UNRAVELLING THE PHENOMENON CALLED GANDHI

Ashutosh Kumar
PGD in Cyber Law and Security
IIIT-Allahabad

Neither the Wharton Business School nor the Kellogg Graduate School of Management can claim to have produced a single management graduate as illustrious and influential as the one produced by the dust and dunes of India. This man in flesh and blood was called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who wielded a magical influence over the teeming millions of India through his simple doctrines of truth and non-violence. The phenomenal appeal of Gandhi lay in his fortuitous South African experience; his social and philosophical ideals; his brilliant understanding of Indian conditions and a rare insight into the psychology of the masses.

His South African experience (1893-1914) provided the foundation to his later ideology and methods. It is important in this context to know that down to 1906, Gandhi had followed the usual moderate techniques of three P's- prayers, petitions and propaganda. A totally new departure began with the three campaigns of passive resistance. The peculiar condition of South Africa allowed the amalgamation into a successful movement of people of disparate religions, communities and classes. It needs to be emphasized that this experience made Gandhi into potentially much more of an All-India figure from the beginning of his work in India than any other politician, all of whom (like Lal, Bal, Pal) had essentially regional bases. Gandhi's life- long recognition of the necessity and possibility of Hindu-Muslim unity certainly goes back to his South-African movements in which Muslim merchants had been extremely active. South Africa also made him some- thing of an international celebrity, while the connections which many South African Indian's still had with their original homes in different parts of the country helped to spread the name of Gandhi throughout India.

The basic Gandhian style was worked out in South Africa after 1906. This involved careful training of disciplined cadres, non-violence Satyagraha, mass courting of arrest, and occasional hartals and spectacular marches. It included a combination of apparently quixotic methods together with meticulous attention to organizational and particularly financial details; a readiness for negotiations and compromise, at times leading to abrupt unilateral withdrawals (like the January, 1908 withdrawal of the first Satyagraha on the strength of a verbal promise from Smuts which was soon broken); and the cultivation of what non disciples usually considered to be the Gandhian "fads"(vegetarianism, nature-therapy, experiments in sexual self restraint etc.).

The net impact had a clear two fold character: drawing-in the masses, while at the same time keeping mass activity strictly pegged down to certain forms pre-determined by the leader, and above all to the methods of non- violence.

Ahimsha (non violence) and Satyagraha to Gandhi personally constituted a deeply felt and worked-out philosophy owing something to Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy, but also revealing considerable originality. As a politician and not just a saint, Gandhi in practice sometimes settled for less than complete non-violence (as when he campaigned for military recruitment in 1918 in the hope of winning post war political concessions), and his repeated insistence that even violence was preferable to cowardly surrender to injustice sometimes created delicate problems of interpretations. But historically much more significant than this personal philosophy was the way in which the resultant perspective of controlled mass participation objectively fitted in with the interests and sentiments of socially-decisive sections of the Indian people. The Gandhian model would prove acceptable also to business groups, as well as to relatively better-off or locally dominant sections of the peasantry, all of whom stood to lose something if political struggle turned into uninhibited and violent social revolution.

The Gandhian social utopia as outlined in Hind Swaraj is undoubtedly unrealistic and indeed obscurantist if considered as a final remedy for the ills of India or of the world. But it did represent a response to the deeply alienating effects of 'modernization' particularly under colonial conditions. After his return to India, Gandhi concretized his message through programs of Khadi, village reconstruction and Harijan welfare. Once again, none of these really solved problems in the sense of changing social or economic relations, but, when tried out with sincerity and patience by devoted Gandhian constructive workers, they could improve to some limited extent the lot of the rural people. It must be added that the peasant appeal of Gandhi was greatly helped also by his political style: traveling third class, speaking in simple Hindustani, wearing a loin-cloth, using the imagery of Tulsidas's Ramayana so deep-rooted in the popular religion of the north Indian Hindu rural masses.

Yet the tremendous breadth of Gandhian movement cannot be explained purely by what Gandhi as a personality thought, stood for, or actually did. Here comes the role of rumours in a predominantly illiterate society going through a period of acute strain and tensions. From out of their misery and hope, varied sections of Indian people seemed to have fashioned their own images of Gandhi, particularly in the earlier days when he was still to most people a distant, vaguely glimpsed or heard-of tale of a holy man with miracle-working powers. Thus peasants could imagine that Gandhi would end zamindari exploitation, agriculture labours of U.P believed that he would provide holdings for them and Assam tea collies left the plantations en masse in May 1921 saying that they were obeying Gandhi's order. The peasants were giving the vague rumours about Gandhi a radical, anti-zamindar twist, but at the same time they were attributing their own achievements to him. The peasants needed to be represented by a saviour from above- and who else could fit the bill as perfectly as Gandhi.

The genius of Gandhi, thus, lay in evolving an India-centric management style. The style could succeed as it was tried and tested before (in South Africa); the psychology of the target group was understood; and above all an unflinching faith and conviction accompanied the efforts--the best cocktail for success for anywhere.