What might Gandhi have done today?

Dial back to his record, learn from today’s Gandhians — or the fires being lit by manufactured hate will engulf everyone and everything  

In this blighted time of hate, it is worth asking: what would Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, that brilliant organiser of salt marches and instant  hartals, have done? Would he have written a tweet, created a meme, modelled in an election campaign centred around “ ladki hoon, lad sakti hoon” (I am a woman, I can fight)?

In 1947, at a similar moment when hate speeches against Muslims engulfed public discourse, Gandhi had not minced his words. He spoke urgently and repeatedly of communal harmony, friendship, and love, in countless prayer meetings, speeches and articles. A man of action and not mere words, the Mahatma visited riot-torn neighbourhoods, destroyed mosques, and refugee camps, conversed with locals and sought out “all party” agreements to keep the peace in 1947. 

In his trademark quiet but firm voice, he demanded that illegally seized mosques be returned to their community owners. Faced with black flags and slogans demanding “Death to Gandhi”,  Gandhi Murdabad, at Amritsar railway station, Gandhi did not flinch. He drafted a resolution that was passed in the All India Congress Committee session of November 1947 affirming:

“India has been and is a country with a fundamental unity and the aim of the Congress has been to develop this great country as a whole as a democratic secular state, where all the citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the state, irrespective of the religion to which they belong. The Constituent Assembly has accepted this as the basic principle of the constitution. This lays on every Indian the obligation to honour it.”

Seventy-five years later, it is 1947 once more, but worse. For, that 1947, however blood-drenched, did bring with it the hope of a clearer dawn. The urgency of building and rebuilding two torn but new nations drove its founders, bureaucrats, refugees to work. The anger and the rage was channelled into building new homes, refugee colonies turned new neighbourhoods, even cities.

But now we have a new kind of manufactured hate, its ugliness blaring on loudspeakers to which so many unemployed young men dance, showcased on social media, and in everyday conduct. The question of whether Muslims belong in India on terms of equality has been reopened — in housing societies, in streets and markets leading up to temples, in educational institutions, in political discourse. And for an answer, Gandhi’s Congress demurs softly lest the Hindu majority vote even more overwhelmingly for the preachers of such hate. Or the rising alternative that is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) invests in a strategic bigotry in the vain hope that they will be able to ‘turn off’ bigotry at will.

But forget the petty,  petty political class for a moment. A historian studying this era will encounter Gandhi elsewhere. In the social workers who provided oxygen and food to the COVID-afflicted and the migrant worker. In the non-violent women of Shaheen Bagh and the farmers at the Singhu border. In the journalists who fill Kashmiri prisons under the draconian J&K Public Safety Act. In the brave editors who assist even braver reporters to document and add the unending spiel of hate speech at so-called religious assemblies to the historical record.