Gandhi’s last fast for fraternity is a reminder of why the political must be personal

At the dawn of Independence, as violence raged in several parts of the subcontinent, the ailing Mohandas Gandhi travelled to riot-torn areas to conduct peace meetings and emphasise interfaith harmony. Though Gandhi managed to quell the violence in those places, he was uneasy. He felt that violence had abated only temporarily but the minds harbouring hate had not changed.

So, on January 13, 1948, Gandhi decided to go on a fast. This was to be his last fast.

In his magisterial book Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World: 1914-1948, the historian Ramachandra Guha noted that Gandhi had said that he would end his fast only when he was “satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities brought about without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense of duty”.

Gandhi’s actions were a moral appeal for fraternity, a principle that was also a central preoccupation of BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution. In his last speech at the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, Ambedkar said “Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint” and referred to fraternity as the principle “which gives unity and solidarity to social life.”

Fraternity or kinship was thus seen as a foundational organising principle of our society. While Gandhi worked for it as a moral imperative, Ambedkar codified these principles in the Constitution as prerequisites for social justice.

When the nation was a communal tinderbox, the voices of some Hindutva ideologues stood in sharp contrast to Gandhi’s appeals for peace and fraternity. Guha also cites a report by Inspector Kartar Singh on a speech that had been made by the Hindutva leader MS Golwalkar in December 1947, shortly before Gandhi’s fast.

Claiming that Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that Congress could gain an advantage during elections, Golwalkar said, “We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus. If we are compelled, we will have to resort to that course too.”

As for the Muslim community, Golwalkar claimed, “No power on Earth could keep them in Hindustan. They will have to quit the country.”

Golwalkar saw the volatile situation as an opportunity to stoke prejudice. Given that prejudice is often a precursor to violent action, it is no surprise that Gandhi was assassinated soon after by a Hindutva fanatic named Nathuram Godse.

Contrary to Golwalkar’s suggestion that the Congress would use Muslims as a “vote bank” during elections, post Independence, economists Sriya Iyer and Anand Shrivastava showed that communal riots lead to electoral gains for the political arm of Hindutva ideology – the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Over the last decade, governance in India has become top-down and centralised even as violence has been decentralised, as self-styled vigilantes have gained arbitrary, unregulated power. Since 2014, when Narendra Modi was voted to power, economist Deepankar Basu shows that hate crimes against Muslims have risen. Such splintered, targeted assault on Muslims have gained momentum since political leaders have either stayed silent or worse, they have actually injected more prejudice into fraught situations. Incendiary speeches, reminiscent of Golwalkar, by the BJP’s top brass have become routine.

Examples abound. For instance, after the alleged gangrape of a 14-year-old girl in Dhing, with a Bengali Muslim among those accused, Assam Chief Minister Hemanta Biswa Sarma said that he would take sides against “Miya Muslims” and would not let them “take over Assam”.

Miya is a discriminatory term used to refer to Bengali Muslims in Assam. The community is often branded as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Sarma gave a communal hue to a crime motivated entirely by power and patriarchy.

Such an alliance of communal prejudice with patriarchy is not surprising but is, in fact, the logic of how oppressive violence and discrimination operates. Such compacts are part of the design to fracture fraternity, atomise human beings and pit an individual against seemingly unbreakable power structures. For fraternity to triumph over prejudicial violence, solidarities must be forged so that individual struggles can be connected to collective struggle.

That was what Carol Hanisch articulated eloquently in her seminal essay in 1969 titled “The personal is political”. The radical feminist asserted that “personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”

This thought is extended and adapted to an Indian context by the noted social activist and former bureaucrat Aruna Roy in her recent memoir of the same name as Hanisch’s essay. Arguing that feminism is in essence a continuous practical pursuit to live the quartet of liberty, equality, fraternity and dignity, Roy offers us a feminist reinterpretation of the Indian Constitution.

She suggests dismantling the man-made boundaries of sectarian identities as a prerequisite for all kinds of justice. “The constant refrain of equality is the most significant contribution of women’s movements at all levels of democratic politics,” she writes.

In this sense, the version of feminism articulated by Roy makes us invert the title of her book and underscores how the political must, in fact, be deeply personal and that the two are indistinguishable.

For instance, discussing how dehumanising communalism can be, Roy recounts her time as part of a committee called the Concerned Citizens Tribunal to investigate the Gujarat genocide in 2002.

“Trained to address communal rioting swiftly and efficiently during my IAS training in the Foundation Course at Mussoorie, I could not but wonder at the paralysis of governance in Gujarat,” she noted. “Each day I spent there was an education in how low the human spirit can fall, as seen in the lack of basic humanity and the violence meted out to the innocent.”

She recounted that she was horrified by the “sadistic enjoyment” in the killing, such as when the stomach of an 18-year-old pregnant girl in Naroda Patiya “was split open and a tilak applied on the foetus”.

In Roy’s framing of feminism, our personal crusades for fairness will remain fragmented unless we internalise all forms of injustice as our own. The US civil rights leader Martin Luther King had alluded to this same spirit when he observed, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

The fight against communalism and casteism must cohabit with fighting gender-based violence, campaigning for labour rights, farmers’ rights and fighting climate change and other injustices. When struggles for justice operate in silos, we risk allowing justice to become fractured.

Recognising this, in the aftermath of the recent protests against the gruesome rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata, in an open letter to all doctors, the doctor and public health professional, Sylvia Karpagam, pushes for building bridges of solidarity against all forms of oppression.

“Can doctors carry the struggle beyond their own group?” she wrote. “Can we doctors use our voices and position in society as change agents to demand better rights for ALL women in the country, no matter their social, religious, economic, caste, geography or class location? The real question then is not whether it is ‘all men or not’. The real question is whether it is ‘all women or not’.”

From the standpoint of Ambedkar, it is essential to pursue legal safeguards and increase institutional accountability because they act as a deterrent against violence and discrimination. But alongside this endeavour, it is equally vital to work on preventive approaches such as developing empathy, fraternity and building bridges of solidarity across groups as Gandhi attempted in his last fast.

Guha notes that in light of Gandhi’s last fast, numerous political parties and civil society groups appealed for peace seeking that Gandhi break his fast. More than 2 lakh people across religions in Delhi alone signed a peace pledge. Prompted by such assurances of religious amity, Gandhi mentioned seven conditions to break his last fast in his meeting with Maulana Azad on January 18, 1948, just 12 days before he was killed.

On that day, several Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders promised Gandhi that each of his seven conditions would be met. Two of those were: “Muslims should be allowed to travel without danger in trains” and “there should be no economic boycott of Muslims”.

Yet, even eight decades later, the dehumanising of Muslims, continues with restless momentum. On August 25, a 72-year-old Muslim man, Haji Ashraf Muneer, was beaten up on a train in Maharashtra by Hindutva vigilantes. On August 27, Sabir Malik, a 23-year-old Muslim migrant worker was murdered by a mob who claimed he had eaten beef. Earlier in the month, Muslim migrant workers from West Bengal were forced to leave their jobs in Odisha after being harassed by Hindutva groups.

The promises made to Gandhi, broken again. We must recognise that such violence is like unsparing forest fires and will eventually engulf us all. That was demonstrated in August, when some Hindutva vigilantes killed a Hindu student, mistaking him for a Muslim cattle trader.

If the mind can push us to be violent, it can also be trained to be compassionate. And so, improving institutional responses to crimes (the political) and replacing prejudice with propriety (the personal) are not substitutes but complements.

After all, what is at stake is an India that is stained with blood as prompted by Golwalkar and Godse or one with a promise of fraternity, peace and justice as Gandhi and Ambedkar hoped for.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and is associated with LibTech India. His handle on X is @rajendran_naray. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the views of Azim Premji University.

October 2 is Gandhi Jayanti.