The man we would like to forget

Some thoughts on Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary

October 2, 2018. Not just another Gandhi Jayanti.  It is the 150th birth anniversary of Mohan Karamchand Gandhi, aka Mahatma Gandhi, aka Father of the Nation (that is India) etc etc.

There is no blaring music in my neighbourhood. Not even a recording of Gandhi's favourite "Vaishnavo jan to".  It is a day off.  In the middle of the week.  Nothing more it would seem.

So in the middle class apartment block where I have lived for almost five decades, which has been home to Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and non-believers, a new generation is turning the clock back.  From a place where tolerance was practiced without effort, they are bringing in rules that divide us on the basis of caste and class, and before long I am presuming on the basis on creed.

My day began when my part-time domestic help informed me that "servants" were not being allowed to use one of the elevators.  Why?  The manager apparently said that henceforth this was the rule.

When I went down to the building office to inquire and register my protest, I was told that a resolution had been passed by "the majority" at the Annual General Meeting to disallow "servants" from using one of the three elevators.  In the 50 years that this building has existed, such a rule had never been introduced.

I found it tragic, and ironical, that on a day when we were commemorating a man who spoke of peace, of tolerance, of compassion for the poor, of building an inclusive India, there is now a generation that thinks nothing of doing precisely the opposite.  Far from having any respect or gratitude towards those who make our lives so much easier through their paid (although often grossly underpaid) work, we want to make sure they are reminded daily of their lower status.  And the justification is that "the majority" voted for this.

The majority -- the same "majority" that is making life impossible for those of us who believe in a just society, where women and men are equal, where you don't discriminate on the basis of caste, class, creed or gender, where you respect those who work with their hands, where people are not divided into "higher" and "lower" castes, a terminology that we continue to accept unquestioningly.

In 2018, not only has India forgotten Gandhi, it doesn't deserve Gandhi.  Without elevating him to a god, or even a mahatma, can we not acknowledge that a good deal of what Gandhi said is relevant for our troubled times?

Fortunately, the anger and sadness I felt at the state of affairs in my building was dissipated when I stepped out to see whether Gandhi was being remembered elsewhere in the city. 

Early this morning,  a motley group of women and men, young and old, met at Chowpatty and then walked to Shantashram, where the Mumbai Sarvodaya Mandal and the Gandhi Book Centre are housed.  Established in 1956, after Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan campaign was launched, Shantashram has been a presence in the Nana Chowk locality for decades.  Since 1972, the one name that is associated with it is that of Tulsidas Somaiya, who has nurtured and developed the place with a dedication that is rare. 

I vividly remember meetings held there during the Emergency in 1975-76 when those of who who wanted to resist and fight authoritarianism met to plan, or just to vent.  It was a safe place, and a welcoming one.  The bonds we forged then have stood the test of time.

Shantashram is a house, unlike the buildings all around it.  It still has wooden balconies and windows, and an old tiled floor.  It is overwhelmed by the noisy and busy Bhaji Galli (vegetable market) on one side, and fronts a really busy road that is virtually impossible to cross.

Across it used to be Shankershett Mansion, where my grandfather lived on the third floor.  That building has disappeared making place for a tower, Orbit Heights and Annexe.  But the sugarcane juice vendor at the top of Bhaji Galli, who would go running up three floors to deliver the frothing, delicious juice whenever my grandfather clapped from his balcony to draw his attention and then gesticulated the number of glasses he wanted, is still there.  So there is change, but there is also continuity.

Today, Shantashram is busy.  In the courtyard as you enter, there is a group of mostly older people.  The oldest of them is the indefatigable, doughty almost 94-year-old socialist and Gandhian, Dr G. G. Parikh.  Along with others, he has decided to fast for the day.  Not just to remember Gandhi, but to remind us of the relevance of Gandhi's actions for these difficult times. 

Dr Parikh asks how many of us, after all these years of knowing about Gandhi's endeavour to build an inclusive India, have Muslim or Dalit friends, have lived in a slum and understood how the poor survive, have felt the need to reach out to people who are not like us?  He points out that this is the way to remember Gandhi, to realise that even after 71 years of Independence, the Dalits still live in a separate section in the majority of villages, that Muslims feel insecure, that there is more hatred between communities.

A floor above sits another indefatigable fighter, Aruna Roy.  She has come to the city for the day to show solidarity with people like Dr Parikh and others.  She has just finished talking with a group of women, led by Shabnam Hashmi, who are travelling from Kerala to Delhi to talk about harmony and healing, something Gandhi would have done had he been alive today. 

Meeting Dr Parikh and Aruna Roy, after the depressing start to my day, was not just uplifting but also humbling.  Their work and commitment remind me that it is possible to be realistic and yet not cynical, that you can be passionate and hopeful about the possibility of change if you set out to do what you can, what you must, even when the problems seem insurmountable.

In the Indian Express today, Avijit Pathak has written a really thoughtful article titled, "Gandhi for the young" in which he writes of his discomfort with the "official" Gandhi that is celebrated while not finding the real/living "experimental" Gandhi anymore.  The article is worth reading in its entirety but let me end with his concluding paragraph that, I believe, says it all:

"On January 30, 1948, when he was walking to attend the prayer meeting in Birla House in Delhi, he was trying to see sanity in the insane Subcontinent.  It is, however, a different story that Nathuram Godse, or the militaristic ideology of nationalist that created him, thought otherwise.  Do the youth realise that killing Gandhi is like killing a dream, a possibility; and this demonic force has not yet disappeared from our society?"

Will anything change in 2010?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 27, 2009

Can we look forward to development in 2010 that will not make the poor in the country poorer?

PHOTO: PAUL NORONHA

IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS: Farmers protesting land acquisition in Maharashtra.

As the sun gets ready to set, bringing to an end another year, we are forced to pause, to consider how the past year has gone by and whether the next will be different. For millions of Indians, who continue to live in poverty and whose numbers have grown statistically, there is little cause to cheer.

As if developmental policies and environmental degradation were not enough to increase the levels of deprivation of those living at the margins, there is now an additional, and more virulent, policy that will exacerbate poverty all over this country. And that is the policy to forcibly seize thousands upon thousands of acres of land, belonging to farmers and communities, for Special Economic Zones (SEZ). Every now and then, people's resistance to this blatant land grab breaks into the news. When political parties are involved, it is dismissed as the work of a “disgruntled” opposition. When it is apolitical, it is seen as the work of the anti-development brigade who resist any form of “progress”.

Yet you only need to go to the beautiful state of Goa, where thousands of Indians and foreigners go at this time of the year, to realise the extent of the fraud that is being played out in the name of SEZ. For, in a state, where a highly literate and involved citizenry has actively questioned and opposed projects seen to be detrimental to the environment and to Goa's development, thousands of acres of land have been acquired for one purpose and without any explanation diverted to another.

Taken forcibly

The Bhootkhamb Plateau in Kerim, northeast Goa, is one such example. It is one of the many plateaus that dot Goa and that are repositories of biodiversity, the source of much of the water supply and of grazing lands that are jointly owned by the community. In 1989, 123,200 sq metres of land on the Bhootkhamb Plateau were acquired under provisions of the Land Acquisition Act by the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) for an industrial project — Dupont's Nylon 66 factory. Nylon 66 had tried to set up shop elsewhere in India but had been rejected on environmental grounds. The people of Kerim and surrounding villages realised this and decided to oppose the plant. They put up a spirited resistance and in the ensuing confrontation between the villagers and the police, one young man was killed.

Today, his memorial stands as a reminder to the struggles of the past but the villagers continue to struggle even today. The land taken then for Nylon 66, a project that was ultimately abandoned, is still cordoned off. It has now been handed over to a pharmaceutical company under provisions of the SEZ. But the villagers will have none of it.

Swati, a spirited young teacher from Kerim, stands at the site and tells us what she and her fellow villagers feel. “We don't want industrialisation in our village”, she says. “We have seen in Goa that whenever there is industrialisation, we don't get jobs and the water dries up. We want our land back. We will decide what we want. The government cannot come and force us. We want our village to remain a village.”

Swati's fears are not unfounded. Even though all work on the proposed SEZ was supposed to have stopped as the Goa government has decided not to sanction any SEZs, the villagers discovered that an illegal tube well was being sunk on the site. Over 200 of them forced their way onto the site and stopped work. They fear that such tube wells will ultimately dry up all their sources of water.

In fact, for the first time, many villagers in Goa are experiencing a shortage of water. They are also witness to piles of industrial waste being burned on other plateaus, and hillsides being gouged out by earthmovers as the red sand is indiscriminately excavated for construction activities elsewhere. In front of their eyes, they are witnessing the destruction of their environment. Not surprisingly, even the easy-going people of this verdant state are now angry and frustrated.

Tragic stories

Further north of Goa, in the state of Gujarat, the story is not very different, only more tragic in many ways. Lalit Vachani, in his arresting documentary film “The Salt Stories” captures this in many touching sequences. The film retraces Gandhiji's salt march of 1930 from Sabarmati to Dandi in the context of modern Gujarat. One of the wrenching sequences shows Rajubhai, a slum dweller living on the banks of the Sabarmati, under the historic Ellis Bridge where Gandhiji held a massive rally. He faces eviction because the Government has plans to develop the riverfront, reflecting the global vision that Chief Minister Narendra Modi constantly articulates for the state he rules. But for men like Rajubhai, there is no place in this glittering global vision. He breaks down in front of the camera as he thinks of the future. “All we want is shelter and food”, he keeps repeating. When Vachani filmed Rajubhai, his slum was under threat of demolition. By the time he completed the film the slum had been demolished and Rajubhai had died, probably a broken man.

The film reminds us of the distance we have travelled in this country from when men and women marched alongside Gandhi to defy the Salt Tax imposed by the British, risked beatings and imprisonment but set in motion a form of non-violent resistance that is still spoken of and emulated. The villagers of Kerim in Goa, for instance, are convinced that this is the strategy they must follow today.

Lingering prejudices

But in Gandhi's own state, the message seems to have been lost, as Vachani reveals. The prejudice against Dalits and Muslims needs little provocation to be expressed. A Gandhian who remembers the struggles of the past has no hesitation in calling Muslims “demons” and insisting that they are to blame for everything. He sees no contradiction between calling himself a Gandhian and pouring venom on a community that Gandhi fought hard to protect in India. En route to Dandi, there are “temples” in the name of Gandhi that are locked and places where he stopped that lie in a state of disrepair.

The one glimmer of hope is from the village of Napa, a Muslim majority village, where even today the communities live together and carry forward the Gandhian legacy. And in Dandi itself, where Mohan Dandekar echoes something that Gandhi himself would have said had he been alive today — that development should not make the poor in this country even poorer.

2010 will be a year where this proposition will be tested yet again. In the name of progress, islands of prosperity in the form of SEZs are being created by forcibly depriving people of the one thing they call their own — their land. These islands will be foreign enclaves, not governed by the laws that apply to other Indian citizens. They promise employment but create nothing on the scale promised. And they are swallowing up land and resources at a pace that should make every Indian proud of the history of a country that fought colonial rule, wake up and think again.

(To read the original, click on the link above)