Gandhi defence ‘blinkered thinking’

THE SOUTH African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, the book I co-authored with Goolam Vahed, has elicited widespread comment, mostly by people who have not yet read it.

Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi (see his column above), says the book contends that “Gandhi disdained black people and supported British imperialism” during his South African years.

Rajmohan does not deny these assertions, but in seeking to explain them he reveals much of his own limited view of the struggle for liberation in South Africa.

Rajmohan is keen to argue that once Gandhi realised that Empire was bad (in the 1920s) he became its foe. But what does it say about Gandhi that during his time in South Africa he saw Empire as a benign if not progressive force?

During this period the British Empire was at its acme. The Zulu Kingdom had been decimated through plunder and pillage, while myriad taxes forced African men off the land and into gold and diamond mines. Their wives and children were not allowed to accompany them. It was a brutal system.

What did Gandhi have to say about Empire at work? One “where all races would be equal”, as Rajmohan says he believed?

He could only envision this because he wrote Africans out of history. When he did write about them, it was in ways in which Empire could further exploit and subjugate them. So it is not just a question of Gandhi’s racism and belief in Empire, but his view that Indians should be allowed to join the whites in this system of racist super-exploitation.

As for nursing the sick, his other passion besides Empire, Gandhi did not care for those dying in British concentration camps. His ambulance missions were limited to showing loyalty to Empire.

Did Empire’s batons have to land on Indian backs before Gandhi realised the falsity of Empire in the 1920s? If so, this aggravates the charge that it took assaults upon those occupying the “Aryan” plane of civilisation to jolt him out of this most obvious error.

It is like saying that Gandhi did not care about slavery (except for wanting Indians to be allowed to their own) because it was limited to Africans, but when Indians were turned into slaves he saw the fault and fought against it. Gandhi took up Empire’s cudgels to ensure that Africans were kept in their place.

For us, this is what marked Gandhi – his begging to be the stretcher-bearer of Empire in South Africa. And when tired of stretcher-bearing, he asked for guns to defend Empire against the rebellious natives.

Rajmohan goes on to argue that “the younger Gandhi (was) at times ignorant and prejudiced about South Africa’s blacks… especially when provoked by the conduct of black convicts who were among his fellow inmates in South Africa’s prisons.”

“Provoked”? Were their black bodies a provocation – the same provocation that in a brutal racist system landed them in prison?

Rajmohan then argues “the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way for the struggle for black rights”. In one sentence Rajmohan writes out the history of African resistance to colonialism that unfolded much before Gandhi even arrived on the scene, and which he was quite keen to subvert, by siding with white colonial power against them.

Rajmohan holds that “on racial equality, (Gandhi) was greatly in advance of most if not all of his compatriots”. This is a staggering claim. The South African Gandhi accepted white racist minority rule, and openly proposed that Indian and whites were more civilised than Africans, who were lazy, and needed to have more taxes heaped upon them.

Of his prison experience, he wrote: “We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed too much to put up with.”

Cherry-picking a quote here or there does not nullify this Gandhi, but does say much about Rajmohan’s own blinkers, which allow him to write so glibly about Gandhi’s siding with Empire in the subjugation of Africans.

In any case Rajmohan’s thesis does not bear historical scrutiny. When Nehru and other leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC) attended anti-imperialism conferences in 1927 where the president of the ANC, Josiah Gumede, was also in attendance, as Joseph Lelyveld records, “Nehru and his circle were quick to take the view, from afar, that Indians in South Africa should stand together with blacks there. Gandhi himself held out”.

Rajmohan ends on this resounding note: “Some, however, seem to think that they are wiser than (Martin Luther) King or Mandela”.

Mandela said many things. He aligned his name with the arch-imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes. And many have long gotten over the idea that Mandela’s words be taken as the gospel.

In any case, given his South African prison record, would Gandhi have shared a cell with Mandela or King?

Rajmohan sets out to exculpate Gandhi but ends up revealing much about his own narrow, even racist, lens by arrogating for Indians a vanguard role and rushing over Gandhi’s complicity in Empire’s brutal project at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rajmohan Gandhi tells us some of his friends regard him as a scholar. Clearly these friends cannot distinguish between a scholar and propagandist and it is about time Rajmohan realised that propaganda is the lowest form of history.