Gandhi taught masses how to conquer fear

IN his edited anthology of Gandhi and the Champaran Satyagraha (2022), Jadavpur University Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das cites classical scholar Gilbert Murray. In the Hibbert Journal of January 1918, Murray captured the impact of Gandhi’s politics in the 1917 Champaran Satyagraha thus: “Persons in power should be very careful how they deal with a man (Gandhi) who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body, which you could always conquer, gives you no purchase upon his soul.”

The Champaran Satyagraha set the framework of the Gandhian ethical and political strategy in the years to come. Mahatma Gandhi was fearless; he preferred to inflict suffering on his own body than on others’ bodies. He taught Indians how to conquer fear. The objective of Satyagraha is not only non-violent resistance; it is also the conquest of fear in full confidence that the cause is legitimate. This creates a distinct political temper.

In his autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of the mood of the 1920 non-cooperation movement. Many of us, who worked for the Congress programme, lived in a kind of intoxication, wrote Nehru. “We were full of optimism and a buoyant enthusiasm. We were not troubled by fear or hesitation, our path lay clear before us, and above all, we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom… We said what we felt and shouted it out from the housetops. What did we care for the consequences? Prison? We looked forward to it,” he said.

We can only attain freedom from fear when we are convinced that the law we resist violates the precepts of natural justice. This right was first articulated by Greek playwright Sophocles (496-406 BC) in Antigone. Antigone defies the edict of King Creon of Thebes that her brother’s corpse should not be buried, and that it should be left for vultures and other birds to feast on. When Creon tells her, “thou didst indeed dare to transgress that law”, Antigone replies: “Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by Justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but for all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.”

Every human being has the capacity to judge whether a law is right or wrong, and to resist unjust laws. The morality of humans transcends laws.

Gandhi told us that fearless resistance is possible when we are confident that we fight injustice, and do so without using violence. The stamp of violence on our body is ineffaceable. It leaves stigmata much like the murder of Duncan left bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”

Gandhi warned us that the power of violence over human beings must not be underrated. It is not a weapon that we can pick up and discard at will. It is a quagmire that relentlessly sucks people into its murky depths. From here there is no escape. When violence holds individuals and groups in thrall, moral disintegration follows. For, we cannot control violence; violence controls us. We can hardly conquer fear when our bodies and our souls have been tarnished by the violent politics of resistance.

The tragedy is that Gandhi, who taught us morality, justice, truth and fearlessness, became the victim of brutal violence on January 30, 1948. He was assassinated by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a right-wing Hindu who believed that Gandhi pandered to the Muslim community. He was reportedly provoked by Gandhi’s January 13-18 fast on the issue of repatriation of money by the Government of India to Pakistan.

Gandhi, who had survived five assassination attempts, had said two days prior to his death: “If I’m to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.”

“The light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere,” stated an overwrought Nehru on radio when he announced to his country the death of a man into whose feeble body an assassin, crazed by the excesses of his ideology, had pumped three bullets. The country mourned and the world wept. And Albert Einstein said movingly, “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked the earth.”

We have forgotten Gandhi, and this is our loss. In Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), Munna, charmingly played by actor Sanjay Dutt, and his sidekick Circuit, equally charismatically played by Arshad Warsi, initially identify Gandhi only as a face on a currency note, and as someone whose birth anniversary marks a dry day. When he begins to read Gandhi, Munna realises how flawed, how unethical his own actions were. He terms the turnaround in his thinking Gandhigiri, the reverse of Dadagiri. Today, by reducing Gandhi to a pair of spectacles on Swachh Bharat posters, we have deprived ourselves of an opportunity to learn what a good life lived in a good society can be.