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- Gandhian swaraj, diminishing the kshatriya
- Radha Rajan
- It established tangentially that Gandhi’s encounter with the British Empire in South Africa was not intended to bring the Empire down by ending Apartheid colonial rule in South Africa, but merely to persuade the British government to look favourably upon the migrant Indian community there and enhance their social and political status above that of native Africans, through amendment or repeal of some discriminatory laws.
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We hope to establish that when Gandhi returned to India, his political career was consistent with his sojourn in South Africa, with no difference in objectives, and with disastrous consequences for Hindus and their motherland. Gandhi rendered Hindus politically impotent and fathered modern India’s politics of minority-ism. It is our contention that:
- The so-called freedom movement was never a freedom movement.
- Until 1942, the INC under Gandhi’s leadership and under his explicit injunction, never contemplated ending colonial rule. - - The call for ‘swaraj’ at the 1920 Nagpur Congress and for ‘purna swaraj’ at the 1928 Lahore Congress was a mockery of the Tilak/Aurobindo war-cry that galvanized the entire nation in the two decades between 1890-1910 on one hand, and on the other hand deceived ordinary Indians about the content and meaning of Gandhian swaraj which was never intended to be complete political independence entailing the exit of the Empire.
- - It was only in 1942 when world events weakened the Empire and made continued occupation of India increasingly untenable that the INC issued the utterly redundant notice to ‘Quit India.’
- - When the Empire finally decided to quit, it did so only on its terms with an ascendant Islam vivisecting the Hindu nation, with Nehru firmly positioned to inherit the mantle of leadership from Gandhi, with Jammu & Kashmir twisted into a permanent thorn in the nation’s flesh by Nehru and Mountbatten, with Hindus decisively disempowered politically, and the basis of nationhood of the new nation-state floundering in rampant confusion.
- Aurobindo’s incisive intelligence perceived the nascent trend in the INC to de-Hinduise itself; but even he failed to develop the thought further. In 1906, the move to dilute the Hinduness of the prominent leaders of the INC could only have been either to please the powerful Parsee community or the Imperial and Indian British governments because courting the Muslims was still in the future.
- Aurobindo accurately diagnosed the condition of educated Indians as being steeped in tamas – a state of languor which did not perceive its enslavement and therefore felt no desire to end it.
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Excerpted from
Eclipse of the Hindu Nation: Gandhi and his freedom struggle
Radha Rajan
New Age Publishers (P) Ltd., Delhi, 2009
Price: Rs 495/-
ISBN 81- 7819 - 068- 0
The book may be ordered from the publishers at ncbadel@ncbapvtltd.com
or at 011-2649 3326/ 27/ 28
The author is editor, www.vigilonline.com
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Friday, July 3, 2009
Gandhian swaraj, diminishing the kshatriya -
