80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Dhanagre's work partially remedies this shortcoming but does not fully take into account the fact that on a national level the rich or middle peasants were compelled to back down in face of landlord and bourgeois pressure. With the advent of Gandhi on the national scene, the leadership expressed concern for the realities of the grassroot level and tried to carry the message of swarajj political freedom and national unity to the slumbering millions. The response and the following evoked cannot be attributed, the author rightly points out, solely to his personality for an individual however gifted morally, spiritually or otherwise could have hardly succeeded in creating a new and powerful mass struggle out of nothing7. Among Gandhi's critics, two sections are prominent: militant nationalists and the emerging left wing of Marxists. The former disliked Gandhi's 'soft-pedalling5 with the reality of Hindu dominance, insistence on non-violence and Hindu-Muslim unity. The latter hold Gandhi responsible for retarding the growth of revolutionary forces through Gandhian dialectics of moralism, fast, soul force and soon. He galvanized the masses but prevented them from having recourse to any potential revolutionary activity. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, he allowed himself to buttress the class interest of the bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy. His technique and programme lacked the basic features of socio-economic construction and, therefore, were bound to fail. The socio-economic grievances of the people and their expression into agrarian movements were exploited by the national bourgeoisie to cement alliance with the landlords and to give them room for compromise with the British. Non-violence and Reconciliation It was into this loose Marxian jacket that Dhanagre fitted the movements led by Gandhi or Gandhians and in the process raised socio-logicaly meaningful questions: These movements reveal that Gandhi drew peasant masses into the campaign and managed to reconcile the interests of landowners, moneylenders and the richer section of the peasantry. The author stresses that there were different strata within the peasantry with different aims and ambitions. Gandhi relied mostly on prosperous peasants. He penetrated into the Scheduled Castes and Tribes—kaliporaj— which constituted the bulk of poor tenantry, through his constructive programme. In the agrarian movements — Champaran (1917)^ Kheda (1918), Bardoli (1928) and parts of Oudh (1921 and 1932) — class contradictions between poor peasants and moneylenders came to the fore. In his scheme of things Gandhi, the author notes, gave priority to covering up class contradictions rather than resolving them.8 Faced with such a situation Vallabhai Patel told the peasants, ^Government wants to divide you and sahukar (moneylender) ... How can you leave a sahukar who has helped you in your difficulties?5'9 Gandhi asked the tenantry of Oudh to