The Man Who Failed

What Mahatma Gandhi offers is not a complete success story. That is exactly why he is useful now

On the morning of 15 August 1947, the man most responsible for Indian independence was not in Delhi. He was in Calcutta, in a derelict house in a minority neighbourhood, fasting. There was no flag, no speech, no seat on the dais. He had been asked to come and address the nation on the radio and had declined. The city around him had been killing itself for a year.

That is the first thing to understand about him and the thing we have carefully arranged not to remember. He did not win. What he wanted was one country. He got two, and a border drawn through Punjab and Bengal by a man who had never been to India. Perhaps a million people died in the months around that line. Ten million or more walked away from everything they owned. The violence he had spent thirty years saying was unnecessary, that he had staked his entire argument on being unnecessary, arrived anyway, on a scale no one had imagined.

Five months later he was shot dead. We have made him a saint because a saint is easier to carry than a man who was defeated. Saints are for garlanding. Statues do not ask anything of you. And so each year we put flowers at the feet of a figure who would have found the whole exercise absurd and we skip the only part of his life that is actually useful to us.

He was seventy-seven in the autumn of 1946 when Noakhali burned. He went there. Not to a conference about Noakhali. To Noakhali, on foot, village after village, through mud and paddy, often barefoot, staying in the houses of people who did not want him, walking to the next place the following morning. He had no authority. He commanded nothing. The violence did not stop because he arrived.

He kept walking. Here is the question that generation after generation has quietly refused to ask about him. If it did not work, why did he not change the method?

Because he never claimed it was a technique for getting what you want. This is the part that got lost somewhere between the man and the museum. We turned non-violence into a strategy, a clever lever, the smart way to win. He didn't think of it that way at all. He thought it was simply the right way to behave, and that whether it produced the result you were hoping for was, in the end, not your department.

He read the Gita every morning for most of his adult life and the line he returned to is the hardest one in it. You have a right to the action. You have no right to its fruit.

Most of us do the opposite. We decide what we want, then work backwards to whatever will get it. If the honest route looks slow we take the other one, and tell ourselves the cause justifies it. Gandhi reversed this entirely. Decide how you will act. Act that way. What follows is not yours to control, and pretending otherwise is a kind of vanity.

Which is why the failure does not refute him. It is the proof of what he was actually saying.

It would be dishonest to leave him there, polished. He was not an easy man and in places he was not a good one. He treated his wife Kasturba badly for years and said so later, with the same unsparing clarity he turned on everyone else. He was cold to his eldest son in ways that ruined him. In South Africa, as a young lawyer, he wrote about Africans in language that is indefensible, and the distance he travelled afterwards does not erase the pages. In his last years, old and frightened for the country, he conducted celibacy experiments involving young women in his household that troubled his closest colleagues at the time and should trouble us.

He wrote almost all of this down himself. He called his autobiography the story of his experiments with truth, and he reported the failed experiments as carefully as the rest. There is something in that worth more than the statues: a man who did not require himself to be admirable in order to go on working.

The reason he matters now is not that he beat an empire. It is that he did not beat it in the way he wanted, and did not change. Because most of us will not fix the thing we most want to fix. The decent person in a bad office will not reform the office. The honest one in a crooked trade will not clean up the trade. Whatever it is that keeps you awake, you will probably not solve it, and you will have to decide what to do with your days anyway.

The usual answers are two. Stop caring, which people call being realistic. Or keep caring and do nothing, which is just exhaustion with a conscience attached. He offers a third, and it is harder than both. Act well. Keep acting well. Not because it will work, but because that is the only part of this that was ever yours.

On the evening of 30 January 1948, he was late for his prayer meeting. He disliked being late. He was walking fast across the garden, leaning on two of his grand-nieces, when a man stepped out and shot him three times at close range.

The country he had held together for a year by walking through it would not stay held. He knew that. He had said so but he went to the prayer meeting anyway.