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Yet Gandhi’s philosophy was imbued with paradoxes. He may have denounced modern conveniences but he made full use of the trappings of modern civilisation—for instance, press and media outlets were a constant feature of his campaigning, whether promoting his epic salt march of 1930 or the protests in South Africa. He was against industrialisation but he made alliances with Indian capitalists. His campaigns were made possible by drawing from the vast financial resources of the industrialist GD Birla. Birla has been described as a devotee of Gandhi but he benefited from the social and religious prestige which his association with Gandhi brought him. Additionally, Gandhi gave his blessing to Birla’s abundant wealth with his teaching on trusteeship, asserting the right of the rich to accumulate and maintain wealth as long as it was used to benefit society.

His attitude to the masses was contradictory. He would champion peasants’ demands and organise them on condition that they remained peaceful, respectful of landowners and obedient to Gandhi’s tactics. If they had the temerity to demand the confiscation of private property, they were deemed to be ungrateful, unruly and unworthy. The orientation on simple farming and an apparent “equilibrium” of peasant life underestimated the degree of social and economic exploitation inherent in rural communities.

Similarly, with workers and employers Gandhi’s tactics had all the hallmarks of compromise and conciliation. The notion of trusteeship was used to dissipate workers’ anger and prevent them from fighting as workers. The emphasis was on rights but also responsibilities. So although Gandhi could claim, “What the two hands of the labourer could achieve, the capitalist would never get with all his gold and silver”, he could also insist that “capitalists are amenable to conversion”.²⁸ Gandhi was enormously suspicious of socialists for their atheism and but also because he held communism to be “evil” and “unnatural” because it demanded abolition of private property. He once stated, “I can no more tolerate the yoke of Bolshevism than of capitalism.”

It is for this reason that the British Indian Marxist Palme Dutt referred to Gandhi as the “mascot of the bourgeoisie” and the founder of the Communist Party of India, Manabendra Nath Roy, held Gandhism to be the most important ideology of class collaboration within the nationalist movement. In describing the movement’s contradictions Roy argued, “One need not be a sentimental humanitarian, nor a religious fanatic in order to denounce the present order of society in the countries where capitalism rules.” Roy understood that Gandhi identified the “latent discontent” of the masses but did not want it to “burst out in fatal physical revolt or revolution… This was the true inwardness of his campaign”.²⁹

Tragically, the campaign was wound up after a few months due to pressure from the right wing of Congress, reflecting the hostility of middle caste and middle class Hindu interests. This section was totally opposed to any initiative that paid special attention to Muslims. Nehru was not prepared to challenge this right wing, fearing his own lack of authority and social weight inside Congress. And the Communist Party was not prepared to break from Nehru and challenge his “top-down” style of politics. Tied to the Comintern (the Communist International that was now dominated by Stalinism), which at this point was pushing for the formation of broad “popular fronts”, the Communists were incapable of launching a viable political alternative. The same political problems applied in the Quit India movement, where the Communist Party refused to support the insurgency, and again after the war when, under Stalin’s guidance, the party supported the notion of distinct nationalities in India, providing a left gloss for Jinnah’s view of a two-nation theory with separate Hindu and Muslim states.

However, the role that Gandhi assigned for women was as “a true helpmate of man in the mission of service”.³² Service is the operative word. For Gandhi women symbolised the “honour” and “virtue” of the nation. He believed that men and women possessed distinct qualities as a result of biology. Men were naturally aggressive and selfish, and women were passive, self-sacrificing and pure. So women were more suited to the domestic sphere, particularly family life and motherhood. His models for women lay in the Hindu goddesses Sita and Draupadi, who epitomised courage and strength but also service to the community. In the non_cooperation and civil disobedience movements women’s activity was primarily confined to picketing wine shops and boycotting foreign cloth. And at major protests women were to nurse the male stayagrahis when they were struck down by police charges. He had nothing but contempt for the tactics of suffragettes in Britian, not only for the use of violence but because their activity entailed the questioning of traditional roles and the demand for complete equality. Gandhi’s views were embedded in a deep social conservatism that was underpinned by self_righteousness. He was not so much concerned with changing the material conditions for women’s emancipation as their “moral” condition.