{"id":43010,"date":"2019-03-04T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T06:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43010"},"modified":"2019-02-03T11:33:10","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T16:33:10","slug":"qotd-gandhi-and-the-partition-of-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/04\/qotd-gandhi-and-the-partition-of-india\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Gandhi and the partition of India"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi\u2019s endless ruminations about himsa<\/em> and ahimsa<\/em> (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion \u2014 let us say in 1920, when swaraj<\/em> (home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi\u2019s inner voice started telling him that ahimsa<\/em> was the thing \u2014 that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence. Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached, Gandhi\u2019s inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi \u201chalf-welcomed\u201d the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal \u201cbloodbath\u201d (Gandhi\u2019s word) would be preferable to the British.<\/p>\n

And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men \u201cusing violence in a moral cause.\u201d How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, \u201cunless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?\u201d He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral \u2014 in my view by no means inapposite.<\/p>\n

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary<\/em><\/a>, 1983-03-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi\u2019s endless ruminations about himsa and ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion \u2014 let us say in 1920, when swaraj (home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi\u2019s inner voice started telling him that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,41],"tags":[173,650,1195,397],"class_list":["post-43010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-india","category-quotations","tag-assassin","tag-civilwar","tag-gandhi","tag-pakistan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bbI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43011,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43010\/revisions\/43011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}