Over this past decade I have been fortunate enough to visit the home in Delhi where Gandhiji spent his final day, the home in Gujarat where Sardar Patel was born, and thanks to flights delays rewatch Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi on my iPod at the airport.
There is a spirit of the founding fathers (and mothers) of a nation which should be more invoked in a country’s politics.
As you visit the homes of Sardar Patel and Gandhiji and witness their words passing through the ages at the birth of their nation, you wonder if ever the politicians in India ever bother to read them. Trite Gandhian phrases roll off easily on airport billboards ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ – but so many of the politicians don’t want to see the change for good in the world. They are the elite in receipt of their brown envelopes – what does it matter to them that their country may be sold down the river for a few rupees more?
No, what Gandhiji should have said is not ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ but ‘see the change we sacrificed for and show some decency and respect for us the founding fathers’.
Gandhiji and Patel were barristers – they had no need to spend years in cockroach infested prisons. Or consider the patriots described in the book ‘Remember Us Sometimes Once in A While’ who wrote to their wives and children why they were willing to be hanged for their sedition against the British Crown during the Independence movement. And hanged they were.
It seems appropriate with current British political controversies to remember Cromwell.
And if Cromwell could be considered the founding father of the modern British Parliament then his speech to Parliament could aptly be invoked today targeted at British Parliamentarians where he said, “...It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.”
Founding fathers were able to found nations precisely because of their foresight and wisdom and their wisdom should be more often invoked – especially if a mighty America does it to this day 200 years later, India certainly should merely 60 years later. How but in our schools do we invoke this, when all from Gandhiji and Nehru are disrespected widely.
