January 30, 2025

I was at Champaran a day before Republic Day 2025. My interest was visiting the two Mahatma Gandhi memorials at Motihari, the centre of East Champaran now, from where the Mahatma was arrested for the first time by the British. Motihari is more than one hundred and fifty kilometers from Patna University College Guest House where I stayed. What impressed me most at one of the memorials was the details exhibited including the charge sheet against the Mahatma, his defence and the judgement, all of which are provided both in Hindi and English.

I distinctly recall Porbandar which I visited almost twenty years ago. The princely state had the grandfather and father of the Mahatma as the Diwan, the Prime Minister then, of the state. The three storied building which housed the family and where the Mahatma was born is now preserved as it was during his time. That he belonged to an upper class family had not dawned on me until I visited the house because all that I thought of the Mahatma was in his simple clothing, food and styles of living. Five years after that, I visited the Sabarmathi Ashram which was slightly better maintained, but even then it did not impress me as a monument for the father of the nation and what that exceptional man had done for the country and its people.

A statue of Sardar Patel, at present the tallest statue of anybody in the world, confuses anyone because of the importance given to the man and makes one doubt whether he deserves that elevation at all. The two and half years that he was the Home Minister, he is supposed to have annexed more than five hundred small states ruled by kings or queens and made them part of the Indian Union. One has to recall that large numbers of states were together members of the British Indian Council through which they were paying taxes to the British kingdom and they naturally became member states of the Indian Union. Many others, then small Indian states, were a part of the freedom movement itself. The most difficult task of a Home Minister at that time was to annex Goa from the Portuguese, Hyderabad from the Nizam and Pondicherry from the French, all of which happened only after the death of Sardar Patel. Hence, his contributions are not anywhere near those of other great freedom fighters though they may be smaller than the Mahatma as far as the freedom movement is concerned.

It is relevant to ask who the true great humans whom India contributed to the world are. Undoubtedly, the two would be Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. Memorials for Buddha are plenty across not only in the eastern part of the country but also across the world. If one visits Porbandar where Mahatma was born or Sabarmathi Ashram which was the centre of his experiments with truth and freedom, one would bend one’s head in shame for not having built a memorial for him at all. If one asks a serious question on who the best product of Gujarat was, that it gave to the country, the response cannot be Sardar Patel, it can only be the Mahatma. Therefore, if there was any statue to come up in Gujarat or anywhere in India in the giant size of being the tallest statue in the world, it could only be that of the Mahatma and not that of any small Patel, small in front of a great man like the Mahatma.

Undoubtedly, the tallest man that India has gifted to the world after Sri Buddha is Mahatma Gandhi, to emphasise it again. So, if any statue had to be erected, it had to be that of the Mahatma. It may be worthwhile to mention here that despite Sardar Patel being available in 1930 when the Mahatma was arrested during the Dandi March, the leadership was handed over to Abbas Tyabji, the first Muslim president of the Indian National Congress, and also a founding member, who was also Chief Justice of the Court of Baroda in 1893; and not to Sardar Patel who by then had organised the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928. The blame for not commemorating the Mahatma has to go to the grand old party of the country whose leaders ruled the country for long, for not creating a proper memorial for the Mahatma in Porbandar or Champaran or Sabarmati or Dandi or anywhere else in the country. No doubt, the erection of the Patel statue in Gujarat indeed is a tourist attraction though he is not the most important person to be remembered as an Indian freedom fighter or even an astute political leader of the country.

On his arrival from South Africa, the Mahatma became the natural leader of the greatest freedom struggle that was waged anywhere in the world successfully and that too with least bloodshed. One cannot forget the idea of non-cooperation resistance, Mahatma initiated, had eclipsed the never setting sun of the British Empire. The power of a Half-naked Fakir, Churchill called him so, was not equal to the powers of very great people who fought for the freedom of their own countries because such fights led to a lot of bloodshed. One also has to remember that the Mahatma’s leadership and non-cooperation resistance against an all-powerful British empire with its parliamentary system as a representative form of government, pseudo indeed from the true definition of parliamentary system, motivated several other nations to fight for their own freedom. The greatest achievement of a multi-polar, multi-religious, multi-linguistic, multi-cultural land ruled by kings or queens of small states was that the people could stand together to fight against a foreign rule.

The Mahatma’s unfathomable leadership was at its supreme during the time of the Second World War. The apprehension that he expressed to Louis Fischer is mentioned in one of the best books on the former is by the latter. If Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister after the British parliamentary elections immediately after the war, naturally he was a successful war leader of the British public, India would not get independence. Chance was against that possibility and India was able to get its freedom because Clement Attlee became the British Prime Minister. The fact that the Mahatma who could have easily become President or Prime Minister of the country chose to become nobody in the free Indian Union Administration proclaims, at the height of a voice, that Mahatma was exceptional and was the true father of the nation. That is why Rabindranath Tagore gave him the title of Mahatma, Subhash Chandra Bose gave him the title of the Father of the Nation and an exceptional scientist Albert Einstein called him the best of the Humanists of the century.

The Mahatma was in South Africa only for two decades before he dedicated himself for the freedom of the country. Very recently, a statue of the Mahatma was unveiled by the Indian commissioner to South Africa Prabhath Kumar. The statue is situated in the Tolstoy Farm which was established by the Mahatma when he was in South Africa. After being neglected for a long time, the farm itself is brought to better status in recent times. During the inaugural, speakers emphasised the great contribution that the Mahatma made to his mother land and to the whole world in the form of non-cooperation resistance against the social evil of untouchability, apartheid in South Africa, and non-cooperation movement for winning freedom. More importantly, he has to be remembered more for his works on the development of the villages in the country and the need for self-reliance as a nation.

However, it was immediately after his arrival in India from South Africa in 1915 that the Mahatma started working with people. The struggles of the war had already created enough troubles for the common people. With the German dye from Indigo plants becoming difficult to procure the British wanted Indigo to be grown in their domains in India. In Bihar, particularly in Champaran district, there was an ill-famous Thinkatia system where tenants had to grow Indigo plants in a particular portion of their land if they had to own the land. With the products of the rest of the land and the sale of Indigo plants to the British contractors, the tenants could not make both ends meet. More distressfully, the tax to be paid to the British was also increased. It was into the middle of this crisis in 1917 that the Mahatma reached Champaran. He started the first Non-cooperation Satyagraha, till then unheard in the history of the world, by organising the tenants. Rajkumar Shukla was the person who invited the Mahatma and he was a popular man in Champaran. The radicals in the then united Bengal were not supportive of the Mahatma’s intervention with the Non-cooperation Satyagraha in the nearby district of Champaran, today Champaran is divided into two districts of east and west.

Gandhi Memorial Pillar Motihari, Champaran

In 2017, the centenary of Champaran Satyagraha was celebrated. However, instead of highlighting the resistance movement and the opposition to illegitimate rules and regulations in the celebrations, one of the minor subjects of the Mahatma was spoken about, that is the need for cleanliness because the country was agog with the idea of Swachch Bharath. Indeed, it was a misnomer. Such things happen in several countries as time passes and as political leaders or parties change. The best example of removing the importance of the Mahatma in the country is that the country has Mahatma Gandhi roads in almost every city or even a village and not a respectable, rememberable, recognizable memorial.

When the Mahatma arrived in Champaran for the first time, with a team of eminent nationalists like Rajendra Prasad, and Anugrah Narayan Sinha, they were welcomed by Rajkumar Shukla at Motihari. Like in many other places, under the colonial-era laws, tenants of Champaran were forced to grow indigo plants in a specific portion of their land. The worst was that the upper classes who had money could pay more rent and get out of the compulsion to grow indigo. The pressure to grow indigo became more and more and this resulted in the resistance by the tenants against the law enforcers. The Mahatma’s arrival gave an impetus to the tenants who gathered together and decided to fight not only against the laws regarding the plantation crops but also for reducing the tenancy taxes.

The Mahatma’s Champaran Satyagraha was the forerunner to the Satyagrahas and Non-cooperation Resistance that he organised in different parts of the country. It may not be wrong to say that the Dandi March itself had its base in the Champaran Satyagraha. He had conducted several marches and satyagrahas after the one at Champaran. It remains a true mark of that great man of satyagraha that he was moving around in a taxi car all alone in the streets of Calcutta to meet and appeal to the suffering as well as warring people of Calcutta where hundreds of them were killed in the communal clashes connected with the division of the country when the other freedom fighters were celebrating the independence of the country by sitting in the parliament house. They raised the national flag and listened to the speech of the Prime Minister - ‘India’s Tryst With Destiny’.