India needs to celebrate Deen Dayal Upadhyay's ideology more than Gandhi's
One thing that is very peculiar to the Gandhian ideology is its unparalleled flexibility. Radical Muslims have nothing to do with Gandhism. Rather their pan-Islamic ideology is the antithesis of Gandhism. Yet when such Muslims want to disarm Hindus and suppress their aggression in reaction to a provocative act of the Muslim community they cite Gandhiji to put them on the defensive.
This typical "disarming feature" of the Gandhian ideology is proved by another example. When Gandhiji extended an olive branch to the Muslims in 1920s in order to draw them into the freedom movement, the Wahabi Islamists seized opportunity, entered the Congress party and then set its agenda giving birth to a Muslim dominated polity based on pan-Islamism which bedevils India even after giving a separate country to the Muslims in the name of Islam.
It's the same with Left oriented movements. Before independence, Gandhism and Leftism were opposed to each other. And naturally so. A section of the Reds believed in an armed revolution while the latter were opposed to even the acts of armed revolutionaries including Bhagat Singh during the freedom struggle. But after independence Gandhiji has become part of the Left in their fight against Hindutva ideologues.
Gandhism being fashionable, Gandhiji is today like a shield for the Left in their ideological fight with Hindutva votaries as in the case of the 2002 Gujarat riots in which they freely used the Mahatma’s name to denounce the anti-Muslim riots but all along tried to underplay the Godhra train burning.
What the two radical ideologies share with Gandhism? If one goes deep into the evolution of the ideologies vis-à-vis human growth the term that runs as a common thread in all the three ideologies is "inorganic growth".
Gandhism is partially inorganic while the other two are almost totally inorganic but in different ways. While the radical Islamists and Letftists want only their own ideologies to rule the world militating against the concept of "live and let live", the Gandhian ideology, while being organic in its economic approach, preaches peace with even your implacable enemy despite knowing that the enemy will destroy you.
Significantly, the Second World War gave a good account of the inorganic nature of Gandhian thought. Winston Churchill was aghast when Gandhiji advised UK to stop fighting Hitler and instead rely on its moral force when Germany was raining bombs on London. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad gives good account of this episode in his autobiography Indian wins Freedom and almost disagrees with Gandhiji while frankly admitting that he didn’t believe in that kind of non-violence.
But Gandhiji’s inorganic thinking goes beyond even this when we look at his attempts to test his celibacy. Therefore it is surprising when Sangh Parivar ideologues seek Gandhian endorsement for an organic and fit-for-today ideology like "Integral Humanism" propounded by its ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya.
While trying to understand Integral Humanism I tried to read some articles and books on the subject penned by Sangh Parivar writers and I found that the common thread that ran in all these articles and books was most writers’ attempts to compare Upadhyaya’s thought processes with Gandhiji’s on the basis of parallels between the two in three or four areas -
The two had similar economic thinking based on village-centric economy, had a special place in their hearts for the poor and the downtrodden and believed in simple living and minimum exploitation of natural resources. But the two personalities had totally divergent views on all other important areas which are equally crucial to the growth of a nation or progress of a society - such as national security, national honour, attitude towards radical Muslims, respect for Indian medieval war heroes who fought for India’s freedom and belief in the indivisibility of the Indian nation. On these issues which are bedevilling the nation today, Gandhiji’s beliefs were that of a pacifist while of Upadhyaya were of an uncompromising nationalist.
The odd thing is that the people from the RSS looking for Gandhian endorsement on Integral Humanism keep silent on areas where the two are diametrically opposed to each other in spite of the fact that these are also part of core issues of the RSS agenda – national security, national honour, and correcting falsification of history (a subject to which Gandhism has rendered a big knock ). This is perhaps the inherent reason why BJP governments have failed to give an effective reply to Pakistan despite that nation’s gravest provocations.
Who was Deendayal Upadhyaya?
Deendayal Upadhyaya, a contemporary of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was one of the tallest leaders of the RSS who joined the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS, which is now the BJP) when it was formed in 1951. He died in a train accident in Mughalsarai in mysterious circumstances in 1968 but not before leaving his ideological imprint on the party which few in the party have been able to match so far. He worked for only two years with BJS founder Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (before the later too died in mysterious circumstances in a Kashmir jail in 1953) but his commitment to nationalist ideals, firmness in taking strong action, organisational skills and efficiency impressed Mukherjee so much that he made the following historical statement: “If I had two Deendayals I could change the political face of India.”
The highly idealistic Upadhyaya’s thoughts are effectively underlined by the following excerpts of one of his speeches: “We are pledged to the service not of any particular community or section but of the entire nation. Every countryman is blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh. We shall not rest till we are able to give to every one of them a sense of pride that they are children of Bharat Mata. We shall make Mother India sujala, suphala ("overflowing with water and laden with fruits") in the real sense of these words. As Dashapraharana Dharini Durga with her ten weapons, she would be able to vanquish evil; as Lakshmi, she would be able to disburse prosperity all over and as Saraswati she would dispel the gloom of ignorance and spread the radiance of knowledge all around her. With faith in ultimate victory, let us dedicate ourselves to this task.”
The statement in a speech at Kozikhode in Kerala is considered historic and deflates the false charges of the Left that Upadhyaya practiced a Hindutva that aimed at imposing Hindu views on Muslims. A political philosopher who floated RSS’s famous media organs , Panchjanya and Swadesh, Upadhyaya, unlike Gandhiji, didn’t hesitate to take hard decisions when these went against basic principles of the party. Once he expelled nine party MLAs in Rajathan who voted against the Zamindar Abolition Act in Rajasthan.
What is Upadhyaya’s "Integral Humanism", better known as "Ekatma Manavad"?
Integral humanism seeks to develop an Indian, self-reliant economic model with village as the base and putting human being at the centre stage. It rejects western concepts like Marxist socialism as well as Capitalist individualism and seeks what can be called a middle ground between the two. But it welcomes what is good for the society being offered by Western science. It is critical of the two systems for their excesses and alienness.
Upadhyaya, who was born in 1916 in a village near Mathura, believed that the problem with both capitalist and Socialist ideologies is that they only consider the needs of body and mind, and were hence based on the materialist objectives of desire and wealth. Society, according to Upadhyaya, rather than arising from a social contract between individuals, was fully born at its inception itself as a natural living organism with a definitive "national soul" or "ethos" and its needs of the social organism paralleled those of the individual.
He believed humankind had four hierarchically organised attributes of body, mind, and which corresponded to four universal objectives, kama (desire or satisfaction), artha (wealth), dharma (moral duties) and moksha (total liberation or "salvation"). While none could be ignored, dharma is the "basic", and moksha the "ultimate" objective of humankind and society. Integral Humanism is a synthesis of the material and the spiritual, the individual and the collective. Plus, Upadhyaya drew from the national heroes of medieval and ancient India when it came to national pride and honour. He wrote books like Cultural Nationalism and Nation is indivisible.
On the other hand, Gandhiji’s single-minded pursuit was peace at any cost. During the Second World War, Gandhiji was once thinking of committing suicide as he couldn’t see the unending cycle of death and killings during the war. His analysis of Bhagvad Gita too smacked of the same kind of self-pacifism.
In his book My Religion some of his interpretations are quite shocking. In it he laments the deaths on the battlefield of Kurukshetra and then calls Yudhisthir’s victory an "empty victory as it caused such a large number of deaths." So the question that a man can ask is should Yudhisthir have taken in his stride the insults, including disrobing of Draupadi, and put up with the injustice that Duryodhan and the Kauravas were inflicting on the Pandavas?
Siginificantly, many believe Integral Humanism was the only alternative to Marxism and capitalism that came up after 1947, but failed to get due recognition in an age of domineering capitalism and socialism backed by political forces. While capitalism suffers from the “one dimensional concept of the human pursuit of material progress”, Integral Humanism envisages a system that permits competitiveness while harmonising material progress with spiritual.
BJP leader Mahesh Chandra Sharma, an expert on Integral Humanism and the contribution of Deendayal Upadhyaya, says Upadhya wanted economic freedom, along with the Right to Work. He wanted private ownership of the means of production but not centralisation of ownership. In agriculture, he favoured land ownership and strongly opposed Soviet-style cooperatives, then a hot topic of discussion.
Sharma’s book, Economic Philosophy of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, quotes him as saying, “We should finish the unaccomplished task of land reforms and agricultural marketing.” Upadhyaya wanted self-reliance in foodgrains but warned against building up excessive buffer stocks that would distort the market – a tune many economists are singing in the wake of heavy procurement by the Food Corporation of India. Nor did he believe that government administered prices could combat inflation. Interestingly, Sharma has also expounded on Upadhyaya’s non-economic views such as national security and honour and the importance of cultural nationalism which the Left mischievously equate with anti-minority activity.
Let’s take ten controversial acts of Gandhiji that left a negative imprint, which Upadhaya would have never committed:
1. Gandhiji’s handshake with pan-Islamists in 1920 in the form of endorsement to their pan-Islamic movement called Khilafat for reinstatement of the dethroned Khalifa in Turkey just to win their support for the Indian freedom movement. The step leigitimised pan-Islamism in the country which is at the root of India’s Muslim-dominated polity today.
2. In 1925 when the Khilafat movement was dying and Gandhiji was looking for Muslim support he called Maharana Pratap, Chattrapati Shivaji and Guru Govind Singh misguided patriots in what many allege was an attempt to please the Muslims.
3. In 1947-48 when Hindu refuges, who were being thrown out from Pakistan after being subjected to rape, plunder and killing, went to meet Gandhiji at Birla House the father of the nation advised them to go back to Pakistan and rely on their moral force to face the aggressors.
4. One of the conditions of Gandhiji to end his last fast unto death was that India give the Rs 55 crore to Pakistan which India had promised to that country from its treasury at the time of Partition. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel had held back the amount as they felt the money would be used by Pakistan to buy weapons to use them against India in its Kashmir aggression which was going on at that time. Gandhiji succeeded in forcing the duo to part with the amount against their wishes.
5. His experiments with celibacy.
6. Making Pandit Nehru the prime ministerial candidate over Sardar Patel by going against the very principles of democracy as Sardar had more than 80 per cent support within the party.
7. Opposing the candidature of Subhash Chandra Bose at the Haripura Congress in 1939.
8. Underplaying the anti-Hindu Moplah Muslim riots in Kerala in 1920 during the Khilafat movement in which Moplah Muslims subjected Hindus and Christians to killing, rape and plunder. This has been graphically recorded by the then Congress President C Sankaran Nair who denounced Gandhiji for his support to Khilafat and not denouncing the atrocities by the Moplahs.
9. Not applying enough pressure on Viceroy Lord Irwin to turn the death sentence of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev into life imprisonment. Lord Irvine himself revealed it in a book that he wrote after going back to England and earning the title of Lord Halifax. He admits in the book thatr had Gandhiji refused to sign the Gandhi-Irwin pact on the issue the British would have been forced to turn the death sentence of the trio into life imprisonment.
10. Gandhiji allowed Abul Kalam Azad, a believer in the radical Wahabi tenets of Islam, to continue as President of the Congress during the most crucial period before Independence between 1939 and 1945 (the period of the Second World War) when many controversial actions of Azad laid the foundation of a Muslim-dominated polity which troubles the nation as well as Hindus and Muslims till today.
When Sardar Patel charged Azad with protecting Muslim interests at the cost of majority community interests Azad hit back. However Sardar was soon proved correct when Gandhiji was forced to remove Azad from Presidentship in 1946 on finding that Azad had betrayed the Congress leadership by secretly agreeing to the proposal of a rotating presidency and Generalship of the Indian Army (One term Hindu and one term Muslim by turns ) as a condition for preventing Partition of India before the British negotiators.
Clearly, with a BJP government in power on the eve of Upadhyaya’s birth centenary and the BJP-RSS bracing up to popularise his thoughts which have much to give to the new generation, the time has come for the RSS to ponder whether the Gandhian stamp on an original and virile ideology like Integral Humanism is necessary.