Many of Gandhis followers protested his habit of sleeping naked with young women (supposedly to test his celibacy), being massaged by them, etc: Swami Anand and Kedarnath in a question and answer grilling from 15-16 March 1947 shot off questions like “Why did you not take your coworkers into confidence and carry them with you [into] this novel practice?” and “Why do we find so much disquiet and unhappiness around you? Why are your companions emotionally unhinged?” The Congress President J. B. Kriplani told him that he was simply, “exploiting human beings as means rather than as ends in themselves.”R. P. Parasuram’s 16-page letter of indictment to Gandhi just before he quit. He called it his letter of “indictment.”There is something of other wrong with them [the women who sleep naked with Gandhi]. [The] Punjabi girl who lived opposite my room in Matunga…She used to weep unrestrainedly and that not caring whether others saw her or not. She laughed also unrestrainedly…And then here is Dr. Sushila-behn [The 24-year-old in-house physician at the ashram who Gandhi also used for his ‘experiments’]. How many are the days when she has not wept? She is a doctor and yet she is always a patient, always is ill. Who has heard of a doctor who cries out at night? [Gandhi later expelled this woman from his community, as the article explains.] youthkiawaaz/2013/10/gandhi-used-power-position-exploit-young-women-way-react-matters-even-today/ Thanks to Carolyn Gage for this link, and for pointing out that Gandhi also actively opposed contraceptive education in India. Arundhati Roy has a lot more to say on the continued lionization of Gandhi... And just today i heard a feminist (!) credit him with inventing fasting as a technique of political resistance, when he was preceded in that by the English suffragists (who he acknowledged as an influence in a newspaper article published in Britain when he was living there), as well as old Indian traditions of gherao, fasting, and other moral pressure tactics.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 06:23:11 +0000
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