Revisiting the legacy of free India's founding fathers (Book Review)

Title: Understanding the Founding Fathers - An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings; Author: Rajmohan Gandhi; Publisher: Aleph Book Company; Pages: 160; Price: Rs.299

Political leaders are never fated to be left in peace, especially if they are among those involved in ensuring a country's independence or charting its future course. Decades hence, there will still be critics questioning their capabilities, motivations, and achievements in tones ranging from mild criticism to angry polemic, or believing others, usually their favourites, could have done better. India's founding fathers are no exception.

In the Indian context, these could entail the prospects that could have ensued if Vallabhbhai Patel had been free India's first prime minister instead of Jawaharlal Nehru, or if Subhas Chandra Bose had stayed in India during World War and led the freedom struggle and/or independent India.

Then how about if B.R. Ambedkar had not left Nehru's cabinet, or going back a bit, the leadership of a united India had been given to Mohammed Ali Jinnah?

But as author Rajmohan Gandhi observes, "these questions may usually be dismissed as being purely hypothetical but a related question makes practical sense. Are our present-day discontents of recent origin or connected to the beginnings of the Indian republic? Were crucial mistakes made in the 1947-50 period?"

It is an attempt to answer these questions that led to this work whose small size does not reflect its weighty and reasoned erudition but he admits its aims were first more limited - "merely wanting to address sweeping criticisms of (Mahatma) Gandhi and Nehru levelled by two interesting men - a swami from Gujarat and a professor from America", both of who he only came to know about in early 2015.

Swami Sachidanand of Gujarat blames Mahatma Gandhi, for weakening India by his espousal of 'ahimsa', leading to the ignominious defeat to the Chinese in 1962 , as well as the Hindu community, by failing to understanding "two things: the value of the sword, and the danger from Islam.

On the other, American 'Marxist' scholar Perry Anderson, in "The Indian Ideology" (2014), charges the Mahatma with being "anti-Muslim, that he forced Pakistan on an unwilling Jinnah, that he helped fashion a Hindu state where Muslims would remain subordinate, a state which had enslaved the people of Kashmir", and prescribes Indians banish Gandhi, Nehru and Patel and others and "all they represent".

With "the Swami and the Professor were in essence cancelling each other's charges against Gandhi, a reply would merely require quoting each to the other" but the author, despite a part of him encouraging this response, holds the issue is greater - for there are are many Hindus who believe or led to believe what the Swami thinks contentions, and likewise, many Muslims in both countries about the stand most lately expressed by Anderson, "and if facts and reasons could clarify a few minds, an effort to supply them might be worthwhile".

He begins with his rebuttals of both Sachidanand and Anderson, by extensively citing their criticism and inferences and countering it through Mahatma's recorded writings, statements and actions - and simple logic.

The next chapter does the same for Nehru and the fourth deals with Jinnah, Bose and Ambedkar, who have all been praised by Anderson, laying out a tantalising premise of whether they could have "joined hands to give India and Pakistan an alternative history, free of Partition and its killings and perhaps free also of the injustices and inequalities that have scarred the subcontinent?"

It is a thought-provoking work that the author, a grandson of the Mahatma, has penned and despite his relationship, he is quite balanced and freely acknowledges his grandfather's shortcomings and mistakes. And there is something new that most of us will find, though it may not be very salutary, eg. What ex-INA men ended up doing.

But the real value of this book is that icons are humans and not infallible or beyond debate, and issues of disagreements, or any perceived dishonours, can be discussed peacefully and logically, without sending oneself into paroxysms of rage and needing coercive action or bans to assuage.

(22.02.2016 - Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)