Book Name: Making of a Hindu Patriot: Background of Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj
Author: J K Bajaj & M D Srinivas
Publisher: Har Anand, Rs 1,995
Making of a Hindu Patriot: Background of Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj by JK Bajaj & MD Srinivas, is based mostly on Gandhi’s own correspondences & conversations, writes Kumar Chellappan
Nearly eight decades after his assassination, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as Bapu or Mahatma remains an enigma. Hundreds of books have been written about this man who took the world by storm during and after his life. Gandhi continues to be read, written, discussed and debated hotly by the world with the same passion or even more than while he was alive. The year 2024 marks the 155th anniversary of the Mahatma and the nation has set many targets and agendas to be realised to coincide with the occasion. Is there anybody anywhere in the world who could wield this kind of influence and love even after 75 years of his demise? It could be Gandhi’s simplicity that had made him so dear to all.
The movie Gandhi directed by Richard Attenborough is ideal to understand the man. What comes to mind is the scene in which Gandhi holds a serious discussion at Sabarmati Ashram with Sardar Patel, Nehru and hopefully Jinnah about the British’s proposal to divide India. The mood and tone of the scene are solemn, serious and sedate. All were discussing about the future of India. A tiny girl enters the scene with a baby sheep and complains to Gandhi about the injury suffered by it. “Gentlemen, if you excuse me...” said the Father of the Nation as he walked out to attend to the injury of the pet. This was Gandhi.
Cut to 1992. Immediately after the demolition of the disputed structure at Ram Janmabhumi, the nation witnessed a furore. The then Union Government in its bid to douse the flames of communal riots asked all State Governments to hold peace meetings in all districts. I was working as a programme officer in the FM station of All India Radio, Kochi and was deputed to cover many such peace meetings. The speeches delivered by the politicians were to be recorded and aired as radio reports every evening. The only negative side of these meetings were the blunders coming out of the politicians! Many of them strongly believed that Mahatma Gandhi was closely related to Indira Gandhi! Two ministers claimed that the Ram Rajya about which Gandhi had dreamt was not that of Lord Ram but another Ram who was a Dalit contemporary of the Father of the Nation!
Another controversy that is going the rounds these days is that a politician commenting that he would not accept the Mahatma as the Father of the Nation. Gandhi was never after any names or titles. It was he who suggested that Dadabhoy Naoroji should be honoured with this title. So much so that even his assassin Nathuram Godse got immortality with his essay “Why I assassinated Gandhi” which was published in 1968 following the Bombay High Court’s lifting the ban order. Persons who are yet to understand the apostle of peace had the audacity to describe the Maoists as “Gandhians with AK-47”.
There is a Malayalam drama by name “Supreme Court” authored and directed by late N N Pillai in the early 1970s in which the latter tells that Godse was far better than the present day followers of Gandhi. “Godse murdered Mahatma only once. But Mahatma’s so called followers are murdering him daily, every minute,” said Pillai, the acharya of Malayalam theatre.
Though there are many books on Gandhi , the one which remained engraved in the mind was The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer. Fischer had no personal or political agenda to push and the work is considered as a straightforward biography of the Mahatma. Though there are many studies on Gandhian philosophy held by hundreds of scholars and volumes have been written about this branch of “science” none of them could make any impact in our minds as Gandhiji himself had explained in his words his life and mission. What the scholars did hitherto was to selectively analyse and put words into the mouth of Gandhi and this ended up in our politicians pontificating from podiums that his Ram was different from Lord Ram of Ramayana.
The gross injustice did by Gandhi Bhakts was to replace the term Harijan (people of God) with the word Dalit, a boorish term which the Mahatma had never uttered in his life. Acharya M K Kunhol, Kerala’s lone and true Gandhian, says that the removal of the word Harijan was the biggest crime perpetrated by the self-styled followers of Gandhi.
Well, this Gandhi Jayanti coincided with the publication of “Making of a Hindu Patriot: Background of Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj”, a pathbreaking work spread across 1,043 pages and authored by J K Bajaj and M D Srinivas of Centre for Policy Studies. The philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi has been rebooted, revived, retold and re-energised by these two theoretical physicists. The work took them through the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG-literally speaking an ocean of knowledge) in its entirety and the vintage Gandhian philosophy has been presented by the authors without any prejudice. A serious reading of this book would make Godse turn in his graveyard and he is likely to plead with the judge who sentenced him to death for another death sentence. Godse for sure had fired at the wrong person!
In a situation straight taken out from courtrooms, Bajaj and Srinivas present before us what Mahatma Gandhi wrote and spoke about various issues in his non-violent fight against the colonial masters, the British imperialists. The authors present the Mahatama’s original words which were culled from his own writings and speeches without giving any interpretation.
Bajaj and Srinivas tell us how Gandhi got converted himself into a true Hindu, a Hindu Patriot, by exploring and undertaking an expedition into Hinduism. Why he chose the mission was because of friends from Christianity and Islam who exerted pressure on him to get converted to their religions. Gandhi undertook a serious study into Christianity and Islam along with that of Hinduism. It took Gandhi to a great truth and also to the answer which he was asking himself; what is a Hindu and who is a Hindu? What are his responsibilities and what the world expects from a Hindu. Gandhi ji studied about India’s civilisation and the modern Western civilisation. What he understood was that the Indian and western civilisations represented two distinctly different ways of being which were difficult if not impossible to reconcile.
The CWMG explains in his own words what Satyagraha stands for. For the first time in history, these two scientists bring out the meaning of Satyagraha to the people of India. In Gandhi’s own words, Satyagraha is a religious instrument. “It is a struggle carried out with God as witness to preserve the sacred dignity of the religious person. It is not an agitation to win concessions or rights. Self suffering is what makes Indian civilisation different from Western civilisation. The heart of Indian civilisation is religion while that of Western civilisation is irreligion”, Gandhiji writes while recounting his South African days. This translation of Satyagraha as visualised by Mahatma Gandhi is certain to put the rationalists and atheists on the defensive as they usually resort to this kind of demonstration to extract concessions from those in power. Equally interesting is the startling disclosure about Hind Swaraj. Gandhiji says that religious duty and patriotic duty are one and the same. “Hind Swaraj is nothing but religious patriotism. My love for India is derived from my religion. Hind Swaraj is based on Dharma,” explain the authors quoting from what Gandhiji has said in his original work in Gujarati.
Gandhi also said that he does not want the Britishers to leave India. “The ideal solution of the conflict between the British rulers and the Indian subjects is that the relationship between the ruler and the ruled be anchored in Dharma. Hind Swaraj does not ask the English to leave India but to remain and rule in accordance with Dharma. If they were to agree to rule in such a manner it would be for the good of all. So doing, we shall benefit each other and the world. But that will happen only when the root of our relationship is sunk in a religious soil”, he writes in Hind Swaraj 3:97. To drive home his Bharateeyata, the Mahatma reminiscences his formative years. “I grew up reading Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita. My life was moulded by the stories in Ramayana, slokas in Bhagavad Gita and the teachers who taught me the same. The youth and children of those days have made it a routine habit and life style to read Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita,” he has written.
What made the Mahatma sad was the kind of work being done by evangelists and missionaries in the country. He says he was taken aback by the kind of language used by the evangelists and missionaries against Hinduism. “Christian missionaries used to stand in a corner near the high school ad hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and gods. I could not endure this..” says Mahatma Gandhi in “Glimpses of Religion”. But then why did he not openly question this attitude of the proselytisers? It is the under hand methods and illegal means employed by the missionaries and evangelists that form the root cause of the tension between the religions. “I am a Hindu and I am tolerant. Only a Hindu can be tolerant and he alone will be able to co-exist with believers in other religions,” he said.
The uniqueness of “Making of a Hindu Patriot” is that Bajaj and Srinivas, while analysing threadbare what the Mahatma has written, substantiate the same with documentary evidences which are nothing other than the latter’s own words. Only Mahatma Gandhi could repudiate what Bajaj and Srinivas have written. The authors drive home an important lesson: Never try to analyse Mahatma Gandhi with ulterior motives or agendas. These two scholars earn full marks in their effort to portray the real Mahatma. Let this work be read widely and discussed. That is the biggest tribute we can offer to the Father of the Nation who had said that his life was his message.
