discipline lower-caste
and lower-class Indians to the authority of elite
members of their own religion. As one study argues,

    Organized Hindutva ["Hinduness"] emerges right
from the beginning as an upper caste reaction to
efforts at self-assertion by downtrodden groups within
the Hindu fold....

    The RSS [a Hindu fascist group founded in 1925],
from its inception down to today, has been
overwhelmingly middle class Brahmin or Bania in
composition, drawn together on the basis of a fear
psychosis directed against other social groups:
Muslims, most overtly, but by implication also lower
caste Hindus.52

The Muslim League, formed in 1906 by middle class
Muslims, never developed a street-thug type of
organization like the Hindu RSS. The League's ongoing
politics were reactionary, however, as they professed
concern about the vulnerable status of worker and
peasant Muslims while holding them back from class and
national struggles--which would inevitably involve
alliances with Hindus.

The Communist Party of India (CPI), founded in 1925,
was an effective antidote to communal divisions in the
places where it grew. Building unity on the basis of
class, the CPI had the most success in organizing
unions like the Girni Kamgar Union, which was
strongest in Bombay. In 1929 the CPI had 42 workers'
committees in the textile mills and had led a
successful industry-wide strike for higher wages.53
Communists were gaining influence among railway
workers and oil workers as well.

Unfortunately, by 1930 the labor movement and the
Communist Party were being beaten back. Fierce
repression from the British combined with the
disastrous twists and turns of the CP's strategy to
weaken the only organized working class alternative to
communalism and bourgeois nationalism. In 1928, the
CPI adopted Stalin's policy of attacking relatively
left Congress leaders. As a result, the CPI removed
itself--and, tragically, removed most workers--from
the next wave of nationalist struggle, the Civil
Disobedience Movement of 1930-31.54 Their later
support of Stalinist Russia in the Second World War,
and thus, of the British war effort, would also remove
them from the Quit India Movement of 1942.

Despite the bizarre twists of CPI policy, their
class-unity position remained the only counterweight
to communal division in the countryside--where "the
failure of Congress leaders to espouse agrarian
radicalism even in Depression conditions, encouraged
Muslim peasant movements to develop increasingly on
separatist lines."55

Independence, partition and communal bloodbath

A combination of factors pushed the British to finally
accept that they could no longer hold India. Some
factors operated outside India, including broad
pressures to decolonize--both from national movements
and from the U.S., which had demanded that Britain
open its colonial markets to postwar American
penetration in return for its lend-lease military
support.56

It was clear that the empire was crumbling. Japanese
forces had swept through British colonies in Asia with
little difficulty, showing Indians that the mighty
British could be defeated. Inside India, Gandhi
launched the Quit India Movement in 1942, which became
the biggest revolt since 1857.57

But after the war, when Britain was negotiating terms
of departure with Congress and the Muslim League, the
revolt continued without Congress sponsorship. In
1946, nearly 2 million workers, more than half of the
working class, went on strike. They earned the
condemnation even of Nehru on the Congress left, who
was headed toward being India's first prime minister
and did not want to inherit an undisciplined
workforce.58

The CP called general strikes in Calcutta and Bombay
that saw the unity of students and workers, Hindus and
Muslims, battling the police together in the streets.

Even more spectacular was the the Royal Indian Navy
mutiny of 1946, which was also founded on Hindu-Muslim
unity. The mutiny sparked sympathy strikes of 300,000
in Bombay--and was also condemned by Gandhi and
Congress.59

At the same time, with Congress having left the field
of mass action, upsurges of united struggle
periodically gave way to gruesome communal
violence--inspired both by the Hindu right and by the
Muslim League's campaign for a separate Pakistan. In
general, mass politics after the war was a patchwork
of communal bloodletting and its opposite--united
class revolt.

In the end, Congress agreed to partition off Pakistan
because the party was not prepared to support the only
real alternative--class struggle on an increasingly
leftist basis. In this way, the refusal to polarize
the struggle along class lines virtually guaranteed a
bloodbath along communal lines. The British, for their
part, were eager for Congress to take over, since they
realized that an Indian government could more easily
put down the wave of strikes and mutinies than they
themselves could.60

Sumit Sarkar describes the ramifications of the final
deal:

    For far too many Muslims in India and Hindus in
Pakistan, freedom-with-partition meant a cruel choice
between the threat of sudden violence and squeezing of
employment and economic opportunities, or a forcible
tearing out of age-old roots to join the stream of
refugees.61

In 1947, millions celebrated the independence that
they had won through decades of struggle. But the year
was also marked by a holocaust of violence and ethnic
cleansing that accompanied Partition. Seventeen
million people were forced to migrate and 1 million
people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of corpses
littered the streets of cities like Calcutta and
Delhi. There are descriptions of train cars arriving
full only of dead people.62

Gandhi, now in his late seventies, personally
journeyed to areas where communal violence had broken
out and did his best to persuade people to stop,
walking barefoot through the riot-torn slums and
threatening "to fast unto death."63 His moral
authority was able to stop the violence sometimes, but
when he left, all the social and economic problems
that led people to see another religious group as
their main enemy were still in place.

Gandhi was disgusted with the opportunism he saw in
Congress, and up to his death he displayed a
principled anti-communalism. While riots raged in
Punjab, Gandhi told a leader of the Muslim League:

    I want to fight it out with my life. I would not
allow the Muslims to crawl on the streets in India.
They must walk with self-respect.64

Gandhi died for upholding Muslim equality,
assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu fascist. The killer,
Nathuram Godse, had been trained as an organizer in
the RSS in the 1930s.65 It is appalling to note that,
just two days ago as we write this, president Clinton
(whose insistence on sanctions against Iraq has killed
more than half a million children) dedicated a statue
of Gandhi in Washington, D.C.--assisted by India's
prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who belongs to
the RSS.

Moral force and class forces

Gandhi's principle of nonviolence, whose moral force
propelled several mass movements forward in their
initial phases, repeatedly held back the struggles at
key moments. As a result, privileged groups in the
urban centers and countryside were able to detach the
struggle for political independence from the struggle
for radical social change--and thus thwarted Gandhi's
own goals of social justice. The British were gone,
but the bureaucracy and police they built up still
functioned with little change--and continued to
repress workers' and peasants' uprisings. Gandhi's
will had been strong, but class forces proved
stronger.

And Gandhi never promoted the class
force--workers--that could have helped him in his
final struggle to unite Hindus and Muslims. Only class
struggle could have achieved what Gandhi's purely
moral mission attempted.

The movement didn't have to turn out in such a mess.
Potentially revolutionary situations existed in the
periods 1919-22 and 1946-47, but no mass party with
revolutionary goals had been forged to steer the
movements to victory.

In the post-Second World War movement, the same social
forces that had overthrown the Russian Tsar in 1917
were at the center of the upsurge--the industrial
working class, along with peasants and workers in
uniform. But in India's case, the country's only mass
party saved the British from being overthrown by
taking power "peacefully" themselves--at the price of
leaving the class rebellion to be consumed in the
fires of communalism.

Different alignments of class forces were possible,
since most classes opposed British rule. The
independence movement would have produced a different
outcome if industrial workers and the agricultural
proletariat had been able to form a revolutionary
socialist party--and drawn the middle class and
small-holding peasants behind their class-struggle
leadership. Instead, Gandhi's party reversed these
relations, with the bourgeoisie included in the
leadership with the middle classes of village and
city.

Gandhi's life was history's longest experiment in
nonviolent political action. The result of the
experiment is fairly clear: An exploitative class
structure cannot be broken without violence somewhere
along the way. Property rights, defended by state
violence, have never yielded to the peaceful pressure
of the exploited class. Put in other terms, no
exploiting class has ever left the stage of history
without being pushed.

But moral force is, in fact, necessary to help draw
together even a socialist movement. In some ways, our
methods must indeed foreshadow a society that is more
humane than the current one. Carpet-bombing civilian
targets, showering thousands of anti-personnel weapons
into rice paddies, or inflicting a starvation blockade
upon an entire population, to take three examples,
have been characteristic tactics of bourgeois war.
Indeed, their use is a good reason to overthrow the
bourgeois order. Conversely, it's hard to conceive of
them as tactical options in a movement that aims at
the liberation of ordinary people.

Moral force alone, however, cannot win a struggle
against a class whose interests are inherently
antagonistic to ours. Violence has to be part of the
movement's arsenal. In a society founded on a violent
class antagonism, our political aim cannot be like
Gandhi's--to win over the whole of society. We must
learn, instead, to draw the right battle lines.

-----------------------------------------------

Meneejeh Moradian is a member of the International
Socialist Organization in New York, and David
Whitehouse is reviews editor of the International
Socialist Review. This article benefited from the
authors' conversations and correspondence with Ganesh
and Deepa Lal, Pranav Jani, and Alpana Mehta.




1 Martin Luther King Jr., "The Current Crisis in Race
Relations," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
James M. Washington, ed. (United Kingdom:
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1986), p. 86.

2 Quoted from <http://www.engagedpage.com/gandhi.html>
as of September 18, 2000.

3 Sam Ashman, "Indian: Imperialism, Partition and
Resistance," International Socialism 77, Winter 1997,
p. 82.

4 Anthony Read and David Fisher, India's Long Road to
Independence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 227.

5 Ashman, p. 82, Sarkar, pp. 32-33.

6 B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India (Delhi: Konark
Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1991), p. 16.

7 Bhatia, pp. 18-20.

8 Bhatia, p. 18.

9 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the
Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 368.

10 Sarkar, pp. 28-30.

11 Bhatia, p. 8.

12 Quoted in Dadabhai Naoroji, "India Must Be Bled,"
in 100 Best Pre-Independence Speeches 1870-1947, ed.
by H.D. Sharma (New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers
India, 1998).

13 Karl Marx, letter to N.F. Danielson, February 19,
1881, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works,
Vol. 46 (New York: International Publishers, 1992).

14 Ashman, pp. 83-84.

15 R.C. Majumdar and P.N. Chopra, Main Currents of
Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994),
pp. 149-50.

16 Sarkar, p. 22.

17 Sarkar, p. 88.

18 Sarkar, p. 134.

19 Sarkar, p. 174.

20 Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), p. 28.

21 Brown, pp. 46-48.

22 Brown, pp. 78-81.

23 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India (Macmillan India
Limited, 1983), p. 179.

24 Sarkar, p.179.

25 Quoted in Sarkar, p.180.

26 Sarkar, p. 181.

27 Sarkar, p. 230.

28 Sarkar, p.180.

29 Quoted in Ashman, p.91.

30 Ashman, p. 89.

31 Alec Kahn. "Gandhi--hero or humbug? How nonviolence
failed in India" (Australia: International Socialists,
1982), p. 2.

32 Ahmad, p. 8.

33 Sarkar, p. 169.

34 Sarkar, p. 186.

35 Sarkar, p. 208.

36 Sarkar, p. 190.

37 Sarkar, p. 191.

38 Sarkar, p. 192.

39 Sarkar, p. 192.

40 Sarkar, p. 194.

41 Sarkar, pp. 224-25.

42 Sarkar, pp. 225-26.

43 Sarkar, pp. 197-98.

44 Sarkar, pp. 286-296.

45 Ashman, p. 91.

46 Siddharth Dube, In The Land Of Poverty: Memoirs of
an Indian Family 1947-1997, (New York: Zed Books,
1998), p. 36.

47 Dube, p. 55.

48 Sarkar, p. 280.

49 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi:
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1996), p. 259. First
published 1936.

50 Quoted in R.C. Majumdar and P.N. Chopra, Main
Currents of Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers, 1994), p. 197.

51 Subhas Chandra Bose, "The Fickle Leader," in 100
Greatest Pre-Independence Speeches.

52 Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika
Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron
Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), pp. 16-17.

53 Sarkar, p. 271.

54 Sarkar, p. 297

55 See Sarkar, pp. 302, 323, 354, and 364.

56 Sarkar, p. 386 and Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of
War: The World and United States Foreign Policy (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1968), pp. 249 and 286.

57 Sarkar, p. 391.

58 Sarkar, p. 429.

59 Sarkar, pp. 423-25.

60 Sarkar, p. 431.

61 Sarkar, p. 453.

62 Ashman, pp. 97-98.

63 Sarkar, p. 437.

64 Quoted in Sarkar, p. 437.

65 Khaki Shorts, pp. 23-24.

jesse

"In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit
and hope of 
further profit were obviously tremendously
important...But there is more 
than that to imperialism and colonialism.  There was a
commitment to them 
over and above profit, a commitment in constant
circulation and 
recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent
men and women to accept 
the notion that distant territories and their native
peoples should be 
subjugated, and, on the other, replenished
metropolitan energies so 
that these decent people could think of the imperium
as a protracted, 
almost metaphysical obligation to rule sobordinate,
inferior, or less 
advanced peoples."

~Edward Said, 1993

jesse

"In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit and hope of further profit were obviously tremendously important...But there is more than that to imperialism and colonialism.  There was a commitment to them over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and, on the other, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule sobordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples."

~Edward Said, 1993

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