A Father Remembered, A Son Forgotten

A dear friend and I had an argument a few days ago. The issue was Anil Kapoor’s new film – Gandhi, My Father. While I had the ‘I-told-you-so’ look, he stood defiantly in support of the Mahatma.Now, Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, was an exceptional national leader. I’d be a damn fool to contest that. My grouse with him was always to do with his ideology. I was, and am still, of the opinion that freedom cannot be attained by allowing the oppressors to bitch-slap you until they need you no more. However, that would be a topic for a later discussion. What I am going to write about today is about one of Gandhi’s greatest flaws – his personal life.

If my father ever treated me as Gandhi treated his son Harilal, I would think I was not his son at all. That was the extent of hopelessness that Gandhi injected into Harilal. He denied him education (that he himself got) and forced him to withstand the worst of his nomadic lifestyle. As a result, the young man became a wasted entity. Some people might say that it was the price one man’s family paid for a country’s freedom. I will agree. Gandhi’s excuse to leave his son as a country bumpkin was that he did not want Harilal to be portrayed as getting unfair advantage. He did not want Harilal to get a foreign education if other Indian children could not have it (never mind the fact that Gandhi himself completed his bar in Britain). Harilal paid the price for the maintenance of his father’s public image. Now, this was not Gandhi’s greatest failing.

His utter failure as a father came to the fore when he could not/would not explain his seemingly irrational decisions to his growing son. Growing up is hard. I grew up in a home of academics and disciplinarians. That was tough. Poor Harilal grew up in the house of MK Gandhi! I cannot even imagine the extent of his loneliness and difficulty in his formative years. Gandhi being the man he was, toured the country and fought battles with the British. I will not say that he should have been at home with his children. However, he should not have totally discarded his filial responsibility.

The animosity between Harilal and his father grew to such an extent that he converted to Islam to spite his father. What does that say about Gandhi? It is easy to preach “Ishwar Allah tero naam…” but what happens when your own son wants a shift in faith? Harilal converted to Islam because he knew that it would piss his father off like very little else. Gandhi vindicated this by disowning him in public. Which ‘great’ person will disown his son for a change in faith? Was this the true mindset of the Mahatma? Although Harilal’s was an immature act, born more out of hatred for his father than love for Islam, it, nevertheless, exposed Gandhi’s double speak.

While celebrating this, the sixtieth year of our independence, we may remember many martyrs. These men willingly chose to embrace their doom in the cause of attaining freedom. One martyr who will not be mentioned anywhere is Harilal Gandhi – The son who was forcefully sacrificed for the country.