The Dark Side Of Gandhi: Authors Claim Gandhi Was “A Racist Who Forced Young Girls To Sleep With Him”
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule, and is known for his nonviolent civil disobedience. He is widely called the Father of the Nation. As you see, it seems that there cannot be any room for evil in a personality like this. But like almost all public figures, there is also untold truth about him. Authors Michael Connellan of the Guardian and Mayukh Sen of The Vice have some pretty disturbing claims about Gandhi. Here are some of them.
We've come to know him as a frail, nobly malnourished old man with a purely moral, pious soul. He's a guy who ushered in a new grammar of nonviolent resistance to India, a country he helped escape the constraints of British imperial rule.
But it seems he wasn't a saint after all...
First of all, to him black South Africans were barely human.
He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur kaffir.
He lamented that Indians were considered "little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa."
In 1903, he declared that the 'white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.'
After getting thrown in jail in 1908, he scoffed at the fact that Indians were classed with black, not white, prisoners.
Around this same time, Gandhi began cultivating the misogyny he'd carry with him for the rest of his life.
According to Michael Connelian, he had extremely misogynistic ideas. For example, during his years in South Africa, he once responded to a young man's sexual harassment of two of Gandhi's female followers by forcibly cutting the girls' hair short to make sure they didn't invite any sexual attention.
Gandhi felt women surrendered their humanity the minute men raped them.
He operated under the assumption that men couldn't control their basic predatory impulses while simultaneously asserting that women were responsible for—and completely at the mercy of—these impulses.
His views on female sexuality were nothing different.
According to Rita Banerji, writing in Sex and Power, Gandhi viewed menstruation as the 'manifestation of the distortion of a woman's soul by her sexuality.' He also believed the use of contraceptives was the sign of whoredom.
And there's more: He'd sleep naked next to women — including some underage girls, in bed without touching them, making sure he didn't get aroused
This was the way he confronted this inability to control male libido head-on!
"Kasturba, Gandhi's wife, was perhaps his most frequent punching bag." Mayukh Sen writes.
'I simply cannot bear to look at Ba's face,' he once gushed about her, because she was caring for him while he was sick. 'The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something.'
When Kasturba came down with pneumonia, Gandhi denied her penicillin, even though doctors said it would cure her.
He insisted the new medicine was an alien substance her body should not take in. She succumbed to the sickness and died in 1944. Just years later, perhaps realizing the grave mistake he'd made, he willfully took quinine to treat his own malaria. He survived.
And lastly, he viewed the emancipation of Dalits as an untenable goal, and felt that they weren't worth a separate electorate.
We mostly tend to mythologize our national leaders or other influential public figures, but these facts or similar ones would probably apply to many heros of the past. So perhaps it's time to look at the whole picture now so that we can create a better future with more progressive ideas, don't you think?
Source: VICE
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