Why was Gandhi compared so frequently to Socrates? This is what Nehru said in 1953 : "I remember once I was reading Plato's Dialogues and someone was describing the effect that Socrates had on him. As I read this Dialogues, I was astonished because it was almost a description of the effect that Gandhiji had on me."

Scholars as different as Raghavan Iyer and Gilbert Murray also made the comparison between Gandhi and the ancient philosopher. Perhaps the comparison took hold because there were some similarities between the two men.

Both were influential thinkers, both attracted political followers in their own lifetimes, and both met with violent ends.  But one of the many interesting features of the comparison is that Gandhi himself appears to have identified with Socrates and even translated a work of Plato into Gujarati.

Gandhi first began to identify with Socrates when he was living as a foreigner in South Africa and he wrote his Gujarati version of Plato's Apology in 1908. The translation began to appear in April of that year, a few months after he adopted the term "satyagraha" and had begun to agitate against the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act. Gandhi's speeches and rallies on behalf of the Transvaal Asians had resulted in a trial, and, in January 1908, he was sentenced to jail for two months. It was while he was serving his prison sentence that he read the Apology in an English translation, and he prepared his own version while in jail or soon after his release. The Gujarati rendition of the Apology appeared in installments in Indian Opinion, the newspaper that he edited in South Africa.

The Apology is a text by Plato that purports to be the speech given by Socrates when he was put on trial in Athens in 399 BC.  Gandhi was drawn to Socrates' sense of duty, self-sacrifice, and moral conviction; he thought of the Athenian as a principled figure who was ready to defend (the word apologia means "defence" in classical Greek) his philosophy in all situations, and who did not back down even when faced with the death penalty.

This was a moment when Gandhi was fighting the government over the unequal treatment of Asians and was exhorting the members of his community to persevere in their efforts against the authorities.  As Gandhi wrote in 1908, "We have much to struggle for, not only in South Africa but in India as well.  Only when we succeed in these [tasks] can India be rid of its many afflictions.  We must learn to live and die like Socrates.  He was, moreover, a great satyagrahi."

Socrates affirmed to Gandhi the importance of self-sacrifice at a time when the latter was developing his ideas of satyagraha and Indian nationalism.

The title that Gandhi used in his serialization was Ek satyavirni katha, which can be translated as "Story of a true soldier" or "Story of a soldier of truth", the second being the form employed in the English edition of the Collected Works.  "True soldier" is arguably more martial than "soldier of truth", but in any case the association of Socrates with "soldier" in Gandhi's version suggests that he thought of Socrates as a figure who was ready to wage war for the truth.  Gandhi's Socrates was religious and pious, a man who said he believed in God, and a philosopher who had a soldier's toughness to withstand the hostility that he encountered in many quarters.

Rather than choose words or terms that might connect Socrates simply or uniquely to a philosophical, spiritual, or religious tradition, Gandhi referred to the Athenian as a satyavir and by that expression emphasized his willingness to fight unto death for his cause.

This dimension of Gandhi's homage to Socrates may surprise those of us who are accustomed to think of him as an advocate of non-violence.  But we might see Gandhi's reframing of the Apology as an attempt to reclaim the figure of the warrior from the sphere of violent conflict, and to redeploy the warrior in the service of ahimsa and satyagraha.  It is not only soldiers who are calm in the face of death, Gandhi appears to be saying, but also moral heroes and philosophers such as Socrates. The militarization of the title can be interpreted as a strategy on the part of Gandhi to show that moral philosophers are no less courageous than soldiers in the face of life-threatening danger.

This sentiment, incidentally, is not entirely alien to Plato's Apology where Socrates uses military language to describe his commitment to philosophy.  In his speech, Socrates likens himself to a soldier at his post and implies that he would not disobey God, just as a soldier would not disobey his commander.

Gandhi soon published his version of Socrates' speech as a pamphlet, and the pamphlet was sufficiently alarming to the British authorities in Bombay that they responded by banning it. According to a notice in The Bombay Government Gazette, the translation of the Apology was seized by officers since it deployed "words which are likely to bring into hatred and contempt the Government established by law in British India and to excite disaffection to the said Government." These expressions were formulaic and evoked the strictures of the Press Act of 1910.  Yet clearly it was not Socrates or Plato who troubled the British administration, and what was vexing to administrators was the knowledge that the author of the pamphlet was Gandhi.  

In fact, three other works were banned at the same time by the government, namely, Hind Swaraj, Sarvodaya, and a copy of a speech delivered by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, and all happened to be published by Gandhi.  Of the items on this list, Hind Swaraj (which appeared in the year after Ek satyavirni katha) is the most celebrated, and it's worth pointing out that this text, too, resembles a Platonic work and takes the form of a dialogue.

There was a particular irony to the ban placed on Gandhi's translation of Plato. Plato had occupied a central place in the British educational system for many decades before Gandhi decided to try his hand at a version.  Benjamin Jowett used to liken his students in Oxford to the guardians of Plato's Republic and remarked that they ran the Empire if not the world.  It was in a Victorian English translation that Gandhi himself had first encountered the text of the Apology in South Africa.  In a very real sense, therefore, Gandhi's approach to Socrates in South Africa was made possible by the circulation of books in the British Empire, and by the admiration for Plato that flourished in nineteenth-century Britain.

The irony of the ban is compounded by the circumstance that, in Gandhi's lifetime, the British administrator Frank Lugard Brayne wrote Socrates in an Indian Village and a series of related titles as part of his programme of rural development in the Punjab.  In 1931, more strikingly, Sir John Gilbert Laithwaite, a British civil servant and later private secretary to the Viceroy, wrote a pseudo-Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Gandhi, for the entertainment of another civil servant, Sir (Samuel) Findlater Stewart, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for India. The transcript of the "dialogue" can be found in the India Office Records at the British Library in London.

Gandhi was an eclectic and insatiable reader and was influenced by a variety of texts, Indian and non-Indian, so it is not altogether surprising that he discovered Socrates, Plato, and the Apology, or even that he invoked them against colonial forces.  Socrates, of course, has had a rich and complicated afterlife in many ethical and political movements: in the nineteenth century and earlier, he was compared to Jesus Christ, another figure with whom Gandhi also has been linked.  Yet, there is something revealing in seeing the level of praise that Gandhi heaps upon Socrates and the manner in which he turns him into a soldier of truth.  

Gandhi correctly observes in his preface that it was not just outsiders and foreigners to whom Socrates directed his teachings but also, and mainly, the inhabitants of his city.  Gandhi writes, "Socrates was a great satyagrahi."  And then adds: "He adopted satyagraha against his own people."  That is the struggle which made him, in Gandhi's words, "a great soul".

Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London and the author, most recently, of  – The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford, 2013).

Story First Published: February 11, 2015 00:27 IST

courtesy : http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/how-gandhi-used-socrates-738600

The so-called West doesn’t like freedom of expression. When I began working at Al Jazeera, then investigating Al Qaeda, the Qatari company was violently targeted. When I was at the BBC, we had a source who was trying to tell the world that Tony Blair’s government was deceiving the public about evidence for an invasion of Iraq. The scientist David Kelly was allegedly driven to suicide. Afterwards, millions were made refugees, wounded or killed, in and around Iraq. Journalists who tried to be free to express themselves were driven out. The head of the BBC was removed.

When The Guardian tried to reveal the Edward Snowden revelations about everyone in Britain being bugged by the secret services, David Cameron sent in the heavies – not to kill editor Alan Rusbridger – but to smash up Guardian computers. Snowden had to flee to Moscow with the aid of Wikileaks. The mass surveillance state had already been used against Wikileaks for having the temerity to believe it was free to expose U.S. military killing of civilians. Thousands more than who died in Paris have been extra-judicially assassinated by President Obama’s drones. There was no place in the Western mainstream media for blame on NATO nations for aiding Israel as it killed and maimed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the summer.

Britain bans TV stations. And as the recent dramatic reconstruction of the work of U.S. journalist Gary Webb – Michel Cuesta’s “Kill the Messenger” – tries to explain, the careers of Western reporters are destroyed if they try and publish stories against the state. Webb killed himself. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings died when his car exploded in LA after he took down – in an article – the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan.

One doesn’t need violent conspiracy theories to understand where the most pernicious attacks on freedom of expression come from in the West. They come from a system of powerful corporate advertiser-funded journalism that prevents real issues of life and death from ever reaching the consciousness of ordinary people in Western Europe. It was the great French revolution that set the scene. For all its benefits, the worst wars in the history of civilisation have been secular and driven by values embedded in perversions of the European enlightenment – not in religion. It has been the search for resource exploitation and profit that has killed more than any ten-year old girl strapped into a suicide vest by Boko Haram.

That’s why it sounds so absurd when liberal commentators try to resuscitate “Clash of Civilisations” rhetoric after Paris. They claim superiority for allowing freedom of expression, for supporting journalism. But they were the ones cheering on as NATO bombed journalists at Serbian TV during the war on Yugoslavia in 1999. They were the ones cheering as NATO bombed journalists at Libyan TV in 2011. They are the ones who cheerlead wars that kill journalists and anyone else in their way.

The liberal defence appears to be that the threat against free expression posed by Islam is too great. Only printing cartoons and launching wars can save us from this religion. But when they namecheck “Islam”, do they even know that the unprecedented march of medieval Islam was precisely because unlike other religions of the Book, it offered freedom of expression? Maybe they think history is irrelevant.

Or is this actually nothing to do with Islam? Is this just propaganda from a Western press that isn’t free? Is there just a playbook for Western journalists in which “Islam” can be swapped for “Socialism in 1930s Spain”, “Communism in Russia”, “Maoism in China”, “Bolivarism in Latin America”, “Non-Aligned Movement in Asia”?  It doesn’t matter what it is – just that it is seen as the enemy because that is in the interests of hegemonic Western capital.

Journalists in the West who have fought to tell the truth about 20th/21stcentury interventions in the developing world – they have destroyed the lives of billions – know what it’s like. Fight against the system, and power will threaten your livelihood. And, more likely than not, you’ll be left with nothing but the ability to say “told you so” after a scale of slaughter is unleashed that not only kills more than ISIS could ever dream of but also catalyses the deluded to carry out atrocities like those in Paris.

There is something suicidal about elite media responses to the Charlie Ebdo massacre. It’s not only that what goes for journalism ignores the fact that the worst slaughters in history – world wars – trace their lineage from secularism. It’s that journalists seem unaware of what questions to ask about the European enlightenment, let alone the French Revolution.

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité” did not so much concern the freedom to publish anti-Semitic or Islamophobic cartoons in Charlie Ebdo magazine. It was about the revolutionary emancipation of the dispossessed. Satire aimed at Marie-Antoinette, not the sans-culottes; the slave-masters of Haiti not the slaves. In due course, the so-called terror at the hands of secular Saint-Just and Robespierre would be as nothing compared to what happened with the ensuing retrenchment of power. Who knows what the Jacobins would have made, a quarter of a millennium on, about rising religious fundamentalism in America and corporations as Gods in Europe? Zhou-en Lai, Communist China’s first premier, had it right – whether he was referring to 1789 or 1968 – when he said it was too early to give his assessment of events in Paris.

But, now, a rotten Western journalism accompanies an entire Western economic crisis. There’s mass austerity because of gigantic, corrupt financial services but no context of the logical need for a complete overhaul of society. The response of the so-called free press has been to write and broadcast as if only sovereign debt ratings rule civic life. Journalism ceases to be free when all mainstream political debate in Western countries centres on pleasing a miniscule percentage of the one percent about deficit reduction. Western journalists appear not to be free to question whether society really is just what gilt-traders tell them.

As for guilt for Western war crimes, there is fear of terrorist attack from “the other.” Fear is what “free” Western journalists use when they cover NATO militarism. And ever greater restrictions on press freedom in NATO countries prevent journalists from talking about something more cataclysmic and eschatological. Recent world events suggest that Western corporations think they have found a way out of the crisis, a kind of final solution. It’s arguably the reductio ad absurdum of the powerful counter-revolutionary forces unleashed by the guillotining of the Jacobins: an out and out, overt, world war.

Lethal, foreign interventions appear on the world scene as if they are the twitches of a dying superpower. No amount of socio-economic strife at home can prevent NATO governments from perceiving military existential threats. Journalists repeat lies and forget history. Wars are prepared against the great powers of the 21st century. NATO plays war games for attacks on China – and, of course, Russia. A breathless Western journalism about Ukraine allows no dissent so that all developments are seen through the prism of Russian expansionism, not NATO’s. But, they merely posture against Russia, China and India. And in Africa and Latin America, there are signs that they sense the game is already up.

One region – dominated, as it happens, by Islam – remains in focus. It doesn’t matter that Saudi Arabia has been the financial source for ISIS. Fossil fuel profits of the Middle East are paramount. Environmental catastrophe isn’t even an issue. Nor are repeated defeats in Mesopotamia. To explain this to the people, NATO powers require a “free” press of fake stenographer-journalists who repeat what’s leaked to them. It can be fake dossiers, redlines and fake WMD and it’s all in the context of a fundamental misunderstanding of the post-1789 world.

So journalists excuse Israeli atrocities. Palestinian cartoonists don’t count when they are persecuted. They look the other way as freedom-fighters threaten the oil-fields of Eastern Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t occur to the journalists that Saudi is the financial source of so much Islamist funding. In this maelstrom, cowering in the face of Western decline, EU servant-rulers of capital transform into suicide bombers. President Hollande armed the Islamist rebels fighting secular Bashar Al-Assad. The Charlie Ebdo killers were part of that movement. It was on the road to Damascus, that the French taxpayer, like taxpayers in Britain and America, facilitated those who committed the atrocities in Paris.

Afshin Rattansi is the presenter of the current affairs TV show, Going Underground, on RT, broadcast in Britain 

courtesy : 'africana-orientalia'

BJP leaders speak in contradictory terms; PM's denial not enough

An unimaginable crisis has gripped our country. Only a straightforward, clear declaration by the Prime Minister can clear it. I am referring to the advertisement issued by the Government of India's I.B. Ministry on the Republic Day carrying in the background a watermark of the Preamble to the Constitution. But a devious interloping was done by publishing the Preamble as it was in 1950, thus deliberately omitting the words “Socialist” and “Secular” from the Preamble which have been in the existing Preamble since 1976. This interpolation clearly shows that B.J.P. ministers are trying to flaunt their status of being corporate friendly and stooges of the R.S.S. boss. I have no problem with how the ministers present themselves. But the Indian government would be guilty of serious constitutional lapses and cannot be allowed to continue in office if by its word or action it conceals the mandate of the present Preamble containing “Secularism” and “Socialism”. In that context the Union Government would be an interloper because the Supreme Court has held that the “Preamble is the key to the Constitution” and therefore the objectives of “Socialism” and “Secularism” must govern the programmes and policies of the Government of India. The perverted suggestion that Socialism and Secularism were not in the original Preamble and were incorporated in 1976 is ludicrous because the governments have to follow the Constitution as it exists.  

Another strained argument is that the word Socialism was not in the original Preamble. It is immaterial because the government is to see the present Preamble. Even this fatuous explanation shows ignorance of the facts and the law. At the time of framing the Constitution it was clearly understood that in India we were setting up a Socialist State. This was brought out specifically by Dr. Ambedkar in reply to Prof K.T. Shah, who wanted “Socialism” to be incorporated in the Constitution at the drafting stage. Dr. Ambedkar, while refusing to do so for technical reasons, explained that Socialism as such was already included in the directive principles. He explained thus: “What I would like to ask Prof. Shah is this: ‘If these directive principles to which I have drawn attention are not socialistic in their direction and in their content, I fail to understand what more socialism can be.’”    

As for the equally fatuous argument of the effect of incorporating Socialism in the Preamble in 1976, the Supreme Court pointed the fallacy as far back as 1983: “Though the word ‘Socialism’ was introduced into the Preamble by a late amendment of the Constitution that Socialism has always been the goal is evident from the directive principles of State policy. The amendment was only to emphasise the urgency.”   

May I also remind the Prime Minister and his colleagues that according to Article 75(4) of the Constitution of India, they took the oath before entering their office which requires them to swear in the name of God that they would bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India. The oath covers the Preamble to the Constitution existing at the time of taking the oath and not to the original Preamble or Constitution framed in 1950. Anyone suggesting to the contrary would be taking the ludicrous stand that the oath would not oblige the ministers to follow the mandate of over 100 amendments to the Constitution. President Obama would have been horrified by this interpretation of the Union ministers because it would mean that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution brought in almost a hundred years after the original Constitution (from which we have incorporated Article 14 of our Constitution, and which is the sheet anchor of equality and non-discrimination for any citizen). If that was the interpretation Obama could never have been the President because the original US Constitution did not have the 14th Amendment which was one of the biggest weapons for ending racial discrimination in the U.S.

B.J.P. leaders speak in contradictory terms. While Mr. Venkaiah Naidu says that the government is for Secularism in the Preamble, his colleague and lawyer Ravi Shankar Prasad says the government wants to delete it. There can be no hedging on Secularism. In fact, even to talk of deleting the word “Secularism” from the Preamble would not only be an act of sedition but also an impossible exercise. This is because the Supreme Court in Bommai's case (1974) categorically held that “Secularism is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution” and the “Preamble is a part of the provisions of the Constitution.”

In the Keshvanand Bharti case (1973) the Supreme Court held that the power to amend (Article 368 of the Constitution) did not enable Parliament to alter the basic structure of the framework of the Constitution. Thus Secularism being a part of the basic structure of the Constitution is non-amendable. Secularism, being part of the basic structure of the Constitution, must be held to have been incorporated automatically in the Preamble to the Constitution right from the beginning in 1950.

No, Mr. Prime Minister, a mere denial, and that too contradictory, is not enough. A covert attempt to undermine the force and strength of the Preamble cannot wish away the fears in the country, especially amongst the minorities. A full-throated public repudiation in “Man ki Bat” and on T.V. was given by the Prime Minister that his government unequivocally and without any hesitation believed in the mandate of Secularism in the existing Preamble of the Constitution of India. The public statements of the Shiv Sena, an ally of the B.J.P., reflect the danger of silence on the part of Prime Minister Modi. He must therefore speak out immediately because to speak is a moral duty and to keep silent a sin and unforgivable.  

courtesy : “The Tribune”, Monday, February 09, 2015