India (19 page)

To make democracy work, Jaya Prakash Narayan suggests, to undo tyranny, it is only necessary for India to return truly to itself. The
Ramraj
that Gandhi offered is no longer simply Independence, India without the British; it is people’s government, the reestablishment of the ancient Indian village republic, a turning away from the secretariats of Delhi and the state capitals. But this is saying nothing; this is to leave India where it is. What looks like a political programme is only clamour and religious excitation. People’s government and that idea of the ancient Indian village republic (which may be a fanciful idea, a nationalist myth surviving from the days of the Independence struggle) are not the same thing. Old India has its special cruelties; not all the people are people. And (though Narayan doesn’t seem aware of the contradiction) it is really against that old India that, later in his speech, he protests.

India is to be returned to itself, to surrender to its inmost impulses; at the same time India is to be saved from itself. The synthesis of Marxism and Gandhianism which Jaya Prakash Narayan is thought by his admirers to have achieved is in fact a kind of nonsense; he offers as politics a version of an old religious exaltation; and it has made him part of the sterility he is protesting against.

A passionate Marxist journalist – waiting for the revolution,
rejecting all ‘palliatives’ – told me that the ‘workers’ of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the ‘system’ that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving,
karma
, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of ‘the people’ then engaging in the pleasures of ‘folk’ activities – the Marxist journalist’s word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression – even the Marxists’ vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of
Ramraj
.

An extraordinary feature of Indian opposition right-wing parties in exile has been their insistence on the antiquity and glory of India. In April 1976, in London, at an ‘International Conference on Restoration of Democracy in India’, the audience heard that Alexander the Great, on his march into India (327
BC)
, had not defeated King Porus of the Punjab. Western histories had lied for two thousand years: Porus had defeated Alexander and compelled him to retreat. Half true about Alexander in India; but the topic, in the circumstances, was unexpected. Yet it was in character. In the programme booklet for the conference an Indian merchant in the Dutch West Indies (secure in someone else’s economy and political system, the creation of another civilization) had taken space to print this quotation from Swami Vivekananda, the Vedantist who at the turn of the century exported Hinduism to the United States.

Protest! The restoration of democracy!

‘To be critical and not be swept away in a flood of archaic emotions is a much greater effort for us Indians (and I include myself),’ Dr Sudhir Kakar, the psychotherapist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, writes in a recent letter. ‘The Indian intellectual’s struggle is on two fronts – inner and outer – for it has been our developmental fate that, in contrast to say France or Germany, it has always been earliest childhood that was seen to be the golden period of individual life history, just as the remotest past is considered to be the golden age of Indian history.’

So, in all the distress of India (now a fact of life, and immutable), protest looks back to the past, to what is thought to have been violated, what is known to be lost. Like childhood, this golden Indian past is not to be possessed by inquiry; it is only to be ecstatically contemplated. The past is a religious idea, clouding intellect and painful perception, numbing distress in bad times. And it is into this past – achingly close in the heart – that Gandhi has been absorbed. He too has become part of what India has lost; he is himself the object of nostalgic memories. To possess him, or to act in his name, is to have the illusion of regaining purity and the past; and in order to possess him, men have only to look inward. Everyone in India is Gandhian; everyone has his own idea of Gandhianism, as everyone has his own intimation of the
Ramraj
he offered.

In 1971, after she split the Congress, Mrs Gandhi called a midterm election. I followed this election in one constituency, Ajmer, in the semidesert state of Rajasthan. The candidate standing against Mrs Gandhi’s man was a blind old Congressman who had taken part in the Independence struggle and had gone to jail. He was a little vain of having gone to jail, and spoke as though the young people coming up who hadn’t gone to jail (and couldn’t have, because the British had gone away) couldn’t be said to have ‘a record of service’.

He was a Gandhian and he wore his elegant homespun and he was honoured and he was a man of the utmost probity, and quite rich too, as a lawyer specializing in land-revenue cases. He told me that poor peasants sought him out from all over the state. His record as a legislator after Independence was blameless but null, though he thought that his stand on matters like cow-protection could bear examination by anyone; and he said he had also been connected with a campaign for the correct labelling of certain cooking oils. If he hadn’t done more, it was perhaps because he didn’t see that there was more for him to do; his main duty was, as it were, to keep the Gandhian prayer wheel turning.

Rajasthan is a state of famine and drought, and it had just been scourged by an eight-year drought; part of the state had been stripped of trees and turned to desert. But during his campaign (or what I saw of it) the old Congressman made no promises to anybody, and offered no ideas; all he offered was himself and his Gandhianism and his record of service. (There were, it should be said, many complex caste matters to be straightened out.)

I asked him one day, as we were racing across the desert in his
campaign jeep, what it was about Gandhi that he particularly admired. He said without hesitation that he admired Gandhi for going to Buckingham Palace in 1931 in a dhoti; that act ‘put the picture of poor India before the world’. As though the world didn’t know. But to the old Congressman India’s poverty was a special thing, and I got the impression that, as a Gandhian, he didn’t want to see anyone spoiling it. The old man disliked machines; he told me he had heard that people in the West had begun to turn against them as well; and – though in a famine region, and though asking people for votes – he strongly disapproved of having piped water and electricity taken to the villages. Piped water and electricity were ‘morally bad’, especially for the village women. They would be denied valuable ‘exercise’ and become ‘sluggish’, and their health would suffer. No more fetching ‘healthy water from the well’; no more corn-grinding with the old-fashioned quern. The good old ways were going; everything was being Westernized.

The old Congressman lost the election, and lost it badly. The reason was simple. He had no organization; the local Congress organization (which he had once manipulated) was solidly behind Mrs Gandhi and her candidate. The old man had forgotten about that. On the afternoon the results were announced I went to see him. He was sitting on a string bed in his drawing room, dressed in white, grieving, supported in his loss by a few silent followers sitting flat on the terrazzo floor. After decades of power, he had been overthrown. And in his defeat the old Congressman saw the death of Gandhian India, the India where, as he defined it, people believed that ‘means should be as fair as the end’.

‘There are no morals now,’ the old man said. ‘The Machiavellian politics of Europe have begun to touch our own politics and we will go down.’

Blind to his own political nullity, the idle self-regard of his own Gandhian concept of service, he was yet half right about India, for a reason he would not have understood.

‘Archaic emotions’, ‘nostalgic memories’: when these were
awakened by Gandhi, India became free. But the India created in this way had to stall. Gandhi took India out of one kind of
Kal Yug
, one kind of Black Age; his success inevitably pushed it back into another.

G
ANDHI LIVED TOO
long. Returning to India from South Africa in 1915, at the age of forty-five, holding himself aloof from the established politicians of the time, involving himself with communities and groups hitherto untouched by politics, taking up purely local causes here and there (a land tax, a mill strike), he then very quickly, from 1919 to 1930, drew all India together in a new kind of politics.

Not everyone approved of Gandhi’s methods. Many were dismayed by the apparently arbitrary dictates of his ‘inner voice’. And in the political stalemate of the 1930s – for which some Indians still blame him: Gandhi’s unpredictable politics, they say, his inability to manage the forces he had released, needlessly lengthened the Independence struggle, delayed self-government by twenty-five years, and wasted the lives and talents of many good men – in the 1930s the management of Indian politics passed into other hands.

Gandhi himself (like Tolstoy, his early inspiration) declined into a long and ever more private mahatmahood. The obsessions were always made public, but they were personal, like his – again almost Tolstoyan – sexual anxieties in old age, after forty years of abstinence. This period of decline was the period of his greatest fame; so that, even while he lived, ‘he became his admirers’. He became his emblems, his holy caricature, the object of competitive piety. Knowledge of the man as a man was lost; mahatmahood submerged all the ambiguities and the political creativity of his early years, the
modernity (in India) of so much of his thought. He was claimed in the end by old India, that very India whose political deficiencies he had seen so clearly, with his South African eye.

What was new about him then was not the semi-religious nature of his politics; that was in the Indian tradition. What made him new was the nature of the battles he had fought in South Africa. And what was most revolutionary and un-Indian about him was what he left unexpressed and what perhaps, as an Indian, he had no means of expressing: his racial sense, the sense of belonging to a people specifically of the Indian subcontinent, that the twenty years in South Africa had taught him.

The racial sense is alien to Indians. Race is something they detect about others, but among themselves they know only the subcaste or caste, the clan, the gens, the language group. Beyond that they cannot go; they do not see themselves as belonging to an Indian race; the words have no meaning. Historically, this absence of cohesiveness has been the calamity of India. In South Africa, as Gandhi soon saw, it was the great weakness of the small Indian community, embattled but fragmented, the wealthy Gujarati Moslem merchants calling themselves ‘Arabs’, the Indian Christians claiming only their Christianity, both separating themselves from the indentured labourers of Madras and Bihar, all subjected as Indians to the same racial laws.

If it was in London as a law student that Gandhi decided that he was a Hindu by conviction, it was in South Africa that he added to this the development of a racial consciousness, that consciousness without which a disadvantaged or persecuted minority can be utterly destroyed and which with Gandhi in South Africa was like an extension of his religious sense: teaching responsibility and compassion, teaching that no man was an island, and that the dignity of the high was bound up with the dignity of the low.

‘His Hindu nationalism spoils everything,’ Tolstoy had said of Gandhi in 1910, while Gandhi was still in South Africa. It is obvious in Gandhi’s autobiography, this growing, un-Indian awareness of an
Indian group identity. It is there in his early dismay at the indifference of the Gujarati merchants to proposed anti-Indian legislation; in his shock at the appearance in his office of an indentured Tamil labourer who had been beaten up by his employer; and the shock and dismay are related to his own humiliations during his first journey to Pretoria in 1893, when he was twenty-three. Gandhi never forgot that night journey to Pretoria; more than thirty years later he spoke of it as the turning point of his life. But the racial theme is never acknowledged as such in the autobiography. It is always blurred over by religious self-searching, ‘experiments with truth’, attempts at the universal; though for twenty years, until early middle age, he was literally a racial leader, fighting racial battles; and it was as a racial leader that he returned to India, an oddity among the established politicians, to whom ‘Indian’ was only a word, each man with his own regional or caste power base.