Gandhi matters more as intolerance grows

BJP president Amit Shah recently called Mahatma Gandhi “a chatur baniya” — a wily man of the baniya trading caste — while addressing some “eminent persons” gathered by his supporters for his peroration. Had the chief of the saffron party the effrontery to do so in the midst of a random group of Indians — just ordinary people — he might have been put to flight by an offended audience.

The Mahatma was indeed born into a family of the baniya caste. But he did not achieve reverential status on account of craftiness, business acumen or individual brilliance on his part.

Some of the most important figures of the 20th century in which Gandhi strode the moral universe — such as Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela, to say nothing of the stalwarts of our freedom movement — came to admire, and revere him on account of his philosophy of non-violence and satyagraha, his vows of poverty and chastity, his focusing of concern on the individual, his innate faith in democracy which to him meant the same dignified treatment of those born in the “untouchable” caste of the Hindu order, and of non-Hindus, as caste Hindus.

It is around these fundamental principles that Gandhi mobilised the Congress Party to defeat the most powerful empire the world had known by unleashing a mass movement of peaceful resistance that touched every Indian, regardless of denomination.

And it is precisely these basic ideas and ideals that were bitterly contested by adherents of political Hinduism or “Hindutva” (who were indifferent to the decades-long fight for independence) and the separatist Muslims who danced to Jinnah’s ideology built on communal hatred. The former eventually assassinated Gandhi.

It is no surprise to see the leader of the BJP, today the pre-eminent political formation of Hindutva, engage in public denunciation of the Mahatma. The denigration of Gandhi is in the ideological and political DNA of the Sangh Parivar.

Mr Shah also sought to ridicule the Congress, saying it had no ideology and was only “a special purpose vehicle”, a term borrowed with some naturalness from the world of finance, created by Gandhi to free India from British rule.

In essence, this is the supreme deriding of Gandhi’s monumental work. To the BJP (and other Sangh Parivar affiliates), there is evidently no ideology involved in fighting imperialism and foreign domination unless the challenge is conducted in religious categories — the defeat of a Muslim or Christian ruler by a Hindu potentate. Islamist zealots who go around shooting and bombing innocents also see their own wretched handiwork in terms of religious triumphalism.

Of course, Mr Shah has betrayed not just the poverty of his politics but the poverty of his soul in mounting a shocking broadside against Gandhi. His party might be better off changing its leader mid-stream.