What was not clear at the time, and was not commented upon, was
the almost colonial assumption among many Non-Cooperators who
thought of themselves as secular intellectuals that the ‘masses’ wanted
religion and would not be moved by anything else. (The secular intel-
lectual’s misgivings were not Gandhi’s misgivings: he said repeatedly
that he thought a politics separated from religion would be devoid of
morality and would be alien to Indian tradition.) And so it came to
pass that a quasi-mystical religious style of politics was often promoted by
non-believers. This second-guessing of the ‘masses’ was typical of Indian
politics: claims had to be made in their name, but their agendas were
not central to the politics of the leaders they had somehow acquired
without necessarily wanting. And if the sceptics had looked more closely,
they might have been less worried about outcomes: religion, or a quasi-
religious morality, depending on how one looks at it, was offered to the
‘masses’, but in a form that could place the Congress leadership in control.
It was Gandhi who retained the right to interpret what correct behaviour
was, and it was he and his deputies who castigated the ‘masses’ for not
living up to the standards set for them.
Be that as it may, the success of the movement caught its organisers
by surprise. One of the indices of the movement’s success, as far as the
government of India was concerned, was the visit of the Prince of Wales
- the future King Edward VIII – to India in 1921. The government
particularly wanted this to be a success, with happy crowds waving to
His Royal Highness, so that whatever happened elsewhere, the appearance
of order and stability could be maintained – but empty streets and hartals
greeted him wherever he went.
It was elsewhere, however, that Non-Cooperation and Khilafat had the
furthest-reaching consequences. Peasant interpretations of Gandhi’s moral
codes of ahimsaand satyagrahaalways threatened to transgress Gandhi’s
careful strictures. It is often easy to see why this should be so. If burning
foreign cloth was not associated with violence, by extension, burning the
property of the oppressor – a landlord, moneylender or a government
official – was not associated with violence. Again, if Gandhi set himself up
as a holy man or a quasi-divine figure, he threw himself open to multiple
appropriations. Many campaigns were undertaken in Gandhi’s name;
so much confidence was vested in him that in some areas the receipts
for the four annas’ Congress membership fee that had been central to the
conversion of the Congress to a mass party were circulating as currency,
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 45