On Gandhi, Mountbatten and Jinnah after 62 years.

India turned 62 this August 15, 2009, marking another year of highs and lows in the arsenal of the Indian experience. Of course, nothing drastic had happened – we were riding the slow horse of the recession just like every other nation. We had not jumped over it and continued to grow at the alarming rate we were once so proud of; we had the stock market rising and falling, droughts and floods wrecking havoc, innumerable bomb blasts leaving pock marks on our faces and the occasional sports victory. This take-it-in-your-stride attitude, however, went to hell come Independence Day. The first step, in my opinion, is when you see the beggars at the traffic signals when you stop your vehicle. They go from window to window, from rider to rider, selling flags and other green-and-orange paraphernalia. I was once sharing an auto with a software engineer while getting back from a friend’s place. He turns to me and asks, “What Independence Day are we celebrating! What independence do we have with bribery and corruption still giving the politician a dictatorial grip over the common man?” These questions are wispy, freely floating in the air, waiting to be asked. First the engineer next to me will ask it, then the auto driver, then a forgotten friend on Facebook. From their, it will jump minds and mindsets, asking and asking. What I don’t like about these questions is they don’t wait for an answer.

Often, arguments beginning on such notes end with something I have come to dislike over the years: Gandhi-bashing. If you were to prowl university campuses around midday and when the tea-stalls are fervently issuing glasses of tea and Gold Flake Kings, you can get a solid dose of “Gandhi was a bastard! He let India be split apart into two factions, and one Islam!” – good enough to make you wonder. I’m an Indian. I know of the infamous partition, and I know of the number of people who died that year. I believe no one can ever come to truly understand the losses of the nation – in terms of numbers, in terms of families, in terms of happiness. But we have moved on; Jawaharlal Nehru captured it in his landmark speech, ‘Tryst With Destiny’. One of our own killed the Mahatma before the nation attained republic-hood and with his demise commenced all that was a face of the Independence Struggle. After that, the early Indian political scenario was dominated by the Congress (INC) – that was inevitable because most of those in Parliament had been freedom fighters.

So yeah, Gandhi and Jinnah together had been responsible for the formation of India and Pakistan, but I don’t think India values Gandhi as much as Pakistan values Jinnah. The general consensus is that Pakistan values Jinnah because he convinced both Gandhi and Mountbatten to conceive those chasms of division that would give birth to the warring nations, while Gandhi succumbed to such pleas and proceeded to divide India of his own volition. Now, before I get down to the specifics, a small story. When Captain Jack Sparrow was detained by Commodore Norrington after saving Elizabeth from the waters, the officer finds out that he is, in fact, a pirate. The Governor subsequently orders Norrington to hang Sparrow. At this juncture, Norrington proclaims that “… one good deed does not excuse a man from a lifetime of wickedness.”

Sparrow: “… but seems enough to condemn him!”

That is the case with Gandhi! The India we all speak of today was because of his efforts. We think we can afford to see Gandhi as someone different from how the world perceives him to be, but in doing that, we go one step too far and condemn him. Yes, we are Indians just as he was and are blest with that kinship, but the truth does not expose itself differently to us and differently to the others. It is the same: Gandhi liberated us from the British  – and that is irrespective of whether it was his ideology or his actions. Gandhi made it possible for us, you and me, to speak of an independent India after 62 years. His efforts went into releasing the country from the relentless talons of the British royalty and he did just that. Blaming him for delivering an India enslaved by money exchanged under the table is like blaming Jack Welch for Dumbledore’s death. And by this time if you don’t already see the fact, you’re retarded.

Now, moving on to the ideological trangle of Mountbatten-Gandhi-Jinnah. As one of the foremost authorities in the Partition Council, Mountbatten was for the Muslim grouping – a solution where the Muslim and Hindu communities would be segregated into two different camps because of Jinnah’s rising demands for a separate Muslim state. Although these demands were not shared by the total Muslim populace nor by Gandhi, Muhammed Ali Jinnah cited the reason for his demands to be the steadily increasing threats of the radically rightist Hindu Mahasabha (popular members of which were Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte). When he (Jinnah) noticed Gandhi’s reluctance to approve of the partition, Mountbatten was faced with the prospect of open civil war in the regions of West Punjab, Sindh, North-West Frontier Province and East Bengal – regions that fell under the political protection of Jinnah. The time soon came for Congress to make a decision on what had to be done – it could either go against Gandhi’s sentiments and partition India, or it could agree with Gandhi and suffer a civil war. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the Iron Man of India and our first Deputy Prime Minister, decided to take a firm stand and ensured that Congress went ahead with the partitioning after convincing Gandhi of the adverse consequences of any other decision. A devastated Gandhi agreed.

Following this and the 1947 Indo-Pakistan War, the INC decided to deny Pakistan’s its due Rs. 55 crores as part of a deal brokered by the Partition Council. Sources of tensions within the nation included Patel, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Patel was of the opinion that Pakistan would use the money to escalate the war against India, an idea that the Mahasabha and the RSS shared. The RSS, for its part, began to press for the deportation of all Muslims in India to Pakistan. Gandhi feared that if Pakistan wasn’t paid its share, agitation from across the border would spill over into Indian territories. Result: he undertook a fast-unto-death demanding that Pakistan be paid in full and the Hindu extremist groups recant their threats. This time, the INC had no choice but to listen to Gandhi. As an outcome of this incident, Apte was led to believe that Gandhi had betrayed Indian sentiments and subsequently instigated Godse to kill Gandhi, which he did. They were convicted and executed on November 15, 1949.

Now would you tell me, ye adrenaline-powered Gandhi-bashers, what wrong did Gandhi do?

On service & duty

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.

– Mahatma Gandhi

To begin nonchalantly on such a broad issue is a momentous task. To spare myself the trouble and the reader all the verbal nimiety, let me begin by asking myself: what is service? A service is work done by the individual as substitution for the duty that is due another individual. When you exercise your right or perform your duty, it does not constitute service because both of them are for you to do so. It is when you offer to help someone or to give up some time of your own in order to do someone else’s work does it become service. At a restaurant, the waiters perform a service when they deliver the food to your tables. The price it comes at is money. On the warfront, when a soldier fires his gun and kills a terrorist, he performs a service for his nation. In both cases, it is not their duty to do so. The waiter earns money in the bargain, and the soldier does it out of either the need for survival or in gratitude of his nation’s gifts. The world around you and me would indeed be drab and devoid of any humanity were it not for the services of those around us. Self-sustenance in this scenario is a highly impossible state of living. We can hope to progress only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

As a 20 year-old, service does not usually take on such magnified proportions for me. I live in a small world around me. My duties, from day to night, include washing the plate I have eaten in and dusting the mattress I have lept on. The food I eat is prepared in the kitchen by my mother. the water I drink seems ready available when I open the taps. However, what I do does not seem like any service to me. It seems a frail triviality as soon as I step outside my door and begin to walk the busy streets outside my house. The either sides of the streets are lined with tens of shops and what seem like small malls, and the floating population on the road at any time of day stand between 5,000-10,000. With no regard for, at the very least, the cleaners who sweep the road at night, garbage lies strewn all over the place. Now, would you imagine me walking up to a stranger outside a saree shop who just threw down a plastic bag full of emptied food packets, and asking her to pick the bag up and put it in the garbage bin? That is what I did, and the woman turned around and ran. She thought I was mad.

Suppose 5,000 such men, and 5,000 such women. Petitions to the local municipal councils don’t help – all I did was ask for them to impose a fine upon those who littered. Their reply: “All that garbage is inevitable. Do you expect each and every one of them to find a garbage bin and throw their stuff in there?” Yes, I do. I replied so, and the counselor looked away. What is wrong in expecting such behaviour? If I can do it, why can’t you? If I could wake up to the day when each and every one of those individuals on the street uses the garbage bins provided, I will be a happy man, for that will be true service. The support you can provide the nation with does not stop at finding work within the country and boosting up its economy. In fact, that is not service at all if you don’t live in gratitude of what the country seems capable of giving you day after day, free of charge. It is like your house; rather, it is your house. Keep it clean. Would you litter your bedroom with rotten vegetables just because the maid cleans it for a fee everyday? I am sure you wouldn’t. It is for this reason that I would, if given the chance, enter into politics. I would like to impart this objectivity in thought, this simplicity of cause, to everyone around me. When Mahatma Gandhi called out for all “brothers and sisters to enter politics, to better this nation”, our nation, the likes of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari came together. Of course, I can go on about corruption in the form of bribes and what not, but what I want to stress is the dereliction of duty. Glaring in contrast to the glory of days past, what irks me most is that, today, the performance of one’s duty happens to be the rendition of a service. That is a shame.

Many of us look to a service as optional. It is not, but neither is it obligatory. Today, it is required. Like in a game that involves no luck, when a point is lost to the opponent, a lead can only be established when all players put in some extra effort. Similarly, looking at the state of the nation in terms of one’s recognition of one’s duties and responsibilities, a difference can be effected only when we step out of our way, only when we put in some extra effort. The preparedness to do so manifests as true hope, and the will of action manifests as the vision. As a 20 year-old, I believe I should hope, and this is one of the many paths that seem to readily open its gates. Switch off all unnecessary electronic appliances when you leave a room. We don’t need a ‘World Earth Day’ or a ‘World Energy Day’ to make us do that for one hour in a year. They do that to make us aware. If you want to respond, don’t mimick. Act. When you walk the streets, don’t litter. If you see someone littering, do not ignore. That is where you make the real difference. With all the intelligence we boast of at the places where we study and work, we don’t seem to have to put any of it into action. We look to win the Nobel, we look to make money. If that is what you ultimately seek above all else, then you will have come into this world and left without a sign of gratitude.