Three quarters of a century after his death, Mahatma Gandhi is still everywhere in India: from statues that welcome visitors at airports to currency, state memorials, street names, commemorative institutions and hospitals, art galleries, political campaign posters, and various forms of popular art. This month – as India marks his 154th birthday – it was harder than ever to escape Gandhi. But it isn’t only Gandhi’s image that lingers.
Affectionately dubbed bapu (father) by his followers, Gandhi’s values have served as the centre of India’s moral consciousness since the nation’s inception.
But his principles have been used and abused by competing groups, particularly egregiously by Hindu nationalists. Gandhi’s core ideals were of truth, religious tolerance and non-violence.The BJP’sversion ofnationalism, meanwhile, favours post-truth politics and a militant masculinitythat privileges a homogenous Hindu identity.
A Hindu fundamentalist, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi, as revenge for his policy of religious appeasement of Muslims (that led to the partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines). It is no surprise that Godse is now being revived as a hero through commemorative statues and memorials by some Hindu political outfits in India. Godse was a follower of Hindu nationalism’s most important ideologue, Vinayak Damodardas Savarkar, who has even recently been lionised as a true patriot by Narendra Modi and his cabinet.
As well as the events marking Gandhi’s birthday, world leaders from 30 countries paid their respects at the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi, during last month’s G20 summit. Gandhi’s round spectacles are the brand logo for the BJP’s Clean India Campaign. A life-sized hologram of him was projected at the launch of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. There are plans to turn one of his residences – the Sabarmati Ashram – into a flashy ‘world class’ tourist destination (though this has been met with public outcry). More concerningly, references to Gandhi’s dislike for Hindu nationalism have been removed from revised school textbooks (which have also cut out references to the Mughal – read Muslim – influence on India).
It also remains difficult to reconcile Gandhi’s championing of women’s equal rights with the BJP ministers’ routine sexist remarks. Despite Gandhi’s efforts towards the eradication of untouchability, caste-based atrocities and lynchings persist. The most disturbing perversion of all of Gandhi’s political legacy is the disregard for communal harmony as Muslim minorities continue to be vilified and victimised by the Hindu nationalist government.
INDIA Alliance (a coalition of opposition parties led by the Congress) decided to hold a march in Mumbai on Gandhi’s birth anniversary as a symbol of peaceful protest against the BJP’s politics. The march was titled ‘Main Bhi Gandhi’ (I Too Am Gandhi). In reaction to skirmishes with the police and arrests of protestors, Mumbai Congress President Varsha Gaikwad said: ‘It is unfortunate if permission was not granted for a silent morcha [march], that too for Mahatma Gandhi.’ Peaceful protest marches have been considered a form of Gandhian non-violent politics and denying them on Gandhi’s birthday is ironic, she said: ‘Everybody knows under whose order the police went in aggressive mode.’
Gandhi was a man of many saintly virtues and several human failings, saddled as he was with the role of the Mahatma for a nation. His worldview was shaped as much by John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, as the Quran and the Bible. Most importantly, his Hinduism was compatible with his secularism and a deep regard for human suffering – a fact that Hindu nationalism still struggles to come to terms with.
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