Gandhiji was the most influential political thinker of the 20th century whose legacy still remains relevant to our time. It is remarkable that a man born in Gujarat almost 150 years ago is still spoken of with great appreciation and curiousity in so many different parts of the world, a proof of which we saw at Tavistock Square on Monday at the Martyrs' Day function. Both Y K Sinha, the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, and C B Patel, the Chairman of India League, spoke about Gandhiji with so much sincerity and interest.
So what is it that makes Gandhi a universal figure? That people cutting across continents and religious boundaries – be it Jews, Christians, Parsis, Muslims, Bangladeshis, Argentinians, Poles, Americans, etc. are all interested in Gandhi. Why?
In 2008 when Barack Obama was elected as President of the US, he was asked by a journalist: “If there was one person who is no longer living with whom you would like to have dinner with, who would that person be?” The reply came immediately: “Gandhi”.
Few know about Tawakkol Karman. She is a young journalist and human rights activist from a small and struggling country called Yemen. She has been waging a non-violent struggle there for greater rights and freedom and has even been the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. She is yet to touch 40. In her study in Yemen there’s a portrait of Gandhiji. And that's where she must be getting the inspiration to do what she does.
So that’s the extraordinary reach of Gandhiji’s appeal – from the powerful Barack Obama to the struggling Tawakkol Karman.
Gandhiji was assassinated in 1948, but he still appeals to many people all over the world.
Gandhi was a political activist, a freedom fighter who launched a popular struggle to free India from the British rule. He was a social reformer who worked to remove untouchability and bring women to the mainstream. He was a religious thinker. Even though he was born in a Hindu family, he had close friendships with people of other faiths and wrote a great deal about how being born in one religion should not prevent a person from understanding and respecting another religion. He was also a prophet. Ages ago he warned against some of the perils of excessive materialism and industrialisation. And last but not the least he was also a prolific writer. All politicians today, perhaps with the exception of Barack Obama, use ghost writers. Gandhiji wrote every word himself and he wrote a great deal for his newspapers, journals and books.
When Gandhiji returned to India on January 9, 1915, he was relatively unknown. He travelled across the villages for a whole year trying to know India. And then he joined the Indian National Congress. Before Gandhiji the Congress was a gentlemen’s debating club centred in the cities. Gandhiji transformed it and took it to rural India. He brought in peasants and workers, changing the proceedings from those conducted in English to incorporate all the languages of India. And it is this deepening of the mass base of the Indian national movement that gave it the power and resilience to bounce back from every downfall. Today’s political parties can learn from Gandhiji how to mobilise people and resources, how to create a cadre of devoted activists, how to build relationships, how to tackle their opponents politely and change them to their point of view.
Gandhi does matter today. His legacy of non-violent resistance has no parallel. His method of non-violent collective disobedience is what shamed the British finally into leaving India. Gandhiji’s “Satyagraha” was successfully adopted later by Dr Martin Luther King in the US and by many activists in the totalitarian regimes of the communist Eastern Europe.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress took a large amount of their inspiration and strategy from Gandhi and his campaigns in South Africa and India. Mandela never ceased regarding Gandhi as an inspiration, and, in fact, saw non-violence as an integral part of the freedom movement. Mandela learned from Gandhi the essential virtues of forgiveness and compassion, values that served him and his country very well on his assumption to power.
Solidarity, the major Polish movement, was inspired by Gandhi. Burma’s (now Myanmar) Aung San Suu Kyi, an extraordinary non-violent leader of modern-day who brought positive change in her country, is also inspired by Gandhiji.
Though not physically, Gandhi is still alive today because his strategy of collective resistance to unjust laws and authoritarian governments did not involve killing or murdering opponents. There was no bloodshed.
Another sensitive issue with people is religion. His religious philosophy did not demonise people of other faiths, and this went home with everyone. He said: “Accept the religion you are born into but do not convert the person of another faith. Start a dialogue and cultivate inter-faith understanding. If you are a Hindu, make your friend who is a Christian a better Christian and his job is to make you a better Hindu.”
What Gandhi meant was – inter-faith dialogue should push people towards cultivating the compassionate, non-violent, emancipatory aspects of their religion against the bigoted, fundamentalist, intolerant aspects of their religion.
If you look at the treatment of minorities in Pakistan and other Muslim (especially Middle East) countries, the troubles between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the rising tide of Christian fundamentalism in some parts of Latin America and North America – Gandhi’s message of inter-faith harmony, mutal respect and tolerance could not have been more relevant today.
His views and ideas on environment are so contemporary. In 1928 Gandhiji said, “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
Today India and China have more than a billion people each. If they blindly follow the same resource intensive, capital intensive, looting model of industrial development, we will collectively strip the world bare like locusts.
Gandhiji is supposed to have said: “The world has enough for everybody’s needs but not enough for one person’s greed.” Gandhi kept his own children away from politics and even from financial gain. He willed the royalties to his writings to a Trust and not to his family. Politicians world over should learn this from Gandhi rather than hoarding money for their kin.
Gandhiji remains relevant for the openness and transparency of his life. Anyone could go to his ashram, anyone could write to him attacking his views on caste, gender, non-violence, or religion and he would get an answer. Anyone could converse with him. He wrote nearly 200 letters a day. In this regard Gandhiji is so different from the suspicious, paranoid politicians of today who erect a wall between them and their public. The current US President Donald Trump is an example. His policy on Mexico and Islam are so parochial. Today you will seldom get a straight answer from a politician.
When he ran his journal Indian Opinion in South Africa and Harijan and Young India in India, he would give huge amount of space to his critics. Sometimes he would also patiently try to argue back in writing. So his was a politics of dialogue. On many issues Gandhi could not see eye to eye with M A Jinnah and B R Ambedkar but that never deterred him from having dialogue with them. Gandhi was always ready for a dialogue, even with his worst adversaries.
So be his advocacy of non-violent resistance or inter-faith harmony or environmentalism or for that matter the transparency and openness of his life – Gandhi matters today. Gandhi is relevant today. Gandhi is invoked in countless debates in many countries. His life and his message resonate with all citizens of the globe today.
It's time we actually take his ideas out of history books and make them relevant today.
(Inspired by Historian Ramachandra Guha's talks and interviews)
