Ep 454: The Ideas of Gandhi

The Seen and the Unseen - hosted by Amit Varma

Historian Ramachandra Guha joins Amit Varma to discuss his latest book, Arguments with Gandhi, exploring the Mahatma's evolving philosophical positions on nonviolence, caste, gender,

Key takeaways

• Guha traces Gandhi's racial views from early prejudice in South Africa to a comprehensive anti-racist stance by middle age, emphasizing his willingness to evolve through debate.
• The episode contrasts Gandhi's commitment to nonviolent means with Bhagat Singh and Lenin's revolutionary violence, concluding that Gandhian methods historically yield more durable democratic transitions.

Main topics

• Nonviolent resistance and satyagraha
• Caste dynamics and Ambedkar-Gandhi debates

Notable quotes

"Gandhi had no rivals, no enmities, he had disagreements."

Conclusion

The episode provides a rigorous, historically grounded reevaluation of Gandhi's

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) you Speaker 2 (0:05) What do you like about reading history? For me, there are two things that fascinate me. One is the inner lives of people. There is nothing as interesting as when a historian manages to make the full humanity of a historical figure visible to us. Their weaknesses, their foibles, their self-doubt, their small sorrows, their big dreams, their torments. The other kind of history I love is the history of ideas. All of our past is a contestation between different views of the world and the messiness of that discourse is not always evident in hindsight. India's history is a history of contestation because there is no one idea of India but many. Well, my guest today is therefore a historian I love for good reason as his work goes into both of these areas. In all the people that he writes about, none more so than Mahatma Gandhi, we see the human condition, we see the cracks where the light gets in. And as you will realize when you read it, read his latest book, there is hardly anyone who can capture the battle of the ideas of India and the ideas in India as well as Ram Guha does. So settle in. This will be a stimulating episode. Speaker 1 (1:11) Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma. Speaker 2 (1:25) Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Ramachandra Guha, back for the 8th time on The Scene and the Unseen. How lucky are we? Ram's latest book is called Arguments with Gandhi and the book documents Gandhi's arguments against the likes of Lenin, Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar and Savarkar and many more. There are fascinating sections on non-violence, justice, religion, caste, gender and the environment. The book also has a chapter on Gandhi's influence on Martin Luther King, which I particularly loved. A lot of it was new to me. So do buy the book, do listen and yes, one more thing. I have a new YouTube show called Watching the Wheels, which I run with Shruti Rajgopalan and Pranay Kottasane. And three days ago, on October 2nd, we released our 10th episode. This was called The Multitudes of Mahatma Gandhi, in which we took a stab, a rather long stab, at exploring the many sides of Gandhi. It was a labor of love. Do check that out and do also check out our next episode, episode 11 of Watching the Wheels, which releases later this week on Friday, October 9th, in which we argue against Gandhi. views on the economy and the environment, many of which are shared by Ram and which we briefly discuss at the end of this episode. May the discourse flourish. But for now, listen to this great conversation after a quick commercial break. Speaker 2 (2:40) Gather around me, friends. I have exciting news for you. I've launched a new YouTube show called Watching the Wheels, in which every week, Shruti Rajgopal and Pranay Kottasane and I will gather to discuss what is happening in the world around us. What have we been thinking about? What do we want to brainstorm? We'll discuss ideas, share stories, argue furiously and punish each other with bad jokes. It will be fun. It will be fast. It will be fantastic. And you are invited. There will be an audio version soon on every podcast app, but our primary home is YouTube. So head on over to Complicated URL Alert. Head on over to youtube.com slash at watching hyphen the hyphen wheels at watching the wheels with hyphens. I'll also link it from the show notes so you can just search for it. But remember the name of the show. watching the wheels. Vishruti, Pranay and Amit. Where the world unfolds and finally makes sense. Speaker 2 (3:37) Ram, welcome to The Scene in the Ones. Thank you, Amit. I'm so grateful that you shared your wonderful book with me. We are recording this on August 8th, but your book will be out on October 2nd. And no doubt listeners are listening to the episode after that. And I got a chance to read it in advance, so I'm very privileged. Before I start talking about the book, you know, before we started recording this, we were just chatting about friends we won't name. But there's a thought that struck me that's really disturbed me for a long, long time. Like just yesterday, I recorded an episode for Independence Day, which is about highlights and lowlights. And one of my lowlights there was demonetization, not because of the policy itself, but because what I realized during that time is that it was defended by people who knew it was wrong. Yes. A whole bunch of them. Some of them were people I admired greatly. And I was very... almost shattered by that because simultaneously the same thing happened in America. Today, for all practical purposes, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of 20 years ago don't exist. They've been torn apart. And the difficult realization that I came to is that many people who you would think believe in principles only believe in tribalism. Those principles are a uniform they wear. And, you know, they'll go wherever their tribe kind of takes them. And at a personal level also, You imagine that you are friends with someone and they're a reasonable person. And okay, they hold some views that you may not agree with, but they're reasonable people. But then the tribalism kicks in and you realize they were never really thinking at all. They just unthinkingly adopted a certain set of beliefs or dogmas that belong to the party that they want to associate with for whatever reason. And I wonder what you feel about this because you must have, you know, because of your higher surface area of exposure to intellectuals Speaker 3 (5:17) and Speaker 2 (5:17) so on, you must have experienced this much more than me. So what are your thoughts on this? Speaker 3 (5:21) Of course, I mean, the conventional view is that the Speaker 2 (5:25) tribalism we are talking about, Amit, and that we notice in many Speaker 3 (5:28) partially democratic countries around the world, not in the authoritarian regimes because no one can express, you know, dissent with Putin openly or dissent with Erdogan openly. But the tribalism, you know, I'm pro-Modi fully or I'm pro-Rahul Gandhi fully or I'm pro-Trump fully or I'm pro-Bernie Sanders fully. The conventional explanation is that it is largely caused by social media. And of course, the algorithms of social media, which self-select what you want to hear, and of course, the echo chamber you want to be part of. This is true to a great extent, but not wholly. I mean, intellectuals have been tribal for a very long time. There's a phrase mistakenly attributed to Henry Kissinger, but actually coined by a... Columbia professor of an earlier vintage, 40s and 50s. And the phrase is the herd of independent minds. Speaker 1 (6:21) Okay. Speaker 3 (6:21) Now, this is usually applied to the left. All right. So, the left prides itself on being independent, you know, radical, open-minded. But there is a herd. They all think alike on so many things. And now there's a herd of independent minds on the right too. And, you know, in the BJP ecosystem too. I mean, among intellectuals and writers, tribal identities go a very long way and it's not an accident that it's those who resist these tribal identities and somehow speak or sometimes speak out against the excesses of their own side who are remembered longest for their moral integrity and their courage. So obviously George Orwell would be a prime example of this. But it is a cost one pays. I mean, I, you know, Speaker 3 (7:12) I have always been on, shall we say, on the left wing of the spectrum. I mean, I'm not a leftist. I'm actually a lifelong anti-Marxist. But the closest label for me would be social democrat. But many of my... Quarrels have been with my fellow left-wing liberals. And because on certain things I can't see eye to eye with them. And occasionally it means they're horrified that someone of my broad political sensibilities could think that on a particular issue that our side is wrong or mistaken. So I think it's... The idea that intellectuals are... Uh... I mean, they act in groups and they sometimes act in herds and occasionally they act as part of a mob. And that could be true of the left, it could be true of the right, and social media has only intensified that. Speaker 2 (8:19) Tell me about why you thought of writing this book. Like I remember we've done two episodes on Gandhi and obviously I won't, you know, repeat any of the stuff in that. But I remember at the end of the second recording, I asked you for more recommendations and I had read a ton of books on Gandhi, but you recommended a beautiful book I hadn't yet read, which was A Good Boatman by Rajmohan Gandhi, which had essays on Gandhi across various themes similar to what you have tackled. I wonder, so what made you decide to sort of do your own synthesis of this. Why was Gandhi still on your mind? I Speaker 3 (8:53) mean, I'll have to go back 30 years. Long before I wrote a two-volume biography of Gandhi, I taught a course at Berkeley called Arguments with Gandhi, which is the title of this book, right? So in 1997, I was invited to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. One Speaker 2 (9:12) of the nice things about... Speaker 3 (9:13) teaching an American university is that you can design your own course. You don't have to teach from a set curricula. And Berkeley, actually, there will be a slightly longer answer to your question and to the origins of this entire project. The university had called me because I had written several books on environmentalism and they expected me to teach a course on environmentalism. But I was bored with the theme. I got interested in Gandhi. I just read. Annihilation of Caste, which is a searing critique of Gandhi. I'd been reading Tagore's exchanges with Gandhi. I'd been reading Marxist exchanges with Gandhi. So I decided to teach this course. And my host said, are you sure? If you teach a course of this kind, the only students who will show up are ABCDs, America Born Confused Desis, and perhaps even ABCDEFGs, America Born Confused Desis Emigrated from Gujarat. But I, you know, I'm a pig-headed obstinate fellow. I went ahead and it was the most wonderfully diverse class. There were African-Americans, there were Jewish students, there was a Burmese student who was part of the democracy movement and had fled when the junta took over. And I taught these different arguments. And it was, I mean, the most enjoyable class I've ever taught. And then I thought I should write a book. expanding on that theme called arguments with Gandhi. And I started some work on it and then I got diverted. I was asked to write India after Gandhi, which is the history of India after independence. And then when I went back to Gandhi, my agent said, no, you must write a biography of Gandhi. Don't write arguments with Gandhi. So I eventually wrote a straightforward narrative biography of Gandhi, which Speaker 2 (10:56) was perhaps excessively long, 600 pages, the first volume, a Speaker 3 (11:02) thousand the second. Speaker 2 (11:03) But in the course of that, Speaker 3 (11:04) I found many more interesting arguments that Gandhi had, and including people had with Gandhi long after he was dead. So the three major differences between my two-volume biography of Gandhi and my new book. The first is, happily for readers, it's much shorter, right? It's 300-odd pages. The Speaker 2 (11:26) second is that it's not Speaker 3 (11:27) narrative. but thematic. And the four last themes which we'll talk about are non-violence, justice, faith and progress. And the third difference is it brings the story right down to the present. So people who are posthumously debating Gandhi, you know, modernizing intellectuals in the 50s, Naxalites in the 60s, Hindutvavadis today, Ambedkarites in the 80s. So it is as much about Gandhi's contentious afterlife as about his contentious life. But in fact, this was the first book I wanted to write about Gandhi, based on the course I taught 30 years ago, and it's come out only now. Speaker 2 (12:05) So, you know, you said that Happily for Readers is only 300 pages. Not necessarily. Readers like me would have welcomed much more. But, you know, I enjoyed reading it thoroughly and kind of read it at one go. Speaker 2 (12:19) provocative question. There are so many arguments about Gandhi that, oh, he did this or he did that and so many different points of view. And you could even argue many of those points of view can be simultaneously correct because a man contains such multitudes. But Why should it matter? Like sometimes I think to myself that whether Gandhi was a racist or not, whether, you know, whatever his views on gender or not, etc, etc. Why does it matter? We know our history. It is there. We can take what we want, discard what we don't want. Why does it matter what the man was? We are not having dinner with him anytime soon. Why does it even matter? Why is it debated so much? Why do feelings get so het up about it? Speaker 3 (12:54) Because Gandhi was such a colossal figure. And with any great or colossal figure, they're bound to be debates. They're bound to be vehement affirmations and equally vehement denunciations. And of course, this is a book of ideas and arguments, but it's also the work of a historian and biographer. And particularly with the most contentious issues of Gandhi's legacy, which are his views on caste, race and gender, I demonstrate two things. One is he was always open to argument. to across the book, you know, he was always open to debate, dialogue, argument, going back to how we opened with the issue of tribalism. Gandhi had no rivals, no enmities, he had disagreements. And even those disagreements, he would have liked to settle in a civil and courteous and open minded way. The second, of course, broad conclusion of my book is that when it comes on some things, on some issues, Gandhi arrives at His philosophical position very early and sticks to it. So his commitment to non-violence as a means of political practice goes back to his earliest days as an activist when he was still in his early 30s. His commitment to Hindu-Muslim harmony also dates from then and he never deviates from his commitment either to Hindu-Muslim army or his abhorrence of violence as a political tactic. But on other issues, such as race or gender or caste is continually evolving and is evolving from more reactionary to less reactionary positions. And with race, it is quite comprehensive. He's a racist as a young man and a radical anti-racist by the time he's in late middle age. With regard to gender, it's not so complete. I mean, there are aspects of his thought, particularly his reluctance to allow women. energetically participate in a modern economy that contemporary feminists would find problematic. But even there he's evolving. He first does not want women to participate in social movements, then he welcomes them, then he solicits not just their participation but their views. So the greatness of Gandhi is that he's open-minded, he's engaging in debate, he's evolving, he's changing. Now because there are 97 volumes of Gandhi's collected works, If you decide your case in advance, if you say I'm going to show that Gandhi was a reactionary on race, you will cherry pick the quotes you want. But if you read his entire corpus over his lifetime, or at least the period of his active public life, which is roughly 1900 to 1947, you will see the transformations in his worldview. And I think that's a mark of his moral greatness that is always evolving. Unlike the tribal identities that we talked about early on, where people... pick a side and won't change regardless of the overwhelming evidence piled up against their side, they won't change. That's what makes Gandhi different. Speaker 2 (15:49) That Gandhi is different or that he's great, I'm not disputing. I'm just wondering if it's a debate that matters at all in the sense that, you know, you can take the good values that he left behind, like nonviolence, like satyagraha, etc., etc. And as for the rest, whatever you don't like, you can say it's irrelevant. I completely Speaker 3 (16:09) agree. And of course, you know, in my view, though I've spent such a large chunk of my professional life working on Gandhi, you know, if I was to think of the India we want to build going ahead, there are many other people you would have to draw on apart from Gandhi. One of the most heartening things about young Abhijit Dipke of the Cockroach Janta Party is that he mentions Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru in the same breath. He says we have to learn from all of them. I would add Tagore, I would add Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay on some things, at least the shrinking of the state sector. I might add a libertarian. I think that, so yes, I mean, obviously, one should not make it, one should not be too defensive, as some Gandhians are very defensive about Gandhi's, not mistakes, the ways in which Gandhi may be irrelevant today. Likewise, Ambedkarite, you know, Marx famously said, I am not a Marxist. Speaker 1 (17:05) I Speaker 3 (17:05) am not a Gandhian. I'm a scholar of Gandhi. I'm not a Gandhian. I think Ambedkarite today might have said, I'm not an Ambedkarite. So in that sense, you're right. It doesn't... Obviously, but as a historian, as a biographer, when you see a kind of one-sided, motivated, self-selecting attack on some aspect of Gandhi's legacy, which you know is clearly motivated and one-sided, you know, one feels obliged to at least try and correct it. Speaker 2 (17:32) No, and the book was felt incredibly relevant to me at the point I was reading it because I was actually reading your manuscript of it when the Cockroach Janta Party protests in Delhi were happening. And there are three. And that made me think about it more deeply than I otherwise would have because because of what your book made me question. So I want to ask you about. you know, three of those areas in which I had thoughts. And one of them is the whole Gandhi versus Bhagat Singh thing. In a couple of chapters, you kind of delineate how that goes. And when I looked at the CJP, I thought that they are simultaneously also praising Bhagat Singh. Yes, yes. You know, one of their activists is always Bhagat Singh, Bhagat Singh. Dipke at one point did mention Bhagat Singh also, though he was not on about it all the time. And I was wondering about that because to me, that doesn't seem to make sense. To me, they're almost opposites. What you described in your book also lays it out. And they're almost opposites simply because of the means. You know, Gandhi would have held the position that your morality is defined by your actions, not necessarily what you're aiming to do. And obviously, Gandhi was for nonviolence. Bhagat Singh was for violence. And you've laid out this general argument between these two schools of thought really well. At one point, Gandhi says, quote, no act of treachery can ever profit a nation, even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts. who will rule in their place? The only answer is the murderers. India can gain nothing from the rule of murderers. At another point, he says that Bhagat Singh was undoubtedly a brave man, but I would certainly say he is not in his right mind. Stop quote. And equally, and people who threw bombs, he described them as cowards. And equally, Bhagat Singh was contemptuous of Gandhi. Bhagat Singh actually said, quote unquote, Gandhi had stabbed the nation in the back by withdrawing the non-cooperation movement after the Chori Chora. And as you point out, he admired Lenin deeply. Lenin believed in violence. The group that he was part of, the HSRA, you know, they believed in violence, in fact, quote, by an organized and armed rebellion. That was part of what they declared. And they were happy to use the term terrorism for themselves, which, of course, has pejorative connotations today. But my thinking there, when I. when everything that was happening in Delhi was happening, is that actually when it comes to means, which is something that Gandhi would have given paramount importance to, Bhagat Singh is closer to Godse than to Gandhi. Speaker 3 (19:57) Uh... Speaker 3 (19:59) Yes and no. Yes, in that Bhagat Singh also exalted violence. But you must remember, Bhagat Singh was very young, in his early 20s. Godse was in his late 30s when he killed. At Bhagat Singh, I think what the students knew from Bhagat Singh was the idealism. and the fearlessness. And it fairs to Bhagat Singh. See, Gandhi is prescient. Gandhi knows where a violent revolution will take a country. You know, finally, the revolution will devour its own children. One revolutionary will set upon the other revolutionary. There'll be factions, there'll be feticidal killings and violence, further violence even after the capture of state power. Prakash Singh didn't really know that because the truth about Lenin was not really available in the public domain then. So I could see why young people exalt Prakash Singh. It's the fearlessness. But I think the Kaukore Janata Party, beyond the leaders who praised Gandhi, was also Gandhian. For example, I would say in the spirit of dialogue, you know, that we are happy to talk to the government, you know. Speaker 3 (21:10) Gandhi never shunned the debate and dialogue, even with the colonial oppressor. I was told that they were, I was not in Delhi, but I was told that the protest site was spotlessly clean and these were volunteers. Effectively, even upper caste volunteers breaking caste barriers by, you know, cleaning up the place. So there was something, there was a spirit of Gandhi, there was also possibly the spirit of Ambedkar. And I think Bhagat Singh, the fact that he was a youthful idol. See, Godse, Bhagat Singh is believing in Marxism. So in Marxism, firstly, one difference between Godse and Bhagat Singh. is that Bhagat Singh is not a religious sectarian. He is Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, taking them all together. Of course, as a Marxist, he might believe that religious identities will get superseded or subsumed by class identities. Young people are idealistic. They do want, they are impatient for change. And it's a much larger change. I mean, Godse was really a Hindu supremacist. I mean, in that sense, he had a very narrow ideological... framework. So except for the reliance, I'll tell you one other thing about Godse and Bhagat Singh. This is there in my book. In fact, one of the editors pointed out to me. Godse is remembered today by his admirers on 30th January only. So he's remembered for killing Gandhi. His admirers... Speaker 3 (22:39) look up to him because he hated Gandhi and by extension hated Muslims. Bhagat Singh's admirers affirm and celebrate him on his birthday as well as the day of his execution. So, I think there is, I mean, of course, broadly Gandhi was right on the question of means and ends. I think if the path of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army or of earlier groups such as Jogantar in Bengal had been followed, it would have only helped the British and it would have led to greater repression of ordinary Indians because they've been caught between these two violent forces, the revolutionaries of the state. Gandhi was right. Also, as I argue in my epilogue, quoting the brilliant Tamil writer Jai Mohan, that because Gandhi cultivated a spirit of debate, dialogue, incremental social reform, we were able to build the society we could after independence. Whereas the path of Bhagat Singh or Savarkar would have led to what post-revolutionary Iran is like or what post-revolutionary Russia became. So in retrospect, we can see that Gandhi was right. But Bhagat Singh must be placed in the context of his time. And that makes him very different from Godse. Godse is animated only by hatred. Hatred for Gandhi and hatred for Muslims. Bhagat Singh is animated by a utopian view, a worldview of justice and freedom and equality. Admittedly utopian, naive, not worked out, not adequately cognizant of human frailties. But you can't place him in this. That would be deeply unfair. No, but Speaker 2 (24:18) here's the thing. That's not what I'm doing. I'm not comparing the two. I am just looking at how through the prism of that one thing that Gandhi held most dear. And by the way, I completely, you know, for me, Gandhi was 100 percent right. And it's not even a question of being looking at it retrospectively that, you know, the means really do matter. And only on the question of the means that violence is required was I comparing the two. Now, of course, everything you said about Bhagat Singh is true, but it has explanatory power, not exculpatory. power for the murders that he committed. And he did commit murders. You can say that, oh, Bhagat Singh committed, you know, oppressors and Godse killed a great man. That's irrelevant. And, you know, in case listeners misunderstand it, I want to point out that I'm not trying to lift Godse up to Bhagat Singh's level, but I'm asking us to question, you know, Bhagat Singh's means. Even if I understand that he's young and he's misguided, but it's Speaker 1 (25:07) a Speaker 2 (25:07) means that, you know. Yes, Speaker 3 (25:08) but again, you know, that comes not just from his youth. But where he is, he's in the Punjab, which has a military warlike tradition. He's a Sikh. He's from Lahore, the city of Ranjit Singh. He would have been, not just his Marxism or his admiration for Lenin, but he would have been molded by all of this. Whereas Gandhi is molded by Vashnivism, by Jainism, by the example of Tolstoy. So I think, again, I'm not trying to exculpate Bhagat Singh either. But I've tried to present a more sympathetic understanding of him than maybe a conventional Gandhian would. But I, and of course, Gandhi was right. Gandhi also was, has been profoundly misrepresented on the question of Bhagat Singh's execution, as I show in my book. I actually urge the white story to stay, contrary to what people claim. And, but, you know, it's a compelling debate. I would say Bhagat Singh, I would put it this way. Bhagat Singh had more reason. In the 1920s, Bhagat Singh had more reason to disagree with Gandhi. than the Naxalites did in the 1960s when they were vilifying Gandhi. Then they were plainly wrong and on the wrong side of history, on the wrong side of morality, on the wrong side of Indian politics, everything. But in the 1920s, you know, given the context of what was happening in the Punjab, Jallianwala Bagh, of course, and then the violent attack on Lala Rajpath Rai leading to his death and the aftermath of the war, you could end the... promise of quick radical social revolution that the Russian example had appeared to show. It was obviously a mirage and a fantasy that there was a radical social revolution, but it had been exposed to the same extent. You can understand why Bhagat Singh felt as he did. That is the job of a historian and a biographer, that even when being broadly sympathetic to Gandhi, I can place myself in Gandhi's critic shoes. I mean, Godse, I can't forgive. I can only see him as, you know, just as... Speaker 3 (27:24) thoroughgoing bigot, you know, and nothing else, right? But, Bhagat Singh, I can see some of the, I mean, I can see, I mean, just as... why did young college students in Calcutta join the Nuxleys? You know, you can see some of that at work. I mean, they're misguided, but they're fired by idealism, by this dream of creating a great society, you know, in which violence... has a cleansing and liberating potential, which is what they think, of course. The truth is quite different. No, Speaker 2 (27:56) I'm not litigating that at all. In fact, when I was Bhagat Singh's age, I would have been inclined to do what he did and not what Gandhi did because you're fired up by idealism, as you said. So I was merely... discussing that idea of the means. And I must say that from everything, like we're recording this in August 8, so who knows what will happen in future. But until this point, everything I've seen of Dipke and Ashutosh Ranka and Swarup Das is fantastic. You know, they behaved in ways that Gandhi would have approved of. Yes. Nonviolent, spirit of dialogue, all of that. So I just want to get into some of the ideas which make this territory complex. One was it felt discordant to me that, hey, you're praising Bhagat Singh, he will just see opposite when it came to me. and luckily you've been behaving in a very Gandhian way. The other aspect I want to take up is that when we, they were also praising both Gandhi and Ambedkar as indeed they should, the two of the great men of the 20th century, but Ambedkar... would not have been for the manner of the protest, which was a hunger strike. You know, he's got his famous grammar of anarchy speech where he points out that all these methods of civil disobedience, including hunger strikes, are not required in a democracy that has a constitution. There are other ways of handling this. So that's kind of another contradiction that comes up where I must personally say that I'm slightly more inclined to agree with Ambedkar, because my sense is that the hunger strike almost feels like a kind of emotional blackmail. Speaker 2 (29:37) I think Speaker 3 (29:38) Ambedkar would have changed his mind. I mean, Ambedkar said that in 1949. Now it's 77 years on and we've seen how Speaker 3 (29:48) institutions have failed the constitution. I mean the parliament, the judiciary, the media, the civil service, the police, the election commission, the investigative agencies does not act and behave as the constitution obligated it to do. And so Ambedkar may have realized that Satyagraha, not specifically hunger strike, but non-violent civil disobedience. you know, had become required. I mean, and he started his career in the Maharsatya Grahaya, which was non-violent civil disobedience. So I think Ambedkar would have changed his mind. One should not, just as one can't quote Gandhi's early racism against him, one shouldn't, we don't know about how Ambedkar would have changed his mind 75 odd years later when he saw every constitutional institution failing in fulfilling his duties. you know, as laid down by the law and the constitution. So I think protests must always be non-violent. It can be collective. It can be, I mean, breaching laws you consider unjust. I mean, I myself breached the law when it came to the CIA protests, which I think was not just, I think that Ambedkar would have, certainly it was Gandhian, but I don't think Ambedkar would have disapproved of that, given the way that, how obnoxious that law was and how unconstitutional. So, hunger strike is, I agree with you, perhaps that a hunger strike could be seen as coercive. Speaker 3 (31:19) But it's hard to say. I mean, it's a collective civil disobedience, yes. But a hunger strike by one person, in this case, of course, and the students who also fasted with Wang Chuk, one should not forget them, it was not just Wang Chuk, crystallized a much wider swathe of public opinion, which was... scrupulously non-violent. I mean, until that day when the police sat upon them and there was some retaliatory violence and not very much, mostly exaggerated. I think it was very much in the Gandhian spirit. Ambedkar, you know, the grammar of Anarki's speech, I think is, I think it's mistaken to see that as Ambedkar's last word or as something Ambedkar would have held today. Speaker 2 (32:02) So I guess to paraphrase what you're saying, Ambedkar would have felt that Satyagraha is the only way out against an oppressive regime. Not only way out, sometimes has to be Speaker 3 (32:10) taken recourse to. Speaker 2 (32:11) Sometimes has to be, or is only justified under an oppressive regime and he thought we are a democracy, they will no longer be oppression. And of course there is still oppression, so what do you do? That's right, that's right, yeah. And we are Speaker 3 (32:22) not really a constitutional democracy in any recognizable sense anymore. Certainly not for the last 10 or 15 years. Speaker 2 (32:28) Fair enough. The other aspect I wanted to talk about was one of the points that Gandhi made. And I really learned this in the chapter you wrote about Martin Luther King and Gandhi. And what a wonderful, wonderful chapter. That's really the highlight of the book for me, because I didn't know most of that. Really great. And you point out that at one point, Martin Luther King, like a good theorist, crystallized some of the features of Gandhi's satyagrahas. And then he added a sixth when he wrote his book. And I'll read all of them out, but I'll ask you about one of them. But for the listeners, I'll read. them all out. At first, nonviolent resistance should not be confused with cowardice. Second, the purpose of the nonviolent protester was not to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. Third, nonviolence was always aimed at the system which promoted injustice and never at the persons leading or manning the system. Fourth, the nonviolent protester wanted to avoid not just external physical violence, but also internal violence of spirit. Fifth, Nonviolence was driven by the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. And the six, which he added in his book, a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. Now, of these six, the CJP followed five to the T and great admiration for them for that, because there was a lot of provocation from the Lati charges and all that. But they were great. The one which I have. question about is the third one. Non-violence was aimed always at the system which promoted injustice and never the persons leading or manning the system. Speaker 3 (33:53) And Speaker 2 (33:53) their key demand seemed to me to be really about getting Dharmendra Prasad to resign and not about structural reforms. Like what I would really have liked is if you have then a list or a charter of structural changes which you are suggesting. One of them, Ashutosh Rangka, I believe, has thought deeply about education and would have been capable of doing something like this. But there was nothing of that sort. It was just that getting Pradhan to resign. And I understand that as a focal point to make the struggle explicable to the public, I understand that a focal point like that helps. But I'm not sure what that really does, because then it creates a permanent adversarial energy between the