Was Mahatma Gandhi secular?

When Jinnah was asked for his comments on Gandhi after the latter’s assassination, he is reported to have called him a “great Hindu” leader. When I first read this somewhere, I thought it was rather churlish of Jinnah to reduce Gandhi to just a “Hindu leader,” when his message was actually intended for the whole of humanity. Some Hindu militants would have challenged Jinnah’s view, for they saw Gandhi as a traitor to the Hindu cause.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t blame Jinnah too much for his comment, for a large part of Gandhi’s life was indeed dedicated to reforming Hindu society. He never made any bones about the fact that he considered himself a “Sanatani” Hindu, even while he felt free to borrow ideas from the world’s other great religions. While I am no great admirer of Gandhi’s tendency to mix his political and religious messages, on going through Gandhi’s views on conversions and Hinduism, I find a remarkable degree of similarity between what he said then and what the Sangh Parivar is saying today.

Gandhi, for example, would have favoured a ban on conversions. He suspected that conversions sometimes changed people’s allegiance to one’s nation, and he held the whole idea of converting anybody as abhorrent. “I believe that there is no such thing as conversion from one faith to another in the accepted sense of the word,” he wrote in 1935. A decade earlier, he was appalled to note the “many Christian Indians” were “almost ashamed of their birth, certainly of their ancestral religion, and of their ancestral dress.” He also said: “I hold that proselytisation under the cloak of humanitarian work is unhealthy to say the least.” Not surprisingly, Sangh Parivar websites quote approvingly from Gandhi’s works, even though they disagree with him on almost everything else.

Despite the outward similarity of views, one needs to point out that Gandhi was writing at a time when political correctness was not an issue. He could think and say pretty much what he felt. Today, few people would dare make such assertions, sacrificing directness for secular correctness. Moreover, if confronted with the kind of mindless attacks on Christian communities in Orissa, Gandhi himself may have changed his stance. He would have been among the first to visit the places of violence and commiserate with those who were attacked. He would have fasted to atone for the Bajrang Dal’s violence.

What impressed me most about Gandhi is not his views on conversion — which I partially disagree with — but his willingness to identify himself wholly with his religion even when he knew it had serious shortcomings. In my last column I had said that one of the factors driving Hindu extremism is the secession of the Hindu elite from the religion of their birth.

Many of the people who call themselves secularists adopt a “you Hindus” tone when talking about Hindu concerns and issues — the Marxists being among the prime culprits. They tend to be vocally critical of Hindus, even while lending an empathetic ear to other religious communities. Today, 75 per cent of what goes under the name of secularism is about being critical of Hindus and Hindu organisations even while offering
excuses for extremism of other kinds.

When the leadership of any community starts behaving as though its current identity is a curse or something that needs disowning, is it any surprise that others in the community turn to more desperate means to assert what they most fear losing? A lot of Islamic fundamentalism is the result of a perceived threat from western civilisation; Christian fundamentalists in the US get apoplectic whenever the secular establishment — especially the media — goes out of its way to rubbish religion and religious concerns.
Gandhi had no use for modernity at the cost of his religious and civilisational identity.
Even while opposing the Sangh Parivar’s actions he would have batted for them in spirit. In terms of today’s political correctness, it is thus worth asking: Was Gandhi secular the way we define it today?
Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net