If Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had not been assassinated by Hindus aggrieved that the Partition of Bharat Mata had taken place, not “over my dead body” as he promised, but over the mutilated remains of millions of men, women, and children, there would have been no hope of Hindu affirmation in the future of Independent India.
Gandhi stood for a perverse version of Hindu dharma, which paid lip service to Ram Rajya and the Bhagwad Gita, but actually initiated the Congress tradition of Muslim appeasement. His theories of ahimsa and satyagraha were tools to disarm the Hindu community from self-defense against Muslim and British aggression. That is why, after the Khilafat movement collapsed in 1924, he first denied and then justified the horrendous Moplah savagery on Hindus in Kerala.
It is pertinent that Gandhi never supported independent India becoming a Hindu Rashtra, a place of respite and dignity for Hindus after one of the bloodiest partitions in modern history. Gandhi should have known that a Hindu nation could never be an exclusionist nation and that there would be justice and freedom for all faiths, in consonance with the Hindu view of Rama-rajya, to which he paid lip service. But he was party to the vulgar secularism preached by Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, and actively promoted the Congress policy of accommodating Muslims at any cost.
Gandhi’s failure is all the more glaring because he understood and did mention some of the most serious threats facing Indian society, such as Christian evangelization and its secessionist agenda. This was already apparent in the north-east, but it was ignored by the Congress leadership then and in subsequent decades. As one who fully understood the perils of deracination inevitable with loss of faith, it was Gandhi’s principal responsibility to demand anti-conversion measures in independent India. More pertinently, he should have opposed foreign funding for any religion in free India. Yet here, as with other core issues of the Hindu community, he was simply missing in action!
On the very eve of independence, Gandhi betrayed the powerful Hindu sentiment against cow slaughter by asserting in a public meeting in Delhi that there could be no national ban against it until and unless the Muslim community consented to it. He thus reinforced the colonial legacy of giving the Muslim community a veto on every Hindu issue. Even prior to independence, Gandhi pointedly refused to hold the British accountable for the horrendous scale of cow-slaughter under their rule, which even impacted upon agricultural productivity in many states. He spoke piously of his respect for the cow, but unjustly blamed Hindus for their plight: “When the Hindu becomes insistent, the killing of cows increased. In my opinion, cow protection societies may be considered cow-killing societies…” (Hind Swaraj).
The current Indo-Pakistan joint terror mechanism may be considered a fitting legacy of Gandhi. Who can forget he fasted unto death to ensure Pakistan received Rs. 55 crores when its soldiers, disguised as tribal infiltrators, were rampaging in Jammu & Kashmir! It is a measure of Hindu powerlessness and the powerful state propaganda they have been subjected to that this person is still considered a ‘mahatma.’
Sunday Indian magazine, October issue 2007