Disagree to disagree? Go fight with Gandhi: Why arguments matter

Last week, when the streets of Delhi were witnessing a fair bit of disagreement, the prime minister told an indoor gathering in the same city, 'India is the mother of democracy. Here, a wide range of issues are debated openly, and diverse perspectives are discussed by the people.'

I don't agree with him. But the very fact that the moment I put fingers to keyboard with this thought, my front door wasn't smashed down, and I wasn't whisked away to an unnamed location that only Kangana Ranaut knows about, proves that Narendra Modi may not be wrong. And he gets strong support on the freedom of expressing diverse views - sure, sometimes with consequences - from a fellow Gujarati: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

We all know Gandhi had/has differences with people. In his latest book, Arguments with Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha takes them up, and confirms that the father of the nation (does that make Gandhi the grandfather of democracy?) was, in the Amartyan sense, one helluva argumentative Indian, also invoking others into arguments.


Guha writes, 'Even if Gandhi could not settle these debates to our satisfaction, how he addressed them remains of enduring interest and significance. Gandhi's arguments with his contemporaries, and the arguments of later generations with him, foregrounded the vital questions of human existence that individuals and nations across the globe still confront some eight decades after his death.'

There are well-known disagreements between Gandhi and Ambedkar (e.g. over separate electorates for the 'Depressed Classes' that Gandhi opposed, as Gandhi thought that 'Hinduism could reform itself by making individuals of different castes eat and live together'), between Gandhi and Tagore (e.g. over what Tagore deemed 'The Cult of the Charkha'), and, of course, between Gandhi and Subhas Bose, about which the former wrote in 1948, 'Subhas Babu was a votary of violence, while I am a devotee of ahimsa.'

Interestingly, even after parting ways with Congress, for which Gandhi was largely responsible, Bose held the older man in tremendous respect, stating that 'it will be a tragic thing for me if I succeed in winning the confidence of other people, but fail to win the confidence of India's greatest man.' This kind of 'paradox' would be unthinkable, and seen as 'sentimental weakness' today.

Guha delves into issues that Gandhi split the country's, and the world's, opinions over: caste, religion, gender, modernisation, race, pluralism. And yet, such 'polarisation' was not echo-chambered. Disagreements had connecting passages and rendezvous points. In that sense, Guha's book argues not just for Gandhi, but for a world fundamentally shaped by arguments.

For me, the BGD - Big Gandhi Debate - has been over his credo of non-violence. Guha lays out critiques of ahimsa. He also quotes Hannah Arendt from her 1970 book, On Violence: 'If Gandhi's enormously powerful and successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy - Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England - the outcome would not have been decolonisation, but massacre and submission.' What seems like a critique, is approval of a sharp strategy undertaken strictly in its context (British-ruled South Africa and India), not as a 'What If?' whimsy.

Guha writes, 'Had Gandhi not been... successfully persuading Indians to eschew violence, the likes of Bhagat Singh, Savarkar and Bose might possibly have liberated India from the British more quickly, Gandhi may have delayed formal political freedom for his fellow Indians, but' - and the author goes on to quote a 1969 piece by British liberal Tory John Grigg - "achieved incalculable success in liberating them from themselves... he made Indian nationalism the most constructive force of its kind in history."

As historian Sunil Khilnani observed, which Guha quotes in an epigraph, '[Gandhi] devoted himself both to undermining the largest empire in human history and to challenging the world's most anti-egalitarian, hierarchical society. He was taking on Britain and India at once.'

As for disagreements and how we deal with them, as the PM said, a wide range of issues are debated openly here in India. Which makes Amartya Sen's observation from his 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, extra cogent: 'Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.' Yes, being shut up would be a bit like being dead, no?