Gandhi has been many things to many people. For some, he was a Mahatma; for the rest of us, he was a narcissist, wannabe ‘Prophet of the New Age’ who is truly the ‘father of the nation’ for Pakistan, although he is marketed as the ‘father of the nation’ for India.
To understand his personality and character, it’s essential to look into his history as a person, husband, father, and leader and analyze some of the milestones from his life. This post is an effort to do just that. Let’s begin.
Gandhi’s name began to surface in India after stories of his work in South Africa. During his entire South African period, and for some time after, until he was about fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an imperial loyalist. Though he demanded Indians the rights of Englishmen, he was unshakably loyal to the British crown. He supported the British Empire eagerly in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the “Kaffir War,” and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I.
Documentary evidence is available via his speeches and writings that his later attitude toward Britain resulted from unreciprocated love. He had wanted to be an Englishman; Britain had rejected him and his people. So, a disappointed Gandhi went in the opposite direction, fighting for the next hot topic, ‘Swaraj.’
As evident from an examination of his writings, his articles, and those of his close friends and followers, we can easily conclude that Gandhi was a man of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical, unyielding even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally intolerant of all opinions but his own. For example, his wife, Kasturba, writes several incidents that prove this point. Here is an analysis of another of her writings we shared earlier.
In Britain, the non-violent Gandhi happened to be in London when the war broke out in August 1914. He instantly contacted the War Office, swore that he would stand by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian Volunteer Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn’t fallen ill with pleurisy.
Then, Gandhi was back in India in 1915 while World War I was still going on. He made a memorable speech in Madras in which he proclaimed:
I discovered that the British empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these ideals is that every subject of this British Empire has the freest scope for his energies and honor, and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience…
In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its final crisis, he wrote to the Viceroy of India:
“I have an idea that if I become your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon you.”
Gandhi proclaimed in a speech in Kheda that the British Love justice; they have shielded men against oppression. Again, he wrote the Viceroy a lengthy letter. But he did say these:
If I could make my countrymen retrace their steps, I would make them withdraw all the Congress resolutions and not whisper ‘Home Rule’ or ‘Responsible Government’ during the pendency of the war. I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment, and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favored partner in the Empire, and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past.
He also said this in the end:
I write this because I love the English nation, and I wish to evoke in every Indian the loyalty of Englishmen.
To some of his pacifist friends, who were horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the Bhagavad Gita and the wars recounted in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu scriptures Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would offer later), which was that they did not recount military struggles but spiritual struggles. This indicates that his philosophies were based on the most suitable or beneficial position for him to take. Whatever benefited him was his call of the day!
Upon careful study, we can see that Gandhi passed through three phases about his relationship with the British Empire. At first, he was a loyal British servant who merely wanted for Indians the rights of Englishmen (as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British but believed that Indians would be granted some degree of Swaraj, having proved their loyalty to the empire. Third, as the home-rule movement gathered momentum, it was the Purna Swaraj (complete self-governance) and nothing but the Swaraj. He is projected to be relentlessly against the crown during this third phase.
The word Satyagraha means something like “truth-striving.” This term itself is very odd because if Gandhi had any common sense, he would have realized that Satya (the Truth) is not strived for; it’s lived. But he coined this new term which would be famously used as a nickname for his civil disobedience and ‘fasting until death’ type movements.
It’s only propaganda that holds Gandhi as a pure non-violent ‘Mahatma.’ But the reality is that he was not so ill-disposed to war at all up until his fifties. As discussed above, in three wars, Gandhi not only gave his full support to the British but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire.
Gandhi was so pumped to help the British Crown in both the Boer War and World War I that he wanted to raise new troops. British military authorities were skeptical and thus ignored him initially, but finally yielded to Gandhi’s relentless importuning that he wanted to fight alongside. At first, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed to go into combat. Still, Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle and provided some critical medical help. For his service on the battlefield, Gandhi also earned War Medal from the British Crown.
It is hardly realized how much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “non-violent” movement from the very beginning.
Did you know that Gandhi’s first use of his “ultimate weapon” of “fast unto death” was to prevent a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a “separate electorate” in the Indian national legislature? Dr. Ambedkar was almost pushed into a corner by Gandhi and his followers and forced to back off from his stand because of this stunt from Gandhi. Ambedkar remained critical of Gandhi for the rest of his life.
Charged with success, on the passionate subject of Swaraj, Gandhi cried, “I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!” But he was not honest. He forced his will of ‘non-violence,’ Muslim appeasement, and suppression of Hindu sentiments. He was selective in praise, selective in condemning and even praised barbarian acts such as the Moplah Hindu massacre. His double-speak and selective leadership created deep resentment in people’s minds, and then his proclamation came to fructify.
The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but the knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew in 1947 and the partition of India happened.
As soon as the oppressive British transferred the power of ‘Swaraj’ to Gandhi’s favorite lieutenants, the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others in India and Pakistan gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed saviors of their respective religions ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. According to the rough estimates, nearly 4 million people lost their lives during those bloody days of 1947. So much for Gandhi’s teachings and preaching of non-violence.
Nathuram Godse had rightly said about Gandhi’s failure as the ‘father of the nation’ in the court when he explained the reasons for eliminating Gandhi from India’s scene. He said:
Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he has failed in his paternal duty in as much he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. …His inner-voice, his spiritual power, his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of… proved to be powerless.
But Gandhi’s monstrous behavior to his own family and children is condemnable. He denied education to his son on some ridiculously laughable high moral ground.
On another occasion, he wrote, speaking about his wife, Kasturba Gandhi:
I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner, she is saying something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering of hers. . .
And at the end of her life, Kasturba lay dying of pneumonia, and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her. Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected into her bodyand simply let her die. It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted Malaria shortly afterward, he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine and that when he had appendicitis, he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.
Gandhi disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to marry. The non-violent but blackmailing expert ‘Mahatma’ banished his second son, Manilal, for giving his struggling older brother a small sum of money. Harilal grew quite wild with rage against his father, attacked him through his writings, converted to Islam, took to women, drinking, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming modestly in an open letter in Young India, “Men may be good, not necessarily their children.”
There are other documented incidents when Gandhi himself reveled in one of his prayer sessions that his own son thinks that Gandhi has ashamed the Hindu religion. The father of the nation could not even be a good father to his sons.
The character of the ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi that has been shown to the world through consistent sponsorship and systematic brainwashing by the left, liberal cabal is quite different from the real, historical character that he was. He was not without a good quality. But the more you study his life, the more you realize that he was anything but a ‘Mahatma,’ and this is the truth that the world needs to know! Gandhi’s cult has caused millions and millions of lives and weakened the very nation he called his ‘motherland.’
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