(Making Sense of a
Bit of Nonsense)
In 1906, the British authorities
in South Africa embarked upon the suppression of the so-called Zulu Rebellion.
The name given to the conflict by the colonial regime may conjure up images of savages swarming around the circled wagons of civilization. The reality of the
counterinsurgency was much shabbier: modern military units pursued, shot and
flogged scattered and practically unarmed Africans who posed no credible threat
to an empire at the height of its power, and whose major offense was their objection
to a new tax calculated to force them into Natal’s labor market. Several
thousand Zulus were killed; hardly any whites died. (It was, in that sense, the
sort of war that Americans came to see as a reasonable expectation after Operation
Desert Storm.)
It’s well known that M.K. Gandhi
participated in the 1906 affair. The Zulu Rebellion was the second of Gandhi’s
South African wars. He reactivated the medical unit he had created during the
Boer War six years previously, recruiting South Africa’s Indian community to
fight for the empire that had done so much for them. Gandhi, in fact, tried to
persuade the government to give Indians a wider role in smashing the Zulu Rebellion,
but the white regime saw this as both unnecessary and undesirable, and Gandhi
and his men had to be content with ambulance work. Gandhi’s objective may very
well have been to promote the rights of Indians in South Africa, not only by
making a display of their loyalty to the Empire, but also by bringing them into
the field of colonial war, i.e., the political circle of the laager, where
citizenship and arms-bearing were joined at the hip. But as Erik Erikson
observed many years ago, there was more to it than expediency and ideology. Gandhi’s
relationship with the Empire and its administrators had the quality of the
rebellion of a son: he tended to swerve violently between fierce opposition and
an almost groveling loyalty, rejecting the ‘father’ in the first mode, and
desperately seeking his approval in the second.
That swerving habit gave Gandhi’s
responses to violence one of its most basic qualities, which is inconsistency. Having
signed up for the anti-Zulu ‘war,’ Gandhi quickly discovered that it was not a
war at all, but a series of manhunts (as he later described it). He and his men
spent much of their time taking care of badly injured Africans that white
doctors and nurses were reluctant to treat. Out of this experience came the outraged,
almost abusive prose of Hind Swaraj,
Gandhi’s best-known piece of polemic, in which he laid out his case against
violence and Western civilization. But five years later, he was back in
uniform, so to speak, recruiting Indian soldiers to fight for Britain in the
First World War.
Even Hind Swaraj is not the inflexible polemic it is sometimes assumed
to be. Gandhi makes it clear, for instance, that the appropriate moral response
to violent injustice depends on a variety of factors, including the identity of the
adversary, the balance of physical capabilities, and the circumstances of the
provocation. (There must, Gandhi wrote in his analogy of the armed burglar, be
one response for your father, and another for a stranger.) But at other points
in the same tract, and certainly in other tracts, he appears to insist that the
tactics and premises of satyagraha are independent of context. There were thus
two levels of inconsistency, or, seen another way, flexibility: one within the
ideology, another without. Raghavan Iyer called this the maintenance of a
distinction between ‘ahimsa as policy’ and ‘ahimsa as creed.’ Thus, even the very
late ‘inconsistencies’ in Gandhi’s career – his apparent acceptance of ‘any
means necessary’ in the Quit India uprising of 1942-43, or his endorsement of
military force in national defense in 1947 – need not be seen as lapses or surprising acts of desperation.
Satyagraha made allowances for desperation.
It is in the context of this
flexibility, then, that we might look at Gandhi’s most notorious application,
or misapplication, of the concept of satyagraha: the Holocaust. When the Nazi persecution
of the European Jews began, Gandhi began to receive requests for his reaction,
or even a prescription. The queries sometimes came from old Jewish friends and
collaborators; there had been many in Gandhi’s South African years. Sometimes
they came, in rhetorical form, from gleeful adversaries who believed that
Gandhi had finally met his ideological match in Hitler. And sometimes they came
from people like George Orwell, who found Gandhi’s moral certainties oppressive
but nevertheless wanted him to have
an answer. Gandhi disappointed them all, taking a remarkably hardline stance:
yes, the German-Jewish predicament was horrendous, but those targeted by the
Nazis must nevertheless offer satyagraha. In a line that has become justifiably
infamous, he suggested that the Jews should hurl themselves from cliffs rather
than ‘submit’ to their tormentors. The suggestion need not be taken literally,
but the meaning is unmistakable: Gandhi was saying that non-violent resistance
against the Nazis was morally necessary and even ‘viable,’ and that Jews who
allowed themselves to be rounded up and herded to their deaths had not only
contributed to their own destruction, but failed in their moral responsibilities.
Responsibilities to whom, one might ask. Well, to themselves, Gandhi seemed to
be saying, but also to those whose lives they might have saved, to other
Germans, and arguably to humanity itself.
In his generally excellent book on
Gandhi, Faisal Devji argued that Gandhi’s position on the Holocaust belongs
within a coherent and consistent
ideology of moral action through satyagraha. Unlike European anti-fascists (and
like many other Indian observers, such as Subhas Bose and Benoy Sarkar), Gandhi
refused to see fascism as a special evil. He therefore refused to see in it a
circumstance that warranted moral exceptions, Devji wrote, endorsing the
perspective. Like Gandhi, Devji conceded that satyagraha would not have
prevented the deaths of many Jews, and he too pointed out the obvious: neither
submission nor violent opposition succeeded in preventing those deaths. Devji
also argued that while the ultimate purpose of politics may not be separable
from the preservation of life, Gandhi had committed himself to a ‘hard’ morality
that was separate from, and superior to, the logic of political action. Thus,
the preservation of life became a secondary consideration, detachable from an autonomous
calculus of ‘doing the right thing.’ To miss the courage of Gandhi’s commitment
to that autonomy, Devji wrote, is to sentimentalize Gandhi.
Devji is, I think, too generous
to Gandhi on several counts. One has to do with the relationship between
information and ideology. Gandhi was aware of a general fact of persecution. He knew that Jews in Europe were being
terrorized, and even killed, by the Nazi regime: he had received letters from
his Jewish friends, and there was of course the news media. But he did not know
the particulars; neither, it must be said, did most of those who corresponded with him
between 1933 and January of 1948. The episode, for Gandhi, remained a problem
of German Jews and their Aryan neighbors: he had nothing to say about Poland
and Galicia, or about the wider European implications of the Wannsee
Conference. The details that constitute the most visceral content of the
Holocaust-as-history, marking it out as something extraordinary – memoirs,
photographs and films, archival data and trial transcripts – were only just
beginning to filter through in the final two years of Gandhi’s life, when he
was already preoccupied with the political and human calamity of the Indian
Partition. In those circumstances, just as it is unfair to expect Gandhi to
have formulated an informed opinion on the Holocaust, it is also a mistake to
endow thinly-informed opinion with the dignity of ‘ideology,’ instead of seeing
it as a bit of nonsense to which even Gandhi is entitled.
It is, after all, in the details
that the devils of the Holocaust lie. Details differentiate it from counterinsurgency
in South Africa and the carnage of the First World War. The assumption that
‘fascism is not extraordinary’ in the context of the modern state is contentious
but defensible, since there is rarely a clear line where the merely oppressive
ends and the fascist begins. But to assume that there is no distinction between
garden-variety fascism and Nazi practice is much more problematic, and the widespread
Indian tendency to see Nazi Germany as just another ‘hard state’ (that is
admirable or objectionable depending on whether the observer is ‘right’ or
‘left’ in Indian politics) misses both the trees and the wood. Obviously, the
Holocaust was not the original case of mass murder, and Gandhi knew from
personal experience that it was not the first time that industrial products had
been used against unarmed targets. But Gandhi, who relied heavily on personal experience
in the formulation of his ideological positions, had neither direct nor
indirect experience of the application of industrial methods to murder, in which the factory model was utilized to
manufacture death itself. He could not grasp, therefore, what his informants
failed to explain, but what those who engineered the shift from Einsatzgruppen to extermination camps did grasp: one cannot appeal to the conscience of
'neighbors,' or make any kind of moral gesture at all, when the neighborhood has
been replaced by the assembly line.
It has become increasingly fashionable
to see Gandhi as all-purpose critic of whatever is unappetizing about
modernity. He fits the bill: he was an eccentric Asian, he had a certain
resemblance to Yoda, his writing is shot through with an idiom of mid-Victorian
Christianity that was stilted and dated in his own lifetime, and, of course, he
was a critic of modernity. But there
is something dangerously ahistorical in the scope that is often allotted
to Gandhi. It covers everything and all periods from civil rights to
environmentalism, antiwar politics to anti-corporate activism, British
imperialism to the occupation of Palestine. Surely Gandhi had the answer! ‘Maoists’
in Madhya Pradesh might actually be ‘Gandhians with guns’! But Gandhi was a man
from a particular time and particular places, dealing with a
particular set of issues and enemies. Placing him in situations he did not
inhabit even in a library turns him into a Forrest Gump of sorts, and it stretches
Gandhian ideology well beyond its breaking point. Gandhi was there when
colonial troops savaged the Zulus; it produced a powerful little book. But he
was nowhere near the death camps or Josef Mengele’s work-station. Nothing that he
had to say about the Nazis – or their victims – is especially useful in
thinking through that particular form of state terror.
March 7, 2014
