Listening to Gandhi in our troubled times

One thinks of Mahatma Gandhi in so many contexts these days that it seems he is alive and around. His stamp on certain things is so deep that one wonders if he has turned into a stereotype in the collective mind. Take war, for instance. A war always meant violence, but the reports we read daily on the international page indicate how war violence has graduated to a different level. Israel’s revenge war against Palestine is deaf to all advice for restraint. It’s easy to attribute Israel’s unending rage to America’s support. Equally easy to say that America doesn’t mind being ignored because its deep State is committed to Israel. As spectators, we are saturated with images of rubble and the newly wounded. No point watching, but the news anchors insist “stay with us”.
Out of the three wars currently on, two are discussed daily; the third one occasionally, like a break. The war between Russia and Ukraine is being fought in a continent one assumed was quite stable. On the other hand, West Asia was highly unstable, so a war there doesn’t surprise, except that this one is more than an eruption. The third war is within a nation — a civil war as they call it, in Sudan. No one seems to care all that much about the suffering it continues to cause for millions of Sudanese. In the case of the other two wars as well, the hi-tech aggression and violence suffered by ordinary people appear to have exceeded the world’s attention span.
One thinks of Gandhi in the context of these wars not because we can find a resolution in his works or words, but simply to seek solace. He was someone who cared — for seeking reasons for violence. It was part of his interest in truth. His writings on violence inspire the reader to take an interest in every war, no matter how small it is. Why don’t fighters listen? That is an interesting question to ask about the war in West Asia. Its long history lies buried in the rubble of Gaza’s homes, hospitals and schools. If truth were to serve as an instrument of peace, surely it would need considerable excavation and resurrection. Over the decades, we have got accustomed to treating truth as a matter of investigative journalism. Listing forgotten facts does help. But this conventional view of truth is much too limited to cover Gandhi’s discourse.
At a recent discussion, philosopher Mrinal Miri said that Gandhi’s idea of truth belongs to the category of discourse pursued by two western thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both saw the truth in expansive ways, associating it with the self. Miri said that contextualising Gandhi won’t help because he transcended the notion of context within his lifetime. Linking truth with words apparently makes us somewhat blind to Gandhi’s search for something more pervasive. His religiosity also bothers us as we fail to frame it squarely in the meaning we associate with the term “religion”.
It is one thing to see Gandhi as a historical figure or as a politician, and quite another to notice how he negotiated the constraints of history. His idea of self-restraint will undoubtedly strike Benjamin Netanyahu as absurd, and neither Joe Biden nor Vladimir Putin would know what to make of Gandhi’s “experiments with truth”. Mired as humanity is today in a negation of common sense — an obvious precondition for peace — all major world leaders are busy demonstrating how radically the idea of democracy has shrunk.
Gandhi would have disagreed with Lincoln’s definition — that democracy is a form of government — of, by, and for the people. Not that Gandhi would deny people’s role or importance, but he wouldn’t agree that democracy is merely about governance. It is a way of life, the American educator John Dewey said about democracy.
Researchers have drawn parallels between Dewey and Gandhi, perhaps because both saw transformative social, and even political, potential in education. One must acknowledge that education as we know it now has no such potential; all it does now is to make the young more vulnerable in every sense.
Thinking about Gandhi today reminds us of what we have lost and how the losses may affect us as we battle with life ahead. He stuck his neck out on so many things that others took for granted, and that’s why it is possible to miss him more than seven decades later. Consider the big worry of our times — the climate crisis. We know it is the outcome of humanity’s war against nature which is fighting back.
Gandhi was anxious precisely about such a battle. He treated nature as a living being, capable of being disturbed by moral outrage. He thought a bad earthquake could be a response to the practice of untouchability. Rabindranath Tagore chided him for this kind of talk, but he stuck to it.
Many rational people now argue that the climate crisis has ethical dimensions. Some are easy to grasp. If the climate crisis is related to the reckless consumption of natural resources, it implies we don’t care about future generations. Some people use legal language to talk about the right of future generations to enjoy life and nature. We have encroached on that right, and there is no compensation we can offer. Who will fight our case and what will the apology mean? Good judges will likely recuse, and, at last, only God will be left to hear our appeal. Gandhi’s logic on the earthquake will come full circle.
Some of his beliefs notwithstanding, Gandhi’s general logic looks impeccable. The relation between truth and violence is one instance. The two can’t co-exist. Violence arouses fear and, therefore, muzzles the instinct for truth. Hence, the practical importance of non-violence. In the context of current wars, the winner — if there is one — will live in perpetual fear of revenge. Unless all children on the enemy side are killed, some will harbour thoughts of revenge when they grow up. The Israeli philosopher Elias Canetti explained this as an unavoidable consequence of hurting children.
Krishna Kumar is a former director of NCERT. His most recent book is Thank You, Gandhi.The views expressed are personal