Last year I had met a south Indian Brahman whose family had been enthusiastic followers of Gandhi’s ideas. Even today he only wears the traditional handspun and woven cotton, called “khadi.” One day in our conversation, he had lamented that Mahatma Gandhi had been a failure. At that time I had very little information on Gandhi, so I was rather taken aback.

For the next few days, my mind kept chewing the facts, trying to make some sense of his allegation. A couple of days later when I saw him, I comment, “You know I’ve really been thinking about our last conversation about Gandhi. It was surprising for me to find out that some Indians consider Gandhi a failure.”

“No, not Indians. Gandhi himself said he was a failure.”

“I see.” I pause to let the facts circulate through my brain. Actually, although we consider him the prophet of non-violence, Gandhi was ambivalent about violence.

“I do see that in the midst of all the violence at the partition of Pakistan and India, that it would have been difficult to not face his failure. If his mission was non-violence, and not the independence of India per se, then he was a failure. Although no British were killed, at least, one million Indians died. So that’s not exactly a non-violent result; not to one who had once declared, ‘I will not purchase my country’s freedom at the cost of non-violence.’”

“Yes, the dichotomy in Gandhi’s attitude surfaced during World War I when he recruited solders of the British army in Mesopotamia. He never seemed to have a simple, straight-forward plan. He kept experimenting to find out what would work.”

“I knew that he supported the British in the war, but I never knew he recruited soldiers.”

“He felt that the British military was protecting India and Indians, so they should be supported. But he did not get much cooperation from the Indians. You see he had just led a non-violence strike, and afterwards was asking the same people to fight in a war. They laughed at him.”

“Sometimes the Indian peasants are not as gullible as one would think. So he had no luck recruiting soldiers?”

“None at all. As a matter of fact, he became so frustrated that he pushed himself until he fell seriously ill. In addition, he had another reason for supporting the war. At that time, he thought there was a chance for Dominion status for India. Therefore, the Indians should know military tactics. The battlefield of the European war would be a training ground for them. His idea was that only the brave and courageous could practice true non-violence.”

“I seem to remember that he said that a cat and a mouse could not form an alliance, implying that Indians were the mice.”

“Yes, you see the depth of his understanding of the situation in that simple statement.”

“Then after the war came the Rowlatt Laws,” I led him back to his train of thought.

“Well, those laws to imprison anyone the government wanted to without trial had actually been practiced during the war, supposedly to punish, or deter, dissenters to the war effort. When the Government decided to make the practice a law after the war, of course, the Indians objected—and loudly. This was the first time the whole country was openly united against the British.

“But after a mob burned a police station, killing the officers inside, Gandhi called off the whole nationalist movement. Because of his pronouncement, the movement lost its momentum.”

I commenedt, “One freedom fighter told me that had Gandhi let the Indians continue with their independence movement at that time, India would have gotten its independence in the 1930’s—with much less loss of lives. At that time, the Indians were directing their violence appropriately against the British. So it some years later when the Indians turned their ire and frustration against each other.”

He picks up the idea, “It is true that the delay gave the British time to regroup, to divide the Muslims and Hindus further. That momentum was never recaptured. And it all ended in violence anyway. But Indian against Indian—instead of against the British where it was appropriate.”

“It does seem that Gandhi stopped the momentum at a crucial time. He was so determined that there should be no violence. He intended that the Indians had to train and discipline themselves. I understand that on his Salt March, all the participants had to train with him at the ashram for a year. I was surprised when I read that not a single member of Indian Congress was among them.

“Of course, there were practical considerations. Certainly, history informed Gandhi of the violence the British were capable of. The British had the rifles and cannons.”

He paused to consider my comments, “You’re right. Even if he did not know the right thing to do, he knew that in dealing with the British, we had to use non-violence.”

I continue, “You know it surprises me that he waited so long to face the fact of the violent nature of the British, that is, the European gene pool. In his personal history, four times he had been physically manhandled by the British, in one instance by a mob. I never understood why that did not wake him up to the fact the British in South Africa and India were not the gentlemen he supposed them to be—the gentlemen he needed them to be if he was going to be successful in his political maneuvers.”

But a failure? I take a long pause to let that one sink in. India did get its independence. But that was not his goal, his goal was independence in the corred “non-violent” way.

In short, it appears his authoritarian disposition was not entirely reserved for his private affairs. After discussions with Gandhi, Dr. Edward Thompson of Oxford University described Gandhi succinctly, “Like Socrates, he has a ‘daemon.’ When the ‘daemon’ has spoken, he is as unmoved by argument as by danger.”

Being the hero of the masses also gave Gandhi the leverage to become a dictator within the Indian Congress. When he called off the non-violent movement in 1930, he did not consult with anyone. He cut down every logical argument of his comrades—who were powerless because they were all in prison. Although he refused to become an officer in the organization himself, he single-handedly manipulated the Indian Congress. For example, when the assembly elected Subhas Bose as their president, Gandhi made a power play and forced his resignation. Bose was definitely following a more aggressive course for Independence.

It’s hard to know why Gandhi chose to continue in politics to the detriment of his social work. Tolstoy personally warned him against the nation state. Tolstoy was outrageous, even in today’s terms, in his criticism of the “State.” He saw patriotism to a nation state as the root of war, violence and exploitation. He warned Gandhi that the very nation he was struggling for would be responsible for deluding the populace to give up their older traditions of allegiance to land, customs, culture—in exchange for the protection of the state, an amorphous entity that would send them off to war to be slaughtered.

He put it rather harshly, “Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, while giving the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power. . . . Patriotism is slavery.” And how did we allow ourselves to be slaves of the State? He had some poignant ideas on that too. “The church is but a backer of the war-monger State. It is the fraud of the church, taught us early in our lives, that sets us up to accept the political frauds.” Sounds like he read Voltaire also!

Gandhi and Tolstoy corresponded for several years right before the Russian’s death. But Gandhi was a Hindu—to the core. He could not give up the mentality that some men are born to be warriors. This is the testimony, although not necessarily the moral, of the great war portrayed in the Mahabharta. This concept, that we are all born with a temperament toward certain duties, is the crux of the caste system. Some persons have a propensity for fighting. Put these people in a war and let them get it out of their system. Remember, the Kama Sutra, which was written by a great sage, conveyed the same message. Some people have a strong desires for sex, so all the information they need is herein provided. Whether sex or fighting, there are just some experiences that certain individuals are born to go through. . . let the world give them what they need to finish off the desires, then their minds and bodies will be free from more spiritual endeavors. The ancient rshis were not upholders of repression.

Along with Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, who Gandhi considered a spiritual Guru at one time, was vehemently opposed to nationalism. In a lecture tour in 1916, he alerted Americans, “Not merely we subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.”

“Political freedom will not make us free,” he warned Gandhi again and again. Tagore felt that the political issues had diverted attention away from the country’s primary needs. He deprecated the trend toward nationalism because it pursued political goals rather than social ones. Of course, Gandhi agreed on the importance of social improvements, but he was adamant about his political goal. However, the two were totally in accord with the concept that those who failed to attain swaraj in themselves could never find it in the outside world.

When I spoke again with Shankar Panday, I mentioned, “When I stood in Gandhi’s hut, I definitely got a glimpse of ‘cultured simplicity.’ The simple mud walls with decorations of the palms and Om symbol that were molded into the walls by Mirabehn. Yet, I can hardly fathom how far this life-style was from the one Nehru and his comrades established in the ex-British mansions of New Delhi.”

“Believe me everyone here was utterly shocked when Nehru moved into the Viceroy’s mansion.”

“Did Gandhi say anything?”

“No, no one said a word. No one had to. It was in complete opposition to Gandhi’s ideals.”

That was not the only thing that was in opposition to Gandhi’s ideas. He had to go on a fast to force the new Indian government to pay Pakistan the cash from the national coffers that was due that country. Also Gandhi criticized the Government for putting the military expenditures at the top of their budget. Again Gandhi wanted legitimate parties formed so that India would not have a one party rule. The truth is Nehru not only ignored Gandhi, he ignored his own Congress Party. Within the first year, the Congress President resigned in protest to the corruption, bribery and profiteering he witnessed in the Government. Ignoring Gandhi’s suggestion to install a strong leader, Nehru found a quiet “yes” man to replace him. Gandhi then planned to take the only avenue he felt open to him: a massive campaign to educate India’s voters. But he was assassinated two months later, so his plan was terminated before it got off the ground.

So we can conclude that Gandhi may have had an impact on the world, but not on his own Government, even though its leader claimed to be a Gandhi disciple. The truth speedily emerged that the men who had spent half their adult life in British prisons were not prepared to live a simple life of self-effacement. In addition, the Indian Congress had been financed by wealthy industrialists, so there was an implied debt of gratitude.

More and more, I am coming to realize that Gandhi was the one and only meeting place between the Indian Congress and the masses. Gandhi had gained the confidence of the laboring masses through his three successful protests. His genius was apparent when he chose the issues of his campaign, for the peasants could comprehend spinning and salt. Gandhi wrote Tagore that he had contemplated for days before he came up with idea of salt, the perfect item for his boycott. In the ancient village economy, every hamlet produced everything it needed, except salt. Salt had to be imported. So over thirty years previously when the British had imposed a salt monopoly along with a tax, it touched every peasant. The sophisticated Congress businessmen, even Nehru, thought salt was a joke. None of them even pretended to participate in Gandhi’s spinning plan.

The Indian Congress had been created by native Indian industrialists for the purpose of improving their own prospects. Looking back, all of them were entrepreneurs, out for their own good. If you think that their “good” suggests the good of the workers, I refer you to Margaret Burke-White’s Halfway to Freedom in which she describes in detail the condition of the workers at the Birla factory in Delhi when she visited Gandhi in 1946. Birla, the wealthiest native industrialist, had stated that the only recourse for India’s entrepreneurs was “strengthening the hands of those who are fighting for the freedom of the country.”

And Gandhi had a certain propensity for the “good life” himself. He had grown up in a middle-class environment. Although he was of the “grocer” caste, his father had been a minister in the local royal court, a duty traditionally relegated to Brahmans. During all of his civil disobedience campaigns, During resided in the homes of the wealthy landowners and a mill owner, not with the laborers. When in Delhi, he lived in the home estate of Birla. Birla’s repute was such that an expose on the machinations of the Indian industrialists, The Mysteries of the House of Birla, was named for him. Margaret Burke-White pleaded with Gandhi to go see how Birla’s laborers lived, but he refused. Birla personally financed Gandhi’s Sevagram ashram for years. Gandhi was staying in his personal quarters at the Birla mansion when he was assassinated. Mr. Panday’s voice interrupts my thoughts, “The Raj of the British Empire was for the sole purpose of milking and bilking the people. A native Government for the sake of the people had to change completely its ideals, structure, and methods. But it remained the same. The faces were now brown instead of white, that was the only change. Gandhi had spent years working out a plan for a self-sufficient economic and political system, one that would require much less government. The ideas were there ready to implement.

“A plan that outlined the new indigenous Government had been drafted twenty-five years before. It stressed a maximum of local autonomy and a minimum of control by state and central governments. The traditional village panchayat (council of five) system, which everyone was familiar with from the remotest village to the executive suites of Delhi, would be the natural foundation of Government.”

“But the Europeans used the rationalization of superiority due to Christianity, white skin, and intellect to exploit ‘the heathens,’ what excuse do these Indians have?” I question him, trying to keep calm. I hate it when my voice gets heated because the Indians are always so cool-tempered.

“I cannot tell you. It is a mystery to me. One of our own people was appointed as Education Minister, but he could not implement a single change. Nehru just ignored him. The public schools retained the old British curricula. The closing of our school here because a Government school was built along side it is common; even though many areas are without any schools at all.”

So drained of its natural resources, its traditional crafts and guilds destroyed, its native education system annihilated—India set out to form a nation with leaders who were intent on making up for their personal losses. I am afraid that’s the story of democratic India. I have to wonder if one of these days the Bharatis will realize who they are and turn back to their traditional roots. The foreign British vacated India fifty years ago, but they had stayed too long.

They left behind a nation of imitators.