THE LAST NAVIGATOR: A Foreword Ashis Nandy

 [Highlights in yellow by Nikhil Desai March 2022)

Written for Narayan Desai, Jigarna Chira, 2013

 

The Last Navigator:

A Foreword

Ashis Nandy

Narayan Mahadev Desai is the name of not only an aging freedom fighter but also that of a vibrant, defiant, walking university. For more than sixty-five years, his journey through India’s freedom struggle and through the rather uneven career of postcolonial India—now trying desperately to shed its Gandhian legacy to emerge as proper, predictable, conventional nation-state—has been that of a defiant, dissenting figure whose rebelliousness did not end with the departure of India’s colonial rulers. Narayanbhai has remained a thorn in the flesh of all bullies, whether they are corrupt politicians vending mass violence in the form of ultra-nationalism or psychopathic scientists selling nuclear reactors in the name of energy security. Throughout his life he has fought for causes that are congruent with the worldview and vision of the person who has been the loadstar of his long public life and political interventions, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, using methods that are parts of the Gandhian heritage, now increasingly incomprehensible to the ones living within our familiar world.

That this university is now eighty-five years old gives many the false hope that time will inevitably take its toll and solve their headache. They believe the initiatives associated with this remarkable person are the last vestiges of an era and a vision that guided India’s struggle for independence but have now become, fortunately, obsolete and disposable. They cringe at the very mention of the name of Gandhi and derive solace from the hope that soon India will be left unburdened and uninhibited by a past that has been obstructing India’s emergence as a proper, modern nation-state with the standard combination of hard-eyed foreign policy backed by military might, uncritical commitment to the urban-industrial vision, and dreams of becoming the world’s third superpower in another few decades. They will read this book as a swan song of a bygone age, a romantic invocation of the last days of a naïve, otherworldly leader thrown up by the vagaries of history, whose hare-brained projects cannot meet the demands of our times and can only jeopardize India’s march towards its true destiny. They wait for India’s love affair with its Father of the Nation to end in apathy and forgetfulness.

In this, they also have the support of the run-of-the-mill politicians who see politics as primarily a means of advancing one’s personal economic and social interests and are ever ready to extol the virtues of the obstreperous Father of the Nation as a necessary ritual of the Indian state. The more the outside world lionizes Gandhi, the more the Indians try to forget him. Some of them believe that they have already successfully reduced him to a domesticated, decorative national hero and a venerable symbol of national pride—in a country that is quickly acquiring the trappings of a hard-eyed, cold-hearted Savarkarite venture—and Gandhi should not now stage a comeback to spoil the game.

Both sets will see this book as a stubborn refusal of an inveterate Gandhian to confront the truth: that modern statecraft has hardly any place for Gandhi’s critique of modernity and the philosophical anarchism to which he was close; that a modern state cedes power only to the market, domestic and international, not to the activists of the civil society or to international do-gooders talking of concerns such as human rights, environment, human-scale science and technology, and the end of death penalty and torture. The best we can do is to remember Gandhi on his birthday, which has become a public holiday, and forget him during the rest of the year.

However, there are others who may not see this book as a laboured attempt to justify Gandhi but as part of an initiative to find for Indian public life a cultural frame that will not only ensure a plural, democratic, humane society but also a society where the dignity of smaller communities and ethnicities will not be snatched away in the name of state-centric projects of social engineering and progress. For this minority, that initiative is necessary, not to protect Gandhi from criticism but to fight the attempts to delegitimize his entire political vision as a deliberate ploy to destroy a modern, functioning democracy in India. Only last year in India was published a book on Partition, which accused Gandhi of conspiring to betray India and the Hindus by accepting Partition.

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The following pages describe the political events that unfolded in British India in the 1940s, focussing on the role Gandhi played or did not play during the period. The story is not entirely unknown. Some thirty-five years ago, while researching the assassination of Gandhi, I ran across the works of a number of authors which talked of his isolation, anguish and disturbed state of mind in his last days and his virtual isolation from mainstream politics and some of his closest associates. I find it strange that, despite this, a large proportion of educated, urban, middle-class Indians have held on to the belief that Gandhi was directly responsible for Partition, that he was the original appeaser of the Muslims. Perhaps the real grievance against the Mahatma was that he had taken India’s freedom struggle out of the control of urban, middle-class India and that this shifted the locus of political power in the country permanently. Much later, I came to suspect that there was systematic propaganda, too, behind this bitterness. It was ingrained in many whose formative years were the 1940s and 1950s.

          Thus, in 1990s, when journalist and Gandhian scholar Rajni Bakshi interviewed Madanlal Pahwa, the youngest member of the team that assassinated Gandhi, Pahwa claimed dramatically and confidently that Gandhi was the Father of Pakistan. For, Gandhi’s was the only voice that counted at the time and he did not raise it against partition. Pahwa insisted that this was a major reason for the assassination. It is this theory that this book seeks to correct.

Those who have heard even parts of Narayanbhai Desai’s well known series of public discourses, Gandhikatha, know that the kathakar, despite being a committed Gandhian, never projects into his story his ideological baggage nor passes himself off as a new bhashyakar of Gandhi. Nor does he show any irrepressible ambition to become a path-breaking Gandhian scholar or historian. He modestly allows Gandhi to directly have his say and his listeners to supply their own interpretations. The narration itself is his politics; the story encodes his ethics.

In this sense, this book too is written as part of the final parva of a new Gandhipuran. Its aim is limited. Narayanbhai Desai tries to stand witness and to tell the story of how Gandhi was made irrelevant to the policy process through a tacit understanding among all the major actors. In the process, however, the story has also become the story of the last phase of Gandhi’s political life. And let there be no mistake; that story is one that has all the makings of a grand tragedy. Carefully isolated and strategically ignored, virtually pushed out of the decision-making process, Gandhi was left by even two of his closest followers—Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel—to die a lonely, heart-broken man, haunted by his nightmares and newly acquired psychosomatic ailments. Narayanbhai does not raise his voice but brings out nonetheless the sense of helplessness in a leader who had been for the previous three decades the uncrowned king of India but whose mantle now lay tattered. But then, Gandhi probably needed that death to complete the story of his life in an appropriate manner.

          Since the 1930s, India’s urban middle class, even in Gandhi’s Gujarat, had been uncomfortable with Gandhi’s politics, his vision of the future of India, and even his nonviolence. Most of them were firmly convinced that they had found a more modern, rational, pragmatic programme in tune with the standard, predictable demands of what was quickly becoming a ‘normal’, conventional nation-state, modelled on the state their colonisers built, ran and extolled. They had no patience with an old man talking of a nonviolent, decentralized, village-centric India, a confederation of roughly hundred thousand village republics bonded by the vision of a postmodern political economy and moved by eco-sensitive forms of social change.

***

However, there is another tacit message as well as warning in the following pages. In the short run, it is not difficult to bypass or defeat visionary politics. Realpolitiik, using short-term public sentiments and memories, can be a formidable enemy even when its opponents are visionary politicians who, like Gandhi, are accustomed to and well-versed in handling the politics of power. In the long run, however, it becomes a different story.

Rejected repeatedly as a disposable part of the ruins of the past, Gandhi has survived and re-emerged from his ashes like a phoenix to capture the imagination of large parts of the world and even crucial sections of young Indians. And he emerges in many guises. It is no accident that one of the first things the Chhattisgarh police destroyed in its anti-Maoist operations was a Gandhian NGO led by Himangshu Kumar trying to mediate between the Maoists and the government. He had been working among the Chhattisgarh tribes for years and was seen as a dangerous sympathiser of the Maoists for that very reason. Some of the most imaginative political activists outside India’s formal party system derive their inspiration from Gandhi.

As I look around me, I also find that most of the great political heroes in the post-World War II period have been not the warrior-kings, elected or otherwise, but leaders who have been called Gandhian some time or other, whether they have read a word of Gandhi or not. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama are household names today. It is my belief that the writer of the following story may also outwit his critics and find resonance in the coming generations of Indians which might discover in his journey another meaning of India, seeking another kind of status in a devastated planet, and perhaps even a prophetic voice. In that sense, this book, like the life of its author, will transcend its times and might be remembered not as an apologia but as a testimony.