The Congress, it seems, may have been a little too hasty in taking to heart what the BJP president Amit Shah had said about Mahatma Gandhi. The party ended up criticising Shah also. But the fact is that critics and admirers have used similar expressions while referring to Gandhiji.
It was Sarojini Naidu who apparently coined the title of “Mahatma” while referring to Gandhiji; The expression struck root and Gandhiji was ever since called Mahatma Gandhi. No one deserved the name other than the ‘Father of the Nation’ who unified the country against the mighty British empire on which the sun never set.
I fail to understand what is so objectionable in describing Gandhiji as a “clever bania”. The expression consists of two words “clever” and “bania”. He was both. Is there anything wrong in being clever?
That Gandhiji was a bania played an important role in his success. A bania (belonging to the trader community) has a businessman’s insight and never falls for misleading claims. The great Indian businesses before 1947 were mostly set up by banias, the Birlas and the Bajajs, for instance, and followed even in independent India by the many Agarwals, and the Mittals.
Laxmi Mittal took the dying British steel industry by the scruff of its neck and reset the brand of British Steel, once the core of British industry and its colonial success. Today it is the clever Indian bania like the Mittal and the mining baron Agarwal of business house Vedanta who make their industry a force to reckon with in the post colonial world.
So only a constrained narrow mind could jump to see in the expression “clever bania” a pejorative vituperation against Gandhiji.
It was the Mahatma’s commitment as well as cleverness that enabled the Congress to oppose Partition; the Congress leaders who gave in to Lord Mountbatten’s charms were the ones to be blamed for the division of the country. In the book Freedom at Midnight, the game the last British viceroy played is fully documented.
By not attending the ceremony in Delhi—while the British flag was being lowered—and remaining in riot-torn Noakhali, the clever Mahatma was telling India that he was sharing the suffering which arose as a result of the Partition. The BJP president in adding the epithet of “clever bania” was only underlining this aspect, indelibly recorded in history.
It is almost axiomatic that to be successful, a bania needs to be “clever”—clever to recognise the opportunity and clever to capitalise from it.
Getting deeper into this event, the Congress, before independence, remained free from the scandals of the type that the party had to face after independence. Despite the large donations it raised to support its countrywide activities to achieve independence against the largest and empire the world had ever seen, Gandhiji’s organisation was able to enforce the fiscal discipline that usually the bania imposes on himself to become a successful trader.
Some of Gandhiji’s closest supporters were banias and were generous in donating for the Congress and other societal experiments like his ashrams. He was a strict disciplinarian when it came to spending these donations and in using the resources: He would reuse the envelops that came with the letters addressed to him.
Banias like Kamalnayan Bajaj found Gandhiji very frugal when it came to spending the donation. He felt Gandhiji was imposing the same discipline on his close followers but the same Sarojini Naidu who conferred the epithet Mahatma on him also mocked at him saying it cost the nation heavy to keep him in poverty.
Had Gandhiji chosen the path of violence like some other freedom fighters did, it would have attracted no sympathy from the colonialists themselves. On the other hand, when the British intelligentsia read reports that Indian satyagrahis did not retaliate even when the police beat them up, it moved them.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other die-hard conservatives like him might have mocked at Gandhiji’s “non-violent satyagraha” and fasts unto death; but British liberals like Harold Laski were more understanding and a pro-India independence sympathy was already rising among the British intelligentsia by the end of the Second World War which strengthened the British Labour Party that had come to power in 1945 to seek withdrawal from the “jewel of the British crown”.
If Gandhiji is criticised today it would be wrong to act against the accusers. Let truth prevail over the centuries. We should be warned also against the wolves in sheep’s clothing and let this great Indian be judged by his own merits and not let the wolves make him a sectarian demi-God. That alone is half the battle won.
We can then protect and preserve the greatness of the people who walked the streets of the country, blessing it as they walked and talked, the same way Gandhiji himself did.
It would be essential to see the weaknesses of Gandhiji too. He himself has sought to make his biography as transparent as possible, listing his weaknesses and faults. The fact that some of his experiments with truth were too abhorrent for others including to his close followers is well known. For instance, when he announced his decision to test his self-control with the ultimate test of lying with young girls as prescribed in the yogic shastras, many were shocked and questioned the rationale behind such a move. But Gandhiji he went ahead.
The economic theory of Gandhiji now looks too impractical in this age of fast-changing technology but there are people who consider that decentralised production is possible as new technologies like 3-D printing make decentralised production an imperative. The bania was therefore not just a great leader but also a prophet for his age.
Balbir Punj
Former Rajya Sabha member and a Delhi-based social and political commentator
Email: punjbalbir@gmail.com