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By
Dr.Nuzhat Ara
Lotus Social Welfare Trust Interantional
Email
lotustrust@hotmail.com lotustrust@yahoo.com
50 years of Independence.
5,000 years of history.
This is India's story.
The Path
shown by Bapu is the solution to the present problems". Mary I. VAHANATI,
7th class, S.N. Kansagara School, Rajkot, India.
Prize
winner in the running inter-school drawing competition "GANDHI AS I SEE
HIM", Rajkot, India, 1991, organized by Gandhi Information Center, Germany
n the conventional narrative, Indian history begins
with the birth of the Indus Valley Civilization in such sites as Mohenjo-Daro,
Harappa, and Lothal, and the coming of the Aryans. These two phases are usually
described as the pre-Vedic and Vedic perio ds. It is in the Vedic period that
Hinduism first arose: this is the time to which the Vedas are dated. In the
fifth century, large parts of India were united under Ashoka; he also converted
to Buddhism, and it is in his reign that Buddhism spread to o ther parts of
Asia. It is in the reign of the Mauryas that Hinduism took the shape that
fundamentally informs the religion down to the present day. Successor states
were more fragmented. Islam first came to India in the eighth century, and by
the eleve nth century had firmly established itself in India as a political
force; the North Indian dynasties of the Lodhis, Tughlaqs, and numerous others,
whose remains are visible in Delhi and scattered elsewhere around North India,
were finally succeeded by the Mughal empire, under which India once again
achieved a large measure of political unity.
The
European presence in India dates to the seventeenth century, and it is in the
latter part of this century that the Mughal empire began to disintegrate, paving
the way for regional states. In the contest for supremacy, the English emerged
'victors', their rule marked by the conquests at the battlefields of Plassey and
Buxar. The Rebellion of 1857-58, which sought to restore Indian supremacy, was
crushed; and with the subsequent crowning of Victoria as Empress of India, the
incorporation of India into the empire was complete. By the early part of the
twentieth century, a nationalist movement had emerged; and b y 1919-20, Mohandas
Karamchand ('Mahatma') Gandhi had emerged as the virtually undisputed leader of
this movement. Successive campaigns had the effect of driving the British out of
India in 1947, but not before they had partitioned it, and carved out th e state
of Pakistan -- later dismembered into Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The
gradual emergence of India as a self-governing entity had been partly envisioned
in the Government of India Act of 1935, and following India's independence in
1947, the Constituent Assembly deliberated over the precise constitutional
future of India. On 26 January 1950, India became a Republic, and the
Constitution of India was promulgated. The Indian National Congress, which had
led the country to freedom, remained the largest and most influential party
under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru, who served as India's Prime Minister
from 1947 to 1964. His 'regime' was marked by the advent of five-year plans,
designed to bring big science and industry to India; in Nehru's own language,
steel mills and dams were to be the temples of modern India. Relations with
Pakistan remained chilling, and the purported friendship of India and China
proved to be something of a hoax, when China invaded India's borders in 1962.
Nehru
was succeeded at his death by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who led the country to
something of a victory over Pakistan in 1965; he could not even relish the
thought of triumph, dying of a heart attack the day after the treaty was signed.
He was succeeded by Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter. By the late 1960s, Indira
Gandhi had engineered a split in the Congress, as the only means to ensure her
political survival, and the Congress had been reduced to a sh adow of its former
self. In 1971, India crushed Pakistan in a short war that also saw the birth of
Bangladesh, and Indira was now at the helm of her powers. But the shine wore
off, and as domestic problems mounted and popular movements directed at her b
egan to show their effect, she resorted to more repressive measures. An internal
emergency, which placed almost the entire opposition behind bars, was proclaimed
in May 1975, and only removed in 1977; and the same opposition, which hastily
convened to ch art its strategy, achieved in delivering the Congress party its
first loss in national elections. This government, serving various political
interests, lasted a mere three years, and Indira Gandhi rode a large wave of
victory in 1980. But she did not li ve to complete her term: shot by her own
Sikh bodyguards, who sought to avenge the destruction unleashed upon the Golden
Temple, the venerable shrine of the Sikh faith, by Indian government troops
given the task of flushing out the terrorists holed in th e shrine, she was
succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress has since held power, but for
another interim period of less than two years between 1989 and 1991, and is now
under the helm of Narasimha Rao.
Mahatma
Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was
born in the town of Porbander in the state of what is now Gujarat on 2 October
1869. He had his schooling in nearby Rajkot, where his father served as the
adviser or prime minister to the local ruler. Though India was then under
British rule, over 500 kingdoms, principalities, and states were allowed
autonomy in domestic and internal affairs: these were the so-called 'native
states'. Rajkot was one such state.
Gandhi later recorded the early
years of his life in his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. His father died before
Gandhi could finish his schooling, and at thirteen he was married to kasturba
[or Kasturbai], who was even younger. In 1888
Gandhi set sail for England, where he had decided to pursue a degree in law.
Though his elders objected, Gandhi could not be prevented from leaving; and it
is said that his mother, a devout woman, made him promise that he would keep
away from wine, women, and meat during his stay abroad. Gandhi left behind his
son Harilal, then a few months old.
In London, Gandhi encountered
theosophists, vegetarians, and others who were disenchanted not only with
industrialism, but with the legacy of Enlightenment thought. They themselves
represented the fringe elements of English society. Gandhi was powerfully
attracted to them, as he was to the texts of the major religious traditions; and
ironically it is in London that he was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita. Here,
too, Gandhi showed determination and single-minded pursuit of his purpose, and
accomplished his objective of finishing his degree from the Inner Temple. He was
called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court of London; but
later that year he left for India.
After one year of a none too
successful law practice, Gandhi decided to accept an offer from an Indian
businessman in South Africa, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a legal adviser.
Unbeknown to him, this was to become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and altogether
Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over twenty years. The Indians who had
been living in South Africa were without political rights, and were generally
known by the derogatory name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness
of the frightening force and fury of European racism, and how far Indians were
from being considered full human beings, when he when thrown out of a
first-class railway compartment car, though he held a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg
From this political awakening Gandhi was to emerge as the leader of the Indian
community, and it is in South Africa that he first coined the term satyagraha
to signify his theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to
describe himself preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be attained other than through ahimsa
(non-violence, love) and brahmacharya
(celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series
of experiments to forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner as to make the
oppressor and the oppressed alike recognize their common bonding and humanity:
as he recognized, freedom is only freedom when it is indivisible. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa he was to detail the struggles of the
Indians to claim their rights, and their resistance to oppressive legislation
and executive measures, such as the imposition of a poll tax on them, or the
declaration by the government that all non-Christian marriages were to be
construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi authored a short
treatise entitled Hind Swaraj or
Indian Home Rule, where he all but initiated the critique, not only of
industrial civilization, but of modernity in all its aspects.
Gandhi returned to India in early
1915, and was never to leave the country again except for a short trip that took
him to Europe in 1931. Though he was not completely unknown in India, Gandhi
followed the advice of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it upon himself
to acquire a familiarity with Indian conditions. He traveled widely for one
year. Over the next few years, he was to become involved in numerous local
struggles, such as at Champaran in Bihar, where workers on indigo plantations
complained of oppressive working conditions, and at Ahmedabad, where a dispute
had broken out between management and workers at textile mills. His
interventions earned Gandhi a considerable reputation, and his rapid ascendancy
to the helm of nationalist politics is signified by his leadership of the
opposition to repressive legislation (known as the "Rowlatt Acts") in
1919. His saintliness was not uncommon, except in someone like him who immersed
himself in politics, and by this time he had earned from no less a person than
Rabindranath Tagore, India's most well-known writer, the title of Mahatma,
or 'Great Soul'. When 'disturbances' broke out in the Punjab, leading to the
massacre of a large crowd of unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar
and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote the report of the Punjab Congress Inquiry
Committee. Over the next two years, Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation
movement, which called upon Indians to withdraw from British institutions, to
return honors conferred by the British, and to learn the art of self-reliance;
though the British administration was at places paralyzed, the movement was
suspended in February 1922 when a score of Indian policemen were brutally killed
by a large crowd at Chauri Chaura, a small market town in the United Provinces.
Gandhi himself was arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of sedition,
and sentenced to imprisonment for six years. At The Great Trial, as it is known
to his biographers, Gandhi delivered a masterful indictment of British rule.
Owing
to his poor health, Gandhi was released from prison in 1925. Over the following
years, he worked hard to preserve Hindu-Muslim relations, and in 1924 he
observed, from his prison cell, a 21-day fast when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out
at Kohat, a military barracks on the Northwest Frontier. This was to be of his
many major public fasts, and in 1932 he was to commence the so-called Epic Fast
unto death, since he thought of "separate electorates" for the
oppressed class of what were then called untouchables
(or Harijans in Gandhi's vocabulary, and dalits in today's language) as a
retrograde measure meant to produce permanent divisions within Hindu society.
Gandhi earned the hostility of Ambedkar, the leader of the untouchables,
but few doubted that Gandhi was genuinely interested in removing the serious
disabilities from which they suffered, just as no one doubt that Gandhi never
accepted the argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate elements
in Indian society. These were some of the concerns most prominent in Gandhi's
mind, but he was also to initiate a constructive programme for social reform.
Gandhi had ideas -- mostly sound -- on every subject, from hygiene and nutrition
to education and labor, and he relentlessly pursued his ideas in one of the many
newspapers which he founded. Indeed, were Gandhi known for nothing else in
India, he would still be remembered as one of the principal figures in the
history of Indian journalism. In early 1930, as the nationalist movement was
revived, the Indian National Congress, the preeminent body of nationalist
opinion, declared that it would now be satisfied with nothing short of complete
independence (purna swaraj). Once the
clarion call had been issued, it was perforce necessary to launch a movement of
resistance against British rule. On March 2, Gandhi addressed a letter to the
Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him that unless Indian demands were met, he would
be compelled to break the "salt laws". Predictably, his letter was
received with bewildered amusement, and accordingly Gandhi set off, on the early
morning of March 12, with a small group of followers towards Dandi on the sea.
They arrived there on April 5th: Gandhi picked up a small lump of natural salt,
and so gave the signal to hundreds of thousands of people to similarly defy the
law, since the British exercised a monopoly on the production and sale of salt.
This was the beginning of the civil disobedience movement: Gandhi himself was
arrested, and thousands of others were also hauled into jail. It is to break
this deadlock that Irwin agreed to hold talks with Gandhi, and subsequently the
British agreed to hold a Round Table Conference in London to negotiate the
possible terms of Indian independence. Gandhi went to London in 1931 and met
some of his admirers in Europe, but the negotiations proved inconclusive. On his
return to India, he was once again arrested.
For the next few years, Gandhi
would be engaged mainly in the constructive reform of Indian society. He had
vowed upon undertaking the salt march that he would not return to Sabarmati
Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he had made his home, if India did not attain its
independence, and in the mid-1930s he established himself in a remote village,
in the dead center of India, by the name of Segaon [known as Sevagram]. It is to
this obscure village, which was without electricity or running water, that
India's political leaders made their way to engage in discussions with Gandhi
about the future of the independence movement, and it is here that he received
visitors such as Margaret Sanger, the well-known American proponent of
birth-control. Gandhi also continued to travel throughout the country, taking
him wherever his services were required.
One such visit was to the Northwest
Frontier, where he had in the imposing Pathan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known by
the endearing term of "Frontier Gandhi", and at other times as Badshah
[King] Khan), a fervent disciple. At the outset of World War II, Gandhi and
the Congress leadership assumed a position of neutrality: while clearly critical
of fascism, they could not find it in themselves to support British imperialism.
Gandhi was opposed by Subhas Chandra Bose, who had served as President of the
Congress, and who took to the view that Britain's moment of weakness was India's
moment of opportunity. When Bose ran for President of the Congress against
Gandhi's wishes and triumphed against Gandhi's own candidate, he found that
Gandhi still exercised influence over the Congress Working Committee, and that
it was near impossible to run the Congress if the cooperation of Gandhi and his
followers could not be procured. Bose tendered his resignation, and shortly
thereafter was to make a dramatic escape from India to find support among the
Japanese and the Nazis for his plans to liberate India.
In 1942, Gandhi issued the last call
for independence from British rule. On the grounds of what is now known as August
Kranti Maidan, he delivered a stirring speech, asking every Indian to lay
down their life, if necessary, in the cause of freedom. He gave them this
mantra: "Do or Die"; at the same time, he asked the British to Quit
India The response of the British
government was to place Gandhi under arrest, and virtually the entire Congress
leadership was to find itself behind bars, not to be released until after the
conclusion of the war.
A few months after Gandhi and
Kasturba had been placed in confinement in the Aga Khan's Palace in Pune,
Kasturba passed away: this was a terrible blow to Gandhi, following closely on
the heels of the death of his private secretary of many years, the gifted
Mahadev Desai. In the period from 1942 to 1945, the Muslim League, which
represented the interest of certain Muslims and by now advocated the creation of
a separate homeland for Muslims, increasingly gained the attention of the
British, and supported them in their war effort. The new government that came to
power in Britain under Clement Atlee was committed to the independence of India,
and negotiations for India's future began in earnest. Sensing that the political
leaders were now craving for power, Gandhi largely distanced himself from the
negotiations. He declared his opposition to the vivisection of India. It is
generally conceded, even by his detractors, that the last years of his life were
in some respects his finest. He walked from village to village in riot-torn
Noakhali, where Hindus were being killed in retaliation for the killing of
Muslims in Bihar, and nursed the wounded and consoled the widowed; and in
Calcutta he came to constitute, in the famous words of the last viceroy,
Mountbatten, a "one-man boundary force" between Hindus and Muslims.
The ferocious fighting in Calcutta came to a halt, almost entirely on account of
Gandhi's efforts, and even his critics were wont to speak of the Gandhi's
'miracle of Calcutta'. When the moment of freedom came, on 15 August 1947,
Gandhi was nowhere to be seen in the capital, though Nehru and the entire
Constituent Assembly were to salute him as the architect of Indian independence,
as the 'father of the nation'.
The last few months of Gandhi's
life were to be spent mainly in the capital city of Delhi. There he divided his
time between the 'Bhangi colony', where the sweepers and the lowest of the low
stayed, and Birla House, the residence of one of the wealthiest men in India and
one of the benefactors of Gandhi's ashrams. Hindu and Sikh refugees had streamed
into the capital from what had become Pakistan, and there was much resentment,
which easily translated into violence, against Muslims. It was partly in an
attempt to put an end to the killings in Delhi, and more generally to the
bloodshed following the partition, which may have taken the lives of as many as
1 million people, besides causing the dislocation of no fewer than 11 million,
that Gandhi was to commence the last fast unto death of his life. The fast was
terminated when representatives of all the communities signed a statement that
they were prepared to live in "perfect amity", and that the lives,
property, and faith of the Muslims would be safeguarded. A few days later, a
bomb exploded in Birla House where Gandhi was holding his evening prayers, but
it caused no injuries. However, his assassin, a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin by the
name of Nathuram Godse, was not so easily deterred. Gandhi, quite
characteristically, refused additional security, and no one could defy his wish
to be allowed to move around unhindered. In the early evening hours of 30
January 1948, Gandhi met with India's Deputy Prime Minister and his close
associate in the freedom struggle, Vallabhai Patel, and then proceeded to his
prayers.
That evening, as Gandhi's time-piece,
which hung from one of the folds of his dhoti [loin-cloth], was to reveal to him, he was
uncharacteristically late to his prayers, and he fretted about his inability to
be punctual. At 10 minutes past 5 o'clock, with one hand each on the shoulders
of Abha and Manu, who were known as his 'walking sticks', Gandhi commenced his
walk towards the garden where the prayer meeting was held. As he was about to
mount the steps of the podium, Gandhi folded his hands and greeted his audience
with a namaskar; at that moment, a young man came up to him and roughly pushed
aside Manu. Nathuram Godse bent down in the gesture of an obeisance, took a
revolver out of his pocket, and shot Gandhi three times in his chest.
Bloodstains appeared over Gandhi's white woolen shawl; his hands still folded in
a greeting, Gandhi blessed his assassin: He
Ram! He Ram!
As Gandhi fell, his faithful
time-piece struck the ground, and the hands of the watch came to a standstill.
They showed, as they had done before, the precise time: 5:12 P.M.
