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.