Choose Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, not his appeasement

As a child growing up in India in the 1970s, Gandhi's legacy was largely without blemish. As the hagiography went, captured in the 1954 song Sabarmati ke Sant:

"De di hamen aazaadi binaa khadag binaa dhal;
Sabarmati ke sant toone kar diya kamaal."
("You got us freedom without sword or shield;
Sabarmati's saint, you pulled off this feat.")

Gandhi got us freedom; this freedom was not brought about via force or threat of force, but by his "moral force."

Seventy years later this narrative is increasing getting frayed. Contribution of Gandhi's non-violence resistance to India's independence is now being contested.

And other parts of his legacy, including his support of the ISIS-like Caliphate to appease the Muslim leadership appears far more troubling. For me, the most relevant parts of his legacy remain his less-well-followed narratives on decolonisation.

While ahimsa (non-violence) is a key value in the Hindu traditions which Gandhi drew on, this was never an absolute. The dharma of a warrior is to take up arms against injustice, doing so is not himsa (violence).

In fact the entire Gita, which Gandhi claimed as his favorite text, is about fighting for dharma. Indeed, the question to ask—how India survived (Iqbal's—kucch baat hai ki hasti mitati nahin hamari—there is something special that we are still around while others have perished).

There is not a single example where either Islam or Christianity ruled a territory for more than a couple of hundred years and it wasn't largely converted.

The mighty Persia fell as did the ancient Greek culture. Christians converted South America by the sword. India survived not due to ahimsa but, as Manoshi Sinha documents in her recent book Saffron Swords (Garuda Prakashan), due to broad-based resistance from Indian warriors.

It didn't survive Islamic invasions due to ahimsa, just as much as it didn't get freedom from the British based on that.

Did India get its freedom due to Gandhi's ahimsa? The evidence has started to disfavour this idea.

In a famous remark of Clement Attlee, British Prime Minister from 1945-51 and ultimately responsible for the decision to grant India independence, the impact on Gandhi in that decision was "minimal."

Gandhi was simply not that important for the British, other than for managing native resistance to their rule. Ahimsa suited them just fine. Firstly, it created no great necessity to leave; secondly it allowed them to act against the revolutionaries with full force, with Gandhi legitimising their actions.

The actual factors for India's independence were British weakness at the end of World War II and the threat of widespread disaffection in the British India armed forces inspired by Subhash Chandra Bose. Force, or threat of force was the key, not ahimsa.

But the troubling parts of Gandhi's legacy extend beyond ahimsa to enabling the most fundamentalist Islamist factions in India in support for the Khilafat movement.

Gandhi himself was brought up under the influence of the Satnamis, a syncretic Hindu-Islamic sect, which regarded both the Gita and the Quran as its holy books.

It was natural that this syncretism would show up in his changing the original bhajan Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram lines from "Ganga Tulsi Shaligram" to "Ishwar Allah Tere Naam."

While this syncretism and attempt to bridge the Hindu-Muslim divide in India was commendable, it turned out to be a one-way song sung by Hindus. Nowhere was this more apparent than Gandhi's support for the Khilafat movement. We read words like "Khilafat" as children, with little idea of its meaning. Khilafat is the same as the English word Caliphate, and the same desire to establish the Caliphate propelled the Islamic State (ISIS) in modern times.

While secular Turkish nationalists finally dismantled the Islamic Caliphate, Gandhi bent over backwards to appease pan-Islamic fundamentalists in India in their Khilafat quest.

This pattern would continue to repeat in Indian secularism after independence, where secularism would mean its exact opposite—pandering to fundamentalist Islam, while sidelining plural secular Muslims.

It reached its climax in Rajiv Gandhi's overturning the Shah Bano judgment to pander to fundamentalists, causing progressive Muslims like Arif Mohammad Khan to resign from the government.

But Gandhi's appeasement had failed during his own lifetime in preventing India's Partition. His shameful exhortation to Hindus to offer themselves as "non-violent willing sacrifices" to Muslim violence during the Partition also buries ahimsa as having any kind of redeeming moral quality with him.

But is Gandhi completely irrelevant today? Personally, it wasn't his autobiography "My Experiments with Truth" but his little missive "Hind Swaraj" that had the most influence on me.

This small little booklet remains a seminal tract on decolonisation. In this dialogue between the "editor" and the "reader", Gandhi says "(you) want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English… This is not the Swaraj that I want."

What India did after independence has turned out to be prophetic, as per Gandhi's original 1908 tract. India adopted all the English ways, its courts, it legislature, its bureaucracy, even its language. India became more English after independence than it was even during British rule.

The Indian state is a colonial one in its attitude to native people and native traditions. Its courts are over-bearing and inaccessible. Its bureaucracy and police are callous. And the English language has been made even more dominant than it was in 1947, depriving crores of Indians from higher and professional education and keeping India poor. Gandhi wrote against all of this.

Equally far-seeing is Gandhi's environmentalism as we push a consumption-based development model solely based on measuring the rate at which we can turn the earth into garbage. These are areas where he understood the value of the holistic approach of Indian traditions.

It is ironic then that we have taken from Gandhi his areas of failure, his normative ahimsa and religious appeasement, and ignored his insights into the problems of Western modernity and the value of Indian traditions. It is time for Hind Swaraj once again.

(The writer is CEO of Garuda Prakashan and the author of "The English Medium Myth." He tweets at @sankrant)