Sunday, August 4, 2019

We had a chance to get out and see some of Delhi’s monuments on a few occasions. First, Ajit drove us by the Parliament building (above) and the Old Secretariat, which houses some government ministry offices (below).

We also took a tour of Gandhi Smirti, which is a museum that was built at the site of Gandhi’s assassination. There is a lot of interesting history on this topic that I’ve been getting from a few diverse viewpoints. A very good history book called India After Gandhi describes Gandhi’s final trip to Delhi. Super short and likely somewhat inaccurate summary (corrections welcome): by about 1946, it became clear that independence was coming to British India, which included modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Muslim leadership, especially Jinnah, started to believe that the leading Indian political party was dominated by Hindus and that Muslims would always be second-class citizens in the independent India that was forming. Political rivalries led to a lot of communal violence between Muslims and Hindus and a lot of Muslims fleeing India and a lot of Hindus fleeing Pakistan. The situation rendered the partition of British India into India and Pakistan (Bangladesh came later) inevitable (to some).

Gandhi abhorred violence, especially this communal violence, and set about trying to stop it. Gandhi was Hindu, and his plan was to get Hindu areas to stop the violence and ensure the safety of refugees, then go to Muslim Pakistan and say “Look, Muslims are safe in India now, let’s stop the violence, right?” He went to Kolkata (then spelled Calcutta) and went on a hunger strike with a list of demands he believed would bring about peace. It worked. Some call it the Miracle of Calcutta.

From there, his plan was to travel to Delhi and run the same playbook. Hunger strike. Get demands met. Make peace. Then he was going to head off to Lahore, Pakistan to do the same thing in a majority Muslim city. Things didn’t go well in Delhi, though. Many Hindus believed Gandhi was appeasing Muslims and making light of the suffering of Hindu refugees from Pakistan. Instead of staying in the street sweepers’ colony as he had during previous visits to Delhi, Gandhi stayed with a millionaire supporter of his. People would come by yelling anti-Gandhi chants. I think there was a bomb thrown into the compound one day, and finally a Hindu Nationalist shot Gandhi as he finished his prayer one day.

I’ve heard three different viewpoints on Gandhi’s legacy in the past few weeks. The first is glowing. This perspective comes through in the book I mentioned and it came through at Gandhi Smirti. This is Gandhi as the nonviolent hero of Indian independence. The second perspective I got from a tour guide who was showing around faculty from our school. This guy blamed Gandhi and India’s first prime minister Nehru for partition. In telling that story he only talked about violence committed by Muslims against Hindus. He even said that Indian Muslims who moved to Pakistan were treated like second class citizens and kept as slaves. This guy was a huge fan of Hindu Nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and not at all a fan of Gandhi. He mentioned a book written by Gandhi’s assassin called “100 Reasons Why I Killed Gandhi.” And he said that the book was banned for a long time, but more and more people are reading it now. The guy went so far as to say that it was good Gandhi died when he did because he would have given 80% of Kashmir to Pakistan. Yikes!

What I’m interested in figuring out (let me know if you know) is whether the tour guide’s point of view is a mainstream one right now in India or a far-right perspective. My hunch is that Indian schools, like American schools, teach a pretty one-sided version of history that can be easily nudged and molded to fit the events of the day by a nationalist extreme right-wing. But! I know very little about contemporary India, or Indian history, and I know absolutely nothing at all about Indian Social Studies curriculum. So I’m just doing this thing where I look at a globally ascendant extreme right-wing and try to see how it’s similar to and different from the USA’s ascendant extreme right-wing.

The third Gandhi perspective came from what seemed to be a well-sourced twitter post. This person was arguing that Gandhi shouldn’t be revered as he is, but this critique was coming from the left. By the way, Gandhi is on all the paper money here. Anyway, they said that Gandhi wrote terrible things about black people while living in South Africa, that he invited young girls to lie with him in bed in order to test his celibacy, and that he took credit from a more violent movement that this tweeter believed deserved the credit for Indian independence. Interestingly, one of the people that this tweeter (I can’t find the tweet I’m sorry) believes credit was stolen from was freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. The tour guide also mentioned Singh. One of his biggest strikes against Gandhi was that he approved the execution of Singh by the British. Upon further review that seems to be false, but there is a widespread criticism that Gandhi didn’t do enough to prevent Singh’s execution. Oh, Gandhi also said some weird stuff about the Holocaust.

Hard to say what to make of these criticisms. You do hear sort of similar ones made of MLK in the US (womanizing (that we know about because the FBI spied on him and wanted him dead), an unreasonable commitment to non-violence, some comments about homosexuality that didn’t age well), but I think the left critique of Gandhi is certainly more widespread. I dunno. I think MLK is very cool, and he was inspired by Gandhi, and I tend to think Gandhi is pretty cool, too. But what do I know, I just realized I’d been spelling Gandhi (Ghandi I thought) wrong this whole time and had to go back and fix it.

Anyway, tl;dr: we saw some cool historical sights, and Gandhi’s legacy is complicated! Here’s pics!

Safdarjung’s Tomb