Yesterday, 30 January, was the day Mahatma Gandhi fell to the bullets of an assassin. The Japan-India Sarvodaya Friendship Association held a meeting to remember the occasion, and invited me to speak on what Gandhi's view of Japan was. What follows is the summary of my talk. Before the talk the meeting was addressed by the Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of India, Tokyo.
Gandhi was deeply interested in the fate of the Russo-Japanese War early in 20th Century. That was by no means extraordinary. All the nations in Asia up to Turkey were keenly watching the war, because they were more or less feeling the pressure of the Tsarist Russia. What distinguished Gandhi from almost all the others was the fact that he was not quite happy with the Japanese victory. At least he was not enamoured of the Japanese way of building the "Rich Country, Strong Army". The Swaraj India would aim at would be something quite different. He would certainly not agreed when Dr.Sun Yat-sen said that Japan's victory was the first victory of the Asians against the Europeans. One of the strong influences upon him in this regard was Tolstoy.
One nation that was not happy with the Japanese victory was the Koreans, who were increasingly feeling the oppression by the Japanese during the war and afterwards. Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Unfortunately Gandhi did not have an opportunity to get in touch with, or think about, the Koreans. Instead it was Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi's contemporary, who took keen interest in the Koreans, and encouraged them by his poems and in other ways. He also told Gandhi some of his experiences with the Koreans.
Another contemporary of Gandhi's worth mentioning here is M.Visvesvaraya. As a civil engineer and the Dewan of Mysore he did a lot of works in the fields of education, irrigation and water management, industrial development, and so on. His Planned Economy for India, 1934, is a monumental book. There he emphasized the need for industrialization of India, repeatedly stressing that if India can be self-supporting in, for example, locomotives, railway wagons and so on, India need not export foodgrains, in which India is short, for the sake of getting foreign currency. Also the building of industries will not make people redundant, at least in the initial stages. These ideas are quite different from Gandhi's. Like Gandhi he also admitted that the Indian peasants have to be idle for about half of the year, but unlike Gandhi he did not take to the khadi. Instead he said 50 million out of the 250 million of India's agricultural population should be shifted to industries. He claimed that much of his ideas for the reconstruction of India came from his observation of Japan.
When Japan declared war on Britain and the US, and approached the Indian border from the east, Gandhi single-mindedly considered the ways and means of resisting the Japanese non-violently. He sent Mira Ben, for example, to the Orissa coast to observe how the locals' mind was working on the war. This was probably the moment when his mind was most deeply engaged in the question of non-violence, especially how to meet the external aggressors without weapons.
As a part of such an effort he wrote a letter "To Every Japanese" in the middle of July 1942, shortly before he was going to launch the "Quit India" movement. There he showed his clear leaning toward China resisting Japanese aggression, and told the Japanese that the Indians would never welcome them if ever they try to enter that country.
The war brought devastation to the Northeast, Bengal, and other places, which paved the way not only for the independence but for the partition of India by making the soil fertile for communal disturbance. In the immediate aftermath of the war came the INA Trials-court marshaling the three officers of the Indian National Army which fought under Subhas Chandra Bose for breaking the oath of loyalty to the British King. How was the Defence to justify the war that the INA fought in cooperation with the Japanese Army?
It was the main theme of Bhulabhai Desai, the leading counsel and an eminent Congressman, that what the accused did was not illegal because they acted as belligerents. In order to explain this he told the court that the INA was under a legally constructed government, recognized by several countries, with the Andamans and Nicobars ceded by Japan, and the INA itself was completely officered by Indians. It was also pointed out that when the British surrendered to the Japanese in Singapore in 1942, the Indian Prisoners of War were handed over by the British to the Japanese and the question of loyalty ceased to exist after this. As to the war itself, Desai talked of 'a necessary evil in this infirm world', thereby justifying it.
There are reasons to believe that Gandhi was not happy about this. On several occasions after the war he was contacted by the INA survivors, when he told them to observe non-violence hereafter and work for the constructive programme like Hindu-Muslim unity. This is all that he could have done. Whether it ever occurred him to disown the INA while the war was still on is not easy to decide. I do not think it did.
The way war was justified by Bhulabhai Desai was also adopted by Justice Radha Vinod Pal at the Tokyo Tribunal trying the Japanese war criminals. If there had been some one appointed by the independent government of India instead of Pal, who had been appointed before India's achieving independence, judgement would have been different. At least its logic must have been so. That would have been much better.
Gandhi was deeply interested in the fate of the Russo-Japanese War early in 20th Century. That was by no means extraordinary. All the nations in Asia up to Turkey were keenly watching the war, because they were more or less feeling the pressure of the Tsarist Russia. What distinguished Gandhi from almost all the others was the fact that he was not quite happy with the Japanese victory. At least he was not enamoured of the Japanese way of building the "Rich Country, Strong Army". The Swaraj India would aim at would be something quite different. He would certainly not agreed when Dr.Sun Yat-sen said that Japan's victory was the first victory of the Asians against the Europeans. One of the strong influences upon him in this regard was Tolstoy.
One nation that was not happy with the Japanese victory was the Koreans, who were increasingly feeling the oppression by the Japanese during the war and afterwards. Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Unfortunately Gandhi did not have an opportunity to get in touch with, or think about, the Koreans. Instead it was Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi's contemporary, who took keen interest in the Koreans, and encouraged them by his poems and in other ways. He also told Gandhi some of his experiences with the Koreans.
Another contemporary of Gandhi's worth mentioning here is M.Visvesvaraya. As a civil engineer and the Dewan of Mysore he did a lot of works in the fields of education, irrigation and water management, industrial development, and so on. His Planned Economy for India, 1934, is a monumental book. There he emphasized the need for industrialization of India, repeatedly stressing that if India can be self-supporting in, for example, locomotives, railway wagons and so on, India need not export foodgrains, in which India is short, for the sake of getting foreign currency. Also the building of industries will not make people redundant, at least in the initial stages. These ideas are quite different from Gandhi's. Like Gandhi he also admitted that the Indian peasants have to be idle for about half of the year, but unlike Gandhi he did not take to the khadi. Instead he said 50 million out of the 250 million of India's agricultural population should be shifted to industries. He claimed that much of his ideas for the reconstruction of India came from his observation of Japan.
When Japan declared war on Britain and the US, and approached the Indian border from the east, Gandhi single-mindedly considered the ways and means of resisting the Japanese non-violently. He sent Mira Ben, for example, to the Orissa coast to observe how the locals' mind was working on the war. This was probably the moment when his mind was most deeply engaged in the question of non-violence, especially how to meet the external aggressors without weapons.
As a part of such an effort he wrote a letter "To Every Japanese" in the middle of July 1942, shortly before he was going to launch the "Quit India" movement. There he showed his clear leaning toward China resisting Japanese aggression, and told the Japanese that the Indians would never welcome them if ever they try to enter that country.
The war brought devastation to the Northeast, Bengal, and other places, which paved the way not only for the independence but for the partition of India by making the soil fertile for communal disturbance. In the immediate aftermath of the war came the INA Trials-court marshaling the three officers of the Indian National Army which fought under Subhas Chandra Bose for breaking the oath of loyalty to the British King. How was the Defence to justify the war that the INA fought in cooperation with the Japanese Army?
It was the main theme of Bhulabhai Desai, the leading counsel and an eminent Congressman, that what the accused did was not illegal because they acted as belligerents. In order to explain this he told the court that the INA was under a legally constructed government, recognized by several countries, with the Andamans and Nicobars ceded by Japan, and the INA itself was completely officered by Indians. It was also pointed out that when the British surrendered to the Japanese in Singapore in 1942, the Indian Prisoners of War were handed over by the British to the Japanese and the question of loyalty ceased to exist after this. As to the war itself, Desai talked of 'a necessary evil in this infirm world', thereby justifying it.
There are reasons to believe that Gandhi was not happy about this. On several occasions after the war he was contacted by the INA survivors, when he told them to observe non-violence hereafter and work for the constructive programme like Hindu-Muslim unity. This is all that he could have done. Whether it ever occurred him to disown the INA while the war was still on is not easy to decide. I do not think it did.
The way war was justified by Bhulabhai Desai was also adopted by Justice Radha Vinod Pal at the Tokyo Tribunal trying the Japanese war criminals. If there had been some one appointed by the independent government of India instead of Pal, who had been appointed before India's achieving independence, judgement would have been different. At least its logic must have been so. That would have been much better.
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