October 2, 2024

It has come to a pitiable plight that Indians remember the Mahatma only on 02 October and 30 January, his birth anniversary and death anniversary respectively. Whether he is irrelevant today is a question that a large number of people ask.

There was news in the Times of India on September 29, 2024 reporting the shooting incidents in eastern South Africa where seventeen people were killed in two separate incidents in a town in the east of the country. If in one case, twelve women and one man were killed, in another, four people were killed. An eighteenth man is in critical condition in the hospital in the town of Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape Province about two thousand meters from Durban. ‘The motive is unknown’, said the police chief Fannie Masemola. In mid-September, seven members of a family including three children were shot dead in their home in KwaZulu-Natal in the same eastern province. None of the culprits have yet been caught.

The narrated incident above is quoted to make people understand how Nelson Mandela’s country is violence-stricken today. Mandela, when he was released after twenty-six years of imprisonment, referred to the Mahatma’s role in the Indian independence struggle and the non-violent methods that he had adopted to lead the people to freedom. It is worthwhile to think why in the country of a man who fought for freedom from Apartheid and established the South African Republic there should be a plague of violence. Only two examples of abject violence on a small scale are quoted above to represent them as examples of violent social consciousness. There could be equal amounts of examples of small-scale violence from different countries in Africa and South America which got inspired by the Indian independence freedom movement and went through struggles to get their own freedom. One has to understand why in our country we do not have such small scale violence in any part of the country, not forgetting personal violence in some cases in a country of one hundred and forty crores; multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-linguistic. The answers will be interesting.

If India enjoys its freedom without small-scale violence in different parts of the country, that too in a federal administration, one does not have to seek far or wide to get an answer. The Mahatma led the freedom movement preaching and practising non-violence. He did not aspire for power. It is rewarding to remember that even when the power from the British empire was being passed on to the people of India at the midnight of 15 August 1947, the Mahatma was nowhere in any celebration. Neither was he a part of the transfer of power. On that night he was in suburban Calcutta moving in a taxi car through the streets to speak to people at midnight, to reduce the violence in the communal riots that were taking place in response to the division of the country. His Satyagraha, including the hunger ones, and his non-cooperation movement against the British were with the least of hatred and violence and the methodology paid rich dividend that our country is less violent even today unlike those countries which got their freedom through violent rebellions.

Unequivocally and with immeasurable amount of admiration and an equally unfathomable pride, every Indian can proclaim at the highest pitch of her or his voice that the peace in the country’s different parts, towns and villages included, are because of the non-violence that the Mahatma had taught his people in his leadership towards freedom of the country for a period of a little less than half a century.

This Gandhi Jayanti is also the centenary of the Mahatma’s Hunger Satyagraha from September 17 to October 7 in 1924 for twenty-one days with his birthday in between. It was undertaken by him to appeal for peace in the Lucknow communal riots. He was seriously ill and his followers were all worried about his life. All the same, despite their requests, he went on with the Hunger Satyagraha which had an impact on the people from different communities. It is interesting to note that Lucknow did not have communal riots after that.

An interesting aspect of the Mahatma’s Hunger Satyagraha is its impact on the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924, towards the end of which year the Mahatma took over the leadership of the fight for allowing lower class people to walk through the road in front of the temple. True enough, the Mahatma visited the place only later. Even then the people of Vaikom prayed for the Mahatma’s health. The number was around five hundred which was a large one for those days, and the revered Sri Narayana Guru led the prayers by being with the people on 28 September 1924, a rare thing that he ever did by participating in programmes of larger crowds. While leading the prayers for the health of the Mahatma, Sri Narayana Guru stated that the Mahatma was an invaluable investment of the people for the freedom movement of the country.

Arthur Herman in his bestselling book ‘Gandhi and Churchill’ refers to the epic rivalry between the two, between what they called a ‘cultured’ Britishers and a ‘Naked Fakir’ of a subcontinent. The success of the Britishers has to be remembered with the irony of a reality that Churchill was the only prime minister in the world who was not re-elected after winning a war. Arthur Herman has written a superbly well researched account of the lives of the two men who have had a profound influence on the world. At some point, Herman brings out a portrait of the Mahatma as a man with counter qualities of Churchill which would last longer than the Mahatma himself. He goes on to add that in 1909 itself a young Churchill realised that saving the British empire in India meant halting a visionary like Gandhi in his tracts. However, if Clement Attlee was not the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the late forties and Winston Churchill was, India would not have got freedom despite a towering Mahatma with his appeal for non-violence as his power.

There is an interesting story that Arthur Herman gives which is relevant to refer to. In the conference in Quebec in September 1944, Churchill was very angry with American president Roosevelt who seemed to have leaned a little towards the Mahatma’ demands. He is supposed to have said that Britain would give half of India to the United States and the other half Britain would keep and would allow the world to see which would be better. His half-jocular words then, according to Herman, was a realisation of the fact that the Mahatma was a formidable person even when two great kingdoms were standing together. According to the writer, Churchill understood that the Mahatma was the most powerful and implacable adversary for things to come for the United Kingdom. Had he been elected again as the British Prime Minister immediately after winning a war, his uncanny intelligence would have stopped the country and the Mahatma from getting independence. But history is different. A Prime Minister who led a country to winning a war was defeated in the elections, making the way for Clement Attlee to preside over the ultimate sanction of freedom for India.

There is a book titled ‘Gandhi on Personal Leadership’, Lessons from the Life and Times of India’s Visionary Leader, by Anantha Kumarasamy, a product of University of Technology, Australia. His tenth chapter, ‘The Value of Creative Tension’, starts by quoting Scot Fitzgerald, the American writer on the test of first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. He says that the Mahatma’s greatest attribute was this. ‘Creative Tension’ is a concept that was coined by Peter Senge in his famous book ‘The Fifth Discipline’. The Mahatma, seemingly simple in his appearance and functioning of his application of intelligence, was a man with tremendous amount of creative tension. That is why he was able to take up issues of people from different parts of the country and it is his people-centric creative tension that empowered him to lead the nation. It is also this creative tension that came in the concept of the idea of nonviolent strategies, methods and techniques for fighting against an all-powerful empire to make it come down to give India freedom for its democratic living.

Alan Axelrod in his book ‘Gandhi CEO’, in his conversational insightful style, breaks down Gandhi’s leadership to fourteen key facets and one hundred lessons. He tries to concentrate on the insights and accomplishments of the Mahatma as a visionary for reform. He says the Mahatma’s greatest quality was that he was right there with the people. He takes representative situations from the Mahatma’s life and draws lessons from them. In Chapter three, ‘The Genius of Non-cooperation’, he says it was a strategy used by the Mahatma against the oppressive authority of the British Raj in India. Associated with this non-cooperation, he organised non-violent mass civil disobedience. This shows that the Mahatma believed that the oppression of the governors came from the silent consent of the governed. The Defense of India Act of 1950 during World War I was to silence the movements of protest to influence the tradition-bound Indian society to accept long-accepted social structure and practices that retarded social progress. The Mahatma capitalised on this and started the non-cooperation movement which had the least of violence in it. He said in a prayer meeting in 1945 that if someone asked him to bow down his head, he would not do it even though the other could knock him down and he said that he would refuse it even when there was a chance that the other would kill him. While quoting such instances, Alan Axelrod presents to us a mighty man against violence.

In our study of Fifty World Leaders of the Past Twenty-five Centuries which was done by thirty-seven professors from Southern India for a period of five years to identify their unique leadership styles and contents the Mahatma was standing different from the rest, particularly because of his faith in non-violence, non-cooperation and self-respect. Though not much spoken about, it may be evident that he had an influence from the Buddha and the latter’s non-violence. All the same, he stands far above many leaders and he was the best contribution that India as a country has made to the world in the modern times. Undoubtedly, he was the best contribution that Gujarat also made to India and definitely to the world. If a full-tall statue had to stand in Gujarat, it had to be at Porbandar and definitely that of the Mahatma, proclaiming his message to the world of non-violence and non-cooperation as a strategy to face the mighty. The tragedy was that it was not destined to be, and the fact remains that now the tallest man the country ever produced is in some bookshelf under the foot of the existing big statue.

A decade ago, I published a book ‘A Statement Against Violence’. No doubt, there was a controversy about the two pictures on the front cover, those of our own Mahatma and Che Guevara, the violent revolutionary Argentinian who fought for the freedom of many South American countries, especially Cuba. At the end of the introduction of that book I wrote ‘the Mahatma and Che Guevara’, have been the two ends of my thought lines, every time I spoke or wrote for freedom against violence, both emerged at both ends making me hang in between. I concluded the introduction by writing the last sentence, ‘I still hang’.