Comments on New York Times article Gandhi’s Killer Evokes Admiration as Never Before

And here is yet another letter of complaint that I wrote concerning an article in the New York Times, as written by Sameer Yasir:

from: thebahuofbengal@gmail.com  
to: yasirshi@gmail.com 
date: Feb 5, 2020, 5:21 PM 
subject: Comments on Gandhi’s Killer Evokes Admiration as Never Before

Dear Mr. Yasir,

This message concerns your article Gandhi’s Killer Evokes Admiration as Never Before, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/world/asia/india-gandhi-nathuram-godse.html.  I have also posted my comments on Twitter and Facebook.

A statue for Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who assassinated Mohandas K. Gandhi death.Credit: Smita Sharma for The New York Times

Comments:

• I don't condone Godse's action, but Gandhi was a disaster for India
• Thanks to Gandhi, people think that India should be passive and not fight back.
• Sometimes it's necessary to take up arms against the forces of adharma: that's what the Mahabharata taught us.
• Gandhi recommended collective suicide to Jews, Brits, and Hindus in the face of evil.  Read Repudiating Gandhian pacifism in the face of mass murder, https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Repudiating-Gandhian-pacifism-in-the-face-of-mass-murder-449885.
• You missed that Gandhi was on a fast to the death concerning giving Pakistan 55 crores. He was working on the behalf on the British
• You wrote "Gandhi walked slowly across a stately lawn in New Delhi, India’s capital, leaning on the shoulders of two young women." Those young women were his grandnieces.
• Gandhi slept naked with these grandnieces to test his sexual abstinence.

Your sincerely,
[The Bahu of Bengal]
xxx-xxx-xxxx

HT Anantanand Rambachan

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Patel

Namaste, 

Too often, Westerners associate India’s independence movement with only Gandhi and Nehru. IMO Gandhi and Nehru emasculated India. In my article The Assertive Indian, I said that Westerners should know about the efforts of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel toward India’s independence.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

Now, after reading His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire by Sugata Bose, great-nephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (and grandson of Sarat Chandra Bose), I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that strong personalities such as Netaji and Sardar Patel were at odds with each other. For one thing, Sardar Patel, as part of Gandhi’s wing, undermined Netaji’s becoming Congress President.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

More personally, and this was new to me, Sardar Patel’s family fought the terms of his older brother Vithalbhai’s will, which allocated a portion of his fortune to Netaji “for the political uplift of India and preferably for publicity work on behalf of India’s cause in other countries.” Vithalbahai Patel and Netaji met as they were convalescing in a sanatorium in Europe.

This is not to disparage the efforts of both Netaji and Sardar Patel toward achieving India's independence.  Both men contributed strongly to India's independence in their own ways.

Note: this article contains a link to Amazon.com.  The Bahu of Bengal is an Amazon.com affiliate, and by selecting the link and purchasing the book through that link, you support the work of this blog.

Rethinking Gandhi

Gandhi

I have made reference to Gandhi in scattered posts on this blog. Now comes another article from the redoubtable Sanjeev Nayyar on Gandhi, Christianity, and Ahimsa. In this article, Sanjeev cites Sri Aurobindo, who was critical of Gandhi throughout his life:
>
“Some prominent national workers in India seem to me to be incarnations of some European force here. They may not be incarnations, but they may be strongly influenced by European thought. For instance Gandhi is a European-truly, a Russian Christian in an Indian body. And there are some Indians in European bodies!

Yes. When the Europeans say that he is more Christian than many Christians (some even say that he is “Christ of the modern times”) they are perfectly right. All his preaching is derived from Christianity, and though the garb is Indian the essential spirit is Christian. He may not be Christ, but at any rate he comes in continuation of the same impulsion. He is largely influenced by Tolstoy, the Bible, and has a strong Jain tinge in his teachings; at any rate more than by the Indian scriptures-the Upanishads or the Gita, which he interprets in the light of his own ideas.”
>
Indeed, Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita is fanciful: he does not accept the need to take up arms against the forces of adharma.

Neo-Neocon is a blogger whose worldview changed after 9/11: she formerly was a liberal; after 9/11, she became, well, a "neo-neocon." In her article The varieties of pacifism: (Part I)–Gandhi’s absolutism, Neo-Neocon looks at Gandhi's extreme form of pacifism, in which he advocated collective suicide on the part of Jews in Nazi Germany and on the part of Sikhs and Hindus about to face massacres in Pakistan.

After hearing yet another hagiographic portrayal of Gandhi by a minister in a New Thought church, I told the minister that I disagreed with the portrayal as she greeted me in the receiving line following the service. She was nonplussed. I then forwarded Neo-Neocon's essay, with an apology for using that time and place to state my disagreement, to her by email. I never received a reply.

But then I'm a bit of a sh**-stirrer: certainly, I PO'ed Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekharan with my criticism about his reporting about Godhra.

More than just the Mahatma

This article More than just the Mahatma by Sanjeev Nayyar, which was published in the September 24, 2007 edition of the Hindustan Times, echoes many of the thoughts in my article The Assertive Indian:

More than just the Mahatma
Savarkar, Subhas Bose and Bhagat Singh left a legacy that India can be proud of. A re-evaluation of Gandhi’s role in India’s independence is necessary to give other leaders due credit.

In his article, Nayyar re-evaluates Gandhi's role by providing evidence that ahimsa did not lead to India's independence. He then discusses the contributions by Veer Savarkar and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose to the freedom struggle.


Vināyak Dāmodar Sāvarkar

If anyone in the West knows anything about Savarkar, they probably learned it through Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre. Collins and LaPierre portray Savarkar as a homosexual and intimate that he was guilty of conspiracy in the assassination of Gandhi, even though he was exonerated of the charges.

The Assertive Indian

with apologies to Amartya Sen and his book The Argumentative Indian

Today is the 60th anniversary of India's independence and I thought that I would share some thoughts about leaders for independence.

Many of our friends think that Gandhi was a saint; in fact, one person opined that if he had lived in Jesus's time and stories about him had accumulated over the years, as with Jesus, that he would be regarded with the same reverence as Jesus. However, Gandhi, and those who promote his legacy, especially in the West, have created the unfortunate impression that India and Indians must be docile. Whenever Indians act assertively, it's met with shock and then condemnation.

As for Nehru, he created a travesty of major proportions when he threw the fate of Kashmir to the UN. The Maharaja of Kashmir was offered the same terms of accession as given to rulers of other princely states. He dithered, until marauding Pathans from Pakistan compelled him to throw his lot with India. And for that, many Pakistanis refer to him as a "Hindu despot"! An acquaintance from India mentioned that he had a friend in the Indian army who, along with his fellow soldiers, were stunned when Nehru commanded the army to stand down, rather than fight in Kashmir. A former army officer told us that India could take Kashmir in 7 days if there were the political will.

Most of our non-Indian friends know about Gandhi and Nehru, but have never heard of assertive Indians like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Patel. Could Netaji's volunteer army marching from Burma have had more to do with Indian independence than Gandhi's satyagraha? A war-weary Britain was unwilling to fight in one of its possessions following WWII. As for Sardar Patel, he did more for integration of India than anyone.

It's time to make Netaji and Sardar Patel better known in the West - it will change perception of India and Indians.

On ahimsa

Hinduism is often believed to be synonymous with ahimsa (अहिंसा); in fact, this article on Ahimsa from Wikipedia says it's at the core of Hinduism and cites the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita (भागवद् गीता) on Gandhi.

Michael Danino notes in his article The Gita in Today's World that:

To the West, there is either brute force or pacifism, either violence or non-violence ; to the Gita the truth is neither one nor the other, but the conscious use of force to protect dharma.

I would argue, however, that this duality is not (or perhaps no longer) exclusive to the West.

Danino concludes with this statement from Sri Aurobindo:

We will use only soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensive employment of physical violence? Good, though until soul-force is effective, the Asuric force [from Asura असुर, or power-hungry being] in men and nations tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, but then at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused as much destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resort to violence.