![]() ![]() It is a testament to Gandhi’s political abilities that by 1920 he was leading the Indian National Congress, and his tactic of mass ‘non co-operation’ had become a human lever for displacing the Raj from India. ![]() ![]() On his fourth day back in India, Gandhi met Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a Shia lawyer active in the Muslim League. A ‘political and social outsider’, Gandhi relied upon his ‘guru’ Gopal Gokhale for orientation, and entered Hindu politics as a moderate who defended the caste system while criticising its degradation of the Untouchables. Gandhi wanted to replicate his South African success in India by massing Hindus through appeals to tradition, and welding Muslims into this Hindu-majority cause. Like Guha’s first volume, it humanises the saint and illuminates the times. This volume resumes in July 1914, with Gandhi taking ship from Cape Town for London and then Bombay, and preparing to reconcile India to himself. In South Africa, Gandhi developed a one-two tactic of Thoreau-style passive resistance and Whiggish appeals to the law, and reconciled these secular western influences with Hindu precedents as ahimsa, ‘non-violence’, and satyagraha, ‘truth force’. The first volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography, Gandhi Before India (2013), carried the young Gandhi across the British Empire from Kathiawar to London to Cape Town. Only Hitler, the other anti-capitalist spiritual politician who broke the British Empire, fascinates to the same degree. He remains the most irritating and admired politician of the 20th century: a perfect subverter of power and political logic, but a nuisance to everyone, allies included. Gandhi would have been 150 years old in 2019, had he taken better care of himself. ‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, wrote in 1933. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |