Gandhi was not even a member of the Congress but such was his mass base that he wielded absolute authority over the proceedings of the latter and often resorted to the dubious effeminate means of emotional blackmailing by threatening to quit contact with Congress should they refuse to abide by his line. He had a patriarchal mentality where there was hardly any room for dissent with what he deemed right in his assumed superior wisdom and a dissent in real terms by any meant sidelining of that individual from the national political scene, such was his grip on the Congress and so malicious was he towards his adversary unless, of course, political expediency compelled this shrewd contriver to compromise and adopt a more conciliatory approach as in his dealings with the British, the Muslim League and Dr. Ambedkar whose support he vitally needed for maintenance of his political preeminence.
The way Gandhi admonished Bose for introduction of the aforesaid amendment to the Calcutta Congress resolution for dominion status shows him in a colour no better than a soft tyrant, intransigent in his resolutions in the short run, for short-sighted he indeed was, although, he cloaked his intent in the garb of adherence to truth, a truth which was ever-changing for Bose in a world of political relativity but fixed in the firmament of this futile philosopher who dragged India into the unreal world of his perverse preferences. However, to clear the air of unnecessary misgivings about the Mahatma on this issue, it must be said that, although, Bose had in the deliberations on the issue opposed it, he had not opposed the resolution for dominion status when it was put up for voting but had instead abstained from voting which could have been interpreted by the Mahatma as his passive acceptance of the resolution. This necessarily gave Gandhi the moral authority to question Bose's sudden shift in stance and, given his superiority in age, an almost paternal privilege of bringing to book an errant child.
It was at the Lahore Congress of 1930 that the resolution for complete independence (Purna Swaraj) was finally adopted and the freedom movement in principle came of age at last, fulfilling the aspirations of bygone leaders like Hasrat Mohani, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal who had espoused the same cause. It was Mohani who had first advocated the cause of complete independence in 1921 in an all-India Congress forum. One wonders what might have happened to our political sovereignty and our present democratic status if the British had acceded to Gandhi's demand for dominion status within a year of the Calcutta Congress of 1928. Would he then have backtracked and started another agitation for total independence giving a lie to his filial adherence to truth or would he, to maintain personal fidelity to truth, have sacrificed national interest which would in essence have amounted to the highest perfidy? These are hypothetical questions but worth pondering.
Gandhi was never the Mahatma in the strictest sense of the term but a shrewd politician, never totally selfless in motivations despite obvious renunciation of the material pleasures of life except some dubious experimental ones which he carried into old age and which have badly scarred his reputation as a man of continence. He frequently altered stance in his political life, suspending movements at their height on the basis of some stray incident as in the case of the Non-Cooperation Movement which he suspended after the Chauri Chaura massacre of 1922. He fasted unto death on all occasions except when it really mattered, to prevent Partition. He was intolerant of violent revolutionary activity, denigrating them often in no uncertain terms, yet, in a strange balancing act befitting his political acumen or, in a more sublime sense, his ability to separate the sin from the sinner, so to say, he would profusely praise the patriotism of extreme revolutionaries despite his variance with their methods.
Gandhi was a curious mixture of contradictions, hard to fathom, and that is what makes him an object of an enduring study in a world in which he is still highly relevant, though, not in the way he, perhaps, would have wished for, for his methods were flawed, his means impractical in the world of realpolitik as his own country's partitioned destiny was to prove in his own lifetime, and his view of the human psyche quite not in keeping with a rational balance and lacking utterly in a sense of mathematical proportion. However, in a world increasingly violent, the 'Sage of Sabarmati', as Bose had dubbed Gandhi, continues to be a light gleaming in the darkness and ushering man on to more enlightened times.
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