Defending Gandhiji’s Legacy

 — Mahatma Gandhi

Now that last week’s dust-up over Joseph Lelyveld’s new book on Mahatma Gandhi has subsided, it’s worth taking stock of the lessons learned.  Whatever the historical validity of the book’s claims about Gandhiji’s sexual habits, racial views, political skills or personal treatment of close associates, the controversy has had the salutary effect of illuminating both the virtues and vices of the Indian polity.

Certainly among the latter is the country’s regular but disgraceful practice of banning books that touch on sensitive issues or arouse passions in certain quarters.  Concerned about the potential for upheaval among its sizeable Muslim populace, India quickly banned native-son Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988.  In 2003, the state of West Bengal prohibited the autographical novel, Dwikhondito, by controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin.  (Five years later, government authorities pressured Nasrin to leave India, an act that former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, among others, criticized as “a severe blow to the fundamental principles of secularism, democracy and freedom of expression on which the Indian state is founded.”)  In the same year, the state of Maharashtra banned American writer James W. Laine’s biography of the 17^th century Maratha king Shivaji and even tried to have him arrested.

These illiberal tendencies reached full flower last year:

• A fictionalized biography of Congress Party supreme Sonia Gandhi was banned;
• Government officials helped put the kibosh on plans to make a movie based on Indian Summer: The Secret History of the En d of an Empire, a non-fiction book that sheds light on Jawaharlal Nehru’s furtive relationship with the wife of the British Raj’s last viceroy;
• An outcry organized by the family of Bal Thackeray, a Hindu nationalist politician, forced the University of Mumbai to drop Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such a Long Journey, a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, from its English-language syllabus;
• And Arundhati Roy, a perennial bete noire to the political establishment and a Man Booker Prize-winner for her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, was charged with sedition for her remarks on the Kashmir dispute.

Given this track record, it was predictable that Indian politicians would stumble over themselves as they raced to denounce Lelyveld’s book.  Narendra Modi, the chief minister in Gujarat, Gandhi’s birthplace, denounced it as a “perversion,” and accused Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times, of indulging “in the most reprehensible act by hurting the sentiments of millions of people.”  The Congress Party leader in Gujarat joined in and urged that the Indian federal government also take action.  The entire state assembly in Gujarat then voted unanimously to ban the volume.  Leaders in Maharashtra were vocal making similar noises.

M. Veerappa Moily, the Indian minister for law and justice, then took up the cudgels.  He condemned the book as “baseless, sensational and heresy and denigrating a national leader.” He intimated that the central government would follow Gujarat’s example and would also enact a law making it a crime to desecrate Gandhiji’s honor.  With all of the ignominy of the blasphemy law in neighboring Pakistan, it is a sad irony that India’s senior law enforcement official would even suggest that a secular government presiding over a multi-cultural country should be the arbiter of what constitutes heresy.  One senses, however, that the irony was entirely lost on Mr. Moily. 

Fortunately, India’s vibrant civil society leapt into the fray, once again rescuing the country’s honor from the instincts of its political class.  The Times of India, for example, editorialized that “such politics betrays an insecure touchiness about our icons that’s out of place in a mature democracy professing to uphold freedom of expression…Evidently, the more India marches ahead, the more illiberal its politicians seem to get.” Similarly, The Indian Express noted that “what’s truly abhorrent, even though it has been seen over and over again in India, is the alacrity with which we ban and proscribe books. Instead of letting people judge Lelyveld’s book, and discard it if the scholarship fails to persuade, the state declares it incendiary and closes off the possibility of reading it at all.”  The Hindu likewise asserted that “the Mahatma would have been the first to protest against any suggestion of an obscurantist ban.”  Perhaps the most eloquent protest was registered by The Deccan Herald:

“Banning a book is the most undemocratic way of dealing with ideas. India, which has a tradition of tolerance and intellectual dissent cannot be any better with the tendency of politicians to drive away books for their narrow political ends…. [They] have tainted the country’s image as a liberal, plural and tolerant society.”

Members of the Mahatma’s family also weighed in, with grandson Rajmohan Gandhi describing calls for a book ban as “wrong from every point of view, and doubly so in light of Gandhi’s commitment to freedom of speech.”  And great-grandson Tushar Gandhi claimed that a ban would “be a greater insult to Bapu that that book or the author might have intended.”

This backlash has stilled for now calls for extending the book ban beyond Gujarat, which once again reveals itself as an odd admixture of capitalist dynamism and cultural intolerance.  For all of its brief sound and fury, the Lelyveld controversy has at least served to burnish India’s credentials as Asia’s brightest exemplar of democratic freedoms.  Yet the affair might serve an even more constructive purpose if it spurs national introspection into the full dimensions of Gandhiji’s legacy. 

Much as the simplicity of Mani Bhavan, Gandhi’s residence in Mumbai, is now overshadowed by Antila, Mukesh Ambani’s opulent 27-storey abode, Gandhian ideals of austerity are honored more in the breach than in the observance.  This is not to say that an India now becoming a hotspot of global consumerism should revert to a nation of homespun cloth and do-it-yourself salt production.  But a thoughtful piercing of the hagiographic aura that envelopes Gandhi would be a cathartic national exercise, allowing for an honest appraisal of the legacy wrought by the Mahatma and the other founding fathers of independent India.  With the nation in the grip of food inflation, perhaps a good place to begin is by inquiring into how Gandhi’s romantization of the agrarian lifestyle (along with Nehru’s industrialization policies) have contributed to the present dysfunctions of the rural sector.