When Gandhi Presented British Officer His Handmade Sandals, Mahua Moitra called Pros**tute by a Member of Indian Parliament And How Development Is Erasing Indegenious People From Andaman-Nicobar
That and more!
It’s been a while, isn’t it?
And so I want you to start with this beautiful story from the Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. Please note since following is transcript from the podcast where two people are speaking and narrating a story, I haven’t used quotes when they are quoting third person. Be mindful.
Anita: In 1906, the South African Republic, or the Transvaal brings out these laws which are racists. I mean, there's no other way of putting it where Indians and Chinese will have to carry pass cards, which they will have to produce every time, a police officer stops them in the street and demands. And if they don't, they can get beaten up or arrested and a police officer has every right to burst into the homes of these people, overturning everything, dragging them out, again, demanding to see these pass cards. And this is an absolute problem, particularly to conservative Indians who are living in South Africa who think their homes are sacred, and their women should not be touched. So that actually lights a fire under Gandhi. And William, that is the start of something we then recognise later in his life, right?
William: Absolutely. This is where he develops the beginning of what will become a satyagraha or devotion to truth, which as you say, develops in many ways, the forms of non-violent resistance employed by the suffragettes, but he also gives it a more sort of spiritual backing. Suffragettes were not looking to religion or to spirituality in their protests. Gandhi ties always his political protest to a form of spirituality and in that sense he's marrying the suffragettes with the theossipes.
Anita: Actually it should be said, so later on, he divorces the suffragettes. He really repudiates them when they start using violence, when they start breaking windows and when they start setting fire to pillar boxes; he says he wants nothing more to do with them. Anyway, he start to say, right, we don't want to carry these cards anymore. We're not going to carry these cards anymore. And he somehow manages to inspire a great, number of Indian people to just reviews, just to say, no. And they set fire to their pass cards and they are arrested, and they are beaten and he comes sort of toe to toe with Jan Smuts. […] Gandhi manages to get those pass laws changed. And when he does do this, you know, you sort of think okay, here's a life in South Africa that's beckoning. But he has a call from an Indian Gopal Krishna Gokhale who is sort of mild mannered member of the Indian National Congress, a nascent political organisations that is agitating for not freedom from British but some sort of control to be rested away for Indian people in their own country. And Gokhale is really enchanted with the way in which Gandhi stood up against the South African racist pass laws without using violence, and wants him to come to India where he thinks it can be used. What's really lovely about the end of this story, the South African chapter, is that Jan Smutts, he calls him to see him and you’re off then for good. And at the meeting Gandhi presents him with a pair of handmade sandals. I've made these with my own hands. They're for you. Smutts at the time, imagine his confusion.
William: Smutts is wearing knee led leather boots and military jompers.
Anita: And he's presented with these beautifully handmade but very sort of crude leather sandals and he accepts them. But what I find really very, very touching is the way in which Smutts returns those sandals decades later. This is from, I think it's called the essential Gandhi by Louis Fisher, who's a journalist who followed and interviewed Ghandi extensively, I think in the 40s. But fisher says, you know, his work in South Africa was finished. Gandhi left South Africa, but before he departed he sent General Smutts these sandals as gift and Smutts wore the sandals every summer in his farm. And then he returns the sandals to Gandhi on his 70th birthday. Smutts remarked - I have woen these sandals for many a summer. Even though I may feel that I'm not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man. It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect.
There are more such stories and one even troubling in that episode on Gandhi of their podcast. If you are into podcasts or have never heard one then I strongly recommend Empire podcast.
One story that I absolutely like is when Gandhi was in India and was writing rather ferociously against British addressing Indians to not cooperate with the state. But these siething articles arrive later. In the beginning Gandhi starts on street.
In 1920, Gandhi introduced the idea of Non-Cooperation. The British governed India, he argued, because Indians assented to such rule. Therefore it was imperative to withdraw public cooperation to an oppressive regime. Non-Cooperation was to include the boycott of government institutions such as courts and schools, and a refusal to serve as policemen or soldiers.
In January 1922, Gandhi moved to Bardoli taluk in Gujarat to prepare for the next phase of the movement — a refusal to pay taxes. But on 4 February 1922, a mob set fire to a police station and burnt alive 22 policemen in Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces. A horrified Gandhi suspended the planned civil disobedience campaign in Bardoli. Gandhi’s unilateral decision was met by a “hurricane of opposition” from his colleagues and caused enormous heartburn. For all practical purposes, the first great upsurge of mass protest against colonial rule that began with the Rowlatt satyagraha came to an end.
Rama Guha in Empire podcast mentions how Gandhi’s reservation about violence was partly morals but also partly tactical. Gandhi believed that if you take up arms to remove oppressor, once freedom comes, you will use the same arms to turn on your fellow countrymen.
Gandhi may have been non-violent, but he had been seething with rage against imperial hauteur and impunity and had written a number of increasingly militant essays in his weekly journal Young India, which almost dared the government to arrest him. His open declaration of disaffection with the government and call for soldiers to quit the army were affronts the Raj could barely stomach. Now, with serious discontent within the Congress over Gandhi’s leadership, the officials felt that they could make their move. After days of rumours, on the evening of 10 March 1922, the superintendent of police for Ahmedabad, Daniel Healy, arrived at Sabarmati Ashram with warrants for the arrest of Gandhi and Shankerlal G. Banker, the publisher of Young India.
Based on his writings, Gandhi was charged with sedition under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code, for exciting hatred and disaffection towards the government. The next morning, Gandhi and Banker told a startled magistrate that they did not need time to organise a legal defence as they intended to plead guilty to the charges. The trial for Rex Imperator v. M. K. Gandhi was set for 18 March 1922.
You have to read further to understand what happened in the courtroom when Gandhi walked in stating he did not want to defend himself. It’s a fascinating story. Also, an important moment in our nation’s memory. Do read: The Great Trial of 1922. Following is a scene from the movie Gandhi regarding this trial.
While we are on the subject of movie, may I draw your attention to this wonderful and funny to the core episode from Pakistan’s hit show Loose Talk?
The Narendra Modi government released the preliminary results of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census in 2015. Its findings were grim: more than nine of every ten rural households had a monthly income below ten thousand rupees; almost two in five were landless and depended on manual labour for sustenance; fewer than one in twenty qualified to pay income tax. Even these numbers likely downplayed reality. Several economists and demographers criticised the SECC for undercounting the poor, leaving millions of deprived people ineligible for targeted welfare schemes. But this was only part of the problem. The SECC had fulfilled only part of its mandate—the caste data it collected was never released.
This September, the government insisted in an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court that it would neither release the 2011 figures nor repeat the exercise of enumerating castes in the future. […] According to the affidavit, “it is apparent that the caste enumeration in SECC 2011 was fraught with mistakes and inaccuracies.” True, the SECC had numerous deficiencies, but this argument must be read in comparison to the Modi government’s previous position on the 2011 data. In 2016, the home ministry told a parliamentary committee that “the data has been examined and 98.87% data on individuals’ caste and religion is error free.” Once the remaining errors were resolved, it added, the data could be released. The timing of the two clashing pronouncements invites a damning explanation: in 2016, faced with long-standing demands to enumerate the backward classes and fearful of losing their votes, the government used the promise of the SECC data to defuse the pressure and stall for time. Now, it can no longer hide that it was long aware of the problems with the SECC but took no steps to plan an improved caste census in 2021. Moreover, the government has suggested that the technical shortcomings of the SECC are insurmountable and that it is not able to conduct an improved caste census. This, again, is trickery. Many of the challenges of a caste census have earlier been thoroughly debated, and feasible solutions suggested, for anyone who cares to listen.
The real cause of the government’s misgivings is not technical but political. To guide debate and policy on caste-based representation and reservations in public institutions, India continues to rely on outdated figures from the colonial-era 1931 census, the last to make a comprehensive count of caste demographics. Those at the top of the caste hierarchy—with a meagre share of the total population yet overwhelmingly dominant in terms of education, wealth, influence and power—have reason to fear that an updated count will remind the rest of just how badly they have fared and galvanise demands for a representative distribution of the privileges hoarded by the elite. […] The affidavit and the long, sordid saga of the caste-census-that-wasn’t—spanning multiple governments and featuring political opportunism, official incompetence and institutional apathy—reveals the hypocrisy of the elite-caste establishment. There are no impossible hurdles to the caste census. All that is lacking is official will. […] Both backward-classes commissions set up by the central government, under DB Kalelkar in 1953 and under BP Mandal in 1979, recommended that subsequent censuses enumerate caste in order to better administer welfare measures—especially reservations. “Before the disease of caste is destroyed, all facts about it have to be noted and classified in a scientific manner as in a clinical record,” Kalelkar wrote.
These recommendations were not implemented. […] M Vijayanunni, who had until recently been the census commissioner, argued that the first census following the Mandal agitation of the 1990s was the right time to “fill the glaring sociological data gap” about caste. He rejected the notion, so popular among opponents of the idea, that a caste census would perpetuate the institution of caste—after all, collecting data on child marriage or child labour did not mean that the government endorsed these practices.
— Losing Count: The discredited excuses for dodging a caste census
Deendayal Upadhyaya, the most prominent post-Independence Hindu nationalist ideologue, claimed that the original caste system, known as the varna vyavastha, needed to be restored in its pristine form. In his book Integral Humanism, published in 1965, he argues that “society is ‘self-born’” and forms an “organic unity” inherited from a caste-based antiquarian arrangement that should not be disturbed.
Zwigato is the story of Manas Singh Mahto, a gig worker who lives in Bhubaneswar with his family. It is also the story of an India that has been invisibilised in Hindi cinema, and even more crucially, from the national discourse controlled and shaped by the all-powerful TV media. When India is shining, why speak of the darkness of those who have no jobs, or are yoked to endless ‘shifts’ with no time for a meal, or a well-deserved time-out?
And that’s why Nandita Das’ third directorial is such a powerful mirror to today’s India, which has always grappled with staggering disparities between the haves and have-nots, and where no amount of papering over can hide the dismal fact that that gap has only widened during the pandemic. Or that over ‘five crore Indians are unemployed today’, a figure flung out at Manas by an unsympathetic character, when he complains about the heartlessness of the gig economy: no one will care if he quits because there are millions lining up for his job.
— Shubhra Gupta, Indian Express
Do watch Zwigato. Apart from Kapil, Shahana Goswami who plays his wife has done wonderful work. And while you’re at it, also play Pather Panchali and Mahanagar, two of Satyajit Ray’s gems on Prime Video.
Mahua Moitra
Yes, the firebrand leader ( so cliche I know) is in much news lately. More like, she’s generating news and going after powerful politicians and corporates that the media in the first place should have gone after. There was, of course, the Adani matter which she has been flagging off long before Hindenburg jumped in on resulting in an eighty-per cent rout of three key Adani stocks. On a separate matter, Arvind Kejriwal was after Modi’s elusive ‘Entire Political Science’ degree. Both these matters were much discussed and so we shall not dwell upon them. Instead, we will go where Mahua took us. She tweeted,
Mahua Moitra is hinting that a member of the Indian Parliament had forged his university document. Grave charge right? And she is not bluffing here as she had attached the university certificate that Nishikant Dubey himself had produced in his election affidavit. So this was not a wild allegation. And this was serious, after all, do we want frauds as our representatives?
Along with the tweet, she posted Dubey’s two affidavits submitted before returning officers along with his nomination paper for the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections. “Hon’ble member in his 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha affidavits claimed to be a ‘part-time MBA from Delhi University’…” Mahua tweeted, and then added in another tweet “on 27.08.2020 Delhi University in a written reply clearly stated that no such with the name of the honourable member was either admitted or passed out from any MBA programme in DU in the year 1993 as claimed in affidavits…” Along with this tweet, she attached a letter dated 28.07.2020 from the Dean of the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) of Delhi University (DU) stating that no person with the name Nishikant Dubey was admitted or passed out from FMS of the DU.
She then went on to ask the Lok Sabha Speaker on Twitter whether “lying on affidavit and faking an MBA degree from DU’s FMS… are grounds for termination of Lok Sabha membership.” This was followed by nasty WhatsApp messages widely circulated in Lutyens Delhi attacking a “firebrand woman MP.” The anonymous messages contained wild allegations and sleazy stories about the woman MP. After the Whatsapp messages surfaced, Mahua tweeted “Farji degree holders do not make great WhatsApp fake letter writers. Nor do their Me-Too mates. Maa Kali always rules.”
[…] To this, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey responded to the attack by tweeting a request to his supporters not to respond to a “woman MP from West Bengal having a perverted mentality” because “in our religion, even the nagar vadhu of Vaishali was given respect”.
— Indian Express
Those who aren’t familiar with the lingua franca of cow belt must know that ‘nagar vadhu’ means a prostitute. So we have a sitting member of the Indian parliament calling another (woman) parliamentarian `a prostitute`. According to parliamentary rules forging nomination documents invites immediate suspension. But he was not suspended nor did police apprehend him for his ‘prostitute’ remark. Now read the following:
Kannada actor and activist Chetan Kumar, popularly known as Chetan Ahimsa, was arrested by Seshadripuram Police in Bengaluru after his tweet on "Hindutva is built on lies" went viral.
India's parliament has disqualified senior opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, a day after he was sentenced to two years in prison in a defamation case. He was convicted in connection with a 2019 speech in which he linked the prime minister’s family name to that of two Indian fugitives accused of swindling millions of dollars, Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi. “How come all the thieves have Modi as the common name?” Mr. Gandhi said while campaigning during the 2019 elections. In the defamation case, the maximum sentence court could have awarded Gandhi happens to be two years which coincidentally happens to be the statutory minimum penalty that renders a sitting member of Parliament ineligible for office. In the history of defamation cases, no one has been awarded the maximum sentence.
Do you see what I’m trying to convey to you?
Now you want to read the following carefully.
Last November, a colossal ₹72,000 crore development project on the Great Nicobar Island got the green signal. A massive port, a swanky airport, a renewable energy power plant, and a lavish township were part of the plan.
[…] the Great Nicobar Island is a biosphere reserve. It’s a protected space. […] For starters, the sensitive project will clear over 8.5 lakh trees in this ecological hotspot. Sure, there will be compensatory afforestation to make up for it. But that’ll happen in Haryana (don’t ask why). What’s lost here is lost — tropical forests and mangroves. The homes of rare and endemic creatures such as the Nicobar tree shrew, the Great Nicobar crested serpent eagle, and the Nicobar megapode will be threatened. Yeah, the addition of the word ‘Nicobar’ in their names speaks for itself. In fact, over 50% of butterflies, 40% of birds and 60% of mammals found here are endemic — found only in this region. Forests in Haryana aren’t going to protect them.
And to push this project through, the government apparently simply decided that the Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary would be denotified. That the sanctuary didn’t really matter for conservation anymore and could be used for port activities. Now this is a problem for the vulnerable Leatherback Turtle. The port activity will be right on the nesting sites and it could mean that its very future is in peril.
Then there’s the effect on the indigenous tribe — the Shompen and the Nicobarese. These communities have been around for thousands and thousands of years. They depend on the bounties of the forests, marshes, and rivers for their needs. That’s what gives them food and nourishes them. They hold a deep connection with the land. But development projects such as these can destroy life as they know it. They’ll be forced to relocate and start afresh in a new area. Their life will be compromised.
And we just have to look a little north towards the Andaman Islands to see the impact of development on the tribal communities — the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese. Communities who lived there for tens of thousands of years.
Even 150 years ago, these tribes numbered over 5,000 people. And while the population in the islands rose, it was mainly made up of settlers from mainland India. The tribal communities make up just 500 people now.
It’s no wonder then that the Tribal Council of Little and Great Nicobar, a local unit that has elected representatives by village heads, apparently also withdrew their consent for the development plan. They fear they’re losing their rights over their lands.
Sure, you could ignore all this and still say — but we need development.
— The Great Nicobar Trade-Off
Also, take time and watch Jubilee. It’s such a fantastic show.
Guess, that’s all for this one. Do consider writing back if you have anything that you would like to be included in this newsletter or something that you read or saw or heard and, you want me to consume the same as well.