Decolonizing The Hindu Mind: Ideological Development Of Hindu Revivalism

by Koenraad Elst

However, modern history teaches that organization and numerical strength cannot prevent movements from failing if they don’t develop a good analysis of the situation they are facing.13 Consider the fortunes of Gandhism and Communism. Gandhi was immensely popular, and he appealed deliberately to people’s emotions, while the Communists were a fringe group, but they worked on people’s minds. Now, who won? In the 1940s, while Gandhi was still alive, the Gandhians imbibed ever-larger doses of Marxist ideas and phraseology, and started saying: “We, too, are socialists.”14 This was simply untrue, at least to the extent that they were real Gandhians still: the anti-modernist Mahatma believed in a voluntarist moral effort of people (“change of heart”), not in social structures. The Marxists were not getting influenced by Gandhi, on the contrary, they denounced him and his ideas left and right. By 1950, Gandhism had become the province of a few marginal activists like Vinoba Bhave, while Marxism was being promoted by the Prime Minister and dictating economic policy. Gandhian do-good emotions proved to be no match at all for Marxist intellectual work.