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The Impossible Exit
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.
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