AT THE END of the Rajpath, the pro-cessional way leading to what was once the viceroy?s house and is now the President?s palace in New Delhi, there stands an elegant stone cupola covering an empty plinth. The King-Emperor?s statue, for which cupola and plinth were erected, has long since been removed; but there is no agreement on who or what should replace it.

A statue of Mahatma Gandhi, the founding father of independent India, would be the obvious choice. But what would that apostle of non-violence make of the massive parade of military might which strides and rumbles down the Rajpath every Republic Day? What indeed would he make of modern India, so different from the austerely religious society of simple village communities and intercommunal harmony which he strove for? More eloquently than any statue, the empty plinth symbolises the gap between contemporary reality and the ideal India of Gandhi?s visionary imagination.

Fifty years ago this week, on 30 January 1948, a frail and ailing Gandhi, heart-broken by the carnage of partition, emerged from Birla House in New Delhi on his way to evening prayers and was shot dead by an amateur gunman posing as a devotee. Ironically, the assassin was a Hindu extremist who thought that, by acquiescing in partition, Gandhi had betrayed Hinduism and sold out to Islam. So the crown of martyrdom hallowed his distinctly Indian blend of courage, sanctity, shrewdness and eccentricity: a million people followed the cort?ge to the cremation.

Fifty years on, critics find it easier to be cynical about Gandhi?s eccentricities, both political and personal, than to admire his passionate belief in non-violence, his commitment to the search for religious truth or the courage with which he faced down the might of the British Raj. He himself confessed to at least one Himalayan error in the course of the independence struggle; his inner voices prompted him to some perplexing decisions; and his preoccupation with the mechanics of sexual abstinence now seems more disturbing than edifying.

Hindsight also enables us to see that for all his efforts to promote Hindu-Muslim harmony, he gave the Congress movement a predominantly Hindu ethos with which Muslims found it difficult to identify. His decision to launch the Quit India movement in 1942 fuelled Muslim-Hindu antagonism and proved a serious misjudgement of British resolve; and by causing Congress leaders to be swept into detention for the rest of the Second World War, it left Jinnah a clear field in which to build up support for the Muslim League.

Nor was this all. Muslim resentment was heightened by Gandhi?s insistence that Congress represented the totality of the Indian people (including Muslims). His interventions scuppered the compromise settlements hammered out by the Cripps Mission in 1942 and the Cabinet Mission in 1946 ? compromises which just might have kept India united. That his characteristically Hindu claim to be himself a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew and a Parsee could be perceived by non-Hindus ? and especially Muslims ? as being threatening as well as absurd seems not to have occurred to him. So Gandhi was right to feel some sense of shared responsibility for the bloodshed which accompanied partition; and one can only admire the fervour with which, when it was too late, he sought to end the killings.

None of his mistakes, however, detracts from his enormous achievements in kindling the self-respect of the Indian peasantry, in successfully harnessing that self-respect to the cause of Indian independence, and in providing the inspiration on which Nehru and other Congress leaders drew so successfully.

Nor is his spiritual influence to be underrated. Doubtless there was a touch, if not of the charlatan, then certainly of the publicist, about his well-advertised austerities, his fasts and his loincloth. There is a cloudiness about his religious rhetoric which sometimes savours of cant. Yet no one who reads his autobiography or traces the course of his career can seriously doubt the sincerity of his search for truth, the strength of his faith in God or his conviction that there is a kernel of truths which all the great religions share.

Profoundly Hindu though he was, his thought was significantly influenced by his exposure to Christianity. It comes as no surprise that he established an immediate rapport with Lord Halifax (then Lord Irwin), most Christian of viceroys, of whom he said that he succumbed not to Lord Irwin, but to the honesty in him; nor that his favourite hymn ? still played as the sun goes down on Republic Day ? should have been Abide with Me. Although he was na?ve about the likelihood of a German-Japanese victory in the war (and what it would have done to India), he loved England and acknowledged a core of decency and restraint in the British which other colonial powers lacked.

In modern India, it may seem that his political heirs have decisively rejected most of what he stood for and believed in. Yet the veneration in which he continues to be held is more than hypocrisy: as long as it persists it is a kind of guarantee ? fragile but real ? that in India corruption will never be taken entirely for granted and the surrender to materialism will never be quite complete.

*** Sir David Goodall was British High Commissioner to India from 1987 to 1991.

Back to homepage