Gandhism

Gandhism is an informal reference to the core inspiration and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a body of ideas and principles that best describe not only the inspiration, vision and the life work of Mohandas K. Gandhi, but what Gandhi's ideas, words and actions meant to common Indians and human beings around the world, and how they used them for guidance as they built their own future.

Gandhism focuses on the core principles of peace, ahimsa (non violence), self-reliance, freedom and justice.

In Nehru's India

Gandhi's death in 1948 left a nascent, independent India devastated. Hundreds of millions of people thirsted for the security and leadership which the little old man inspired. And though India was finally independent, the country's battles against poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, violence and disease were only beginning.

The country's young, energetic Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a student of Gandhi was given this task of leadership. Nehru always claimed his work through 17 years of premiership to have been inspired by Gandhi's vision for India.

Nehru was a sympathizer of socialist thought and beliefs. But he did not agree with Lenin, Mao Zedong and Stalin in their interpretations of inevitable class warfare. Although land reform was one of his first priorities, distributing land to tens of millions of landless, poor farmers, no indiscriminate seizures of property or victimization took place. Famous was the Bhoodan movement of the 1950s, where social workers (famously the socialist Jaya Prakash Narayan) encouraged landlords and capitalists to give land to landless farmers by their own free will, out of goodwill for their poorer, fellow Indians, and for the sake of the country's progress and social harmony. This system eradicated the force, violence and hate-filled propaganda of the Communists in the USSR and China, even though progress, while significant, was slow as well.

Nehru also embraced an internationalist foreign policy committed to peaceful diplomacy as the means of resolving disputes between nations. He was a great, early champion of the United Nations, and a founding leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, which grew to over 120 member nations across Asia and Africa, who did not want the polarization and militarization of the US-USSR Cold War.

Inspired by Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement was Nehru's strong opposition to continuing British and French imperialism in parts of Asia and Africa. Nehru backed Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Ben Bala of Algeria in their respective struggles for independence.

However, Nehru's interpretations of Gandhi's teachings were considerably more deeply influenced by his own instincts and personal adherence to fabian socialism, an idealist outlook of the world. Nehru was so committed to peaceful dialogue to resolve disputes, he neglected India's defense services. When China incursed into Indian territory in Kashmir and the Northeast, Nehru did not respond by taking corrective military action to secure the nation's borders. He neglected the advice of his own Ministers and commanders, and did not prepare a practical defensive strategy to a possible Chinese invasion. The latter occurred in September 1962, precipitating in the Sino-Indian War. Thousands of Indian soldiers were killed by an onslaught of Chinese forces, especially as the supplies were slow in coming and Nehru's misjudgments had left the Army in no position to mount a swift response. Despite the terrible leadership and logistics, Indian soldiers preferred fighting to death in extreme, high altitudes and treacherous terrain, than retreat. China's forces occupied the northeast portion of Kashmir known as Aksai Chin and swept right into the major state of Assam, threatening major Indian cities. Declaring a ceasefire, China withdrew from the northeastern states to the international boundary, the disputed McMahon Line, but did not relinquish their seizures in Kashmir, which to this day are subject of conflict and dispute. India's perceived military weakness was noted by its other rival, Pakistan, and led to the 1965 Indo-Pak War over Kashmir.

Nehru was also hypocritical in his implementation of an anti-colonial foreign policy. Although only too willing to condemn the United Kingdom and France and Israel for the 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal, he chose not to condemn the USSR's invasion of Hungary in 1957-58 to repress a pro-democracy revolt. Although personally committed to neutrality, Nehru's socialist ambitions drew him closer to the USSR, and more critical of the United States.

In the relations between Hindus and Muslims, Nehru was all too willing to attack the discrimination of lower caste Hindus and women, but unwilling to attack the same amongst Muslims. Gandhi's sacrifices in ensuring that Muslims were free and protected in India despite the savages of partition and the creation of Pakistan were translated by Nehru all too willingly as viewing the Hindu majority as eternally threatening Muslim rights. Not only Hindu society was heavily criticized, nothing was offered to Muslim discrimination of women, and minority vote bank politics which increased the importance of Muslims beyond what is justifiable in a system calling for equality of all. If Muslims make 10% of the population, they cannot be viewed at parity with 82% majority Hindus. True, each individual is equal and free, but the will of a minority cannot subjugate that of the majority of Indians.

In 1986, his own grandson Rajiv Gandhi, as Prime Minister led his party in passing an amendment to the Constitution, making it mandatory for Muslim women applying for divorce to be tried under Islamic law, not the nation's civil code. As a result, Shah Bano, a Muslim woman who had fled her oppressive husband, received no alimony and was castigated by conservative Muslim jurists. Rajiv Gandhi pushed through this law for "minority rights" despite the Supreme Court of India itself calling for the equal treatment under law for all women. Such blatant hyprocisy and appeasement could allow Muslims to construct a Taliban-style system for their own community, while Hindus must bear the burdens of keeping India secular. And further more, a separate legal system would only ensure a further separation of the two communities within one nation, just as the advocates of Pakistan wanted a separate nation for Muslims, a demand deeply opposed by Gandhi and Nehru.

Inspiring Struggle for Freedom

Gandhi's deep commitment and disciplined belief in non-violent civil disobedience as a way to oppose tyranny, oppression and injustice was shared by many contemporary leaders of nations, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the United States, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar.

Gandhi's early life work in South Africa between the years 1910 and 1915, for the rights of colored peoples oppressed by the racist, white-dominated South African regime inspired the later work of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. Since the 1950s, the ANC organized non-violent civil disobedience akin to the Indian National Congress of Gandhi during the Indian Independence Movement. Determined ANC activists braved the sticks and bullets of the police, water-hoses, tear gas and mad dogs to break the back of tyranny, racism and oppression in South Africa, all without retaliating despite the brutality. Many, especially Mandela, languished for decades in jail, while the world outside was divided in its effort to remove apartheid from South Africa. When Mandela and the ANC finally won, and when the first universal, free elections were held in South Africa and Mandela became President, he made a special visit to India and publicly honored Gandhi as the man who inspired the freedom struggle of black South Africans. Statues of Gandhi have been erected in Natal, Pretoria and Johannesburg and South Africans do not hesitate to honor his importance to their revolution.

Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of the Civil Rights Movement seeking the liberation of African Americans from racial segregation in the American South, and also the terrible economic and social injustice and political disenfranchisement, traveled to India in 1962 and Nehru met him personally. The two discussed Gandhi's teachings, and the methodology of organizing peaceful resistance. The terribly graphic imagery of determined Black protestors being hounded by police, beaten and brutalized, evoked universal admiration for Dr. King and the protestors across America and the world, and precipitated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In an unholy coincidence, Dr. King was assassinated by a white fanatic in 1968, even as Gandhi was killed in 1948 by a Hindu extremist.

The non-violent Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa of Poland overthrew a Soviet-backed communist government after two decades of peaceful resistance and strikes, in 1989, beginning the downfall of the Soviet Communist empire. Peaceful resistance had been offered by many over 50 years in Soviet-occupied countries, but the Communist empire was finally broken not merely by U.S. economic and military power, but also an deep desire for freedom shared by the peoples of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

To this day Gandhi evokes fiery passion for freedom. Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, a small young woman, remains under house arrest, and her National League for Democracy suppressed in their non-violent quest for democracy and freedom in military-controlled Myanmar. This struggle was inaugurated when the military dismissed the results of the 1991 democratic elections and imposed harsh military rule. It is said that more than 5 million Burmese men, women and children are being used as slave labor. And it should be noted that despite provoking outrage around the world, India, Gandhi's own nation, has worked for normal relations and cooperation with the regime, instead of actively supporting Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD.

For World Peace

Gandhi is often quoted for his total belief in non-violence, even when faced by militarist tyrants like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Gandhi believed that non-violent civil resistance could overcome the brutal armies of Nazi Germany, if the people adopted this method whole-heartedly.

Gandhi was often quoted by Americans opposed to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Pacifists who have opposed even wars to liberate countries and defeat dictators cite the beliefs of Gandhi in Pacifism.

Gandhi is one of the heroes of American liberalism and pacifism in Europe, including the pacifists and leftists who opposed the Trident missile deployment by NATO countries in the 1980s. While NATO and the United States argued that Trident as necessary as a preventive deterrent, pacifists were convinced that the trident would only make nuclear conflict inevitable.

The Gandhism of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Modern Indian politicians, liberals and peace-lovers worldwide have incorporated a lot of their own instincts, passions and understandings sufficiently to corrupt the common meaning of Gandhism. Gandhism is seen today as outright pacifism, internationalism and socialism. This understanding is too broad and quite wrong.

Gandhi was never hypocritical. He would have opposed the Trident deployment as thousands of protestors did, but he would have actively taken the USSR to task for its persecution of millions of East Europeans and Russians. Gandhi would have been horrified by the empire of repression, dictatorship, corruption and violence that the Soviet Union had erected. He would have just as ardently opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989) as he would have opposed the War in Vietnam.

Gandhi was a believer in economic and social justice, but not socialism. He had in fact not approved of Nehru's idea that the Congress adopt socialism as its goal in 1938. Gandhi wanted to focus entirely on winning freedom, not speculate about a free India's future government. As much as Gandhi would have supported land reform, he would have backed free enterprise and property rights. Gandhi had led the revolts of land-owing peasants in Gujarat along with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a struggle which revolved chiefly around the right of ownership of the Gujarati farmers. Prominent Indian industrialists like the Sarabhai family, textile mill owners of Ahmedabad, and the Birla family were close supporters and followers of Gandhi.

Gandhi would never have approved of a legal system separate for Muslims, Christians and Hindus. Gandhi would not have approved of Muslim women being denied divorce rights and alimony by Islamic conservatives and jurists, while non-Muslim women enjoyed more freedom and rights. Gandhi would never extend the meaning of secularism to allowing conservative Muslims to impose Taliban-like religious dictatorship, and demand equal numbers in representation despite being a minority community.

Gandhi is evoked when war is being opposed. But Gandhi defended military force when used for defensive purposes. Although he would have loved to use civil disobedience against men like Stalin and Saddam Hussein, it is not likely that he would oppose military action meant to liberate millions of people from tyranny, and allow them an opportunity to develop democracy.

But Gandhi staunchly believed in individual human freedom, the oneness of all religions, and the brotherhood of mankind. When he advocated non-violence against the British, he understood that the British were normal human beings, capable of the same prejudices and racism that upper caste Hindus used to create untouchability, an empire of repression based on birth and social position. If the Indians could make the mistake of enslaving their own, could not the British make the mistake of enslaving their own, human kind? Could not men like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin be victims of the same mental flaw?

Gandhi understood the vulnerability of all mankind. He knew that while the United States fought Hilter's tyranny and Japan's violent colonialism in World War II, millions of African Americans continued to suffer from oppression within the United States itself. He knew that while untouchability in Hindu society was intolerable, the persecution of women and minorities in Islamic society made it no justifiable alternative. All Hindus were not depraved, and neither were Muslims saints. And while the weapons of the United States and Western Europe could only make war, the Soviet Union's propaganda of peace could not veil its reign of terror perpetrated upon its own people.

Gandhism is perhaps the most balanced philosophy ever conceived by a human being. However, human nature is far from perfect.