Gandhi: Holy Fool and Hypocrite

It has been officially announced by government ministers on a visit to India that a statue of Gandhi is to be erected in Parliament Square. 

Obviously this shameful gesture is being made because Britain is keen to develop stronger commercial ties with one of the world's largest and fastest growing economies. But, according to the Chancellor, George Osborne, it's high-time Gandhi took his place in front of the Mother of Parliaments; his monument serving as an inspiration to people around the world and as a permanent reminder of the friendship between our two countries (this coming the day after a new £250m arms deal was signed). 

Gandhi might be thought of today as a peace-loving civil rights activist (thanks in no small part to Richard Attenborough's deceitful and sentimental 1982 film) - a saintly figure in a loincloth who courageously resisted violent imperialism - but this is a ludicrous caricature and his legacy is, arguably, a highly dubious one.      

Certainly it's worth remembering a few things about this shrewd but rather sinister and often cynical figure; a religious fanatic who wanted India to reject modernity and revert to a primitive 'spiritual' society; a holy fool who held bizarre views on sex, diet, and sleeping arrangements that were as much rooted in the puritanism of the late Victorian era as they were in ancient Hindu teachings.

           

For a start, Gandhi was initially a great supporter of the British Empire and an admirer of its power; he only changed his mind and called for Indian independence once he sensed the weakness of the latter and thus his own chance to succeed with a campaign of civil disobedience. During the First World War, for example, he joined a government campaign that encouraged Indians to enlist in the British Army. 

Similarly, when living in South Africa between the years 1893 and 1915, he supported the regime and its policy of racial segregation, merely petitioning for the increased rights of civilized Indian gentlemen like himself within the system. He certainly didn't advocate racial equality and did nothing for the black majority whom he referred to in his writings as kaffirs. 

Gandhi continued to express his attraction to (and flirtation with) powerful regimes during the Second World War, sending his dear friend Adolf Hitler a letter in which he expressed his conviction that the Führer was not the monster described by his enemies, but a brave and devoted nationalist obliged to commit unbecoming deeds. He openly called upon the British to Quit India in 1942, when they were critically and almost fatally weakened by their struggle with the fascist forces. In effect, therefore, Gandhi the pacifist allowed soldiers from the Imperial Japanese Army to do his fighting for him whilst he sat smiling at his spinning wheel.

Interestingly, as Christopher Hitchens notes, there was already in India at this time - and had been for decades - a strong alliance of secular leftists who had laid out the case and won the argument for Indian independence. Thus there was "never any need for an obscurantist religious figure to impose his ego on the process and both retard and distort it".

In a killer line, Hitchens concludes: "Just at the moment when what India most needed was a modern secular leader, it got a fakir and guru instead".

This is certainly regrettable, but, thanks to an assassin's bullet, at least Gandhi did not live to implement his Year Zero agenda which would surely have resulted in mass starvation and misery for tens of millions of people.   

     

That a British government - and a Conservative led government at that - should plan to erect a statue of this little weasel is deeply depressing.     

See: Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great, (Atlantic Books, 2008), pp. 184 and 183.