S S Gill, a career civil servant, was a Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and was also the CEO of Prasar Bharati. His other two books “The Dynasty – A Political Biography of the Leading Ruling Family of Modern India” and “The Pathology of Corruption” were also in the best sellers list.
Independence of India was achieved because of a combination of factors, the non-violent movement of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the most prominent among them, but not the only factor.
When Gandhi finally returned to India, he was already a celebrity. He had no definite plan for a political career. He wanted to do social work, mainly in Gujarat, under his guru Gokhale. But when he attended the Lucknow Congress session in 1916, Rajkumar Shukla, a Bihari farmer took him away to Champaran, showed him the plight farmers, who were forced to cultivate indigo underBritish Raj. That changed everything.
The results of a quarter century of Gandhi’s political activity has been summarized by the author in one or two pages. Gandhiji’s first challenge to the authority of the British Raj was with Rowlatt Satyagraha. But he suspended it owing to eruption of violence. Gandhi himself called it as a “Himalayan miscalculation” and thought people needed to be trained more on non-violence.
Soon thereafter he started his Khilafat-cum-Non-Co-operation movement. Its one of the objectives was to attain swaraj in twelve months, besides supporting the Khilafat, which did not happen.
[Note The Ali brothers, who started the Khilafat movement criticized Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and severed their ties with them after he suspended all non-cooperation movement after the killing of 23 policemen at Chauri Chaurai in 1922. Although holding talks with the British and continuing their activities, the Khilafat struggle weakened as Muslims were divided between working for the Congress, the Khilafat cause and the Muslim League. The final blow came with the victory of Mustafa Kemal's forces, who overthrew the Ottoman rule in Turkey to establish a pro-Western, republic in independent Turkey. ]
Next Gandhi started his epic Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930 to attain poorna swaraj. He suspenced this great movement after signing the Gandhi-Irwin pact, which did not even refer to the demand of swaraj, and none of his eleven points were conceded by the British.
[Note, in my view still something was achieved. Otherwise Winston Churchill would not have been so furious. He publicly expressed his disgust "at the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor"]
The Quit India Movement, his last great political agitation, did not bear his stamp, as he was arrested, before it was started. It was crushed within two months, though underground activity continued much longer.
[But to view the movement as a complete failure would also be unfair. One of the achievements of the movement was to keep the Congress party united through all the trials and tribulations that followed. ]
Gandhi as a Social Reformer has also been aptly discussed in the book.Gandhi believed that the fight for independence and the social reforms must go together. Gandhi’s concept of Ahimsha, which was by far the widest, compared to what is written or understood about the concept from India’s religious scripts, is discussed thoroughly. His fight for removal of untouchability, his concept of Daridra Narayan, the concepts of Khadi, and his efforts on Hindu-Muslim unity all find a mention in this book. All these concepts have been clearly discussed and contradiction, wherever relevant, in his ideas have also been fully brought out.
Gandhi was criticized most, not only by outsiders but also his own people and disciple, for his skewed concept of celibacy, which has been dealt with in the fifth chapter of the book under the heading “Gandhi’s Brahmacharya”.
In the author’s opinion, Gandhi’s aversion to sex, is traced to a trauma of his father’s death. His father was seriously injured when he was journeying to attend his marriage. Gandhi took great care of his father and nursed him with great care. One night after giving his father a massage, he retired to his bed room, woke up his wife and had sex with her. While still in the act, a servant knocked at the door. On opening the door, he was told by the servant that his father had died. He felt deeply ashamed and miserable. This feeling of guilt was further aggravated, ‘when the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days’. Gandhi carried this guilt throughout his life.
But does this explain Gandhi’s many women accompaniment, even along-with his wife, may be for a higher goal or his use of women as walking sticks?
Gandhi’s controversial experiment with brahmacharya and with women in his Ashram, first attracted the attention of public with an article in the Bombay Chronicle. You can read the full details in the book including quotes from Gandhi's own writing crossing the limits of decency.
Consider the following quoted from C Rajagopalachari “ he was one of the hungriest men I have ever known…. It was said he was born with a natural bent for brahmacharya, but actually he was highly sexed”
The other most important chapter to read is titled ‘Gandhi and Partition’. This shows where and how the Muslims were alienated, how in spite of being a Nationalist leader, Jinnah ended up being the creator of Pakistan. In spite of Gandhi’s strong views against partition, how some of his actions and ideologies contributed to the division of India, directly or indirectly, including his joining of the Khilafat movement.
The print is not good, pictures are scarce, but going by the bibliography attached to the book, I am sure it is one of the most well researched books on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
