Wednesday 3rd November

6 – 8pm (seated by 5.45pm)

at The House of Lords
Room 4A

This year the Annual Lecture will take the form of a panel discussion with the following distinguished members:

• The Parents Circle Families Forum (2 representatives: 1 Israeli and 1 Palestinian)
• Denis Halliday – former Assistant General Secretary of the UN, who was on the recent flotilla to Gaza
• Huw Irranca-Davies – Labour MP for Ogmore
• Professor Lord Bhikhu Parekh – Chair.

The panel will discuss nonviolent solutions to the situation in the Middle East.

The Gandhi Foundation Trustees felt that the Parents Circle Families Forum has been guided by one of the highest forms of Gandhian ideals, that of dialoguing with and understanding the adversary’s point of view and finding common ground on which to base a solution. The PCFF is also working to influence public and political opinion on aspects of reconciliation as a means to finally resolving the problems of security, historical lineage and common inheritance. The bereaved families on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have united in their common grief, have had the courage to advocate that further violence is not a solution and are striving peacefully to prevent future bereavements.

Tickets are free, but there is limited availability and those wishing to attend should contact Omar Hayat at: omarhayat@chemecol.net

Gandhiji would be even more saddened by the depth and extent of poverty. On the official criteria of earning one dollar a day, 25% of our people live below the poverty line. But if this poverty were to be defined in terms of calorie consumption and the satisfaction of basic needs, the figure would rise to 60%. Gandhiji would see this as nothing short of a national shame. He would consider it a betrayal of his legacy that no systematic movement has been mounted for the abolition of poverty and the growing economic inequality in the 60 odd years of India’s Independence.

He would be equally disturbed by the country’s lack of an inspiring moral vision. It has set its eyes on becoming an economic super power by 2020 on a growth rate of between 5 and 7 percent. Gandhi would want to know the point of this. Economic growth exploits nature, creates deep inequality, puts enormous pressure on social and political institutions and encourages mindless consumerism. At best, it can be a means to a worthwhile goal but never an end in itself. Gandhiji would want to know what great moral and political ideals we intend to realise by means of economic growth and how we intend to make India a humane and compassionate society.

Gandhi would have been shocked by the increasing cultural philistinism and lack of moral idealism of the new middle class, on which he had placed his hopes for Independent India. The middle class of his time had a strong social conscience. It was bi-cultural and at ease with both the Indian and the Western tradition. It was both rooted and open, and took a morally serious approach to human life. It had certain standards by which it aspired to live and felt guilty when it could not.

The new middle class could not be more different. It lacks social conscience and has little regard for the worse off. It is rootless and is neither well versed in its own traditions, nor in those of the West. It is culturally and economically insecure and prone to panic. Its primary concern is to make money and spend it in shallow pursuits.

Faced with all this, what would Gandhiji have done? First, he would have mounted a campaign of satyagrahas against clearly identified and suitably dramatised cases of inequality and injustice. In doing so he would have offered the victims of injustices a badly needed alternative to Naxalism. Second, he would have built up a nationwide cadre (lok sevak sangh) of committed workers, dispersed them in villages and expected them to attend to local problems and act as a powerful check on the local power structure. Third, he would have set a personal example of incorruptibility and inspired his close colleagues to do the same. Fourth, he would have thrown up a political movement that would have cleared away the decaying and unprincipled political parties and created a space for the emergence of new ones. Finally, while confronting a situation like the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992, he would have explored all possible political ways of resolving the issue peacefully.

He would have put pressure on Hindu and Muslim religious leaders to work out a compromise, which was not impossible and perhaps suggested building a multi-religious complex around it to symbolise India’s commitment to religious pluralism. If Hindus had still insisted on destroying the mosque, he would have seen it as a grave violation of their great tradition of tolerance and an indelible stain on the national conscience. He would have felt that he had no choice but to embark upon a fast, even perhaps a fast unto death, to save the honour of the religion and the country that he loved more than his own life.

Lord Bhikhu Parekh is Vice-President of the Gandhi Foundation and a Professor at the
Centre for the Study of Democracy in the University of Westminster.

Justice Aftab Alam of the Indian Supreme Court giving the Annual Lecture

A very distinctive Indian version of secularism has underpinned India since independence and is the critical guarantee in the continuing existence of its multi-cultural pluralist society. Were it to weaken then terrifying forces of communal violence are always at risk of breaking out. These thoughts are prompted by the Olympian lecture on this theme by Justice Aftan Alam, the 2009 Annual Gandhi lecture, The Idea of Secularism and the Supreme Court of India, delivered in the Temple Church of The Inner Temple, 14 October, and a short text by the Jawarharlal Nehru University historians, Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mookerjee and Sucheta Mahajan, RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi (Sage: 2008). It is a theme I have myself looked at in the past, in a long article in Contemporary South Asia Volume 2 Number 1 1993, entitled Indian Secularism Reconsidered: from Gandhi to Ayodha, and as Editor of a collection of essays connecting Hindutva (Indianness or Hinduness) to the story of the religious reform movements, Hinduism in Public and Private (OUP India: 2003). I like to think that in those publications I raised the uncomfortable ambiguities of this debate though probably at the expense of clarity. There is a certain virtue in oversimplification. How do the lecture and the text by the JNU historians reopen the debate on Indian secularism?

The event that put this issue at the centre of Indian politics was the truly shocking vandalism 6 December 1992 of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodha. As my article tracking this outrage was long in the making, (in fact I wrote my piece some months before the final outrage), and it has left uncomfortable questions about who was responsible. Justice Alam refers to a decision of the Supreme Court which validated the dismissal of the popularly elected governments of Rajasthan, Madya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh for aiding and abetting the demolition of the mosque. The presidential decree has been seen as an attack on democracy. But on this occasion the Court was certain that the dictates of secularism justified their dismissal. Interestingly, it is only now that a commission on the event headed by Manmohan Singh Liberhan has published its findings and they are pretty explosive. For the first time the former prime-minister, Vajpayee, together with the other leading politician of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Advani, are seen as “culpable of taking the country to the brink of communal discord”. According to the report the demolition was “neither spontaneous nor unpreventable” and was the “zenith of a concerted and well laid out plan”. Responsibility ultimately lay with the Rashtriya Swayasevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological source of the Hindutva programme (See The Guardian 25 November 2009). How the current Congress government will now react is just as provocative a question as to how any future government here will react to the findings of the Chilcot Commission.

Varieties of Secularism

Secularism is not self-defining and comes in several versions. In post-revolutionary France it took the from of an aggressive rationalism, hostile to all clerical power and to religion itself, inspired in the 19th century by the republican ideology of positivism, and it led in time to the separation of church and state in 1905. In all state schools children were inculcated with a doctrine of laicite. A similar anti-clerical version of secularism briefly dominated Germany in Bismarck’s so-called kulturkampf and Italy has always been subject to strong anti-clerical, anti-papal protest. If here we have been spared a similar political expression of anti-clericalism, for we still have an established church, in the writing of Richard Dawkins and his like we are now exposed to an equally aggressive rationalism and atheism. Probably Indians were more aware of the draconian assault on all things religious in the Soviet Union. But in India secularism took a very different shape. It was not anti-religious but driven instead by seeking a way of securing a mutual tolerance of faiths. Both sources under view try to exemplify what Gandhi and Nehru meant by secularism. The JNU historians who see Gandhi as “perhaps the greatest person to walk the earth in the 20th century” (p43), come at it largely in terms of how Gandhi challenged communalism in the name of a secular nationalism, Justice Alam by reference to Gandhi’s concept of sarma dharma samabhav, an equal treatment and respect for all religions. However, his quotation from Gandhi in 1939 disputing the idea of a separate Muslim nation and a speech days before his death on how all religious faiths have an equal claim on India’s capital Delhi, although it reveals Gandhi’s deep belief that all Indians were children of Mother India, does open up a certain ambiguity as to how different cultural communities are all subsumed by an Indian identity. I prefer a quotation I used in my article:

It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which bonds one indissolubly to the truth within and which even purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself. (Quoted in S Gopal Anatomy of a Confrontation Viking: 1991, pp14-15)

Nehru as an agnostic was closer to a European version of secularism but he saw the vital importance of building into the constitution safeguards for the protection of religious minorities, a means of staunching the communal bloodshed that has stained India up to and during the partition. The whole debate on Indian secularism goes in two overlapping directions: there is the debate as to the nature of a secular nationalism and there is an ongoing tension between the protection of the personal laws of Indian religions and the search, one Nehru himself supported, for some personal code more in line with human rights worldwide.

Responses to Indian Pluralism

Secular nationalism was one solution to Indian pluralism. It both guaranteed multi-culturalism whilst guarding against separatism. Justice Alam wittily points out at the beginning of his lecture that there are six different ways of getting married in India. The JNU historians provide a lucid account of how a Congress secular nationalism differs from a Hindu nationalism though my instinct is that they do so by a degree of simplification and an avoidance of the inherent ambiguities in the Congress Party’s attitudes. I try in my introduction to Hinduism in Public and Private to point to an approach to nationalism of the likes of Lajpat Rai that converge with a Hindu, and Congress were of course right to deny membership of both Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. The Congress Right continued to be a barrier to the rise of a distinctive party of Hindu nationalism. That only takes off in the late 1980s. We need to be reminded of that atmosphere of hatred towards Muslims that led to Gandhi’s assassination by followers of the RSS and it is chilling to learn that at a meeting in Bombay 19 November 1995 Gopal Godse, brother of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, still justified the murder in terms of ridding India of a “demon” and pre-empting the risk of a second partition with the breakaway of Hyderabad.

The most intriguing section of the book by the JNU historians is on the way school textbooks are being doctored to promote a Hindutva version of Indian history. With the BJP in power at the centre their education minister, Manohar Joshi, set about fashioning a communalised version as opposed to a secular one and in 2002 there was a wholesale introduction of a new set of textbooks. Initially the one on contemporary India did not even mention Gandhi’s assassination though, after a public outcry, just a sentence was added. The India History Congress drew up a list of errors in the new textbooks. If it remains somewhat mysterious why self-proclaimed representatives of the Hindu majority should be so afraid of minority communities, the JNU historians make the good point that theirs is not so much a fear of ‘the other’ as a determination to mould Hindus to their own ideal of a correct way; they are even more hostile to liberal-minded Hindus than they are to Muslims. They also suggest it was their very isolation in 1948 that drove them out of desperation and cowardice to murder Gandhi.

And it is impossible to overlook the tension between protecting the rights of minority communities and the emergence of a progressive legal code. The thrust of Justice Alam’s lecture is the slippage from a rigid adherence to the terms of India’s Constitution by the Supreme Court towards both a prioritisation of individual rights and freedoms over community based rights and, more worryingly, a tendency “to take a mono-culturalist view rather than a pluralist view of secularism”. He has much to say on the way in the 1950s the Supreme Court defended the rights of Christian and Muslim schools in Kerala to remain free from state intervention but in its decision of 2003 the prestigious Christian St Stephen’s College would have to limit its Christian admissions to 50%. There is much here of relevance to our current debates on faith schools. Justice Alam summarises: “for about forty or forty-five years, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not permit community specific political rights, it recognised community specific social rights. But in the last fifteen years the court seems to have come to the view that under the Constitution there cannot be any community specific rights either political or social.” (p15)

But is this necessarily a mono-culturalist agenda and by implication a Hindutva one? One of the hugely controversial decisions taken by the Supreme Court was in the Shah Bano case in 1986. Here I’ll quote my own account in my article.

Implications of the Shah Bano case

In 1976 one Shah Bano after 43 years of marriage to a prosperous lawyer was divorced in traditional Muslim fashion. She was to fight a case for maintenance all the way to the Supreme Court and win: in 1986 she was awarded Rs 500 a month. In the Islamic Shariat law, once the husband has returned the wife’s mehr, or dowry, responsibility for the wife’s maintenance falls on her family, so this decision was in clear breach of Muslim personal law. This was hailed as a victory for secularism and a feminist triumph to boot. Muslim women were now to enjoy the same rights as those of other religions under Indian personal law. Belatedly it looked as if the Constitution was going to fulfil its directive principle, Article 44, and introduce a uniform personal law. But Rajiv Gandhi’s government, alarmed at Muslim anger, lost its nerve and in the Muslim’s Women’s act was to reverse the decision of the Supreme Court. Here was a betrayal of secularism and of the equality of women before the law. Congress could once again be blamed for unscrupulous politics, its courting of Muslim conservative interests as a way of securing the Muslim vote-bank.

I add, more dubiously:

Significantly, progressive Muslims now see the wisdom of abandoning Muslim personal law and an assimilationist approach to independent India. After all, theirs is a population largely born after 1947 and they know no other loyalty.

Justice Alam is not hostile to the Supreme Court’s decision and points out that in a subsequent appeal against the new act the Court claimed nothing had in fact been lost: “it may look ironical that the enactment intended to reverse the decision in the Shah Bano’s case, actually codifies the very rationale contained therein.” What Justice Alam is looking for is a more culturally tolerant approach. In his interpretation of the Court’s new ruling, “it effectively held that the Act would be unconstitutional if interpreted to give Muslim women less than other own by way of maintenance” but did so in his view by “a different and more acceptable route”. Clearly Justice Alam sees the conflict between the possibilities of a universal code and the particular demands of community and argues that the Court “will have to find a middle ground between its two extreme positions, one where the right was held to be absolute and not subject to any reasonable restrictions even in public interest or national interest and the other where the right stands emasculated”. There is a danger, he recognises, of insulating minorities from the national mainstream and one has also to recognise that minorities anyway are divided and “that an over protection of the community specific rights was of little if hardly any use to weaker sections within the minority groups”. But minorities nevertheless remain fearful of being subsumed within the majority. And in the end Justice Alam comes down I think on the conservative side: “In India secularism cannot be seen or used as a means for doing away with all the differences of creed or caste and region and language and for developing a more homogenised society laying stress on ‘Indianness’. All this is of profound relevance to European states which are having to come to terms with Muslim minorities. Just recall the public uproar that greeted Archbishop Rowan Williams when he suggested that English courts would at least have to be aware of the claims of shariat law. The recent referendum in Switzerland over minarets points to the profound fears of European majority communities. In India it seems that the move for a more progressive personal code has been seriously distorted by the intrusion of the Hindutva campaign for a uniform personal code.

And what of the future? With the BJP led National Democratic Alliance defeated in the two recent general elections the Hindutva movement is in some disarray. The rather shadowy relationship between the RSS and the BJP, the former a socio-religious grouping, the latter, political, is once again being played out and the RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat has directly intervened in the political process and is trying to shape the BJP party leadership, marginalising the old guard under Vajpayee, though he has a soft spot for both Advani and Manohar Joshi, but his preference is for a younger leadership. There is to be no let up in the RSS ideological commitment to Hindutva. Interestingly the debate on Hindutva still goes back to the events around Gandhi’s assassination and a continuing insistence on the responsibility of the RSS. However a recognised interpreter of the RSS, D R Goyal, forecasts: “I don’t see any future for the party for the next ten years, at least until 2014”. (See Frontline September 25 2009) In the meanwhile it is Congress that has to justify its own claims to a secular nationalism by being sure its reach embraces the tribal and forest populations of India, put so grotesquely at risk by India’s industrialisation programme, as Arundhati Roy has recently so bitterly portrayed. (See her essay Into the Inferno, New Statesman 20 July 2009)

Antony Copley is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kent and a member of the Gandhi Foundation’s Executive Committee.

Justice Alam’s Lecture can be downloaded here

Few books on Gandhi and the environmental implications of his thought have so far appeared. It is only in recent decades that we have become aware of the huge impact that human activities are having on our environment and although Gandhi did not say a great deal specifically about the environment his general outlook is very relevant to caring for our planet.

This book is based on one by the late Dr T N Khoshoo and is written by John S Moolakkatu who holds the Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Kwazulu Natal and is also Editor of Gandhi Marg.

Gandhi absorbed from his Indian background the idea of the unity of all things in the universe and this can lead naturally to a respect for all human beings, for animals and plants, and even for the inanimate. This is significantly different from the idea of exploiting nature for human benefit, which has been for some centuries the approach in the West. Gandhi’s orientation is therefore cosmocentric rather than anthropocentric.

With Gandhi’s life being his message his “personal lifestyle was the most sustainable one – simple, austere, clean, need-based, adequate worldly possessions, and reasonably comfortable” (p10) This however runs counter to the economic system we have all been exposed to and which is still the dominant one in the West and is rapidly embracing all countries. In these circumstances Gandhi’s approach is truly a revolutionary one. It is also, however, common sense. Unrestrained economic growth is simply impossible in a world which will probably have 10 billion people before long.

Amazingly Gandhi saw this in his own time: asked if he would like to see the same standard of living for Indians as for the English, he replied:

“It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve this prosperity. How many planets will a country like India require!”

Some of Gandhi’s specific practices would make a big difference if adopted. Significantly reducing the quantity of imported goods and using as much local produce as possible (swadeshi) is something we could move towards. Adopting a vegetarian diet is another – but why does the author call veganism ‘puritanical vegetarianism’ when there are strong evidence-based reasons for it? Trusteeship of one’s wealth and possessions, meaning that they should be used for the wider good, not oneself alone; this would mean greatly reducing luxury items and thus reducing wasteful production.

While new technology will be of some help in reducing environmental impact in the hazardous decades ahead, changes in lifestyle will be more important and this puts Gandhian ideas centre-stage. The book contains a very useful appendix of some of Gandhi’s sayings relevant to the issue, although it is surprising that the references for the many quotations in the book are not given – nor is there an index.

Nevertheless it is an excellent presentation of a subject that is of the highest importance and demonstrates how Gandhi can challenge us all six decades after his death.

George Paxton

The story of Mahatma Gandhi is inter-woven with the story of London. His three years as a law student at the Inner Temple (1888-1891) were pivotal in shaping his philosophy.  During this time he also learnt to ballroom dance, became an advocate of vegetarianism, immersed himself in key spiritual texts and developed a passion for Equity Law.

TARA evokes Gandhi’s life in London in the spectacular rotunda of the Temple Church with a company of actors, musicians and dancers. The performance on 2 October, Gandhi’s Birthday, marks the launch of the
Gandhi Inner Temple Association.

TARA produces global theatre for local audiences. Positioned between East and West, TARA has pioneered cross-cultural theatre for over three decades. In 2009 the company co-produced Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album with the National Theatre.

Performances of Gandhi in London:
2 Oct 6:15pm (Gandhi’s birthday)
5 Oct 6:45pm
Tickets £10
The Temple Church
London, EC4Y 7HL

Book tickets:
020 8333 4457 / tara-arts.com

Before I set out my reflections on the past year and future plans, I first of all want to pay tribute to the tireless work and dedication of my predecessor, Susan Denton-Brown. Susan took over the chair of The Gandhi Foundation (GF) at a very challenging, transitional time for us. She not only kept things going but left the organisation stronger and more stable than she had found it. I cannot hope to match Susan’s energy and dynamism as Chair but her legacy has certainly made my job far easier than it would otherwise have been.

As well as running the Foundation, Susan also put together a wonderful Gandhi photographic exhibition for school children based at Kingsley Hall in memory of my father Surur who was one of the Founders of the GF. I hope that we will be able to inspire a new generation of local children around Kingsley Hall using the exhibition.

I also need to thank all my colleagues on the Executive and our Secretary, Sabera, for all their help and support. They all continue to take on responsibility for the Foundation’s running,activities and outputs and I rely entirely on their hard work and commitment.

This year we have already held a very successful multi-faith celebration, thanks to the work of Omar Hayat and Sabera, and our partnership with St Ethelburga’s Centre, and their Director Simon Keyes, who hosted the event and helped put together a very thought provoking programme.

As well St Ethelburga’s, the Foundation has continued to maintain strong relationships with existing partners, such as Kingsley Hall, the International Sufi School and Jeevika Trust (see separate reports) as well as forge new ones, including the Derby Multi Faith Centre. They made a very generous donation after borrowing the British Library Exhibition on Gandhi, for which we are very grateful to Dr Phil Henry.

You can read reports on the Multi Faith Celebration and our other highly successful, well attended annual events over the last year in this annual report. Plans are also well underway on the events for this year; the Summer Gathering, Annual Lecture and Peace Award. I look forward to seeing some of you at those events in the coming months.

Matthew and Diane at Rohita have built and maintained a very impressive, engaging website for the Foundation. I have a number of unsolicited compliments from friends and associates about our website, which is very encouraging. The Gandhi Way is the jewel in our crown as tool for both engaging with existing friends, and attracting new members. However, a strong web presence is crucial in showcasing Gandhi Way articles and promoting the work of the Foundation, as well as the message of Gandhi. I look forward to working with Rohita and our Executive Committee to develop the site and our broader web strategy further.

In the meantime, I would very much welcome the thoughts of GF friends about how we can broaden and deepen our reach, or any other matter, via the website or the Gandhi Way. If the GF is going to develop we must open up more dialogue between the Chair/Executive Committee and GF Friends and supporters both through traditional, as well as new channels of communication.

Full Annual Report 2009-2010

© copyright, Robert Wallis 2010

People outside India as well as inside it are becoming aware that there are thousands of local movements of people trying to save their land from being invaded and taken over by big corporations, and the contractors, subcontractors, NGOs, media firms, biofuel and seed companies, banks, hedge fund/private equity fund investors and others who serve and finance the mining companies. Living in India, Anthony Sampson’s title comes to mind from his Anatomy of Britain series: Who runs this place? The Governments or the Companies and Banks?

Village people (tribals and non-tribals alike) are trying not just to hold onto their land and homes, communities and age-old systems of cultivation, but also, as part of the same thing, to prevent ecocide: the long-term destruction of every aspect of the land and environment where they have lived for centuries (http://www.thisisecocide.com/hotspots/). If they accept displacement, even World Bank statistics show that displaced villagers’ standard of living drops drastically (in India, and as a worldwide pattern), and that they hardly ever regain their standard of living, let alone improve it (which by the Bank’s own standards, is meant to be a key requirement of any project). These movements are aimed at saving the people and their environment – “for what future will our grandchildren have if our mountains and streams are destroyed?” This is the land of their ancestors over thousands of years.

It is also the heartland of tigers, leopards, bears and elephants – the whole cast of Kipling’s Jungle Book. But the hunting mafia has taken a massive toll on all the cast, and these animals survive as best as they can, as far as they can get from Man. Even wildlife sanctuaries cause conflict, displacing yet more tribal villages from their forest. Tribal people and their forest are one: damage that bond and the culture and environment are slowly but surely killed, together: cultural genocide and ecocide.

British geologists in the 1900s named the base rock of south Orissa’s bauxite-capped mountains ‘Khondalite’, after “those fine Hill men the Khonds”. These mountains are classed as one of the world’s best deposits for making aluminium – prime strategic metal for the arms industry (‘Mining as a Fuel for War‘ at War Resisters International.

Preventing a whole series of mining projects are the movements. The war against the Maoists, ‘Operation Green Hunt’, acts as a filter that often draws attention and support away from these movements, as the situation escalates towards a classic resource war.

2,270 years ago, the “first recorded event of Indian history” was Ashoka’s massive attack on the Kalinga people in Orissa. By his own admission – was he really repentant, or was he just doing his own PR for history ? – he killed 100,000, and enslaved 150,000, while many more died of disease and hunger. The Kalinga did not have kings and they put up a terrible fight to try and keep their freedom. Ashoka’s two inscriptions in Orissa threaten the ‘forest tribes’: the Kalinga who could retreat to the mountains and forests to preserve their independence as best they could, and have lived there till today. The Konds’ name for themselves is Kuwinga, and there is no doubt they are essentially the same people. So the ongoing takeover of tribal land now conjures a structural memory of Ashoka’s terrible violence.

The PR now is gross. ‘Kalinganagar’ is the name of the steel complex with a dozen new plants in various stages of planning and operation, that has already displaced thousands of Adivasis of the Ho and Munda tribes (whose heartland is in Jharkhand), just beside the Sukinda chromite mines in Jajpur district of Orissa, characterised as “one of the ten most polluted places in the world” (by the Blacksmith Institute, USA).

Kalinganagar is where Adivasis who refuse to shift to make way for a huge new Tata steel plant have got together as the People’s Platform Against Displacement. They were fired on and 14 killed on 2nd January 2006, when police and contractors tried to start construction of the plant. Last November, Orissa’s Chief Minister conveyed his public thanks to the steel companies for constructing a new hi-tech Kalinganagar police station (making clear a collusion that was already clear, though rarely spelt out).

Police with goondas started an attack on the 20 or so protesting villages on 30th March, breaking houses, stealing possessions, wounding many with a new type of rubber bullet, and taking over people’s land and villages in the guise of building a big road across the area. The People’s Platform Against Displacement has made it clear throughout that they are not Maoists, and have kept their movement non-violent (e.g. http://orissamatters.com/2010/04/11/foul-play-exposed/) The events unfolding now in Kalinganagar and the lack of cover in the media is a national disgrace and a severe blot on Tata’s name.

Who made proper mention at the Copenhagen summit on Climate Change about Orissa’s 40 new steel plants and the carbon emissions from making 60 million tonnes of steel per year – Orissa’s stated target ? Or are these essential for ‘India’s development’? How can it be ‘development’ to destroy ecosystems and communities of people whose lives are based on long-term sustainability – who have sustained in the face of assaults from Ashoka to the EIC to now, and who are fighting these projects with everything they gave?

Knowing one’s Indian history, what we witness is a return of the East Indian Company. It took power here on the east side of India in Bengal and Madras in the 18th century, taking over Orissa from 1803 onwards. And the subsidiary company it formed was called the Government of India, based around collecting tribute, and implementing the laws being made to facilitate this all over the country. The senior administrator of a District in India is still called the Collector or District Magistrate.

Analysing the causes of the current conflict, and the reasons why many tribal people join the Maoists, the following are some of the main ones:

1. The system of endemic exploitation of tribal people, coupled with ingrained disrespect for tribal culture.

2. The escalating dispossession of tribal people from their land and resources – by numerous industrial projects but also by the war itself. No one disputes the figures of 644 tribal villages burnt by Salwa Judum and an estimated 200,000 tribal refugees from these burnt villages.

3. The atrocities perpetrated on tribal villages by the Salwa Judum (a tribal militia created by a section of the government) and security forces, and the impossibility of getting justice through the courts. The case of Sodhi (she was one of a dozen villagers lined up and shot by the police – she survived, but as witness to the case at India’s Supreme Court, has been kept under ‘police protection’) and the villagers killed at Gompad has highlighted this impossibility of bringing security men responsible for atrocities to account, and the appeal of Maoists arises directly out of this impunity to prosecution. Numerous human rights reports and courageous journalism have highlighted a definite pattern of attacks on tribal villages, in which most of the village flees, and the women, old and young who don’t get away are raped, killed, tortured or taken away. The best aspect of Arundhati Roy’s recent article Walking with the Comrades is that she brings out the voices of young Maoist women and men. These voices need to be heard. All of them witnessed close friends and family raped and killed, and were motivated to join the Maoists by these atrocities. Having suffered such loss and witnessed such horror, if there is no chance of bringing the perpetrators to account, and the Maoists are there, offering comradeship and guns – who wouldn’t go with them?

4. However, the Maoist ideology and leadership believes in war, exactly as many do in the mainstream and military. War has an attraction, and we all need to fight internal as well as external battles to resist this attraction. What is happening is a polarisation into two sides who both believe in war, leaving no space for neutrality, truth and peace. The recent attack is a deliberate escalation of war. We should not blame the individual Maoist fighters, any more than the individual CRPF men: both are pawns in a game where leaders actually believe in sacrificing people’s lives, on a huge scale. Mao himself was one of the worst tyrants: during his rise to power as well as his ‘great leap forward’ (upping steel production, causing a massive famine) and cultural revolution, he was responsible for millions of deaths of innocent people and even loyal party supporters. He was a superb propagandist though, and in that, very similar to mining companies’ PR machine, turning truth on its head. The ideology he created promotes war, and promotes an escalation of war. We must not let this happen. Maoist attacks instigate huge-scale counterinsurgency attacks on villages. This pattern must stop.

5. In other words, the attack on tribal communities as a strategy to wipe out Maoists is paradoxically a principal cause of the growing strength of the Maoists. This mirrors the worldwide ‘war on terror’ (in Afghanistan, Iraq etc), where everyone can see that attacks on ‘terrorists’– and the ‘collateral damage’ on countless civilians whose outrage has no outlet through judicial process – have increased the number of ‘terrorists’ exponentially. In Dantewara, the systematic attacks on tribal villages are a campaign of terror. In other words, the primary perpetrators of terror are the security forces rather than the Maoists. In the recent attack, the Central Reserve Police Force people killed are human beings too and their death is very sad. Police in the area live in fear of attack. The difference is – armed policemen have signed up for a job that involves high risk of killing or being killed. Tribal villagers have signed up for no such thing. Current news portrays this Maoist attack as an outrage, and the CRPF armed policemen killed by the Maoists as ‘martyrs’. What of the countless villagers who have been killed and terrorised by the CRPF and other ‘security forces’? The tribal villagers living in the eye of the conflict are essentially innocent. If they often support the Maoists, they do so because they experience an invasion and atrocities in which they lose their land, food, families, culture – everything. We get to hear of only a tiny percentage of the atrocities committed by security forces in villages, while every killing by Maoists gets high publicity. (See some excellent examples of such journalism published in the New Indian Express, at http//:moonchasing.files.wordpress.com – e.g. ‘Operation Tribal Hunt?’ 11 November 2009)

Arundhati Roy’s writings have come under fierce criticism, but she is not uncritical of the Maoists. While contrasting democratic features about how Maoists operate in terms of people’s councils and meetings where anyone can and does speak, she also comments that the present phase may well be a honeymoon period in which Maoists are wooing the people, and history shows this honeymoon doesn’t last. The voices of tribal Maoists and accounts of atrocities need to be heard a lot more widely if a Sri Lanka situation of all-out war and genocide is to be avoided, and Roy’s article has done an excellent job of bringing them out.

If there is a genuine move for peace, one essential step will be repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) – this has often been called for, especially from the Northeast and Kashmir. This has become essential for the war in Dantewara. If it can be seen that security personnel who commit atrocities are punished this will automatically take wind out of the Maoist sails.

Human rights work is a prerequisite for peace. Tribal culture places a high value on Justice and Truth. Some kind of Truth and Reconciliation process will have to take place if the escalation towards war is to be halted. Responsibility lies on both sides. Where it does not lie is with the tribal communities, and when they know they can get Justice, Peace will prevail.

Dr Felix Padel is an anthropologist who has lived in India for 30 years. His latest book ‘Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel’ by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das has just been published by Orient Black Swan. ISBN: 9788125038672

Margaret Chatterjee is a philosopher and a Gandhi scholar, as well as a long-time Friend of the Gandhi Foundation. English by birth but now living, in her senior years, once more, in Delhi, these two volumes are reflections on some of the experiences in her life and the people she has met who left a mark on her.

This is not an autobiography and there is thus much not revealed here including her marriage to an Indian professor of English, her move to India, and her children. Instead there are about 100 short sketches, some about relatively well known figures such as Mulk Raj Anand, Krishna Kripalani, Ninian Smart and Nirmal Kumar Bose, others about ‘unknowns’, even sometimes unnamed by the author, but not forgotten by her.

Her philosophical inclination showed itself early, around three years old, when she concluded that although a crumb of bread could be divided until it could not be seen that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Unusually, her parents attended services in many different churches and different denominations exposing their daughter to different preachers and liturgies but also to the music performed there. Music is one of Margaret’s great interests which also extends to skillful performance of the piano and voice.

Her career took her to many countries – USA, Russia, Israel and various European states and there are stories from many of them. It was through Nirmal Kumar Bose, the Bengali colleague of Gandhi, above all that she became convinced that Gandhi was the “key to understanding India”.

In contrast to the author’s quite demanding writings on Gandhi and religion these sketches are a delightful easy read especially as she brings out the positive characteristics in the friends that she has met on her journey through life.

George Paxton

Aldo Capitani

The Nonviolent Revolution: An Intellectual Biography of Aldo Capitini
by Rocco Altieri
trans. by Gerry Blaylock
IGINP 2008, pp182
$10

Aldo Capitini (1895-1968) was probably the most important advocate of nonviolence in 20th century Italy. He was born in modest circumstances in Perugia and went to a technical school although his passion was literature. His health was poor but he drove himself to study and won a scholarship to study philosophy and literature in Pisa.

Capitini took up active politics when he observed the Concordat between the Roman Catholic Church and the state in 1929. He believed that the Church could have brought down the fascist regime by noncooperation but disgracefully compromised. From then on he made a sharp distinction between religious institutions and a free religious faith exemplified by Jesus, St Francis and the Buddha.

He was dismissed from his teaching post in Pisa because he would not join the Fascist Party and returned to Perugia where he began writing and got his first book published in 1937. In it he wrote: “Pain, remorse, the thought of death are always real; and it is here that religion springs up”.

Gandhi’s autobiography had been published in Italy in 1929 and he had visited Europe including Italy in 1931 and this had an impact. Altieri writes:

“Nonviolence seems the highest spiritual teaching, a religious idea of absolute purity, to love for its own sake, the only power able to defeat fascism. If Mussolini in order to assert himself resorted to sinister means – deceit, lies, murder – Capitini counterposes the highest values of truth, non-mendacity, nonkilling”.

Capitini believed that nonviolence should embrace all creation and he consequently became a vegetarian.

Capitini developed a political ideology called liberal-socialism which did not develop into a political party but was a very decentralised movement which attracted many young people. He was imprisoned three times in 1943-4 as were other activists. A Party of Action now developed in the movement but Capitini kept apart from it as he saw the movement as an ‘orientation of conscience’ not a political party. In danger of arrest and deportation by the Germans when they occupied northern Italy he hid in the countryside.

In the post-war period Capitini refused to support any party, declaring himself a free religious and left-wing independent. He started to set up Social Orientation Centres around the country to counterbalance central power and encourage democracy. He also turned his attention to education for a renewal of culture and he taught in universities. The recent tragic history of Italy, he believed, was due to cultural and religious backwardness and the absence of collective moral conscience. He was nominated Rector in Perugia but was moved due to pressure from the Catholic Church.

In 1952 he set up a Centre for Nonviolence in Perugia and also promoted conscientious objection to conscription. He regarded Gandhi’s approach as a third way between communism and capitalism. Crucial is the primacy of means in social change. Gandhi’s way was revolutionary but it did not just change the structures as Marxism intended, but also a person’s being.

Capitini became aware of Danilo Dolci, who settled in Sicily to help the poor in their struggle against the Mafia, and gave him his full support. Dolci’s outlook and actions were essentially Gandhian.

Capitini held up Gandhi and Jesus as examples of those who detach themselves from the world, though remaining in the midst of humanity in order to transform society. Conflict cannot be avoided but responding with nonviolent action can create new positive relationships.

A march for Peace and the Brotherhood of People was organised by Capitini in 1961; walking from Perugia to Assisi it attracted large numbers. Capitini’s programme is a radical one indeed: abolition of armies, of borders, of property. A few days before his death in 1968 he wrote: “… Today’s utopia can be tomorrow’s reality”. He recommended a green and nonviolent society with a rejection of consumerism and admired the Community of the Ark which was set up by Lanza del Vasto in France after he met Gandhi in India.

Altieri’s study is called “An Intellectual Biography” and there is much more philosophy here than this review might indicate. Capitini was a deeply religious or mystical person although he rejected religious institutions. We should be grateful to the International Gandhian Institute for Nonviolence and Peace (IGINP) which has published this English version and brought to non-Italian readers the life and thought of a person who ought to be much better known than he is.

George Paxton, Editor of The Gandhi Way

The Address of IGINP is CESCI, Majagram, Kadavur, Madurai – 625 014, TN, India
They also publish a journal in English called Ahimsa Nonviolence.

People sometimes say in this secular society that Gandhi was old-fashioned because he was deeply religious and spiritual. Yet his teachings are, for the most part, avant-garde. He believed, as did the Masters of Humanity, that Truth and God were synonymous and stuck tenaciously till the end, emphasising that Truth was that “spiritual inner voice” of those that practised Ahimsa and Satyagraha. In My Religion he writes:

‘There should be truth in thought, truth in speech and truth in action but truth is the right designation of God. Hence there is nothing wrong in every man following Truth according to his lights”.

But in practice we see many opinion leaders teaching from the pulpit of Truth which contradicts the Truth of other seekers. The theosophists such as Helena P Blavatsky have a slogan “there is no religion higher than Truth”. Gandhi always praised the theosophist Anne Besant for introducing true Hinduism to him and he took a step nearer to God by saying He alone is the sought-for reward for a true disciplined heart and educated mind. Then we see people swearing through their teeth that the gospel according to Truth is their slogan. Leninism and Maoism have captured the minds of reformists, scientists and academicians. These have done much harm to the Truth as God as practiced by Jesus or Zoroaster.

While Gandhi teaches nonviolence and passive resistance in response to the search for God, Marxism teaches brute violence and calls to arms those who labour and are exploited by the bourgeoisie and capitalists. All those teachings which have denied man as spirit have helped to create a cerebral humanity who avenges itself on the spiritual-cum-emotional self by denying that soul, God and heart exist.

When Gandhi insisted that “the small inner voice” was his authority, he also says that one must find this self through discipline and perseverance. What is discipline, the key to the door of ‘inner self’’? Gandhi believed asceticism, piety and chastity and life-long marriage with Haq (the Truth) was the basis for practicing Ahimsa (love) and well-informed reason for finding God. He says in My Religion (p 103):

“In such selfless search for Truth nobody can lose his bearings for long. Directly he takes to the wrong path he stumbles and is thus redirected to the right path.”

What the Sufis ascribe to the Spiritual Master, Gandhi ascribes to the educated self or ‘voice within’. Thus everyone is encouraged to practice self-effacement and search for God through himself. “Know yourself and you will know God.” This Gandhian teaching, in times when Spiritual Masters have arisen everywhere, capturing the hearts and minds of ill-informed people, is an elixir.

The New Testament which inspired Gandhi a good deal invites people to practice ocean-consciousness. In John 4, verse 24 we read

“God is spirit and all worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

In book 3 verse

“But whosoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

In the holy Quran we see many references to truth seeking. In Surah 16 verse 36,

“so travel the earth and see what was the end of those who denied the truth. But he will be set right who selflessly seeks and observes the unfettered Truth.”

Zarathustra, the Persian prophet (1200 BCE) similarly called God Absolute Truth to be found by those who dedicate their lives in thought, word and deed to the pursuit of Divine Power, Ahura Mazda. While Gandhi and Jesus spread the gospel of love, Zoroaster sought help through reason from the archangels of God, in particular the ‘Good Mind’ or ‘Spenta Mainya’. He taught that once the spirit of Benediction has been found, the Good Mind, one can know God as the Father of Truth. It is with such a faith that the truth seeker practising Ahimsa and Satyagraha will reach the shores of peace in the whirlpool of existence.

One cannot hope to find the right ‘inner voice’ without asceticism and self-discipline. Gandhi believed “truth resides in every human heart and one has to search for it there and be guided by the truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his views of truth (The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, page 44). Again emphasising his commitment to Haq (God) he says in The Mind of Mahtma Gandhi page 43:

“But as long as I have not realised the Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and my buckle.”

These teachings have been practised for several thousand years and we have to find them again. Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius have all had the taste for God, self-realisation and Fana (self-annihilation in God).  Yasna 46 v. 18 has:

“Oh Mazda I seek but to fulfil your will through Truth”.

Everyone hence must strive to live a truth-inspired existence. Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it, the deeper the search in the mine of truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there. In the awe-inspiring Proverbs (the Old Testament) we are reminded that love and faithfulness never leave you.

“Bind them around your neck and write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favour and a good name in the sight of God and man” (Proverbs 3 verse 3).

Let us conclude with the much quoted saying of Gandhi: “Without Ahimsa it is not possible to seek and find Truth. Ahimsa and Truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them.”(My Religion p. 106).

Bibliography:
My Religion M K Gandhi, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad 380014
The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, Compiled and edited by R K Prabhu and U R Rao
The Holy Bible New International Version, Hodder and Stoughton
The Holy Quran, Text, Translation & Commentary by A. Yusef Ali 1983.
The Ancient Gods, E O James, Phoenix Giant 1960
The Gathas of Zarathustra, Piloo Nanavutty 1999