After Anna Hazare went on a fast unto death, this non-violent means
of protest has once again gained a lot of traction in India – sometimes
successful, sometimes not. In the
India Ink blog, Samanth
Subramanian traces how even Mahatma Gandhi’s fasts at times resulted in
failure, and his thoughts on how to use them.
Even Mohandas K. Gandhi, the architect of the Indian obsession with
the hunger strike, did not always succeed in his fasts — although
success was, admittedly, measured by Mr. Gandhi’s own standards.
He considered, for instance, a 1918 fast in Ahmedabad a moral
failure. He had stopped eating in solidarity with striking mill workers,
and three days into his fast, the factory owners agreed to raise worker
wages by 35 percent.
But Mr. Gandhi was unhappy: some of the workers had contemplated a
suspension of the strike in favor of violence. During the strike, he had
exhorted them to stick to the pacifist path, reminding them that they
had “their hands, their courage, and their
fear of God.” After the fast, he would regretfully say of the workers:
“They have not won their masters’ hearts, as they were not innocent in
thought. They were only non-violent in deed.”
Mr. Gandhi could be ruthless about the conduct of his hunger
protests. On Sept. 20, 1932, on the grounds of Pune’s Yerawada Prison,
he started a fast to protest the notion of creating a separate
electorate for Hindu Dalits, because he feared that the move would
fracture Hindu society. His health deteriorated rapidly.
B. R. Ambedkar, who had advocated strongly for this electoral
structure, had initially called the fast a stunt, but as Mr. Gandhi grew
sicker, Mr. Ambedkar came under immense pressure to negotiate. The
Poona Pact was born out of compromises that Mr. Ambedkar and Mr. Gandhi
reached on Sept. 24.
Mr. Ambedkar would insist on portraying the pact as a failure for Mr.
Gandhi. In a book titled “What Congress and Gandhi have done to the
Untouchables,” Mr. Ambedkar would write: “When the fast failed and Mr.
Gandhi was obliged to sign a pact … which conceded the political demands
of the Untouchables … he took his revenge by letting the Congress
employ foul electioneering tactics to make their political rights of no
avail.”
Mr. Gandhi himself identified a 1939 fast in Rajkot as an
unsuccessful, “tainted” one. The ruler of the princely state of Rajkot
had revoked a set of political reforms, and when Mr. Gandhi’s fast did
not produce the change he wanted, he asked the viceroy to intervene.
“There can be no room for selfishness, anger, lack of faith, or
impatience in a pure fast,” he wrote in Harijan. “It is no exaggeration
to admit that all these defects crept into my Rajkot fast … I had in me
the selfish desire for the realization of the fruits of my labor. If
there had been no anger in me, I would not have looked to the Viceroy
for assistance.” He left Rajkot “empty-handed, with body shattered and
hope cremated.”
In Harijan in 1940, as per his custom, Mr. Gandhi posed himself
questions and answered them. In one such query about the ethics of
fasting, he argued that a fast “out of love” might appeal to the senses
of a friend going astray. “There is a possible risk [that] he would be
tempted to go back to his old ways,” Mr. Gandhi wrote. “But then I can
fast again. Ultimately the increasing influence of my love will either
convert the friend to the extent of weaning him completely from his evil
ways, or repeated fasts may lose their novelty, blunt his mind, and
make it impervious to my fasting.”
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