The Ugly Truth About Gandhi

The great Mahatma Gandhi, a hero of India, a  man who through a campaign of non-violence, freed his country from the  clutches of British Imperialists. He was not just a “father” of his nation, but  for some, he was considered almost saintly. He also liked to sleep alone in beds with his  grandnieces and other young women, and held some shockingly racist views towards other races.

Today we will shock some of you. We might even offend some of you. But we also think  by the time you’ve got to the end of this show you will have changed your mind  as to how you think about Mr Gandhi.

Before we get to that, here’s an  abridged introduction to the man born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on October 2, 1869. He grew up in fairly comfortable surroundings seeing that his father held the position of  chief minister in the Indian state of Porbandar. His mother was said to be a very pious woman,  which is where the young Gandhi discovered the benefits of cherishing the simple things in life.

The religious devotion he saw by his mother would foster in him a sense of ethics that he  later become famous for on a global scale. Things such as non-violence, tolerance  of others’ beliefs, vegetarianism, and acts of self-purification, were his badge.  They were also steeped in hypocrisy at times.

His beliefs were put to the test  when he went over to London to study. Before he left India, he swore to his mom to  not fall for the enticements of modern life, to stay clear of women and meat, and generally  to uphold the beliefs she’d taught him. But while studying law in London, he witnessed  late 19th-century industry and all the horrors that could come with it.

The streets of London  were certainly not paved with gold. Far from it, many Londoners with their ragged  clothes and dirty faces didn’t seem to be enjoying Britain’s industrial wealth. Gandhi witnessed poverty, but he also witnessed activism there.

It was the same when he went  over to South Africa, where he saw much of the population living in abject poverty. Gandhi might have been an educated lawyer by this time, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t told  like other Indians that because of his skin color he wasn’t allowed to walk on certain  footpaths or enter certain buildings. There’s more to this story, but just let  us tell you the good Gandhi story first.

He was disgusted. There he was, an  educated man who considered himself as much English as he was Indian but treated  as a second-class citizen by the Europeans. One time, he was kicked out of a  train coach because of his race.

Like many other people of color, his rights  were taken away from him. On another occasion, he was beaten up for not making room for a  white passenger. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was barred from staying at certain hotels  even though he had the money to pay for them.

The story goes that Gandhi understood the  many wrongs committed by the imperialists. And so it was at this juncture in his life when  he decided that he was going to bring about change. But his resistance, in line with  his religious beliefs, had to be peaceful.

One of his most famous lines is, “Every  revolution begins with a single act of defiance. ” And this is how he began fighting for the  rights of Indians. This is how he got a name for himself as an activist, which on one  dark day in Durban, South Africa, almost got him lynched by a mob of angry white folks.

He spent several years in South Africa, but he knew that India needed him. When he announced  his departure from Africa, a statesman wrote, “The saint has left our shores. ” This  statesman was a white South African.

He finished the sentence, “I hope forever. ” Back in India, Gandhi carried on fighting for people’s rights. He’d been beaten up; he’d  be jailed.

He’d been harangued and oppressed, but he still preached peace. He might  have supported the British war effort, but he also never shied away from  criticizing the British imperialists. We apologize to our Gandhi enthusiasts  for skipping over many years of his life, but we think most of you know that this man became  one of the most powerful people in India.

His form of Indian nationalism was embraced by much of  the country, most of the country in fact, and they started to believe that with the right will,  the Indian people could be free of the British. His activism got him arrested on March 10, 1922,  and he spent the next two years behind bars, but he wasn’t done by any means. In the years to follow, he would lead many of the Indian people to peacefully  revolt against many facets of British rule.

His followers - and there were many - went to  prison for their acts of civil disobedience. In 1932, while in prison again, he undertook  a now-famous fast over the disenfranchisement of those at the bottom of India’s caste  system, people called the “untouchables. ” When Indians saw how willing  Gandhi was to die for his people, for the rights of the country’s poorest, it  spread hope through the hearts of a nation.

Then the second world war happened, and again, the  Indians were expected to fight for the British. But this time, the Indian National Congress  wanted a form of self-government if it were to throw Indian nationals onto the battlefield.  Close to 90,000 of them would eventually die, not to mention the perhaps 2.

5 million  total Indian casualties of war. Before the war ended, Gandhi had already  started the “Quit India Movement”, and then on August 15, 1947, India  finally got its independence. Ok, so what you’ve just heard is the condensed  story of a man who saw cruelty and unfairness in the world and wanted to do something  about it.

He then took considerable risks in fighting the perpetrators of these  wrongs and he made it his life’s work. It’s now time we got into costume  and became the devil’s advocate. Here’s a quote for you, “Hitler killed  five million Jews.

It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have  offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the  sea from cliffs.

. . It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.

. . As it is  they succumbed anyway in their millions.

” Yep, those were the thoughts of Gandhi. He was  taking non-violence to another level and he was not surprisingly condemned for saying such things. While his beliefs might not exactly fall into an ugly truth category, his moral absolutism  just made no sense at all to some people, especially those under attack from Germany.

When  the Nazis were bombing England, Gandhi seemed to think the Brits should not bother fighting back. This is what he said about that: “I would like you to lay down the arms  you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and  Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.

. . If  these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them.

If they do not give you  free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but  you will refuse to owe allegiance to them. ” In hindsight, we all now know the many added  horrors that would have occurred had governments followed Gandhi’s instructions and just allowed  Nazi Germany to do what it wanted. His assertion also sounds much worse when you consider  some people now say that Gandhi was a racist.

In 2019, in the African nation of Malawi, people  were saying just that. In Ghana that same year, a Gandhi statue was taken down at a university.  You might think that strange given what we told you about Gandhi fighting for people’s  rights when he was in South Africa.

Well, in Ghana, many people right now don’t have  much love for Gandhi, which can be seen on Twitter when folks use the hashtag “#GandhiMustFall. ” Maybe you think that is a bit severe, but it sounds righteous enough when you know  some of the racist things Gandhi wrote back when he was in Africa. For instance, he once wrote  that white folks, despite their flaws, should be “the predominating race” in South Africa.

You see, the young Gandhi as you know went over to England to get himself an education.  It seems it was his dealings with the ruling British that convinced him that the Europeans were  just more civilized than black people in Africa. We should say that he changed his entire  stance in time and became an anti-racist, but it wasn’t always like that.

He also wrote in a letter summing up the beliefs o the British that the “general  belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are a little better, if at all,  than savages or the Natives of Africa. ” He absolutely thought that  many Africans were savages, and he used derogatory language too when referring  to black people – such as the term kaffir. In 1904, he wrote another letter stating that he  was upset about these people living among Indians, saying, “About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the  Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.

” He wrote that as long as blacks were  mixing with Indians then diseases such as the plague would further spread. You can now understand why people are now calling Gandhi out. They also accuse  him of being a hypocrite, stating that he didn’t believe in the rights of Africans  at all while also working with the British government in segregating whites from blacks.

A stunning example of this is when Gandhi petitioned the colonial government in South Africa  to ensure that Indian people didn’t have to share the same queue as black people when they went to  the post office in Durban. He didn’t think it was fair that Indians couldn’t queue with the whites. Some people now try to cover for Gandhi saying he was just a product of his times, although one  would think that a person of high intelligence would still have known right from wrong even  if they didn’t always fight for what was right.

Others now say that Gandhi was a card-carrying  member of the Aryan brotherhood, and no, we don’t mean that bunch of violent angry  neo-Nazis whose pastime is smoking amphetamines and sharpening shivs. We mean the brotherhood that  wore suits and smoked pipes in dingy boardrooms. For example, when asked just how racist  Gandhi was, one of his new critics wrote: “Gandhi believed in the Aryan brotherhood. 

This involved whites and Indians higher up than Africans on the civilized scale. To that  extent, he was a racist. To the extent that he wrote Africans out of history or was keen to join  with whites in their subjugation he was a racist.

” As we said, Gandhi shifted his stance, but how  much he shifted we can’t say. The question is, when he was telling people to lie  down for the Germans did any part of him still believe in superior races? You have to remember that when Gandhi was in South Africa it wasn’t as if black people hadn’t  already for years been fighting for their rights.

You can’t just say Gandhi was a product of the  times because he knew very well that a race of people rightly felt they were violently oppressed. When Gandhi was in England he spent most of his time hanging out with intellectuals and the odd  vegetarian, and then once he was in South Africa, he found himself having to share the same  train carriages and join the same queues of a people he referred to as “coolies. ” He hated this.

That much was evident in 1906 when during the Zulu rebellion, Gandhi supported the British in what he  termed the “revolt of the Kaffirs. ” These people, who he pretty much believed were barbarians,  he said deserved Britsh rule because they spent most of their days in “indolence and nakedness. ” Again, people say you have to forgive him for his foibles.

They say he had his road to Damascus  moment, and he changed his views. Nonetheless, as his critics still point out, even if he did  hold some racist views on racial hierarchies, why could he not ever refer to African people  as Africans and not coolies and kaffirs? His utter lack of respect for Africans was  evident when he attended a dinner party held by the British imperialist, Hugh Wyndham, 4th  Baron Leconfield.

Gandhi was overjoyed to be seated next to some of the empire’s toffs, and he  quite enjoyed his aubergine cutlets and plum tart. He gave a speech about his leaving Africa, saying  he hoped “the Europeans of South Africa would take a humanitarian and imperial view of the Indian  question. ” But one of his biographers pointed something else out.

That was the fact Gandhi never  said any farewells to any Africans, even though he’d been in Africa! That biographer said Gandhi  didn’t think Africans deserved a goodbye message. We hammered this point home just a little  bit only because you have to admit that it’s quite a huge deal when a human rights advocate  fighting to end discrimination went along with discrimination and human rights abuses.

If he was flawed in public, what about his personal life? Things get even more strange now. Gandhi once wrote to this son that “a person who  marries in order to satisfy his carnal desire is lower than even the beast.

” He had no time  for casual sex in human relations and he himself became celibate at age 38. He’d gotten married  when he was 13 but turned away from sex later. So, then why did the Guardian newspaper  write that Gandhi was prone to having “weird, manipulative flirtations  with young unmarried women?

” Why also, in 2021, did some people in  California knock down a statue of the great man? The answer is that some people think Gandhi wasn’t  just hypocritical when it came to racial equality, but also in relation to his thoughts on sexual  purity. When it was decided that the statue in California should be re-erected,  a group called the Organization for Minorities of India was dead set against it.

When asked why, a spokesperson for the group explained, “Gandhi was instrumental in influencing  national treatment of women in India. He said ‘my life is my message’ and the life he modeled for  the nation was one of sexually exploiting his grandnieces and many other teenage girls under  the guise of performing ‘celibacy experiments’. ” Gandhi stands accused of being sexist, racist, and  also of committing creepy acts with young women.

Like other spiritual leaders that have  tainted the Earth with their footsteps, Gandhi has been called a “predator” which we don’t  have to tell you is a really bad look for someone touted as being a man of peace with a pure soul. Nonetheless, when people are accused of such things, we should hope there’s a lot of  evidence or even some evidence to back it up. Well, he was against birth control unless it  was the kind of control that involved a man or woman taming their “animal passions.

”  He once said if people have too much sex, “They will become soft-brained, unhinged,  in fact, mental and moral wrecks. ” Then, when he was an aging man in the 1930s he  asked his young grandniece to get into bed with him. He told her that it was an experiment to  see if he could control his own animal passions.

As bad as it looked, he didn’t hide  what he was doing, which was to “test, or further test, his conquest of sexual desire. ” It’s written that he didn’t care what people thought about it. One author said, “When a close  disciple heard of Gandhi’s ‘experiments with celibacy’, he had threatened to leave the ashram,  unless Gandhi rectified his predatory behavior.

His choices were clearly never acceptable. ” These experiments not only involved his grandniece but other young women and girls at the  ashram. He never did have intercourse with them, but let’s just say he really tested himself. 

As for how his wife felt about all of this, Gandhi never seemed to show her much love. He once  said he couldn’t bear to look at her face and is famously known for denying her life-saving drugs. He certainly took a lot of criticism for the two-week celibacy experiments, and he still  does now, just as he does for many of his more conservative beliefs regarding sex and  gender.

To give you an idea about those beliefs, his answer to two women being attacked by men in  the street was for them to shave off their hair so they were no longer attractive to men. Yep, he blamed the women for a male problem. He even once went as far as to say  that a women’s menstruation cycle was actually a “manifestation of the distortion  of a woman's soul by her sexuality.

” For many people, Gandhi was a racist with a  predilection for sexually-focused predatory behavior. Others say, leave him alone. The  man did good on the whole and can be said to have done something not many people can  attest to in actually changing the world.

Today we’ve just played devil’s advocate and  will let you decide what to make of Gandhi. The blacker parts of his life don’t figure  much when it comes to his legacy, but hey, mythologies are rarely interested in nuance. Now you need to watch another myth-busting extravaganza “The Ugly Truth About  Mother Teresa.