The Impossible Exit

Ranabir Samaddar
Calcutta Research Group
(Abstract)

A situation of closure

Communal riots and recurrent events of civil strife marked the Congress rule in several of the eight Indian provinces in which it came to power in the elections of 1937. Gandhi wrote in the Harijan, “The communal riots in Allahabad – the headquarters of the Congress, and the necessity of summoning the assistance of the police and even the military show that the Congress has not yet become fit to substitute the British authority. It is best to face the naked truth, however unpleasant it may be.” He then went on to say, “The Congress claims to represent the whole of India not merely those few who are on the Congress register. It should represent even those who are hostile to it and even want to crush it, if they can. Not until we make good that claim shall we be in a position to displace the British Government and function as an independent nation”. Gandhi was of course referring here to the issue of dual power – colonial rule and the anti-colonial power growing within the colonial rule, and asking the Congressmen on the occasion of the Allahabad riot and the demonstrated incapacity of the nationalist power to prevent and stop it, namely, if they were ready to fill in the vacuum in the event of the country’s independence. He was asking: had they become capable of replacing alien rule?

This was an important question. It basically revolved around, and I still think such question revolves around, the question of transition. Yet, clearly Gandhi did not sense in this problem purely a question of transition, he sensed also a closure - hence Gandhi’s own subsequent responses all through the forties, changes in stance, considerable straining of efforts to convince the interlocutors of the consistence of his approach, in one phrase, the situation of an impossible exit. To break out of that kind of situation, Gandhi asked for sacrifice in the cause of unity, in his words, spotless deaths. But what sort of events and sacrifices would make death spotless? If we are startled by the deployment of such words, we must also notice here the extreme effort by Gandhi to find the right expression of what he had in mind and wanted to convey, also therefore the extreme economy of words to describe the aporia. Of course in politics the idea of the power of sacrifice plays a significant role, and has attracted enormous attention of political movements and thinkers. Revolutionists throughout the entire anti-colonial era again and again spoke of the power of death, spotless death, death not contaminated by cowardice, betrayal, hesitation, self-interest, revenge, or lure of reward and glory. Yet, this is not the point here. The point is that in thinking that death could bring about an exit from an impossible situation, he could only less and less rely on a theory of non-violence, and more and more he had to adjust his attitude and stance to the particularities of the situation, or of the event, to formulate what courage, strength, and power of the nation would mean in such circumstances. Politics less and less remained a strategy, it became more and more a matter of tactical adjustment – and this was perhaps for him the saddest part of an already ironical situation. He would of course say that the search for truth kept him on the road, though towards the end of this paper we shall have occasion to see what truth signified in such situation.

War and the weak nations
The Second World War presented the anti-colonial politics with one of the most difficult moments in relation to the question of war and peace. It had to redefine its position vis-à-vis the war in Europe, in the making or conclusion of which it had no role. It could not be the victor or the vanquished, yet had to now become a party to it, and was being asked to contribute to it, allow its people to perish in it, without any clear prospect that war would lead to freedom of the colony. Gandhi typically wrote in Young India (7 February 1929) on this, “What I feel is that I am looking at peace through a medium to which my European friends are strangers. I belong to a country, which is compulsorily disarmed and has been held under subjection for centuries. My way of looking at peace may be necessarily different from theirs.” In this situation of closure, where an exit was impossible, Gandhi had to define what the policy of truth and non-violence would be in an India that was passing through war time, and where the closure to the nationalist politics that the war brought about was clear to all.

But if the nationalist world had no resource to cope with a new reality – a worldwide war that would affect its own destiny – and had to rely on an unconditional pacifism in the hope that in this way the international marked by the presence of Great Powers would take notice of the national, the international too was equally baffled at the nationalist response, and was driven to despair to make sense of the latter. Needless to say, these were two distinct social texts at work, competing with each other for legitimacy and attention in a situation of two different logics of sovereignty and government. Gandhi’s exhortations of pacifism to quell both internal conflicts such as riots and international conflicts such as the War not only constituted a distinct social text, but it became a contentious text. And herein is the irony, namely that a seemingly neutral text seemed an adversarial one. If Gandhi’s colleagues found his views hard to follow, his enemies were also hard put to make sense of them, as some of the war time British commentaries on India shows. We can of course in this context raise this question, what is then the scope of the neutral? Ancient philosophy tells us that to be neutral means the art of dealing with the present, of being in this world. But judging from the hostile response Gandhi’s appeal to the British political class to follow peaceful resistance elicited from them, and from his own lukewarm attitude to the formation of the United Nations, we can see that while the neutral was looking for the right relation to the present, from the angle of power the neutral appeared as arrogant. Through the power of sacrifice, neutrality, and the willingness to refuse the colonial mode of administration Gandhi wanted to prise open the situation of nationalist closure

Gandhi’s strategy of exit
Yet as I show in my talk, two factors spoilt such an exit strategy. First was Gandhi’s own insistence on non-violent method and the implication of that insistence that Congress must carry everyone else, every part of the nation in its journey, and only then Congress would be able to prove that it was ready to govern the country. Second was the fact that this was the time of War, as war began decolonisation took a different character, which established new relations between the national and the international. Both these factors prevented the strategy of withdrawal from the administration from being a success for the Congress in terms of exiting from a situation that was fast closing in on the party, indeed on the nationalist politics.

The moment of deadlock appeared in this way. Constituted by factors mentioned just now, the event of 1942 arrived – neither as a programme of the party, nor as a programme of the radical nationalists – and when the event was over, India was not what it was before 1942 and the War. The moment of truth for the nationalist politics appeared as an extremely disconcerting moment, marked by what we can call the other scene of politics. It is tempting to view the closure as a consequence of a series of binaries, such as (a) anarchy / the emphasis on order, (b) war time necessities / old politics of democratic agitation, (c) policy of non-violence / all around atmosphere of social war, (d) the intransigence of Gandhi / a flexible party called the Congress, (e) the old nationalist goal of achieving independence / dictates of governmentality, and finally (f) the dream of anti-colonialism and freedom / the reality of the international producing the process of decolonisation. Yet we must understand the links between these, which made clear choices difficult, and made the reality of the nationalist journey a complex one. In this sense the complexity of the wartime situation forced the nationalist politics and its principal exponent Gandhi face the moment of truth. It was particularly ironic for Gandhi because he had all along said that non-violence was linked to the pursuit of truth.

The truth of transition
Gandhi as we have seen had positioned himself within the nationalist order of reasoning as a figure of the absolute – absolute value, absolute non-violence, absolute discipline of life – a non-historic position that not only turned a concrete historical situation in the life of the nation into a problem, it also turned its own position into a problem for the historic nation, for his own party, even for his rival party. As a result, even though the situation was new after the War, in fact the new situation began with the War, the old politics of sovereignty represented above all by Gandhi failed to realise that with this new situation a new set of relations had appeared. In fact it is impossible not to be struck by the non-correspondence of an idea of sovereignty and the complex reality of a nation caught in all round war – civil, social, and international.
In some way, one can say, this situation reminds us of two earlier times of great transition – the transition to East India Company rule in the early part of the second half of the eighteenth century, and then roughly one hundred years later the passage to direct colonial rule after 1857. Ayesha Jalal in her magisterial work on Self and Sovereignty (2001) shows in great details how in a period of transition sovereignty becomes a complicated contest, when the question becomes: sovereignty of the self, of the community, or of the political power, or at times dual sovereignty? This was exactly the idea that Gandhi was expressing in his own way; yet as I intend to discuss in this talk, inbuilt in this problematic of sovereignty during transition is the issue of governing.