Historian Ramachandra Guha on his book Arguments With Gandhi, why Gandhi has both followers and critics, the points where Gandhi and Ambedkar diverge and converge and why student protests should go beyond these two national figures. The session was moderated by Vikas Pathak, Deputy Associate Editor, The Indian ExpressVikas Pathak: In your book, you refer to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the appropriation of figures like Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose. Why do you think there’s this tendency to appropriate figures who were either with the Indian National Congress or revolutionaries with Left leanings?There’s a general answer and a specific answer. The general answer is that the Hindu Right, whose ideological ancestors would be the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), never really participated in the freedom struggle. There were two important strands in that movement, one was embodied in the Indian National Congress, which articulated a philosophy of non-violence, and the secondary strand was of revolutionary violence.Now, the Hindu Right either were agnostic on the question of the freedom struggle or in some critical moments, supported the colonial state. That’s the general answer. The specific answer is that although the Hindu Right has a strong dislike for the Congress, much of their criticism is against Nehru but Gandhi, for them, is anathema. For two reasons. One being that Gandhi believed in equal rights for Muslims and he eventually died for the cause of Hindu-Muslim harmony. The secondary reason is that he practised non-violence, which is regarded by sections of the Hindu Right as effeminate, not combative enough. So, given that they have no pre-history of participating in the freedom struggle, they are looking for anyone, who at any stage, quarrelled with Gandhi.On the Hindu Right and Gandhi | Gandhi is anathema for the Hindu Right because he believed in equal rights for Muslims and he practised non-violence. They are looking for anyone who, at any stage, quarrelled with himThe case of Patel is different. The appropriation of Patel is actually only over the last eight or nine years. It has a different context. The trimurti (trinity) that I begin my book with was a statue erected by the ABVP on the Delhi University campus, which had Savarkar, who belongs to them — he is an ideological precursor of the government that is in power today — along with Bose and Bhagat Singh, who would have been appalled to be clubbed with Savarkar. But they are united in the mind of the Hindu Right because all three, at different stages of their career, opposed Gandhi.Vikas Pathak: But, there is counter argument that there were other figures too who did not participate in the freedom struggle but they were active in the public sphere. There was Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo.You are right. There were many strands that were not narrowly anti-colonial but the origins of these different strands cannot be collapsed. Ambedkar and RSS are also not on the same page. But my book is thematic. It’s a book of ideas and arguments: political arguments, social reform arguments, moral arguments, economic arguments. It’s not part of this endless debate. The intention of my book is to take these four large ideas: non-violence, justice, religion, and economy and progress, and see what Gandhi tried to articulate, how it was opposed by different people and to what extent the critics were right and to what extent Gandhi’s original position holds.Story continues below this adVikas Pathak: Over the last 10-12 years, there has been a tendency to pit freedom fighters against one another. It is as if Nehru is on one side and Patel, Bose and Bhagat Singh on the other side, which they were not. Later, it was JP and Patel, who actually did not see eye to eye. How do you see this?There are two aspects to that question. One is within the Congress party. As you point out, Nehru and Patel had differences but the Congress was a broad church, and in the interest of the party and of building the nation, they submerged their differences and worked together.And there were genuine differences between the Congress and other strands. Between the Congress and Bhagat Singh, and the revolutionary movement, there was this question of violence versus non-violence. As for Bose, the difference arose on the question of whom to support in World War II: the British or the Nazis. These differences were genuine in the context of the 1920s and ’30s, but in the context of the Hindu Right, Bose and Bhagat Singh are on the same side as Gandhi because they do not believe in Hindu supremacy. So that is where this appropriation is so tendentious and mischievous.On student protests and references | The young kids at Jantar Mantar had Ambedkar, they had Nehru, sometimes they had Bhagat Singh, I wish they also had Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Rabindranath TagoreVikas Pathak: Gandhi, despite his global stature, is attacked by multiple streams, there’s a Hindutva attack, the communist attack, the Ambedkarite attack. How do you explain this?Story continues below this adThere’s a fourth attack, the economic modernisers’ attack, who say Gandhi was a backward reactionary. He exalted the village economy and was anti-development. That’s the interesting thing about working on Gandhi: His ideas provoke debate, disagreement and sometimes outright hostility and that makes him a fascinating figure for historians.Immediately after Independence, there was a cult of Gandhi, there was Gandhi Jayanti, there was Gandhi on the currency note, and every prime minister would go to Rajghat. That was excessive but have we turned the other way? Have we demonised him excessively? Don’t we still need him if you want to cultivate Hindu-Muslim harmony, if you want to have a civil public discourse, if you want to be sensitive to the environmental dimensions of economic development? But Gandhi has come back into public conversation in the last few months because of the students’ protest. CJP’s Ashutosh Ranka often praises Gandhi but Abhijeet Dipke, an Ambedkarite Mahar from Maharashtra, said, ‘We read Ambedkar and Gandhi’.Devyani Onial: The Chipko Movement used the Gandhian method of non-violent resistance. In that context, how do you see the big-ticket infrastructure push in the ecologically fragile hills?For this, I’ll have to go back 40 years. My doctoral dissertation was on peasants and forests in the Himalayas. Early in my research, I met two remarkable Gandhians, both in their 90s: Chandi Prasad Bhatt from Garhwal and Radha Bhatt from Kumaon — that’s the kind of legacy that the environmental movement must carry forward. Gandhi never used the word ‘environmentalism’ but I have a chapter in my book called ‘Gandhi’s Precocious Environmentalism’, where I talk about his ideas on forests, on water, on soil fertility, his critique of chemical agriculture, his austere lifestyle and his warnings that the globalisation of Western-style industrialisation. I think what has happened in Uttarakhand, particularly with large dams, with mines, and the Char Dham highway, and even possibly a railway line, from Rishikesh to Karnaprayag is just crazy.Story continues below this adVikas Pathak: Do you think that Gandhi and Ambedkar can be seen as converging or complementary?Their social locations were different, so in their lifetime, they were bound to disagree. Gandhi was a guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer practising the path of ‘self-purification’. Ambedkar was a Dalit who had experienced oppression himself and was practising the path of ‘self-respect’. Ambedkar was 23 years younger than Gandhi, it was almost like a father-son debate. But after their death, given that caste inequality still exists, they have to be brought together. And that, I think, is the wisdom of young people like Dipke.Vikas Pathak: On the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate regarding separate electorates, which one do you prefer?I’m agnostic on this. In the book, I talk about post-Ambedkarites, who criticised joint electorates. I have a section on Kanshi Ram, who called Dalits elected in joint electorates chamchas because he felt that they will be answering to the whims of the upper-caste majority that helped elect them.Story continues below this adOn the other hand, today, there are 543 Lok Sabha constituencies because there are joint electorates and a Dalit vote in almost every one of those 543 constituencies. They can radically reshape the result of any election conducted fairly, which is why every political party pays obeisance to Ambedkar, much more than they do to Gandhi, or to an Adivasi leader like Birsa Munda or Jaipal Singh. Because Adivasis are concentrated in Adivasi electorates. So, Adivasis can probably influence something like 80 to 100 seats in the Lok Sabha; Dalits could affect 500. Now, if you were to have separate electorates, Dalits would only affect about 75 or 80, 15 per cent of the seats. It’s a complicated argument, and today, provided the voting is free and fair, they are not struck off the rolls inside some kind of arbitrary SIR, I am not sure that separate electorates are the answer. (We need) more independent-minded Dalit candidates, more ministers in positions of authority, not just token presidents or parties but maybe even prime ministers and home ministers. I don’t think there’s a straightforward case for separate electorates.Shiny Varghese: Gandhi romanticised villages but do you think the future of our cities was not given enough thought?To give an overall picture, when it comes to non-violence, in a context like India, Gandhi was dead right. When it comes to Hindu-Muslim harmony, he was dead right. When it comes to economic policy, I think he was neither dead right nor dead wrong. The people who opposed him were dead wrong because they practised a kind of energy-intensive, capital-intensive, resource-gathering industrialisation, first under state planning and now under the neo-liberal economy. The environmental consequences have been the same. So the people who opposed it were dead wrong. But Gandhi was not dead right either. His was a moderating influence. You may still need some skyscrapers, some centralisation. So I see him not as someone who gave an economic blueprint. His ideas were a moderating influence even for cities.For instance, in Bangalore, where I live, why not practise more water conservation, why not have more green spaces, why not privilege public transport? Rather than the chief minister deciding what is good for Bangalore, why not have the local councils, the municipality decide?Story continues below this adSo I think Gandhi as an economic thinker is prescient about the environmental and social devastation; he offers us some ideas that can nudge us towards a less destructive, more sustainable path.Aakash Joshi: There has been criticism of Gandhi, especially abroad, at university campuses around race, some of his physical and sexual practices and gender. How much of him was a genuine engagement, given the honesty with which he wrote?Section two of my book, which is called ‘Justice’, has three chapters. The first chapter is called ‘Caste: The Life and Afterlife of the Gandhi-Ambedkar Debate’; the second chapter is called ‘Gender: The Partial Unmaking of a Reluctant Patriarch’ and the third chapter has the straightforward title, ‘Was Gandhi a Racist?’And I trace the evolution of his views very carefully. I show that as a young man, he was a racist. He went to South Africa in his early 20s carrying the prejudices of his time — an upper-caste Indian obsessed with skin colour, thinking Africans are backward, thinking Indians are more or less equal to Europeans as two great old civilisations but the Africans are lost in the forest kind of thing But then how his views changed over time when he was in South Africa and he returned to India and was a principal anti-racist in the last decades of his life.Story continues below this adIt’s easy to cherry-pick Gandhi, quote him from Volume 6 of the Collected Works and forget what he said on the same subject in Volume 40 or Volume 86. He was a racist as a young man, and he slowly shed his prejudices, and this is part of Gandhi’s deep and essential humanity. He’s always growing, he’s always listening, he’s always modifying his views. Even on technology. He never wholeheartedly accepts Western industrialisation but he can see the benefits of what science can offer.Aakash Joshi: In the last 10-odd years, we have seen history becoming a battleground as well as a government project. How do you see this?Obviously the BJP has taken this to an extreme. They use the rewriting of history to promote a kind of crude majoritarian agenda and to distort events so that a Hindu king now happens to have won a battle he actually lost. But the Congress is not above criticism either.In 2018, the Congress came to power in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. I am someone who believes that historians —- Clio, the muse of history was an anarchist — should not associate with states.Story continues below this adWithin weeks of the Congress coming to power, I got letters from ministers saying, ‘Please address all of us on Jawaharlal Nehru, not on Savarkar, because Savarkar can’t be known’. And the Congress textbooks in the 1960s and ’70s were not perfect. However, those produced during the UPA regime of 2004–2009 were excellent. There was a visionary director of the NCERT, Krishna Kumar. For history textbooks, he had recruited a very good team headed by Neeladri Bhattacharya. He curated a series of textbooks which was not just Prithviraj versus Akbar, Nehru versus Savarkar, but around themes, particularly in ancient and medieval India, around housing, food, dress, forms of transportation and how these changed and evolved. Now those are beautiful ways of introducing young people to the nuances and complexities of history and changes over time.Khushi Sinha: Do you think India needs a modern-day Gandhi?India does not need a modern-day Gandhi. It does not need a modern-day Ambedkar. It does not need a modern-day Nehru. It does not need a modern-day Tagore. It does not need a modern-day Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Although those are the five modern Indians I admire most. It needs a synthesis of all of these renewed for our times.I think in one of Ambedkar’s great speeches in the last meeting of the Constituent Assembly, he warned against the dangers of hero worship. He said bhakti in religion is a route to the salvation of the soul, bhakti in politics is a route to eventual dictatorship. He was prescient about Indira Gandhi, he would have been prescient about Narendra Modi. We can’t have one leader, we must have a bouquet of ideas.So, to the young kids of Jantar Mantar — they had Ambedkar, they had Nehru, sometimes they had Bhagat Singh — I wish they had Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, possibly also Tagore, but I’m very happy they did not have Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar, those are exactly what we do not need.Vikas Pathak: Freedom fighters usually are most popular in the region to which they belonged, like Bose is in Bengal and Bhagat Singh in Punjab. But the irony is that Gandhi is not an icon in Gujarat and Nehru is not an icon in Prayagraj, from where he came. How would you explain this?Gandhi drew on dissenting traditions within the state. He drew on poet Narsinh Mehta, who preached compassion and tolerance. So when it came to his religious pluralism, maybe he was an anomaly. But you pointed out something very interesting — Khushwant Singh once criticised Tagore, and the entire West Bengal legislative assembly stood up and censured him. You cannot criticise Savarkar in Maharashtra, Ambedkar among the Dalits. Gandhi in India belongs to everyone and to no one. Nehru at least belongs to the Congress party, which has been run by his descendants for some time. Gandhi belongs to everyone. And maybe it’s a new generation that will find their own Gandhi, which will be different from mine and yours.