Is India today a distortion of Mahatma Gandhi's legacy?

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Ghandi worked to prevent the Congress Party from disrupting the British war effort.

Lifestyles of the rich and noble 18 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1985 An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family, by Tariq Ali. G.P. Putnam's and Sons, New York, 1985, $17.95.

Mahatma Gandhi led India to its indepen -dence from Britain after 30 years of inter -mittent campaigns of militant civil diso -bedience, or what he called satyagraha, meaning "truth-force" or "love-force." The notion that a radical transformation of society might come from a peaceful movement based on the power of love was an idea that appealed to millions. And, at least on midnight of Aug. 15, 1947, the moment when India achieved its indepen -dence, it seemed that it had worked.

But almost immediately the country was plunged into a massive communal war between Moslems and Hindus. "Many millions were killed," wrote V.S. Naipaul, "and many more millions expelled from their ancestral land: as great a holocaust as that caused by Nazi Germany."

If freed by love, India was soon ruled by money, by a powerful group of capitalists and the corrupt Congress Party. If conceived in peace, India was immediately at war with Pakistan. If it escaped British imperialism, it was still part of the world market and attractive to the multinationals, as shown so tragically in the catastrophe at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. De -mocracy gave way to dynasty, and briefly in the mid-1970s to dictatorship, as Indira Gandhi arrested 100,000 opponents.

What went wrong in India? Is India today some terrible diștortion of Gandhi's ideals and experience? Or is it rather the result of the policies he pursued?

Tariq Ali's An Indian Dynasty gives us an opportunity to re-examine this question with his comprehensive account of the rulers and regime that arose from the struggle for independence. Though Jawa -harlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi are at the center of Ali's book, it is Mahatma Gandhi and his relation to Nehru which remains the most fascinating and important aspect of this history.

While Ali's book really begins with the events of 1919, Gandhi's political career had begun in South Africa years before, where he had led a fight for the civil rights of Indians. Already the outlines of his political method were clear: While he fought for civil rights for Indians, he never challenged the system as such, accepting the empire, capitalism, and bourgeois de -mocracy.

When the British fought the Boers from 1899 to 1902, Gandhi supported the British. When the Zulu war broke out in the first half of 1906, Gandhi joined the British Army as a medic because, he said, "the British Empire existed for the welfare of the world." Jawharlal Nehru (left) with Mahatma Gandhi selves, their villages, and their country."

Such were Gandhi's politics as he entered the most important era of his life, as -suming leadership of the Indian movement against British imperialism.

In India, the Moslem Khilafat Movement and the Congress Party, which involved both Moslems and Hindus, were being pushed into a confrontation with the British by a mass movement from below. To stop the movement, the British parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts on March 18, 1919, which gave the colonial government unlimited powers of repression.

Gandhi called for a general strike devoted to prayer and fasting for March 30. "Within a few days," writes Ali, "a creeping general strike had paralyzed political India."

There were demonstrations and clashes, and British atrocities in the Punjab, including torture. The worst atrocity was the massacre in the Jallianwalla Bagh garden in Amritsar, where 40 soldiers opened fire on 20,000 people, killing hundreds.

India was in a revolutionary mood, and a determined leadership and organization might have succeeded in challenging British rule. "Popular anger and outrage had spread," writes Ali, "but Gandhi wanted a movement that was strictly non-violent. He was determined to build a bridge between those who favored some form of armed struggle and those who saw the future as being determined by a slow process of reform."

But the rising movement against On Shakespeare's stage, it took the role of a king or queen—or at least a duke or duchess—to voice the great moral issues of the day. But to our television heroes, both nobility and morality come easily. It's a rule of thumb from "Dallas" to "Dynasty" that TV characters need be merely filthy imperialism, including the demonstrations in 1921 against the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales, continued to lead to violent confrontations.

When in one incident at Chauri Chaura, near Gorakhpur, police attacked peasants with pistols, the peasants chased them back to the police station, set fire to it, and burned the police to death. Three Congress volunteers, two Hindus and a Moslem, were hanged by the goverment.

As a result of that incident, at that crucial moment, Gandhi on his own initiative called off the movement-and in so doing called off the Indian Revolution. It was a decision that altered the course of Indian and world history.

Fears losing control

Why did Gandhi stop the movement? "Gandhi knew," writes Ali, "that if peasant struggle became dominant and the workers started agitating for class demands, the nationalist movement would be seriously weakened. He calculated that it was far better to call it off rather than permit it to get out of control."

At the same time in the 1920s and 1930s, Jawaharlal Nehru was developing into a key political figure, and one often at odds with Gandhi over the strategy and goals of the movement.

Nehru became attracted to the Stalinist Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, declared himself a "socialist," and said he wanted to see the end of social classes in India. As a result, though he was a wealthy bourgeois, he became suspect among other Congress leaders because of his radical views.

Gandhi understood that Nehru helped to strengthen the Congress by keeping many socialists within it. But the party was really controlled by industrialists like G.D. Birla and J.R.D. Tata. It was Gandhi as charismatic leader, mystical symbol, and astute politician who held together the socialist workers and the capitalist indus -Meanwhile Orry's best friend, George Hazard has his own problems, since his once-noble sister has become an abol -itionist weirdo...But it doesn't matter. The point is, as Hamlet learned, that nobility may suffer while doing its best to avoid taking a stand.

BOOK REVIEW trialists, the poor peasants and the rich landlords.

Gandhi set all of these forces in motion once again in 1930 with the campaign against the Salt Act. The movement con -tinued to grow through the 1930s and by 1940 India again entered a pre-revolutionary situation. When World War II broke out, Nehru told Churchill that India would fight fascism-but only as an independent state. Churchill rejected India's demand for independence.

While Gandhi nominally opposed supporting the British in the war, he actually worked to prevent the Congress from disrupting the British war effort. Nonetheless, a revolutionary movement was developing. Subas Chandra Bose, a highly respected Indian leader, joined forces With the Japanese to win India's liberation from the British. He organized an Indian National Army among Indians who were Japanese prisoners of war and formed a government in exile.

On Aug. 7, 1942, the Congress Working Committee passed the historic "Quit India" resolution, calling on the British to leave the subcontinent. Demonstrations occurred and the British arrested 60,000. Somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 people were killed.

The movement grew as the war ended. "Throughout 1946 India teetered on the brink of revolution. There were mutinies in the police and in the army, while on Feb. 1946, 20,000 naval ratings from 11 shore bases in Bombay and all the ships in the harbor hauled down the Union Jack," writes Ali. In Bombay a general strike broke out in solidarity with the mutineers.

At the same time communal violence erupted, in which a minimum of 250,000 Indians were killed. The colony became ungovernable and the British agreed to independence.

Finally, at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, India was free-and in Gandhi's way. The pacifist had insured that the Indian civil service, police, and army were still intact. The capitalists still owned their factories. The landlords controlled the land.

Gandhi's Hindu prejudices had kept the movement from joining Hindu and Mos -lem. The caste system with its "untouch -ables" still stood. Women were still in a state of subjection. Such was the Mahatma's peaceful revolution. Shortly before he was assassinated, Gandhi ap -proved India's first war against Pakistan.

The dynastic Nehru-Gandhi regime with all of its corruption, which is the central subject of Ali's book, is not some dis -tortion of Gandhi's politics. It is the result of them. As V.S. Naipaul has written, "the irony is that both tyranny and political sterility were insured by the very success of Gandhi."

..As I see it In the final moment of the drama, as the music swells to a crescendo, George pon -ders whether anything could have been done to avert the impending Civil War. Orry swallows. "Maybe," he replies, knowing only too well that if anything had been done (such as freeing the slaves), television viewers could not tune in next spring for "North and South II," which promises nifty battle scenes.