Missing the Gandhian imprint

5th February, 2021 Editorial

Context:

Ved Mehta believed that Gandhi was hard to copy. He found Gandhi’s standards of ethical conduct far too high for emulation by others. He also thought that Gandhi was lucky not to have been born in Leopold’s Congo or Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. Under such regimes, ‘he would have met his death in a purge.

A complex legacy:

On hearing about a violent incident in the Chauri Chaura village of Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi decided to withdraw the first all-India movement he had led.
Gandhi’s rigour did mellow with age and experience, but some of his tall contemporaries remained sceptical of his strategy of mass mobilisation.
Tagore foresaw that Gandhi’s legacy might prove tough to follow in the absence of his leadership.
Gandhi’s legacy is complex and evokes some fundamental issues embedded in the theory of peaceful settlement of conflicts.
It is useful to visit these issues today when we are in the middle of a mass movement focused on a subject of Gandhi’s deep concern: rural economy. Those in the forefront of this movement are farmers.
The questions their protest brings into public attention go well beyond the validity of their apprehensions and doubts. Gandhi is highly relevant to these questions. His legacy for India, and the rest of the modern world, is not confined to the culture of protest. It also involves an interpretation of peace: its logic and the method of inquiry it demands.
Can a conflict be peacefully resolved? A satisfactory answer to this question requires that we understand peace more precisely in the context surrounding the present mass protest.

Farmers’ agency:

Government initial position was that opposition to the new farm laws is based on misunderstanding. The government has maintained the view that the farmers who are agitating are misled and do not represent the farming community as a whole.
Among experts, those who support the new farm laws have taken the stand that these laws are necessary for reforming the agricultural sector and such wider reform will eventually benefit farmers.
Thus, both the government and the supporters of the new laws view farmers as objects of persuasion or guidance.
In this jointly held view, the farmers are believed to have no agency of their own. For the government and its expert advisers, an outreach effort is the answer to protests.
This idea is similar to the persuasion approach. The term ‘outreach’ reveals its inherent approach: that of spreading the word across the boundary that divides decision-makers and targets of decisions.

Persuasion and inequality:

Along with mediation, persuasion ranks high among the means of achieving a peaceful resolution in a conflict situation. However, there is a condition attached to the use of persuasion in this context.
The condition is that both sides, i.e. the persuaders and the ones to be persuaded will be equal partners in the act. This condition is clearly difficult to apply in the present conflict.
Inequality between farmers and the state has deep historical roots. It is reflected in the rural-urban gap. As a professional community, farmers suffer from the common stereotypes that the urban educated classes carry with regard to villagers.
According to these stereotypes, farmers cannot be expected to know their own good — especially the benefits that are somewhat distant — on account of general ignorance and lack of education.
The poor spread of education reinforces this stereotypical perception of the farming community as being simple-minded, and therefore prone to being misled.

Tradition to political use:

Gandhi did not invent this vision; he spotted it in tradition and put it to a new, political use. The value system he used and modernised can still be witnessed in certain settings and contexts.
For instance, when an irksome neighbour falls ill or meets with an accident, a few people do ask if the family needs help.
Gandhi used this old value system to develop his ethic of non-violence in oppositional politics. It was rooted in the belief that an adversary has human instincts which can be activated by demonstration of self-inflicted suffering.
Gandhi saw the protester’s willingness to endure physical discomfort as a means of awakening the adversary’s saner instincts.

The struggle versus values:

The farmers’ struggle and suffering have failed to achieve this psychological goal. Neither the government nor the privileged urban middle classes seem to have felt a sense of unease over the physical suffering the farmers have endured in Delhi’s severe winter.
Many among the protesters have lost their lives and their deaths have been ignored. Apparently, India has gone through a sea change in values, both at personal and collective levels.
The charade one routinely hears is that education must inculcate moral values, overlooks the broader social context and direction of change.
It is a romantic idea that education can compensate for psychological losses incurred in the pursuit of lopsided goals. It is hardly surprising that a farmers’ movement is reminding us of the legacy we inherited from Gandhi’s social experimentation.

Daily News Analysis