Nationalist Passions by Stuart J. Kaufman

Author:Stuart J. Kaufman [Kaufman, Stuart J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Violence in Society, Political Ideologies, Discrimination, Social Science, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism
ISBN: 9781501701320
Google: eKGlCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26404789
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

GANDHI’S RISE

Gandhi’s political rise in India began in 1917, after an activist from the Champaran district in Bihar persuaded him to investigate the oppression of indigo workers in his area. Gandhi patiently launched a detailed investigation, defying an order by local officials to leave. Attracting a cadre of young professionals to assist him, he documented and publicized the peasants’ mistreatment so effectively that the government felt compelled to retreat, addressing the peasants’ grievances in a new law. This episode was notable in two ways. First, it was very unusual for a politician of national stature to involve himself so deeply in the pragmatic concerns of ordinary peasants, especially in so remote a region as Bihar.61 Second, having done so, Gandhi was remarkable in that he had managed to use his celebrity to achieve some quick practical results.62

Fresh from this success, Gandhi was drawn into another peasant dispute in 1918, this time in the Kheda district of his home region of Gujarat. The issue in Kheda was excessive taxation in a context of poor harvests and wartime inflation. Assisted by local activists from Annie Besant’s Home Rule League, Gandhi organized a true satyagraha campaign, persuading the peasant cultivators to withhold their tax payments en masse. The framing was religious symbolism: Gandhi’s chief local organizer, Vallabhbhai Patel, told villagers “that their land had been made holy by Gandhi’s presence,” while Gandhi himself appealed to dharma.63 It was their duty, he told the richer peasants, to make sacrifices in support of their poorer neighbors.64 Gandhi’s success in recruiting participants was spotty and short-lived, but he still achieved some partial success: the district collector agreed to suspend tax payments by the poorer peasants. A simultaneous effort to mediate a labor dispute in nearby Ahmedabad, ultimately featuring a hunger strike by Gandhi himself, similarly resulted in a compromise settlement. The effect of these two campaigns together was to make Gandhi the “most powerful politician in Gujarat.”65

The next year, 1919, Gandhi moved to make himself the most powerful opposition politician in India. The provocation was the Rowlatt Act making wartime restrictions on civil rights permanent after World War I had ended. This act left Indian nationalists, who had been expecting increased civil and political rights after the war, sputtering in outrage. But only Gandhi came forward with a plan for a significant mass response: a call for an all-India hartal, a modified general strike. To organize this effort, Gandhi worked through the Home Rule Leagues, some pan-Islamist groups, and an organization called Satyagraha Sabha which he had just created.66 The hartal, scheduled for April 6, was again unevenly observed. But the overall process matches the expectations of symbolic politics theory: social threat (to status) leads to resonance for Gandhi’s assertive framing (given Gandhi’s personal credibility), but the reliance on new and spotty organizational effort yields uneven turnout.

The government reacted to the hartal by restricting Gandhi to the Bombay Presidency and removing him from a train when he tried to go to Delhi. When word spread that

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