I took History at school but what recently learnt about M.K. Gandhi, 14 years after matric, makes me feel like asking for all my school tees. I am so angry. At any rate, I am glad that I now know what I know because wisdom remains better than all the silver and all the gold.
For long and many decades “Mahatma Gandhi has been wrongly heralded as a champion of human rights, racial harmony and justice. His name is often mentioned in the same breath as Rev. Martin Luther King and Dr. Nelson Mandela, as though he shared these men’s values. Although Gandhi received international praise for his much-publicized fasts and passive resistance campaigns, the world seems to have missed the true Gandhi.
CONTEMPT FOR BLACKS
The South African liberation movements, White Liberals, Hollywood, the US Left along with their respective intellectuals were not only unable to expose the real Gandhi, but are also largely to blame for the posthumous bravado that he now enjoys. He himself a great deceiver, deceiving many Black revival rights movement leaders who continue to honour him. Although the two never met, Dr. King and his wife Coretta went to India on a Gandhi bandwagon and neither they and nor their astute delegation came away none the wiser about the real Mahatma. Had they, imagine the shock, the shame of realizing that the man and banner you took to the mountain tops had long betrayed you. But Gandhi, even in death continues to disarm and charm them all.
The truth that has been hidden for so long is that Gandhi never saw the dignity and capacity to suffer of the Indian as being the same as that of the African under the apartheid regime. He failed to see African people as human beings. He said in effect when he was arrested once and placed in the same cell as Africans; humiliated by the error of his jailers he noted in his writings how many of the Native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves in their cells.
G.B. Singh, author of the book, Behind the Mask of Divinity, (DV April 16, 2005 p.28) wrote in a separate article titled, “Would the Real Gandhi Stand Up’. of the 21 years that Gandhi lived in South Africa, one cannot help but discern that there is not a single Black person anywhere in any of the photos of Gandhi during that time.
With Black people in the great majority, there is no way that Gandhi had missed noticing them”. Certainly Gandhi noticed us, the problem is that we were beneath him. For him, we Blacks were the “untouchables of this land. Gandhi came to Africa already having organized in his shiny head and the reality he was poised to create, a place and life-station for dark skinned people.
G.B. Singh points to the sad fact that “only a few scholars are aware of this background”. It is certainly sad that those who have known have not told. Someone who could have said something should have said something. Why has this truth been hidden behind a veil of deceptive secrecy? What was the motive in hiding the fact that “Mahatma Gandhi really hated the people of this land. He even fought against us, enlisting many Indians to help him in 1906 as Sergeant-Major Gandhi.
PROMOTED RACISM
Gandhi supported the separatist and racist policies on the apartheid govt. He said in a public meeting in Bombay in 1896 that theirs (Indians) was “one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us (Indians) by Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”
Seduced and blinded by an apparent adopted British-Indian arrogance and a superiority complex fueled by a sinister support and justification of the Indian Hindu caste system. The Caste or varna system as it is also sometimes referred to relegates. the darkest skinned Indians to a life of forced humiliating service to their lighter skinned country women and men. The Untouchables or Dalits as they like to call themselves endure unspeakable discrimination and oppression. They number some 200 million and “official government statistics show that Dalits suffer more than 100,000 murders, arsons, and rapes annually”, wrote Larry Glassco of his trip to India last October in an article called ‘Casteism Racism’. Drawing further parallels between the (plight) of the Dalits and struggle of Africans in America. Glassco pointed out that the plight of the Dalits in India was “remarkably close to that of Black Americans”.
DALITS & BLACKS
Because the Dalits are not racially different from the upper castes, casteism may not be racism by formal definition, but caste-based discrimination bears enough Similan ties in practice, in outcome. and in struggles to end it that it could well be considered a close cousin. Informed by religion and not race, the Shudras, of which the Dalits are a part of, bear the closest resemblance to Africans and are also therefore forced to do the type of work that used to be reserved for us darkiest. “Dalits, like Blacks, are given jobs that others shun. Blacks formerly dominated among garbage haulers, Dalits today clean the nation’s latrines”.
Further, “like Blacks, Dalits cannot be served in many restaurants; if they are served, it is in separate glasses and cups. Upper caste men have access to Dalit women, by force if necessary, but Dalit men dare not date or try to marry an upper-caste girl under pain of death and mutilation by a lynch mob, like the sexual-based lynchings of US history, noted (Glassco) .
Gandhi tried to recreate and duplicate a sort of caste racism here in South Africa, with Indians naturally at the top with Whites and us Africans groveling at the bottom as usual. As such, Gandhi lunged himself head first into the Sou ridge that was South African politics, Unwilling to transcend the trappings and shortcomings of the caste system, which are inherently divisive and racist.
DURBAN ATTACK ON INDIANS
Unwilling also to stand in solidarity with oppressed Africans in the land of their birth, Gandhi, as a widely respected and influential Indian leader set the stage and tone for Indian/African relations on the continent and African diaspora for decades to come. Indian/African relations over the decades have been parasitical and abusive exploding most dramatically in Idi Amins Uganda when he expelled 50,000 Indians and Pakistanis in 1972. Tensions have also on more than one occasion come to a head in our own Durban where Indian families were sent fleeing en mass leaving homes burning behind them.
You can cross any country and swim across any sea, you will find the attitude of the Indian towards the Africa as being the same; one of disdain.
IN DEFENCE OF CASTE SYSTEM
The Mahatma expressed his views on the caste system at length in a journal called Nava Jivan in 1921. It was originally written in Gujarati and now recently translated into English. He minced no words when he said:
“I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand it is because it is founded on the caste system. He further reiterated that “these being my views i am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.
Gandhi’s legacy is a paradox. While it is true that he helped bring “independence” to India, it is highly contested especially in India that he brought freedom to his people. The view is that while he brought his country out of British colonial occupation, he himself then roped it into a more subtle and paralyzing bondage: Hindu casteism. What is happening to the Dalits is illegal by government decree even as it is widespread forcing many Dalits to offer armed defense.
ENEMY NO.1 OF DALITS
Novelist and musician Beverley Nichols when he met Dr. Ambedkar during a visit to British India, the doctor told him that “Gandhi is the greatest enemy the untouchables have ever had in India.
Standing on the side of history. G.B. Singh also cautions:
“Gandhi’s racism will incite a whole lot of controversy. Be that as it may, I am of the view that the facts speak for themselves. I have exhausted the last 18 years of my life critically analyzing these hidden documents, and I have no doubt that Gandhi harbored anti-Black views and forced his racial views on his fellow Indian countrymen while living in South Africa”.
The irony of the Gandhi conspiracy is that while it may have been propagated by well meaning Indians from all persuasions and intent, supposedly in an effort to safeguard the futures of their children in a foreign continent, the consequence however of that conspiracy is being brought down as judge and yardstick for the same children that they were trying to protect. Indian youth stand to be most affected by this revelation. Further, the collective innocence of those who believed in the righteousness and integrity of Gandhi; even the divine in him, they too will be (altered). What Indian youth now have to reckon with is the fact that the Indian has no future in Africa that is separate from that of the Africans. The Gandhis tendency of attempting to create a satellite India in Africa with castes and all has no future in Africa. The Indian has to become an African in Africa. Gaddists and others who believed otherwise are now suffering a cultural shock.
Gandhi himself is turning in his grave as you read this. Could his legacy, by the same token. be regarded as the greatest enemy of the Indian living in outside India? Is this the irony of history? (nhlanhla@kush.co.za)
