When George Osborne announced that Parliament Square was to be adorned with a statue to the ‘father of democratic India’, I thought for a second he had Lord Louis Mountbatten in mind.
It was after all the British Empire that created the legal, governmental and most other institutions that allow India to boast of being the world’s largest democracy.
Hence, as the country’s last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten had a valid claim to begetting India’s democracy. Moreover, if rumours are to be believed, his wife even came close to begetting a few Indian democrats.
But of course our governing spivs aren’t in the business of honouring empire builders. They feel a closer affinity to those who hated Britain, along with all her inhabitants. Thus it’s not Lord Mountbatten but Gandhi who rates a statue in front of the mother of all parliaments.
There he’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with others who felt rather understated warmth for Britain, or specifically England. Mandela is already there, as is Jan Smuts who, unlike Mandela, at least saw the error of his ways later in life.
The statue to Lloyd George commemorates another chap whose claim to one of the plinths isn’t exactly indisputable. Whatever affection he felt for Britain was in competition with the admiration he had for both Soviet Russia and, later, Nazi Germany.
In fact, he could be justly regarded as one of the midwives who delivered Soviet Russia to a horrified world. For it was Lloyd George, along with Woodrow Wilson, who did all he could to ensure the Red victory in the Russian Civil War.
Here he is in his memoirs, laying a claim to a Parliament Square statue: “A Bolshevik Russia is by no means such a danger as the old Russian Empire.” “There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms.”
Gandhi too had a Russian connection: he was a devoted disciple of Leo Tolstoy, who first showed pacifism’s potential to set the stage for massive carnage. But the two men had much more in common besides the subversive idea of non-resistance to violence and hypocritical insistence on wearing folk garb.
Both had a gargantuan, in many ways perverse, sexual appetite, which they indulged on an epic scale. This happily co-existed with a sermon of celibacy and rejection of sex even in marriage.
The two sages weren’t unduly bothered by the obvious fact that, should their ideas have been acted on, mankind would not have survived beyond one generation. Ideologues in general are seldom bothered by such inconsequential details.
Meanwhile, Tolstoy was busily populating his estate with dozens of illegitimate children born to his serfs, girls who weren’t in any institutional position to reject his advances.
Gandhi’s sexual tastes were more subtle: from his late 30s until his death at almost 80 he slept and bathed with naked teenage girls. He claimed no hanky-panky was taking place, but in some quarters tactile voyeurism would be regarded as suspect by itself.
Mahatma Gandhi belongs, with Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, to the unholy trinity that proves that ‘false idol’ is a tautology.
Idols are always false by definition, and secular idols are invariably pernicious as well. One should always be on guard against secular hagiography, such as that exemplified by the film Gandhi.
‘Mahatma’ means ‘saint’ (or as near as damn), and the film set out to prove that its eponymous protagonist was just that. He wasn’t.
He was, however, a fanatical hater of the Raj who dedicated his whole life to the destruction of the British Empire. Like most other revolutionaries in history, he was mainly driven by hatred. Like them, he had to mask his animus by a sanctimonious claim to saintly love.
Thus he busily agitated for the departure of the Raj during the Second World War, when Britain bled white fighting Japan. The Raj’s withdrawal then would have left India at the mercy of Japan and led to an immediate massacre of thousands, possibly millions, of Indians, but such numbers mean nothing to fanatics.
This Gandhi went on to prove by continuing his agitation after the war, when India was already self-governed de facto if not yet de jure. All that was needed was some prudence and patience, but revolutionaries are never endowed with such qualities, especially when they’re old.
Gandhi wouldn’t wait: he wanted to live to see the fruits of his labour of hate. His dream came true in 1947-1948, when the violent partition of India drove 14 million people out of their homes and killed the best part of a million.
Rather than being at odds with Gandhi’s pacifism, this tragedy was its direct result. That the result was unintended is neither here nor there. It was entirely predictable, and people who can’t predict such results should refrain from revolutionary activities.
If they don’t, they’re as culpable in the ensuing massacres as those who actually do the massacring. In other words, they are criminals.
It’s fitting that Osborne announced the intention to erect a statue to the great pacifist to sweeten a £250-million arms deal with India. Quite apart from the obvious cynicism of it, there’s no contradiction: pacifism unfailingly creates a situation where missiles, preferably those able to carry a nuclear payload, are sorely needed.
The British are brainwashed to worship those who hated them. Mercifully, the nation has enough sense of humour left to see through at least some such ploys. Thus ‘Mahatma’ stands for ‘brandy’ in Cockney rhyming slang. Considering that Gandhi was teetotal, the irony is devastating.
Churchill summed him up neatly: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.”
Pure rubbish.