Tag: happy gandhi jayanti

How Can We Understand India’s Fractured Independence?

As street children in the national capital with torn clothes and malnourished faces try to persuade the affluent to buy national flags for their mere survival, the tales of our fractured independence become sharper.

This article was originally published on August 15, 2018 and was republished on August 15, 2021.

Wherever you find free soul–
that’s my home.

∼ Amrita Pritam

August 15 – my childhood memories take me to those moments which, it seems, I have lost. A day of celebration, distribution of sweets at school, an idealist/honest/contemplative headmaster, the tales of Gandhi, Nehru and Bhagat Singh and the sound of music – Allama Iqbal’s ‘Sare Jahan se Accha’. The day used to enchant us. However, with adulthood, as I begin to eat the ‘fruit of knowledge’, I feel a decline in the spirit of celebration.

Even though Independence Day continues to arouse my psychic urge to feel the meaning of Gandhi walking towards Dandi, or Bhagat Singh writing his diary in jail, I cannot deny a sense of disenchantment. And particularly at this moment when the might of majoritarianism causes severe damage to the principle of inclusion, and the violence of ‘development’ is valorised, it is not easy to sit in front of the television and watch the Red Fort spectacle. Instead, I choose to watch M.S. Sahtyu’s Garam Hawa, read U.R. Ananthamurthy, and begin to make sense of the prevailing state of affairs indicating the consequences of our fractured independence.

Salim Mirza amid the scorching wind of Partition

Maula salim chishti, aaqa salim chishti
Aabaad kar do dil ki duniya salim chishti

(A song from Garam Hawa)

Garam Hawa was released in 1973. However, even today as I watch the film, and enter the inner world of Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni), I experience the merger of history and cinematic imageries, sociology and the tales of the tormented life of a Muslim gentleman in post-Partition India. Not solely that. In the pain, loss and hope of Salim (Balraj’s sublime art of acting is as powerful as Ismat Chughtai’s story and Kaifi Azmi’s script), I see the complex trajectory of Indian secularism after the assassination of Gandhi by a Hindu fanatic. Salim believes in the grace of Allah; he adores Gandhi and thinks that the Mahatma’s sacrifice has a deeper meaning: Hindus and Muslims can live together and heal the wound of Partition, and he can continue to run his shoe-making factory in Agra. But then, is he becoming irrelevant? Is he refusing to understand the mood of the times? And is he trying to retain the idealism that has lost its relevance after the departure of Gandhi?

Balraj Sahni in a still from Garm Hava.

Unlike Salim, his elder brother Halim Mirza is a Machiavellian – a leader of the Indian Muslim League, and despite his promise to stay in India and work with the Muslims here (the film depicts beautifully his narcissism as he loves to hear the echo of his own fiery speeches), he emigrates to Pakistan with his wife and son. Yet, Salim, despite losing his credibility in the community because of his brother’s deeds, retains his hope in the possibility of leading a dignified life in India. However, with the changing socio-political reality after Partition, Salim experiences scorching wind – the existential, political and economic turmoil of the troubled times.

Look at the three traumatic experiences he passes through. First, it becomes exceedingly difficult to run the business. As banks and lenders become reluctant to lend money to Muslim businessmen (it is feared that without repaying the loan they would eventually migrate to Pakistan), Salim’s business suffers. Even though at this moment of economic hardship Salim, instead of bowing down, redefines himself as a humble shoemaker (is it an internalisation of the Gandhian lesson of the dignity of labour?) to earn his living with self-dignity, Baquar – his eldest son who used to help his father in business – cannot bear it anymore. He too leaves India, and migrates to Pakistan.

Furthermore, Salim loses the large ancestral house after his elder brother’s departure. Salim keeps experiencing the pain of loss, separation and increasing marginalisation. Everyone leaves – Halim, Baquar and then his cunning brother-in law. He experiences the deficiency in trust. Everyone suspects. His Muslim identity is a major obstacle. It is not easy to rent a house; it is not easy to convince even the loved ones including his wife. Furthermore, he is investigated on charges of espionage over his sending plans of their former property to his brother in Karachi; and then his physical injury in a mob violence reveals the degree of humiliation and stigmatisation he is passing through. It is like being crucified in one’s own land. And third, as the film portrays with a great deal of sensitivity, Amina (Gita Siddharth) – Salim’s daughter – experiences the violence of division.

First, she loses Kazim (Halim’s son) whom she loved intensely; and then, she loses Shamshad (Salim’s brother-in-law’s son): her last refuge, her love and surrender at Fatehpur Sikri with the enchanting qawwali. The migration to Pakistan, the destiny of separation and the search for new fortune – neither Kazim nor Shamshad can come back and unite with the beloved. The divided nation with fractured independence doesn’t allow Amina to live; her suicide is the ultimate tale of the trauma of Partition: the loss of the feminine amid the cowardice and conspiracy of masculinity. Again, Salim loses her mother. Her refusal to die at a rented house, and her moment of death at the ancestral house (Salim somehow manages to take her there), the movement of her eyes and her quest reveal the meaning of a home – the land filled with memories, the spirited space that cannot be divided geometrically.

A still from Garm Hava.

For how long can Salim live in India as a tormented/unwanted entity? He too decides to leave the country with his wife and younger son Sikander (Farooq Shaikh). As the tanga moves towards Agra railway station (a symbolic site in the film depicting the journey towards Pakistan), something happens. We see a huge demonstration, the ecstasy of togetherness, a moment of collective struggle for justice and equality in the tormented nation. Sikander and then Salim decide to break their insulation and become part of the confluence of struggling people. No, this time the tanga does not go to Agra station; it undertakes a reverse journey, and takes Salim’s wife to her own land.

Hindutva or Hind Swaraj

“Through his readings of Savarkar, Godse truly believed that Gandhi, the advocate of non-violence was an impediment.”
∼ U.R. Ananthamurthy

Despite the scorching wind of Partition, Garam Hawa ends with a ray of hope. However, when an assertive ideology of militant nationalism becomes the dominant discourse, it is difficult to carry the lamp of truth. Yet, as I approach U.R. Ananthamurthy – the creator of the path-breaking novel Samaskara, I see yet another struggle in the realm of ideas. In his last book Hindutva or Hind Swaraj, Ananthamurthy, despite his frail body (possibly, he was smelling death), evolved a sharp critique of Savarkar’s Hindutva – a project of militarised nationalism legitimised in the name of Hindu unity, and aimed at excluding the ‘alien invaders’ for retaining the supremacy of Hindu rashtra.

U.R. Ananthamurthy
Hindutva or Hind Swaraj

True, despite his affinity with Gandhian and socialist movements, Ananthamurthy could not escape the moment of pessimism. “It seems to me”, he laments, “the Gandhi era has come to an end; Savarkar has triumphed”. And this despair gets intensified because, as he articulates his anguish, “Mr. Narendra Modi with no regret for the Muslims massacred in Gujarat which he had ruled unopposed, has set out to make a strong India ruled by the corporates.”

In fact, in the present regime, Ananthamurthy saw the unholy alliance of Hindutva and anti-people/reckless development with its inherent violence. His immensely sensitive mind sees the ‘evil’ in ‘mines, dams, power plants and smart cities’; it is truly traumatic to see ‘shadeless roads, widened by cutting down trees; rivers diverted to fill the flush tanks of five-star hotels; hillocks – the abode of tribal gods – laid bare due to mining; marketplaces without sparrows and trees without birds.’ Like Salim Mirza’s pain and hope, Ananthamurthy too passes through the curved trajectory of mixed emotions.

Even though the triumphant ideology of Savarkar’s Hindutva seems to be all-pervading, Ananthamurthy does not forget to renew his hope and moral conviction from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj: a dialogic text inspiring the reader to see the possibility of collective redemption in soul force, in ecological harmony, and in ethically empowered decentralised/inclusive communities. At this dark hour when all alternative voices are suspected as potentially ‘anti-national’, and the psychology of fear weakens us, Ananthamurthy celebrates ‘egoless fearlessness’. “Had Gandhi lived”, we are told,”he would have recommended Sarvodaya to a world that is gasping because of modern development.” From Salim Mirza to Ananthamurthy – Gandhi keeps haunting us.

I too strive for answers. And as street children in the national capital with torn clothes and malnourished faces try to persuade the affluent to buy national flags for their mere survival, the tales of our fractured independence become sharper. With pain and longing I seek refuge in a Kishore Kumar song ‘Aa Chal Ke Tujhe, Main Leke Chalu’:

Come on, I’ll take you
below such sky
where there is no sorrow, no tears
only love grows
below such sky.

Avijit Pathak is a professor of sociology at JNU.

Who Wrote Gandhi’s Autobiography of Errors?

A voice wrote Gandhi’s autobiography. Others, like Mahadev Desai, translated it, and still others, like Tridip Suhrud, retranslated that voice, to prolong its debt to hearing.

Note: This article was originally published on August 05, 2018, and was republished on October 2, 2020.

The error became for me a beacon-light of warning.
~ M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography

Reintroducing the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography to readers, Tridip Suhrud informs us in the new, critical edition of Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (January 2018), published originally by Penguin (India) and later by Yale University Press (US), that the title of the English translation reverses Gandhi’s intention, and along with it, the precise nature of the book. Suhrud writes, “In the original Gujarati, Gandhi introduced this difference through two forms, jivan vrutant (autobiography or the chronicle of life) and atmakatha (the story of a soul). What Gandhi wanted to write was an atmakatha and not a jivan vrutant. This distinction gets blurred in the English rendering, ‘autobiography’.”

Suhrud clarifies a further twist in translation, that “the title Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha foregrounds the experiments with Truth. The order is reversed in the English translation, where ‘An Autobiography’ has primacy.” The mode of autobiographical writing with its roots in early Christianity that influenced its practitioners in India since the nineteenth century, took precedence in the book’s English title over Gandhi’s foregrounding his narrative as a story-telling of truth. Is there any special significance that underlies this privileging?

The autobiography is traced back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Commentators see it as a narrative form where the immanent temporal form of the autobiography is displaced by the scheme of allegory. But it is agreed that even when the autobiography took its modern, secularised form, the idea of the “self” always seemed to draw out, under autonomous garbs, certain religious and normative ideas, thus never really abandoning the allegorical influence. The autobiography was always an anxious enterprise to describe a journey of the self to be recovered, examined, vindicated, defended or simply guided in time through certain idealised visions. Gandhi, however, clarified about his project, that “it is not a real autobiography”. It is not about his life as such, but his “experiments with truth”, which as we shall see, is about documenting a life of errors.

The spirit that Gandhi borrows from his Christian/Western predecessors is that truth is very much the higher-order or master narrative that orders the narrative of the self/soul. The English translation, by privileging the experimenting with truth over the story of the self/soul, merely reverses the reversible. In keeping with Gandhi’s own project of privileging truth over self, the translation of the title does not do any violence to Gandhi’s writing project. Yet, this privileging, in a way, does alter the central motive or purpose behind Gandhi writing his autobiography. What is it?

M.K. Gandhi Translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai Introduced with notes by Tridip Suhrud Foreword by Ashis Nandy An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Critical Edition) Penguin, 2018

M.K. Gandhi
An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Critical Edition)
Translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai
Introduced with notes by Tridip Suhrud
Foreword by Ashis Nandy
Penguin, 2018

Gandhi’s main purpose of writing an autobiography, I would argue, beneath the declared intention of writing his experiments with truth, is in every respect, most fundamentally, a recording of (his) errors. Gandhi’s search for truth reveals at every step, his obsession about (not) committing errors.

Suhrud writes in his introduction:

“An experiment in Truth is an experiment in brahmacharya. An experiment with Truth cannot have any possibility of secrecy. As an experiment, it was important and imperative, Gandhi felt, to record the unusual, uncontrolled occurrences. It was essential to speak of the darkness within.”

For Gandhi, experimenting with truth opens up a necessary task of recording his errors. Errors are the “unusual, uncontrolled occurrences” that have to get faithfully, truthfully, without any temptation for “secrecy”, written on paper. The act of truth-seeking demands, there is no hiding place for errors. Gandhi’s autobiographical task is the confession of errors. Writing on his errors is the only possible (and demanding) means to his experimenting with truth. It defines the discursive field of Gandhi’s autobiographical narrative.

The search for truth requires the constant (and minute) vigilance towards errors.

In Gandhi’s own introduction to the original translation of the autobiography, which he signed on November 26, 1925 from Sabarmati Ashram, he wrote:

“I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be. Measuring myself by that standard.”

What is the harshness of truth? It can be nothing else but the most rigorous ordeal to harshly judge one’s errors. Truth-telling can thus also be read as error-telling, and the science of satyagraha, the technique of revealing your errors to yourself and to the world. Gandhi’s purpose is obviously not to say good things about him, but risk the judgement of others in publicly recording his errors. Error-telling is not an attractive job. What is the “standard” for measuring truthfulness? It is measured by the ability to boldly record one’s errors.

To tell the truth is to tell one’s errors.

Suhrud’s retranslation from Mahadev Desai, of a crucial passage from the autobiography, takes us closer to my argument on Gandhi’s self-experimental project:

“I have always believed that we must reduce to a dust particle the elephantine errors of others and view our own errors, small as a mustard seed, as large as mountains; only then do we get a relative estimation of others’ and our own errors.”

The ethical subject of truth, in Gandhi’s conception, will lower the degree of error if committed by another, but enlarge the error if committed by the self. There is an unequal measure (and measuring) of error between the self and another, for there is a certain economy of intentionality involved. Those who are prone to enlarging small errors committed by others, are inclined to pass off their own, major errors as miniscule. It causes a double ethical imbalance, both within the self, and also between one self and another.

The Gandhian subject of ethics treats oneself more critically and rigorously than it treats others. What is the relation of truth to this unequal economy of error-finding, between self and another? The answer to this question will perhaps best illuminate what Gandhi understood as truth and truth-seeking. And the answer is an ethical one, where the other is always at a greater height than the self, such that his errors are less noticeable, less under scrutiny than one’s own. It is this imbalance between self-scrutiny and finding fault with others that allows Gandhi’s ethical relationship with the world. There is no ethics without this primary imbalance, where the other is always less in question than you, your self/soul. You are more responsible than others is the first principle of ethics, whose roots are Judeo-Christian.

Gandhi adds an ontological twist to it: You will be held more responsible, you are more accountable, for your errors than others. We are error-prone beings.

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of his fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Apart from writing, as an act of confessing one’s errors in public, Gandhi also uses the technique of fasting as a mode of truth-telling, or its other component, self-purification. Fasting, like writing, is a sovereign act, where the subject wields full power over himself. In Gandhi, it is a declaration of the power of self-control. Suhrud explains the connection:

“If the Autobiography required him to dwell within himself, fasting was upvas, to dwell closer to Him, to be closer to Truth. Both the autobiographical act and the upvas were modes by which Gandhi dwelled closer to Truth.”

Dwelling, in this sense, appears to be an act. It is an act that presents oneself to the world. This act of presenting opens up the meaning of dwelling as a possibility of life. Dwelling, for Gandhi, is the material basis of experimenting with truth, where the body enforces concrete acts (of writing and fasting) upon itself. Suhrud expands the meaning of dwelling in Gandhi’s life, beyond the acts of writing and fasting, to the place where Gandhi performed these acts: the ashram.

Suhrud writes: “This in-dwelling had a physicality, not grossly in his body but within the Ashram and with the Ashram community.” The place of dwelling, embodied in the ashram, meant a larger body, that of the community. Suhrud lays out the further context of this in-dwelling: “This in-dwelling was not only with the language of experiences and memory, but for Gandhi it was also about the very form that he wished to give to his autobiography.” As a presence (and place) of the community, the ashram was a body of experience and memory. Gandhi inhabited the responsibility of this body where experience and memory could be summoned to narrate its story. Gandhi’s act of dwelling in writing his autobiography took place within the larger body of the community. In this sense, Gandhi’s life and autobiography were both dedicated to this larger body. The ashram became the concrete embodiment of all these debts and practices put together. No wonder, different intensities were at work in Gandhi’s daily life at the ashram, where he also wrote his autobiography.

We come next to an interesting question: who is writing Gandhi’s error-prone autobiography of the self/soul? It was, we learn, a voice. Suhrud writes, “Gandhi’s notion of in-dwelling is the antaryami who spoke to him in a “small, still voice” and whose exhortations Gandhi submitted to.” There is a dramatic narration by Gandhi on how the voice came upon him:

“‘In the night when I retired I had no idea that something was coming up today. But after eleven I woke up, I watched the stars, repeated Ramanama but the same thought would persistently come to my mind: “If you have grown so restless, why don’t you undertake the fast? Do it?” The inner dialogue went on for quite some time. At half past twelve came the clear, unmistakable voice. “You must undertake the fast.” That was all.’”

This is a clear sign of a heteronomous force at work on Gandhi. The voice is the invisible but definitive author behind Gandhi’s decisions to act (upon himself). Listening to such a voice enables the Gandhian subject to negotiate its sovereignty with something other than itself. It breaks the monopoly of what, following Kant, is rather sacrosanct to liberal, Marxist and dominant strands of feminist thought: autonomy. The idea of heteronomy is critiqued by these various schools, as an allegiance to a power outside the self, and seen as working to the detriment of the self’s (moral and political) agency and freedom. Autonomy is regarded as the legitimate, ethical (and universally applicable) source or ground of a rational subject. The rational cult of autonomy treats the idea of heteronomy, the act of listening to (and acting upon) a force outside yourself, as succumbing to unfree laws and temptations that compromise self-sovereignty.

In contrast, philosophers like Emanuel Levinas, challenge this idea of autonomy by insisting on the value of heteronomy, where the subject is posed (and willing) to lose her autonomy for an unnamable and invisible force that confronts her attention. If rationality is supposed to singularly define the freedom of the subject and enable it to make choices, these choices are conditioned and limited not by the law of freedom but rationality, which isn’t the same thing. The faculty of reason (and its claims over a moral and free subject) primarily based on thinking, is found inadequate to address the deeper questions and connections that the self-seeks in its relationship with the other, a relation that predates and presupposes the demands of rational knowledge. Levinas invites us to imagine another origin (and horizon), where the self is defined only in relation to the other and the (moral) scope between them is more speculative and less categorical.

If thinking is the ground on which the Kantian self-establishes its realm of knowledge and power, and defines its autonomy, Levinas opens up other affective (/sensuous) conditions (of desire) like seeing and hearing as modes of opening up to the other. Knowledge (of the other), with its history of slavery and colonialism, its orientalism, has served more as new, modern forms of prejudice than possibilities of liberation. How does knowledge serve communities at war, subjugated people facing the colonial state and occupation, violence of caste and race, beleaguered refugees looking for a country? It is the rationalist (and by extension, nationalist) language of the state that put this violence in place. People don’t enough listen to others and there is a lack of shelter and care. Political ideologies claiming superior knowledge of history have done their bit of massacres.

It is not a logical but ethical extension of Gandhi listening to his ‘small, still voice’, and opening his ears to the peasants of Kheda, to the Hindu victims of Noakhali riots and the Muslim victims of Bihar riots. It is surrender to a commandment that can happen in any name, but occurs as an event that forces the self into a question, unanswerable by reason: “I was not dreaming at the time when I heard the voice. The hearing of the voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm.” The authorial voice from within appears from a source that comes from an intense state of “hearing”. It has no resemblance with the voice of reason, whose source is the singularity of the self. The voice appears as a double, where the self is the listener, and the voice, the commandment. The idea of divinity, of prophecy and revelation, exists in the abiding mystery of such a voice.

Gandhi adds a preparatory note for this moment of hearing. He calls it “a conscious practice of self-restraint and ever-increasing effort implicitly to obey the will of God speaking within and then known as the inner voice.” The voice can be heard only when the self is under restraint, when it doesn’t hear itself too much, and enables enough silence for the other voice, the “small, still voice”, to speak.

The act of listening to a voice is not a rational act, for reason demands justifications for an act, whereas hearing is its own justification, its own desire. To listen requires obedience to an authority, described by Gandhi as “the power which is beyond our ego”. The authority/power of the voice does not reduce the subject’s ego to submission, for it is precisely the prior effacement of the ego that makes hearing the voice possible. Listening to others is in no way different from a commandment, where Gandhi’s seeking to “see God face to face” describes in exact terms Levinas’ ethical encounter. And the other commands you to listen, not by reason, but by her voice alone. But even in religious terms, Gandhi steers away from ascribing to god any specific religious sign. He simply calls god as another name for truth. The truth lies in the hearing, and not thinking. Gandhi assigns his own god, his own master/maker, which in political and material terms, he finds in others.

Gandhi wrote his autobiography of errors, commanded by a voice that urged him to speak the truth. That voice wasn’t Gandhi’s in ontological terms. It suggests a complex sphere of hearing the transcendence within, where Gandhi grappled with the idea of an author submitting to a force who wrote in his name. A voice wrote Gandhi’s autobiography. Others, like Mahadev Desai, translated it, and still others, like Suhrud, retranslated that voice, to prolong its debt to hearing.

M a nash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018). 

For Gandhi, Freedom of the Individual Was the First and Last Goal

Gandhi believed that real swaraj would come “not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused”.

Note: This article was originally published on October 2, 2019, and was republished on October 2, 2020.

The following is an excerpt from Reading Gandhi in the Twenty-First Century, by Niranjan Ramakrishnan (Palgrave Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

As I watch world events unfold, Gandhi’s life appears increasingly relevant. With each passing day, his words and methods seem even more uncannily prescient.

Gandhi had numerous interesting and formidable personal characteristics – prodigious courage both physical and political, enormous self-discipline, asceticism and industry (more than a hundred volumes of writings and twenty-hour days), a fine sense of humour, and the ability to laugh at himself – that must have played a major role in the making of the Mahatma. But if I were to condense his political philosophy into one phrase, it would be this: the freedom of the individual.

Complete liberty, for Gandhi, was the first and last goal. India’s freedom from Britain, to him, was only an objective along the path, and a rather insignificant one at that. Far more important was the ability of each individual to seek out his or her own freedom. “Real Swaraj (freedom) will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused,” he wrote. I think of this statement every time I recall how mutely the public of the United States accepted the slap delivered full to its face by the Rehnquist Supreme Court after the 2000 presidential elections, followed by the post-9/11 march of official arbitrariness and open violation of liberties.

Reading Gandhi in the Twenty-First Century
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Palgrave Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

It is also in the context of liberty that ahimsa, Gandhi’s creed of non-violence, must be understood. It was not out of some sense of piety that he espoused peaceful means. He held non-violence to be essential because it afforded the only democratic means of struggle. It was available to everyone – not just those who owned weapons. Second, a violent victory, even a just one, would prove only that violence had triumphed, not necessarily that justice had done so. A violent solution would mean that the fate of the unarmed many would be mortgaged to the benevolence of the armed few. This was contrary to liberty as Gandhi saw it.

An extremely intelligent man, he had a knack of cutting right through shibboleths to the heart of the matter. In an earlier echo of the American position on Iraq and Afghanistan, the British kept telling India that they would leave India in a heartbeat, if only they could be sure the country would not fall into anarchy. This made some sense to many in view of the vicissitudes and general caprice of feudal rule in pre-British India, for self-governance. When one hears the cant that passes for political discussion on our airwaves, how one longs for a similar voice today.

Also Read: Dublin to Srinagar, Gandhi Steps on Barbed Wire at 150

Gandhi saw that millions had lost their livelihood because the British, in a former era of globalisation, had systematically destroyed India’s cottage industries to create a market for the products of the Industrial Revolution. Gandhi was the chief architect of India’s revived cottage industry. Although this was a magnificent achievement in itself, even more telling was the way he brought it about. He did not run complaining to the British government, asking it to reduce exports to India. Instead, he mobilised people to buy Indian-made goods. Huge bonfires of foreign cloth resulted in the handspun Indian fabric khadi replacing foreign mill cloth to become, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, “the livery of India’s freedom.”

“It is also in the context of liberty that ahimsa, Gandhi’s creed of non-violence, must be understood….It was available to everyone.”

This too has to do with freedom. To have demanded something of the government would only have increased its power. Gandhi instead chose to empower each individual to make a statement by shedding foreign cloth and wearing khadi. Today, a third rail of American politics is the word “trade.” It is commonly accepted, and rarely challenged, that trade is a deity to be propitiated at all costs – even if doing so means sacrificing jobs, families, homes, even towns or entire ecologies. Gandhi wrote that he would like to see all of a community’s needs met from within a reasonable radius. Some years ago Vegetarian Times carried a mind-boggling statistic: the average item consumed in America travels 1200 miles. Is it any surprise we have to invade other countries for oil? As American gadflies such as Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan rail against NAFTA and the WTO, one wonders why they haven’t thought of organising a movement to buy American-made products.

§

It is a paradox of our times that with the availability of the finest gadgetry and every form of material sustenance, the individual has seldom been more powerless or redundant. Gandhi’s perception has been proven right, in that the more a human being is regarded as an economic entity, the less he remains an individual.

The world, according to his view, was made up of individuals, and disfiguration of this structure could not but result in a distortion of the aggregate. Toward the end of his life, writing to his associate and heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, he says that “man should rest content with what are his real needs and become self-sufficient. If he does not have this control he cannot save himself. After all the world is made up of individuals just as it is the drops that constitute the ocean. This is a well-known truth.”

All the arguments…questioning the practicability of Gandhi’s ideas are true in a limited sense, some of them even obvious. The “obvious” is inertia’s customary resort against the trouble of changing for the wiser. I use the word “obvious”, too, because Gandhi can be classed with Galileo or even Einstein in the way he kept on challenging the conventional wisdom. As anyone originating a new paradigm must seem, Gandhi often appeared to be unrealistic, if not unreal. A man leading a population of 300 million facing a foreign ruler of infinitesimally smaller numbers declared that he would rather go without his country’s freedom than have it won by violent or deceitful means. A man who had guided his ancient land of freedom in a manner unprecedented in history chose to observe the day of independence not by whooping it up in the capital city, but by fasting half way across the continent to bring peace among rioting factions. A man whose intelligence and business acumen could have made him a top industrialist saw instead the depredation set in motion by industrialism and spoke out against it. There was nothing conventional about Gandhi, and the fundamental questions he raised will not be wished away by conventional wisdom.

A strange but striking tribute, though it never mentions Gandhi, appears in a recent article by Morris Berman. Called ‘The Wanting of the Modern Ages,’ it declares that the modern age and all that it connotes are at a dead end, and that what is called for is nothing short of a new “Civilisational Paradigm’. Berman might have added that one of the chapters in Hind Swaraj is titled ‘What is True Civilisation?’ The book was written in 1909. That the question was still exercising Gandhi twenty years later is evident from a quip attributed to him during his visit to England in 1931: asked by a reporter, “Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of modern civilisation?” he is said to have replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Also Read: Why the Youth Should Engage with Gandhi

Albert Einstein propounded the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. It wasn’t until 1919 that it was actually verified. Gandhi declared modern civilisation unsustainable back in 1909. He was not making this argument because he was familiar with global warming, housing bubbles, or collateralised debt obligations. Instead, it was because he saw the Emperor’s new clothes for what they were. Modern civilisation based on heavy industry and centralisation required an ongoing bubble of consumers. It was debasing to all concerned, and life-destroying to millions. As Einstein’s theory was proved experimentally four years later at Principe, a century later we can see every element of Gandhi’s warnings coming true in fear-stricken populations and rudderless leaders trading away every vestige of human dignity for promises of safety and economic welfare. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” went the old Soviet-era joke. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” as Walt Kelly said:

Morris Berman notes in his article: “[V]ested interests, in both the economic and psychological sense, have every reason to maintain the status quo. And as I said, so does the man or woman in the street. What would our lives be without shopping, without the latest technological toy? Pretty empty, at least in the US. How awful, that capitalism has reduced human beings to this.”

This is exactly the erosion Gandhi had foreseen and warned against. In Gandhi’s view, this was one end result of an alienation from one’s sources of sustenance. “Outsourcing” the basics of one’s daily living would eventually lead to the loss of human dignity, to his mind the greatest tragedy imaginable.

But would a population busy figuring out the latest neat feature in one gadget when it wasn’t trying to get the best deal on the next have any patience with someone telling it to toss the whole darn thing into the ocean, as Gandhi once persuaded his associate Hermann Kallenbach to do with his expensive pair of binoculars?

Outsourcing” the basics of one’s daily living would eventually lead to the loss of human dignity, to his mind the greatest tragedy imaginable.

The answer to “Where do we go from here?” lies in whether we are willing to abandon the conditioning of “a new excitement every minute” and pay attention to the nature of our own lives and of our surroundings. Gandhi had thought a great deal about the corrosive effect of constant thrill. “There is more to life than increasing its speed” is a quip often attributed to him. But he wrote at greater length about the essential nature of the mundane:

All natural and necessary work is easy. Only it requires constant practice to become perfect, and it needs plodding. Ability to plod is Swaraj. It is yoga. Nor need the reader be frightened of the monotony. Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. And imagine the catastrophe that would befall the universe, if the sun became capricious and went in for a variety of pastime. But there is monotony that sustains and monotony that kills. The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving. An artist never tires of his art. A spinner who has mastered the art, will certainly be able to do sustained work without fatigue. There is music about the spindle, which the practiced spinner catches without fail. And when India has monotonously worked away at turning our Swaraj, she will have produced a thing of beauty, which will be a joy forever.

Would anyone today listen?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan has been a long-time contributor to Counterpunch and Countercurrents and his work has been carried by Z-Mag, Common Dreams and Dissident Voice. Among the print outlets that have featured his writings are The Oregonian, The Indian Express, The Hindu, India Today and The Economic Times. His first book, Bantaism – The Philosophy of Sardar Jokes (2011), was hailed for its audacity by noted author and historian Khushwant Singh.

What Gandhi Said in Ayodhya: Violence Is a Mark of Cowardice, and the Sword Is a Coward’s Weapon

Gandhi visited Ayodhya on February 10, 1921, the first of his two visits to the place associated with Rama. He had just two messages to give – on Hindu-Muslim unity and non-violence.

This article was originally published on February 10, 2018. It is being republished on August 5, 2020.

It would take anybody by surprise to know that Mahatma Gandhi, who was inspired to ceaselessly strive for Ram Rajya throughout his life, visited Ayodhya, the birthplace of Rama, just twice. However, through the messages he communicated on both occasions, he underlined the enormous significance of those visits.

The news of Gandhiji’s first visit to Ayodhya, on February 10, 1921, sent an unparalleled wave of excitement through the twin cities of Ayodhya and Faizabad, say those who have kept track of local history. Hours before his train arrived, huge crowds had lined the roads, and terraces, all the way from the railway station to the meeting ground where he was to speak. Everybody had but one desire – to be blessed by a mere glimpse of him. The historic clock-tower gracing the magnificent Faizabad chowk was resonating with the strains of shehnai. The words on everybody’s lips were these: Gandhiji is coming to set us free.

The venue of the meeting was a maidan located to the west of the Jalpa nallah which lies between Ayodhya and Faizabad. In 1918, the British had celebrated their World War One victory at this maidan, and the Congress had chosen the venue precisely for that reason — to show the British the difference between them and Gandhiji’s way.

As the train trundled into the station, two local Congress leaders, Acharya Narendra Dev and Mahashay Kedarnath, holding the Congress flag aloft, made their way to Gandhiji’s compartment. They were totally unprepared for the scene that met their eyes. It turned out that as soon as the train had entered Faizabad district, Gandhiji had asked for all the windows in and around his train compartment to be shuttered. Moreover, he had refused to meet or speak to anyone. He was upset about the fact that the farmers’ movement in Awadh, attuned more to the battle cry of aggression than to ideals and principles, had turned violent. Those in the movement did not see much value in ahimsa. The farmers of Faizabad in particular were on the warpath – in Bidahar, events had taken a violent turn, with the farmers setting fire to and looting the houses of talukdars and zamindars.

The situation was intolerable to Gandhiji but he eventually gave in to entreaties that he should address the meeting even if it was to make his displeasure known. He was accompanied by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and also the Khilafat leader Maulana Shaukat Ali. The latter, following the Lucknow Congress resolution of Hindu-Muslim unity as well as the coming together of the Non-cooperation Movement and the Khilafat Movement, had set out on a joint tour with Gandhiji.

However, as Gandhiji sat in the car and the procession started moving, he came face to face with a group of Khilafat supporters waiting to welcome him, naked swords in hand. He decided there and then that he was not going to mince words in reprimanding the violent farmers as well as the men with swords in their hands, in his speech.

At sundown, the crowds surged to the maidan which was neither well-lit nor had an efficient public address system. His first message to them was that instead of taking to the path of violence they should learn to bear the hardships of struggle. Then, in severe words brooking no ambiguity, he condemned the farmers’ violence as well as the procession of sword-bearers, saying that violence was an attribute not of bravery but cowardice and that the sword was a coward’s weapon.

It is worth noting that Gandhiji chose to deliver these two mantras to his fellow Indians in Ayodhya – the Ayodhya of King Rama, whose rajya remained an ideal for him throughout his life. His stay had been arranged in such a manner that allowed him to take rest and made it possible for an unending procession of people to file into the room for his darshan and file out – in silence.

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of his fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of a fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

That night, thousands of farmers, with tears of repentance in their eyes, made a silent plea to their liberator for forgiveness. The following morning, after bathing in the Sarayu river, Gandhiji set out for his next halt. But the pain caused by the farmers’ violence, which had not only dealt a blow to the movement but was cause for shame, refused to leave him. He urged Jawaharlal Nehru to guide the farmers who had wandered off the right path.

Some days later, Nehru addressed a gathering of the rebellious farmers and got them to publicly accept collective blame for their misdeeds. So much so that many of them who admitted to their wrong-doing said they were prepared to give themselves up and serve long jail terms as well.

This episode tells us something about the force of conviction that propelled Gandhiji’s advocacy of a freedom struggle based on the moral and principled yardsticks of satya and ahimsa. The manner in which he suspended the entire non-cooperation movement in the wake of the Chauri-Chaura incident is well known.

§

It is noteworthy that by the time Bapu visited Ayodhya for the first time, Tilak, the leader who gave the resounding slogan ‘Freedom is our birthright’, was no more. The mantle of steering the freedom struggle, giving it a new momentum, now rested on Gandhiji.       

On February 10, 1921 when he reached Faizabad station – he was returning from Varanasi after having performed the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Kashi Vidyapeeth – one of the aims of his visit was to meet the sadhus of Ayodhya and persuade them to join the freedom movement. Gandhiji’s decision to meet them was significant considering that his attempt to turn the Khilafat Movement into an opportunity to promote Hindu-Muslim unity had started bearing fruit. (The Khilafat movement was started to influence the British prime minister to refrain from abolishing the Turkish caliphate, a move seen as a threat to Islam and hence to the religious freedom of Muslims under British rule.)

At the time Gandhiji was not only engaged in moulding the Khilafat movement in accordance with his principles; he was also trying to remove the obstacles the British were placing in the way of Hindu-Muslim unity. The biggest obstacle was the issue of cow slaughter which the British were busy giving a communal colour. It was only natural that he would want to speak frankly on this issue in Ayodhya. The way he put the British government in the dock on this issue and made Hindu-Muslim unity an imperative for cow-protection, only he could have accomplished it.

Also read: The Sangh’s New Game Plan for Ayodhya

It was telling that Gandhiji who did not take his eyes off other concerns of the freedom struggle while focusing on this issue, did not take any cognizance whatsoever of the so-called Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue. No matter that this was his first visit to the birthplace and kingdom of his Rama (in 1915, while travelling from Calcutta to Haridwar for the Kumbha mela he had passed Ayodhya).

Physically exhausted by the previous evening’s long meeting, when Gandhiji reached the Sarayu ghat the following morning to attend a meeting of sadhus being headed by Pandit Chandiram, he found it difficult to speak standing. He began by asking the gathered sadhus to forgive him for his physical weakness which forced him to be seated as he addressed them. Then he proceeded to hold up a mirror to them: “It is said there are 56 lakh sadhus in India. If all 56 lakh of them are ready to sacrifice their lives, then I am confident that with the power of their tapasya and prayer they can liberate India. But they have strayed from their path. So have the maulvis. If at all the sadhus and maulvis have achieved anything it is to make the Hindus and Muslims fight with one another. I say this to both…even in circumstances where you are rendered devoid of your faith, become heretics or obliterate your religion, there is no such command of god that permits you to create enmity between two individuals who have committed no wrong against one another.”   

Gandhi did not stop there. He continued: “I said to the sadhus of Haridwar that if they want to protect the cow, they should be ready to give their lives up for the Muslims. Had the British been our neighbours, I would have advised you to request them that although their religion does not prohibit them from slaughtering cows and consuming their meat, they should consider stopping the practice for our sake…. But they raise their hand [against us] and say they are the rulers and that their rule is like Ram Rajya for us. My appeal to the sadhus is that if you want to protect the cow, give your lives up for Khilafat….Those who kill Muslims for slaughtering cows should abdicate their religion. There are no such directives given to Hindus anywhere.”

“If at all the sadhus and maulvis have achieved anything it is to make the Hindus and Muslims fight with one another,” said Gandhiji. Credit: Arshad Afzaal Khan

Gandhiji continued to give advice in this vein. He said: “These days the Hindus want the municipality to put an end to cow slaughter. I call it stupidity. On this issue, some Marwari friends in Calcutta were misled by thoughtless advisors into asking me to save 200 cows from being slaughtered by butchers. I told them point-blank I would not save a single cow until such time as the butchers were not told which other occupation to adopt because they do not do the work they do to hurt the sentiments of the Hindus….What happened in Bombay? The butchers had hundreds of cows but no Hindu approached them. The members of the Khilafat committee went to them and said what they were doing was not right; they should let the cows go and buy goats instead. The butchers gave up all the cows….This is called protecting the cow.”

He clarified that the object of cow protection was not animal protection:  “The concern was for the protection of the weak and the helpless — only by doing this do we get the right to pray to god for our protection. Praying to god for our own protection is a sin as long as we do not protect the weak….We need to learn to love the way Rama loved Sita. As long as we do not observe our dharma conscientiously and with utmost faith and steadfastness, we shall not be able to destroy this demonic government. Neither shall we attain swaraj nor will the rule of our dharma prevail. It is beyond the power of Hindus to bring back Ram Rajya.”

He concluded his address by saying this: “I do not want to say too much. I see students of Sanskrit here. I urge them to sacrifice their lives for Muslim brothers….Every student who is desirous of obtaining knowledge for a livelihood should realise that acquiring knowledge from the British is akin to drinking from a poisoned cup. Do not drink from the poisoned cup. Come back to the right path….There is an idol here, which receives offerings of foreign cloth. If you do not want foreign cloth for yourself, then you must end this practice. Adopt swadeshi. Use the thread spun by your brothers and sisters. I am hoping that the sadhus will give me a part of what they have….Sadhus are considered to be pious; let them give within their means. It will come in useful in the struggle for swaraj.”

The English translation of this speech is preserved in the Uttar Pradesh state archives in Lucknow. It was placed in the category of confidential documents at the time. The previous evening, too, after throwing light on his South Africa satyagraha, he had given a call to the people to engage in peaceful non-cooperation against the British government, boycott government-aided schools, give up wearing foreign cloth and spin yarn on the charkha instead. He refrained from giving the same call in his Ayodhya meeting saying he did not want to merely repeat what he had said the previous evening.

§

In 1929, Gandhiji came to his Rama’s capital Ayodhya for the second time to seek contributions for his Harijan Fund. In a meeting held in Faizabad’s Motibagh locality he was given a silver ring for the fund. He decided to auction it there and then.

To provide an incentive for high bids, he announced that he would personally put the ring on the finger of the individual who bid the highest. One gentleman bid fifty rupees and the auction ended with him. Gandhiji kept his word and put the ring on his finger. The gentleman had a hundred rupee note with him. Offering it, he stood there to get fifty rupees back. Gandhiji left him speechless with a comment that he was a baniya after all; a baniya never parted with the money that came his way — all the more so if it was a donation. The gathering burst into laughter and the gentleman made his way back in a happy frame of mind.

During this visit, Gandhiji visited the first Gandhi ashram in the country, which had been established in Akbarpur by Dhirendra bhai Majumdar. It was on that occasion that he delivered his famous message ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’, exemplifying his statement by staying in the house of an English priest called Sweetman. In the ashram meeting, he urged the people gathered there to get organised, give up wearing foreign cloth, spin the charkha, confront the oppression of zamindars with non-violent resistance, dedicate themselves to the cause of liquor prohibition, and boycott government schools.

Thereafter, even Awadh’s rebellious farmers gave up the path of violence. Not just that, by facing police atrocities and excesses resolutely, they no longer provided an excuse for the British government to unleash its army’s oppressive force on them on the grounds that it was justified.

Krishna Pratap Singh is a senior journalist based in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Translated from the Hindi original by Chitra Padmanabhan

Book Review: Even in Gandhi’s Resolutely Examined Life, There Is Something Inaccessible

Supriya Chaudhuri reviews Ramachandra Guha’s book ‘Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948’.

‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Socrates at his trial, quoted in Plato’s Apology.

Today, October 2, 2019, is Gandhi’s 150th birthday. It is tempting, in these dark times, to say that we are more distant from him and his teachings than ever before. But one lesson of Ramachandra Guha’s massive biography, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948, is that there is always, even in such a resolutely ‘examined life,’ something inaccessible about Gandhi.

Few people in history have written so much, and had so much written about him – a fact disparagingly commented upon by his great antagonist B.R. Ambedkar. Not only are there the 100 volumes of his own Collected Works, which include an Autobiography, but multi-volume biographies, much larger than Guha’s – for example those by the documentary film-maker Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar (Mahatma, 8 vols, 1951) and by his own secretary Pyarelal Nayar (unfinished, 10 volumes) – began to be published soon after his death, competing with the volume of writing about him while he was alive.

Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948
Ramachandra Guha.
Penguin Random House, 2018

Moreover, Gandhi insisted on making the smallest details of his life and actions available for public scrutiny, commenting on them in letters and conversation, asking for advice (which he rarely followed) from friends and even from the public, and looking back upon them in written recollections. In many ways, Gandhi is a biographer’s dream, but also perhaps her worst nightmare.

What do we really know about Gandhi?

For all this flood of information, what do we really know about Gandhi, and how much closer are we to understanding him? Guha’s biography has all his characteristic gifts as a writer: it is immensely readable, it engages with the everyday humanity of his subject while noting, in equable, matter-of-fact tones, the events and actions that set him irreconcilably apart, and it offers an account of the ideological differences that marked his relations with his greatest contemporaries.

It reveals, above all, the strangeness of Gandhi’s special relation with history, and the ease with which he attracted loyal admirers and followers, whose numbers and support – emotional as well as material – effectively made him what he was. The only word for this personal magnetism, though Guha does not use it, is aura: an odd term for a middle-aged lawyer based in South Africa returning to India with plans of public service. At the same time, because biography sets itself the difficult task of allowing its subject to unfold in history, it must put up with the progressive, unfinished nature of the historical self that appears at any given moment. The biographer has constantly to put Kierkegaard’s observation to the test: ‘it is true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.’

Also Read: For Gandhi, Freedom of the Individual Was the First and Last Goal

Gandhi, who tried incessantly to understand his own life backwards, was committed to living it forwards, dedicating himself to courses of action whose outcome he could not foresee. Guha’s book begins with his return to India in January 1915, just after the commencement of the first World War. He contributed to the war effort (by nursing the wounded) during a brief stopover in London, and in the last year of the war, 1918, he toured the Kheda district of Gujarat, where the peasants were refusing to pay taxes after a late and severe monsoon that had damaged their crops. Although he campaigned for them and wrote to the viceroy on their behalf, he also tried (unsuccessfully) to raise recruits for the imperial army, since at this point he believed that India’s claim to Home Rule was linked to its becoming an equal partner in the British Empire.

How different was this from Gandhi’s response, 20 years later, to the second World War, at which point his views on the power of non-violent resistance had hardened considerably? While the Congress party, under Nehru’s leadership, had offered qualified support to the British in its struggle against global fascism – though Britain was itself an oppressor of colonised peoples – Gandhi was not only at odds with his own party on this matter, but wrote letters to Hitler in 1939 and 1940, addressing him as ‘Dear Friend’ and asking him to ‘make an effort for peace’, while he also suggested that the Jews in Europe, whose demands for a separate homeland in Palestine he had opposed, should offer peaceful satyagraha against the Nazis. Attacking the recruitment of Indian soldiers for this war, he initiated a programme of civil disobedience (culminating in the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942) that put unprecedented pressure on the colonial government.

These are not two Gandhis, nor are they a time-serving Gandhi adjusting his actions to the mood of the political moment. They are, rather, a single Gandhi-in-process, a Gandhi who spent his life attempting to examine and strengthen his beliefs, and to match belief to action, a struggle that repeatedly placed him in contradictory, even untenable positions, and produced ideological disagreements with his friends and colleagues.

Mahatma Gandhi. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mahatma Gandhi. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Contradictions and disagreements

Guha’s biography engages some of these contradictions and disagreements: most importantly, the ever-deepening rift between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the issue of caste and Hindu society’s treatment of ‘untouchables’; the disputed idea of the nation in his relations with M.A. Jinnah, ending with the failure of Gandhi’s vision of a mature religious pluralism in a single independent country; and the ideal of brahmacharya that Gandhi set himself, with possibly unfortunate consequences for the young women in his entourage (towards whom, as with Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, he appointed himself as ‘law-giver’).

In each of these controversies – social, political, and moral – Gandhi’s personal stand is marked by an attempt to reconcile tradition with radicalism, justice with care, individual experiment with social action. In each, he appears at something of a disadvantage. There is no denying the fierce logic of Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism along with caste, nor the traumatic frustration of Gandhi’s hopes with India’s Partition, nor, indeed, the oddness and narcissism of a male cultivation of sexual self-control that uses women as tools.

Also Read: Dublin to Srinagar, Gandhi Steps on Barbed Wire at 150

Yet Gandhi’s disadvantages are also at the root of his strength, which was to postulate goodness in the world and to claim truth as its instrument. This idea of goodness was not (or not primarily) a religious value: it was a political value. It was also, quite uniquely, a personal moral principle, and for Gandhi the personal was the political.

Guha’s unemphatic chronicle, following the documentation where it exists, and refusing to introduce narrative expansions for the sake of history alone, is an invitation to reconsider the tasks of historical biography. Guha reflects on Gandhi’s relevance today in an epilogue, interestingly contrasting Arun Shourie’s attack on Ambedkar with Arundhati Roy’s attack on Gandhi.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, with Mahatma Gandhi. Photo: Wikipedia commons

Two major events receive brief treatment

But two major historical events that receive brief, even cursory treatment in the book are the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919 and the Bengal Famine of 1943. While Tagore returned his knighthood in protest against the Amritsar massacre, Gandhi did not return his medals to the King-Emperor until 1 August 1920, the day Tilak died, in protest against the unjust settlement imposed upon Turkey by the Allies and the failure of the Khilafat agitation. At the time of the Bengal famine, Gandhi was in prison, cut off from the rest of the country: his wife Kasturba died in February 1944, while they were still imprisoned. These two instances are a reminder of the impossibility of fitting a life to history, even if that life ‘makes’ history.

Also Read: Why the Youth Should Engage with Gandhi

Even 150 years on, Gandhi’s life obstinately perseveres in clinging to its own, unrepeatable shape, its ‘aspiration to truth’ (satyagraha) set against the material contours of India’s struggle for Independence, its end an unhealed wound in the fabric of the nation-state. It is not just India, but the world today that has irreversibly abandoned Gandhi’s hope of a moral foundation for political action, and his belief in religious pluralism as the cement of a stable society.

Supriya Chaudhuri is a professor (emerita) at the department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Gandhi and the Cowardice of Hindutva

At a time like this, when Hindutva has become dominant, it becomes especially relevant to ask: why does Gandhi consider Hindutva evil?

This article provided the basis for briefer remarks made in a talk at the Indian Association of Minnesota on September 29, during celebrations of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

One of the dangers of an event like this is that we all come, pay homage to Gandhi, and go away with no change in our relation to ourselves or the world. Gandhi has become – like Martin Luther King here in the US – one of those figures whom everybody invokes, including those whose politics and everyday lives are opposed to everything that Gandhi stood for.  Whenever I am asked to attend a Gandhi event, I worry that I might participate in this process of taming Gandhi, making him into a sweet old toothless man whom everybody loves to love. And we as people of Indian origin can go home, feeling good about having produced such a great man, sunning ourselves in his reflected glory.

So I think it is important to ask: what is Gandhi’s legacy, and how would we nourish and cultivate it? We often say that Gandhi’s message was nonviolence. That is not wrong, but it is not enough. The challenge is to think with him, and ask: what is the nature of his nonviolence? Thinking with somebody involves not so much sticking to the letter of what they say as eliciting the potentialities of their concepts. If we think with Gandhi, it seems to me that we can come to nonviolence only after passing through two other terms first – courage and evil. An account of nonviolence that does not spring from an understanding first of courage and evil runs away from what is most thought-provoking in Gandhi.

Let me begin with the word courage. Let’s go back to 1918, slightly more than 100 years back now. Gandhi has just finished the Kheda satyagraha. This is his third major satyagraha since his return to India in 1915. Earlier, there had been the mill workers strike in Ahmedabad, and the one in Champaran in Bihar 1917, where he took up the grievances of the indigo cultivators. These three satyagrahas have made him a household name in India in just three or four years after his return from South Africa. In everybody’s mind, he is associated with ahimsa or nonviolence.

And then, he declares that he is going to recruit soldiers for the British army. He goes on a recruitment tour of Kheda. Many nationalist leaders are baffled. So are ordinary Indians. Why is this man, who has been talking of ahimsa, now asking people to pick up arms? Gandhi is adamant, however. And in his later years too, he insists that he would have done exactly the same thing.

Also read: Dublin to Srinagar, Gandhi Steps on Barbed Wire at 150

Without go into the details of his explanations, all I wish to stress is this: Gandhi sees no contradiction between his ahimsa and his recruitment drive. How is this possible? For our purposes today, Gandhi’s explanation could be rephrased this way. Satyagraha requires a courage greater than that involved in picking up arms. If you have the courage for ahimsa, for confronting the British, then it is fine to not join the army. But most people do not join the army not because of a strong moral objection (if this was the case, they would have opposed the British vigorously in other ways) but because they do not have courage to even to take up arms, let alone to practice ahimsa. So the first step towards ahimsa must be to develop courage. Those who do not have courage can never take up ahimsa.

Abhay, the Gujarati word he translates as both courage and fearlessness, is a crucial term in Gandhi’s vocabulary. When Gandhi says ahimsa requires greater courage than that required for bearing arms, this does not mean it requires a greater amount of the same courage that those who bear arms have. It means a different kind of courage – not physical but moral courage. Above all, moral courage involves questioning oneself, reflecting on whether one’s actions are right or wrong.

Moral courage installs an equality within oneself, so that one is internally divided. To be internally divided is to develop a conscience, to become capable of having an interminable conversation with oneself about right and wrong, beginning with the right and wrong of one’s own actions. This internal division is also, paradoxically, the first requirement for integrity: those without moral courage cannot have the integrity necessary to recognise right and wrong – they are not capable of morality, ethics or religion. At best, they are capable of moralism, that weaponisation of morality which consists in unquestioningly accepting and defending the dominant values of one’s social circle. They will just follow, both in their actions and their thinking, the path of least resistance. Such moralism is the opposite of moral courage; it is moral cowardice.

Also read: What Gandhi Believed Is the Purpose of a Corporation

This brings to my second word, evil. To have moral courage means, amongst other things, recognising and naming evil when we see it. Gandhi is very liberal in his use of the word evil and other analogous words such as adharma, irreligion. (The Gujarati words he uses are rakshashi, which he usually translates as evil rather than demonic, and adharma.) His use of this cluster of words occurs most often in the context of three phenomena – ‘modern civilisation’, untouchability, and Muslim and Hindu nationalism.

So the second point I wish to stress is his willingness to use words such as evil. We usually shy away from a word like evil, because we think of it as too strong. To call something evil, we usually think, is to be intolerant. But Gandhi, whom we think of as a paragon of nonviolence, is very free with this word. I think Gandhi’s use of this word, and our reluctance to use it, is indicative of something. All too often we confuse non-violence with not rocking the boat, with refusing to take a strong stance, with not calling things wrong (actually, more precisely, not having the moral courage to recognise a wrong).

In such an understanding, nonviolence becomes an especially tame version of see no evil, hear no evil, and do no evil. That is to say, while we may not ourselves do injustice, we also avoid seeing the injustice around us. But in Gandhi’s terms, to avoid seeing injustice is not merely to allow injustice to happen; it is to actually participate in injustice. If there is an injustice that we keep quiet about, or even do not have the moral courage to recognise, then we are guilty too. This is why he uses the word evil so frequently – to name injustice.

This brings us to the question: what does he call evil? Or, put differently, what is injustice for Gandhi? Let us look at one of the phenomena for which he reserves the word evil – Hindu nationalism or communalism, or what we today call Hindutva (in his time, the word Hindutva has not yet come to be attributed exclusively to, or for that matter claimed exclusively by, Hindu nationalism). He criticised Hindutva repeatedly. And perhaps because his vision of Hinduism was so opposed to theirs, because he made the poverty of their conception of Hinduism so evident, the followers of Hindutva detested him, and it was one of them who finally assassinated him.

Also read: How the RSS Detested Gandhi

(These days, I am sometimes tempted to think that perhaps Gandhi’s most important contribution to the life of post-independence India was the very manner of his death. His assassination by Godse, a figure so closely associated with Savarkar and Hindutva, likely played a crucial role in the eclipse of Hindutva for at least three generations. Those three generations provided the breathing space for the newly independent Indian state to create, within the limits of liberalism, institutions that affirmed the secularist values of individual dignity, freedom of expression, separation of powers, and religious freedom. It also provided the space for the more complex Hinduism than Hindutva to develop ways of coexisting with a secularist state.)

At a time like this, when Hindutva has become dominant, it becomes especially relevant to ask: why does Gandhi consider Hindutva evil? And why, despite his many criticisms of liberal secularism, does he fight for a liberal secularist state in India?

The answer to these two questions is relatively straightforward. For Gandhi, justice involves the equality of all beings. The reason he is critical of liberal secularism is because even at its finest, it can only think the equality of humans abstractly, and it cannot at all think the equality of all beings. Because of this, liberal secularism’s equality is premised on the domination of the world, on exploitation of other beings and of other humans. But precisely because liberal secularism is at least driven by an idea of equality, even if a flawed one, he has a respectful critique of it: he senses that it keeps open the possibility of a more unconditional equality, an equality that is more sensitive to difference.

By contrast Hindutva – like white nationalism, or contemporary Zionism and Islamism – is to its very core antithetical to equality.  This is so in four cascading ways.   One, it cannot allow for even the abstract equality of all humans.  it is premised on the superiority and primacy of Hinduism, just as white nationalism as premised on the superiority and primacy of western civilisation. And Gandhi, while a passionate Hindu, is not insecure enough to say that Hinduism is in some objective sense superior to every other religion.

(To ask whether one religion is superior or inferior to another already requires understanding religion primarily sociologically rather than ethically, and this understanding Gandhi would have considered irreligious. Hinduism was the religion he loved most, but to love something or someone most does not require considering them superior to other things or persons).

Two, there is the way it makes the claim that all Hindus are equal. (Its critics often do not recognise enough this ostensibly equalising aspect of Hindutva; they forget that Savarkar opposed caste discrimination). Hindutva makes this claim by confusing equality with identity.  This is a completely wrong way of conceiving equality between sentient beings.

True, equality is identity in mathematics. (‘Equality’ is the first word in Gottlieb Frege’s famous ‘On Sense and Reference,’ and it is asterisked with a footnote: ‘I use this word in the sense of identity, and understand “a=b” to have the sense “a is the same as be” or “a and b coincide.”’) But civil, political, or social equality is not mathematical equality.  Equality between sentient beings is premised on difference: or rather, the equal must remain irreducibly different from each other.

Three, mistaking identity for equality, Hindutva tries to exterminate difference, or at least have only as much difference as is politically expedient.  On the one side, this exterminatory politics involves trying to exterminate difference within what is posited as the putative Hindu community – only those differences are permitted to survive which submit to Hindutva, which do not disagree with it.  But amongst sentient beings (as distinct from, say, rocks), diversity without disagreement cannot be called difference. An early moment in this exterminatory drive is Gandhi’s assassination; today it continues with the assassination of M.M. Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh, and so many others; it continues also in the vicious attacks that Hindutva’s proponents mount on all those who criticise it.

On the other side, this exterminatory politics involves trying to exterminate all that cannot participate in this equality-as-identity of Hindus.  Repeatedly, as we know, this side of exterminatory politics has turned genocidal, and will turn genocidal again.  Indeed, because of its striving for equality-as-identity, there can be no Hindutva – or white nationalism, Zionism or Islamism for that matter – that does not at least contemplate genocide.

Four, because it insists so much on identity, Hindutva cannot have moral courage; it becomes moral cowardice.  Moral courage, as we saw, requires the ability to question oneself, to ask about right and wrong in dogged ways.  And the insistence on thinking of oneself in terms of identity does not allow for this questioning, for this cultivation of difference within oneself.  Such moral cowardice makes it possible for us to rest easy with depriving our fellow citizens of basic rights, as is happening currently in Kashmir with only few murmurs of protests from the rest of India.  Maybe it is their deep and unspoken anxiety about their moral cowardice – about their lack of the deep and intense bravery that is moral courage – which makes proponents of Hindutva substitute for it talk of fi56-inch chests, or righteously shout down, as not only internet trolls but some of our famous TV anchors do, those who show even the slightest moral courage.

For someone like Gandhi, this moral cowardice of phenomena like Hindutva was more troubling than its exterminatory politics.  He would have seen it as the source of its exterminatory politics.  The German-American thinker Hannah Arendt, who herself who barely escaped the German concentration camps, made a somewhat similar observation about Adolf Eichmann, one of those most responsible for overseeing the genocide of Jews.  His evil, she observed, was not so much diabolical or radical as it was banal – springing out of thoughtlessness. One might add: thoughtlessness is the way moral cowardice manifests itself in everyday life – doing without reflection what is socially expected. This thoughtlessness modern society is particularly prone to, not least because of the way it reduces occasions for solitude.

I have already taken up too much time, so I will not say much about the term that has shadowed this talk – nonviolence.  Let me just note: why nonviolence? Very simply put, because evil must be fought in a way that recognises the equality and humanity of the actual bearer of evil.  Nonviolence or satyagraha becomes thus a way of fighting evil that sacrifices the self rather than the other, and by doing so gives moral courage to the other.  Sometimes, as Gandhi himself noted, nonviolence might itself require violence (controversially even at that time, he defends killing stray dogs under certain circumstances), and only moral courage can help one discern whether one is fooling oneself when one uses violence in the name of nonviolence. This is why nonviolence must begin with moral courage – without it, one cannot even distinguish between violence and nonviolence. This may also be why for Gandhi phenomena like Hindutva are evil and irreligious – they make a virtue of moral cowardice.

In concluding, let us ask: how to pay homage to Gandhi. It is usual at times like this to recall the exhortation attributed to Gandhi – Be the change you wish to see in the world. I have not found any such remark in Gandhi, but it is in principle possible he could have said something like it. Still, my sense is that by itself it is a little anodyne. To talk only of change is not faithful enough to Gandhi – one has to talk of a change that brings in questions of courage and evil, or in other words of social justice. So maybe a more meaningful way to pay homage to Gandhi would be to cultivate a conscience, to develop the moral courage to find an evil that we hold ourselves responsible for, and fight it nonviolently.

Ajay Skaria is professor of history at the University of Minnesota. He is the author ofUnconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance and Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India. He is currently working on two books, one tentatively titled Ambedkar’s Revolutions, and the other on Indian secularism.  

Palestine, Turkey and Uzbekistan Issue Commemorative Gandhi Stamps

The stamps were issued to honour Gandhi’s legacy on his 150th birth anniversary.

New Delhi: To commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, Turkey, Palestine and Uzbekistan have released special stamps.

The stamp issued by Uzbekistan’s government is part of the “Outstanding personalities” series of its postal department and a similar stamp was also issued by Turkey. Palestine released a commemorative postage stamp to honour Gandhi’s “legacy and values”.

On Tuesday, Palestinian Authority’s minister of telecommunication and information technology Ishaaq Seder released the stamp in the presence of representative of India in P.A. Sunil Kumar at a ceremony held at the ministry in Ramallah on the West Bank.

Underlining Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence, values, wisdom and vision, Seder said:

“Palestine’s issuance of the commemorative stamp comes in honour of Gandhi’s memory, legacy, and values that guided and shall continue to guide the humanity.”

Kumar noted that the gesture to honour India’s ‘Father of the Nation’ symbolises the strong historical, political and cultural relations that India and Palestine share. He also highlighted Gandhi’s significant contribution to human development, stressing that his teachings of peace, freedom, respect and tolerance are still felt around the world.

Also Read: Why the Youth Should Engage with Gandhi

The Indian mission in Ramallah has organised several events over the past year to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi, drawing a huge response from all sections of Palestinian society, especially youth.

At a cycling event organised in the historic city of Jericho in June, the governor of the city, Jehad Abu al-Asal, said Gandhi is a “real source of inspiration” for the Palestinian society whose messages “will continue to inspire millions of human beings” around the world.

Uzbekistan, Turkey also commemorate Gandhi

According to The Hindu, Uzbekistan’s ministry of information technology and communications and the postal department issued a commemorative Gandhi stamp as a joint initiative. “The postage stamp has been published in the form of a postal block,” said a press note.

The 52 x 37 mm stamp bears the image of Gandhi with the backdrop of historic Indian monuments. It was designed by Sulaimonova U. and the image was sketched by Farmonova S.

The Turkish postal department, in a press release, said: “Gandhi pioneered the independence of the Indian subcontinent, dedicated his life to eradicating racism and discrimination, reducing poverty, making everyone equal and free.”

On October 2, 1947, Why Did Gandhi Say He Was Ashamed That He Was Still Alive?

“You want only the Hindus to remain in India and say that none else should be left behind,” he asked. His message: “If you really want to celebrate my birthday, it is your duty not to let anyone be possessed by madness.”

The plans to officially mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary are on course. At the ground level, however, the ugly face of communalism continues to rear its head in one virulent incident after another. It was an issue which agitated Gandhi until his dying breath and, in fact, was uppermost in his mind during his prayer discourse on October 2, 1947, in Delhi, on the day of his 79th birthday, just one-and-a-half months after independence and Partition.

The Wire brings you a short excerpt from Gandhi’s prayer discourse of October 2, 1947, from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 89, as published online by the Gandhi Heritage Portal.

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Today is my birthday…For me today is [a] day of mourning. I am surprised and also ashamed that I am still alive. I am the same person whose word was honoured by… millions [in] the country. But today nobody listens to me. You want only the Hindus to remain in India and say that none else should be left behind. You may kill the Muslims today; but what will you do tomorrow?

At present we have some Muslims in our midst who belong to us. If we are ready to kill them, let me tell you that I am not for it. Ever since I came to India, I have made it my profession to work for communal harmony, and I wish that though our religions are different we may live in amity[,] like brothers. But today we seem to have become enemies. We assert that there can never be an honest Muslim. A Muslim always remains a worthless fellow.

In such a situation, what place do I have in India and what is the point of my being alive? I have now stopped thinking about living for 125 years. I have stopped thinking in terms of 100 or even 90 years. I am entering my 79th year today; but even that pains me. I would tell those who understand me – and there are quite a few who do understand – that we should give up such bestiality.

I am not worried about what the Muslims do in Pakistan. It is not that the Muslims become great by killing the Hindus[;] they only become brutes. But does it mean that I should also become a beast, a barbarian, insensitive? I would stoutly refuse to do any such thing and I must ask you too not to do so.

If you really want to celebrate my birthday, it is your duty not to let anyone be possessed by madness and if there is any anger in your hearts you must remove it….If you remember this much, I would consider it a good act on your part. This is all I wish to tell you.

What Gandhi Believed Is the Purpose of a Corporation

Gandhi argued that companies should act as trusteeships, valuing social responsibility alongside profits.

Mahatma Gandhi is celebrated across the globe as an idealist who used civil disobedience to frustrate and overthrow British colonialists in India.

The popularity of his nonviolent teachings – which inspired civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela – has obscured another important facet of his teachings: the proper role of business in society.

Gandhi argued that companies should act as trusteeships, valuing social responsibility alongside profits, a view recently echoed by the Business Roundtable.

His views on the purpose of a company have inspired generations of Indian CEOs to build more sustainable businesses. As scholars of global business history, we believe his message should also resonate with corporate executives and entrepreneurs around the world.

Shaped by globalisation

Born in British-ruled India on October 2, 1869, Mohandas K. Gandhi was the product of an increasingly global age.

Our research into Gandhi’s early life and writings suggests his views were radically shaped by the unprecedented opportunities that steamships, railroads and the telegraph provided. The growing ease of travel, the circulation of print media and the increase in trade routes – the hallmark of the first wave of globalisation from 1840 to 1929 – impressed upon Gandhi the myriad of challenges facing society.

These included vast inequality between the rich West and other parts of the world, growing disparities within societies, racial tension and the crippling effects of colonialism and imperialism. It was a world of winners and losers, and Gandhi, although born into an affluent family, dedicated his life to standing up for those without status.

Gandhi (center) with his secretary, Miss Sonia Schlesin, and his colleague Mr. Polak in front of his Law Office, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1905. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The horrors of industrialisation

Gandhi studied law in London, where he encountered the works of radical European and American philosophers such as Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Ruskin – transcendentalists who advocated intuition over logic.

Ruskin’s moving discussion of the ecological horrors of industrialisation, in particular, caught Gandhi’s attention and led him to translate Ruskin’s book Unto This Last into his native Gujarati.

In 1893, Gandhi took up his first job as a barrister in the British colony of South Africa. It was here, not in India, where Gandhi forged his radical political and ethical ideas about business.

His first public speech ever was to a group of ethnic Indian business-people in Pretoria. As Gandhi recalls in his candid autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth:

“I went fairly prepared with my subject, which was about observing truthfulness in business. I had always heard the merchants say that truth was not possible in business. I did not think so then, nor do I now.”

Gandhi returned to British-occupied India in 1915 and continued to develop his ideas on the role of business in society by talking to prominent business leaders such as Sir Ratanji Tata, G.D. Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj.

Today, the children and grandchildren of these early Gandhi disciples continue to lead their family businesses as some of not only India’s but the world’s most recognised conglomerates.

Mahatma Gandhi is greeted by a crowd of female textile workers during a visit to Darwen, Lancashire, September 26, 1931. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The role of business

Gandhi’s views of what trusteeship really means were expressed in great detail in his widely popular Harijan, a weekly periodical that highlighted social and economic problems across India.

Our study of Harijan’s archive from 1933 to 1955 helped us identify four key components of what trusteeship meant for Gandhi:

  • a long-term vision beyond one generation is necessary to build truly sustainable enterprises
  • companies must build reputations that foster trust across transactions and with all sections of society
  • business enterprise must focus on creating value for communities
  • while Gandhi saw the value of private enterprise, he believed the wealth a company creates belongs to society, not just the owner.

Gandhi was murdered in 1948, just after India secured independence. However, his ideas have continued to resonate deeply with some of India’s leading companies.

Interviews conducted for Harvard Business School’s oral history archive turned up surprising evidence in recent decades of Gandhi’s role in guiding modern companies in a variety of countries toward more sustainable business practices.

“We have to take care of all stakeholders,” says billionaire Rahul Bajaj, chairman of one of India’s oldest and largest conglomerates, recalling his grandfather’s association with Gandhi. “You can’t produce a bad-quality and high-cost product and then say, I go to the temple and pray, or that I do charity; that’s no good and that won’t last, because that won’t be a sustainable company.”

Anil Jain, vice chairman and CEO of the second-largest micro-irrigation company in the world, recalls:

“My father was greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi who believed in simplicity – he believed that the real India lives in villages, and unless villages are transformed to become much better than how they are, India cannot really move forward as a country.”

Gandhi’s pacifism made him a leader among civil rights activists- but he was a leader among CEOs too. Photo: Flickr/Robert GLOD CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

What would Gandhi say

Gandhi’s views were constantly evolving in dialogue with the business community, and this is one reason why they remain so relevant today.

Imagine a Gandhian perspective on today’s tech companies. He would perhaps ask proponents of self-driving cars to consider the impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of cab drivers around the world. He would ask proponents of e-commerce to consider the impact on local communities and climate change. And he would ask shareholders whether closing factories to maximise their dividends was worth making communities unsustainable.

Gandhi didn’t have had all the answers, but in our opinion, he was always asking the right questions. For today’s business leaders and budding entrepreneurs, his wise words on trusteeship are a good place to start.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hundreds of Prisoners to Be Released on Gandhi Jayanti

Although final list is still under making, 600 prisoners are speculated to be released.

New Delhi: Several hundred prisoners who have not been convicted for murder, rape and corruption, will be released from jails across India on October 2 to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, officials said on Sunday.

The number of prisoners to be released on Gandhi Jayanti could be around 600 and the final list is being prepared by the Union home ministry in close coordination with state governments and the Union Territory administrations.

According to a home ministry official, under the scheme for special remission to prisoners to commemorate 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, so far 1,424 prisoners have been released by states and Union territories in two phases – on October 2, 2018 and April 6, 2019.

The third phase of release is due on October 2 and the action is underway by states and UTs, the official said.

Prisoners, including politicians, who have been convicted in cases of murder, rape or corruption, will not be released as part of the amnesty scheme announced by the government last year for the year-long celebrations to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

Women convicts aged 55 years and above and male convicts of 60 years or more, who have completed half of their sentence, and a few other categories of prisoners in jails across the country will be released under the amnesty scheme, the official said.

Also read: Western Railways to Observe Gandhi Jayanti as ‘Vegetarian Day’

Transgender persons of 55 years of age and above, who have completed half of their actual sentence period, without counting the period of general remission earned by them and disabled convicts with 70 per cent disability and more, duly certified by a medical board, who have completed half of their actual sentence period will be eligible for release.

However, the special remission is not to be granted to persons convicted for an offence for which the sentence is death penalty or where death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment.

The other categories of prisoners who will not be considered for amnesty are: persons convicted for an offence for which punishment of death has been specified as one of the punishments, persons convicted for an offence for which punishment of life imprisonment has been specified as one of the punishments.

Those convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985 (TADA), the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA), Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), rhe Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO), Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 (FEMA), Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015 will not be released.

(PTI)