Besides the re-election of Donald Trump the most positive news of 2024 came from India on one of the last days of the year: under the great Narendra Modi finally the Indian ban on Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses‘ was lifted.
Not only was this an important victory over Mohammedan attempts to silence any form of criticism towards their holy prophet by screaming ‘blasphemy’ and by attempts at murder.
It also embodies the end of the Gandhis’s own very special form of untouchability.
His mindset
Reading all of the over 500 pages of the autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a very special experience. There were moments that I thought that I had absorbed enough but until the very last paragraph it shed new light on this man’s role in world history and -to a greater extent- his mindset.
Untouchables versus Brahmin
In connection with this question of the caste of untouchables in India, I must start with something about his wife: Kasturbai.
In the third and fourth of the total of 167 chapters, Mr. Gandhi writes about the arranged marriage with her, when they are both 13 years old.
He writes painfully honest and in detail about the first years of their marriage.
Considerably more painful is what he leaves out: when he goes to Great Britain at the age of 18, he is already the father of a child. A son whose name he only mentions for the first time hundreds of pages later. Elsewhere he writes almost literally that the task he has taken on is so big and important that he cannot pay much attention to his children …
Kasturbai is a member of the same caste as Mohandas – the most powerful and often wealthy Brahmins – but she is illiterate.
He writes at the very beginning of the book that he wanted to educate her, but more than 30 years later, when Mohandas opens his commune (‘Ashram’) to untouchables, she still has trouble with that.
Kasturbai did not make it into the index of the book …
WW I
In the featured image my arrow points towards the screaming of ‘Allaho Akbar‘.
This is shouted in the context of a so-called ‘hartal‘ – a strike, so to speak – in April 1919. This protest concerns the peace agreement of the First World War and the anger is directed at the fact that it is negative about followers of Mohammed.
As I describe in my E-book about the origins of Turkey, Muslim extremists played a much more important role than usually reported in escalating to a world war after that murder in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip in those horrible summer months.
The secret terrorist organization Princip was part of did not engage in military confrontation with the Hungarian-Austrian empire, but had engaged in confrontation with the Ottoman empire in 1912; and with success!
In November 1914, Sultan AND Caliph Mehmet VI declared holy war: in Arabic (!) all Muslims worldwide were called upon to participate in the war against Russia, France and Great Britain.
Although this call did not find much response, in the context of assessing Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi it is essential not to lose sight of the fact that forming a single united front with the Mohammedans became very explicitly his highest goal. He took the lead in the so-called Khilafat movement in India.
The movement wanted the restoration of the Caliphate, suggesting that it was ended by the British when in reality the sultanate and caliphate were actually abolished by the new Turkish nationalists led by Atatürk.
Misogyny and unlimited free rein for ‘real religions’
In a letter from April 1919 to the Viceroy of India – included in the autobiography, unlike other letters and formal declarations – MKG states that he believes that STATES can be Mohammedan and that he stands up for the rights of those governments (see also: legitimate causes of those governments).
Those countries may act completely in accordance with their religious precepts.
And he knows very well what this means for women and children.
On page 461 he writes about a demonstration in Bombay (now: Mumbai) in the context of that joint front formation:
The procession included a fair sprinkling of women and children, while Musalmans joined it in large numbers.
And there is no doubt about it: ‘Musalwomen’ (or children) were not there.
The relevant chapter is aptly called: “Passion for Unity”.
Peaceful for the time being …
On page 497 we read about his negotiations with Muslim leaders, he actually uses the term ‘Ulema’.
In the end they all agreed that Islam did not forbid (!) its followers from following non-violence as a policy.
Up until then he had not tried to sell them the concept of non-violence: he knew how strongly Muslim leaders appreciated violence.
He asks for advice to come up with a new word to get the ulema on board and he is suggested ‘tark-i-mavalat’.
Modern dictionaries and other publications indicate that this stands for: delay, lateness, procrastination, retardation. In other words, no violence for the time being.
What is completely ignored is that the Ottoman Empire had been in decline since 1565.
WW II
Only recently I discovered that Mohandas Karamchand wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler!
One in July 1939 and one in December 1940. Both with the salutation ‘Dear Friend’. In the longest, second one he writes Hitler that people in India are opponents of the British too…
And take note: in South Africa (in the Boer War) as well as in India at the beginning of World War I he recruited Indians to volunteer on the side of the British Empire!
And the whole autobiography is steeped in admiration for British individuals, including British administrators.
Elsewhere he basically argued that if the jews had themselves get slaughtered, karma should punish Hitler later.
This letters to ‘The Leader’ (It happens to be the official name of the Iranian Ayatollahs Khomeiny and Khamenei too, BTW) I found thanks to a Trump Derangement sufferer named Kelly Rae Kraemer.
She wrote a really amazing article titled ‘Dear Friend’: The Practice of Nonviolence in Gandhi’s Letters to Hitler and published it in a journal with the cringy name: ‘Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis‘. (Here I elaborated a little bit on it).
An even more pronounced form of fascination with religious madness I encountered in none other than the murdered Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic verses, Hitoshi Igartashi, which brings us back to my opening line.
The Holy Cows
MKG has been criticized before. He has been accused of racism against blacks in South Africa and of wanting to maintain the caste system himself. I will not go into those accusations here.
Another accusation I find much more interesting and important: the accusation that he was horse-trading with his Islamic friends: they received support from him for their wish to restore the Caliphate and not to split up the Ottoman Empire and he would receive their support to ban the slaughter of cows.
Gandhi himself also found that accusation the most important: the 7th to last chapter in his book is entitled The Khilafat against cow protection?.
Yes, including that question mark.
English as Lingua Franca of the Indian Subcontinent
The bizarre thing is that he does not really go into the content of that accusation in that chapter.
‘Actually’ those two themes should not be discussed in conjunction, he indicates, but the most important thing he brings forward in that text is his own doubt about the language in which he should address a joint meeting with the Muslims …
Take good note: the country India did not yet exist.
There was a subcontinent that was ruled by the British. To govern that enormous area, they needed to deploy a remarkably small number of administrators and soldiers.
The people in this enormous area spoke dozens of different languages.
And even more important: the majority of the inhabitants had not forgotten the bloody subjugation of all non-Muslims by the Muslim rulers in the past.
The British were able to keep the Muslims in line partly thanks to that sentiment.
The efforts of Gandhi and his followers consisted, in the end, only of addressing abuses in the subcontinent, for which he found a willing ear among British individuals AND the British regime.
The partition and his mindset
During the centuries-long British rule, tens of thousands of victims fell among the population of the subcontinent.
However, this number pales in comparison to the millions of fatalities that resulted from the foundation of those two countries in 1947: Pakistan, explicitly for the Muslims and India explicitly for people of all ‘religions’, including the Muslims.
We are talking about approximately 2.5 million dead and more than 15 million people who fled from one country to the other.
Until his death Gandhi continued to cling to those silly dreams and ‘experiments’ of his.
The autobiography consists of five parts. Each of those parts has its own front page with the text:
The story of my experiments with truth, followed by the number of that part…
Narcissism
In dozens of places in the book Gandhi makes it very clear that he does not want to write about his role in world history but about the inner struggle with his feelings that his experiments evoked in him.
He is exceptionally open about this.
In a few passages about politically exceptionally important committees he does not devote one word to the mandate of those committees or to the question of whether they fulfilled that mandate. He does write about it literally: “but that is history”.
I strongly disapprove of almost everything Gandhi stood for.
I consider him guilty of the millions of deaths that occurred as a result of the Partition.
And also of the nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India and the horrors of that other partition: that led to the new state of Bangladesh.
The flow of millions of (mainly Hindu) refugees caused India to intervene militarily.
But why do I get so angry about that? He can no longer be punished anyway.
For two reasons.
Firstly, because of the renewed violence of Mohammedans against Hindus in that same Bangladesh in 2024!
Secondly, because this dangerous lunatic is wrongly looked up to by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
In 1914 he travels from South Africa to India via London. On page 345 he writes about an exchange with an admirer: Hermann Kallenbach.
Perhaps his most successful ‘conversion’.
Kallenbach has acquired a pair of binoculars and he visibly enjoys them during part of the sea voyage. Gandhi says that such a thing “was not in keeping with the ideal of simplicity that we aspired to achieve”.
He then convinces Hermann to throw the expensive binoculars into the sea!
In line with this is his great campaign to reject industrial cotton production and embrace hand weaving. Such a manually powered loom initially even adorned the flag of India!
The worst genocide after WWII – by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – was also marked by a complete rejection of Western-like progress: those urban spectacle wearers were chased into the countryside.
Millions of deaths.
Shortly before Stalin’s death, the Dutch Communist Party distanced itself somewhat from Moscow. In response, several Marxist-Leninist parties flourished, which the Dutch communists found too little radical.
The leader of one of those is now busy burning pension funds (including mine) in the context of the climate hoax!
This man never distanced himself from his openly expressed admiration for the Khmer Rouge.
Winston Churchill saw through the dangerous attention-seeking of this opponent of technological progress.
It was during the years that he first spent in Great Britain that Mr Gandhi came across the utopian socialists.
As a trainee lawyer, he still wore a suit. In 1931 he appeared in a loincloth at the British royal family and Churchill reminded of that earlier stay in Great Britain and his attirement.
Churchill and Gandhi met only once in person: in South Africa.
Gandhi’s ideas about resistance to British rule were still far in the future. Nevertheless, Churchill already developed a great deal of distrust towards MKG.
Not 100%, but largely justified.