MAHATMA GHANDI

Waipa Post, Volume 48, Issue 3468, 19 May 1934, Page 11

MAHATMA GHANDI

WHY HE HAS LEFT POLITICS

“What has become of Gandhi?” a correspondent asks me, writes a wellinformed commentator in the London Daily Herald. The answer is a strange one to those who think of the Mahatma as a political leader, a man who had devoted his life to the struggle for Indian self-government. For his abstention from politics is not merely a fulfilment of the promise he gave when he was released from prison. He seems to have put it behind him finally and for good. He is immersed in his campaign for the removal of the disabilities of the “untouchables ” of Hinduism: a campaign which, he insists, is enirely religious, entirely non-political. For the past six months he has thought of nothing else, spoken ot nothing else. For four months he has been touring India preaching the cause of the untouchable. It is a curious change, until one remembers that to Gandhi any cause is an expression of personal religion, a personal purification from sin. In the height of the non-co-oper-ation struggle he would interpret any failure, any lapse by his followers from the precept of the non-violence, as the direct result of sin cr spiritual weakness in himself.

His remedy for defeat or indiscipline would be to fast or to undergo some penance. His recipe for- success in seme complex political campaign would be self-purification.

It is a state of mind hard for the European to understand. But you must understand it if you want to understand Gandhi. So new he seeks self-purification through the “ Harijan ” Movement, and the success of the Harijan Movement through self-purification. And he interprets the universe, no longer in terms cf “ Swaraj,” but in terms of Harijan.

“ It is,” he wrote last month, “ an ennobling thing for me to guess that the Bihar earthquake-is due to the sin of untouchableness. . . It brings me nearer to my Maker.” Note the strange mind that not only attributes an earthquake to a social crime, but finds the important thing about that curious diagnosis to be that it is “ ennobling ” and spiritually helpful to Mr Gandhi. He refused the request of some Indian Trade Unionist, who urged him to combat the economic oppression ot the “ untouchable.” He found it unnecessary. The essential thing was to secure them free entry to temples and the removal of such stigmas as physical “ untouchability ” and the prohibition to use the same wells as “ caste Hindus.” “ If,” he announced, “ this effort succeeds, the struggle between Capital and Labour will cease.” The class-struggle, you see, is, like the Bihar earthquake, the consequence of sin; and the great sin of India is “ untouchability.” It is all so plain, and so “ onobling ” to Mr Gandhi. NO MORE POLITICS. But it means, I think, that he will never be a political leader again. The Gandhi era of Indian nationalism is ever, the leadership passes to men of the type of Nehru and Bose. That, at any rate, makes for dark

fication. They think and speak in terms that the Western mind can understand.