(The below excerpt is just an article I came across and found it worth sharing with everyone. I have posted it verbatim without opinionating it with my thoughts)
ON November 25, 1949, as the Constituent Assembly of India completed its task, the Chairman of its Drafting Committee, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, replied to the general debate and said, “Here I could have ended. But my mind is so full of the future of our country that I feel I ought to take this occasion to give expression to some of my reflections.” What followed was a sustained, deeply felt cri de coeur:
“It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but to give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.
“If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, noncooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us” ( Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. XI, page 978).
When he made these remarks, devoted followers of Gandhi were present in the House – Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, chiefly; but none contradicted him then or later. Gandhi's programme of civil disobedience or satyagraha was seldom free from violence. K.M. Munshi wrote of the participants in the Quit India Movement: “Truth to tell, what they did was anybody's business. It was certainly not non-violent even at the start.” There was extensive disruption of communications and destruction of public property ( Pilgrimage to Freedom, Vol. I, page 83).
The scholar Neeti Nair points out that “the line between hunger fast as penance, self-purification, and a form of political protest was blurred by Gandhi himself”. In Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi defined satyagraha as a “force which is born of truth and love or non-violence”. Neeti Nair establishes that “Gandhi's understanding of satyagraha developed over the years through particular struggles conducted by himself and those who claimed to perform satyagraha in his name”. Indeed “he characterised the hunger-strikes deployed by British women suffragettes in prison in 1909, which elicited forcible feeding, as resorting to physical violence. In 1920 he was alone in his criticism of the Irish leader Terrance MacSurineg's final hunger fast.” (Neeti Nair , Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Permanent Black, 2011; pages 126-128. An extremely able work. Emphasis added, throughout.)
It is, therefore, unsafe and also unhistorical to cite the Gandhian precedent before Independence. Curiously, the debate in India more or less stops there with some fleeting references to political developments and debates in more recent years. Particularly instructive is the debate in the United
A person assumes an awesome responsibility when he makes such a claim. It must be a grave and intrinsically moral issue. Advocacy of a policy on legislation does not justify violation of the law on coercive fasts. In the final analysis: “The state must tolerate the individual's dissent, appropriately expressed. The individual must tolerate the majority's verdict when and as it is settled in accordance with the laws and the procedures that have been established. Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.”
But would Gandhi himself have approved of satyagraha in a free India? Evidence has come to light which suggests clearly that he would not have. Only last month this writer discovered in the invaluable treasure house of the great institution, the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) in New Delhi, a document which clinches the issue. It was the transcript of an interview in the Oral History Programme of my guru at the Bar, Purshottam Trikamdas. He was secretary to Gandhi in 1919; joint secretary of the Swaraj Party and president of the Socialist Party in 1948 before he became one of the leaders of the Supreme Court Bar. This is what he told the NMML's interviewers K.P. Rangacharya and Hari Dev Sharma on October 9, 1967: “After Gandhiji was released and we had the Poona Conference over which M.S. Aney, who was then the Acting President of the Congress, presided, I tried to meet Gandhiji but his nephew prevented me from meeting him because he knew my views to which I shall refer presently. Anyway, Aney was good enough to invite me to that meeting of Congressmen….
“I went up to Gandhiji at the end of the meeting and I said, ‘I am trying to meet you and your nephew is preventing me from meeting you.' He said, ‘No, no, nobody can do that. You come and see me.' I would like to mention that in my speech I had said, ‘I do not know what card Gandhiji had up his sleeve.' I was amused to find that some people thought this to be disrespectful because Gandhiji never played cards.
“When I went to him the next day, he showed me the letter which he had prepared for being dispatched to the Viceroy. In the letter, he had mentioned that satyagraha must be recognised as a constitutional right. So, I said to Gandhiji with utmost respect, ‘Several views have been expressed for framing our Constitution. Tomorrow, when India is free, would you say that satyagraha is a constitutional right and write it into the Constitution. And, if we do, what does it mean? It means that anybody can break the law with impunity and nothing could be done. Actually, it would be contrary to your own ideas. Satyagraha, you say, means disobeying authority and facing the consequences. Now, if satyagraha is a constitutional right and it is permitted, what are the consequences to face?' It would be said to the credit of the great man that he started thinking and he said, ‘ There is something in what you say.' Next day, he sent for me and said, ‘ You are right. I have decided not to send that letter.' Such was the greatness of the man; he always kept an open mind. After he had actually drafted the letter and finalised it, he said, ‘I am not sending it.'”
