Thread by @tathagata2

Today is Mohandas Gandhiji’s birth anniversary. I had been re-reading his biography by Louis Fischer over the last few days. In the process I had posed myself a few questions which I have also tried to answer in my own way.
Q. Was Gandhiji a saint or a politician?
A. The two are

completely incompatible. No one can be both. Gandhiji was every inch a politician,though he did have some saintly thoughts (which don’t make him a saint). He made very skilful use of these thoughts,actions and pretensions in furthering his politics.

Q. What do I make of his

basic creed of non-violence?
A. His firm belief in non-violence was based on kindling of the conscience of his tormentors. It would not have worked on anyone who began the process with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE. Examples are Jihadi Islamists like Islamic State or Taliban; Hitler’s SS

or Stalin’s NKVD. Or Kim Jong Un. He was lucky that neither of his adversaries-South African Whites or the British in India-were prepared to go to the extent of these five.
He also did not forbid newly independent India to have armed forces or send such forces to Kashmir

when Paki irregulars tried to invade the state. These are compromises. A politician has to adjust,compromise, innovate all the time. He did exactly that. His elbowing out of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose from the Congress after the latter won the presidency in the Tripuri

Congress of 1939 belong to the same category. So does his endorsement of the retrograde fundamentalist Khilafat movement and the slaughter of Hindus in Malabar (present-day North Kerala). There are many other examples. Anything but saintly,rather wheeling-dealing

politics of a low order.

Q. Anything else?
A. Yes. I think he imagined himself as a near-perfect amalgam of a saint and a politician. So he tried to inculcate saintliness in his followers by USING POLITICAL METHODS. It worked on his followers in South Africa and for a time

on Hindus of India. When he found that it was not quite working on Muslims in India he tried bending over backwards to please them. One after another. Endorsing the Malabar massacre of Hindus,not saying a word about the Great Calcutta Killings, forgiving the Muslims for

the Noakhali carnage,his appeal “Vivisect me but not India”. Nothing worked. Jinnah got his Pakistan. And most significantly,HE DID NOT GO ON FAST TO PREVENT PARTITION. He knew he would have died,Jinnah would not have relented. After all,politics is the art of the possible.

The methods did not work on his immediate family either. Witness Harilal!

Q. And his bizarre sexual experiments with the young girls,Abha and Manu? What about them?
A. I won’t like to talk about those. Leaves a horrible taste in the mouth.

Q. His status as the ‘Father of the Nation’?
A. An arithmetical impossibility. Our nation Bharatvarsha,named after Shakuntala’s son Bharat,is thousands of years old. He was born only 152 years ago.

Q. To sum up?
A. Mohandas Gandhiji was a consummate

politician. NOT A SAINT. But he was a very humane person and imagined that he would be able to plant that humanity through his preachings. He succeeded only partly,and mostly only with Hindus.
He was also not a ruthless person like Hitler,Stalin or Kim Jong Un. That partly

explains his lack of success. Persuasion can go only so far. Beyond that one needs SS or NKVD. Those methods were anathema to him.
All in all,a great man,without doubt. But let us not fall into trap of deifying him,a common failing among us Indians.