Relevance of the Mahatma today

By Predhuman K.Joseph Dhar

The question of relevance is a search for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of past historic events, persons and values to the society, which owes and traces its origin to them. Thus the great relevance would reveal the values of the present generation than its knowledge of and attitude to the past collective history and the historic values and persons.

If our youth are in such a state of national indifference, or alienation and aggression, it is not wholly due to their ignorance of the history of our Independence. It is the subsequent and current history of our freedom struggle that made them cynical about it. Our political, social and religious leaders and organizations have not been the right role models for them. They are largely self-seeking individuals and organizations, placing national interest second to narrow personal and sectarian party interests. The political, administrative and judicial processes are stamped by rampant and large-scale corruption. Public confidence in them has been shaken. Education has been turned into pragmatic and moneymaking business. The mass media, television especially, have become sensational entertainment providers rather than educative contributors to our collective national consciousness and cultural-historical life. Religious leaders are turning into communal politicians rather than nationwide teachers of the spiritual values and prophetic critics of the counter-values built into our historic cultural inheritance. The voting public, as well as the educated elite, is spiritually demoralized into a state of materialistic and socially indifferent and inactive individual pragmatism. Prayer, public worship and religious celebrations seem to go on without any relation to national life. Meditation and spirituality seem to be wholly otherworldly flights into immaterial and unhistorical abstractions. In short, we are untrue to the history of our Independence.

While good-willed, public spirited and historically conscious individuals and organizations are not wholly absent, they do not quite seem to know, organize and work consistently with one another as a team. This is another negative aspect of our public, national, cultural, political and spiritual life. All this is not to fault the nation. As if it were exterior to us. We are a part and parcel of the whole system with its good and evil. All of us are more trustful of ourselves than of others. We are self-righteous. We are individualistic and selfish even in our prayer and spirituality. Our social, philosophical and psychological structures have shaped us so. And we are not making concerted efforts effectively to question and overcome these handicaps.

As I see it, this is the context, in which we must locate the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi to India and to us Indians. The current socio-economic situation in the country is such that it is as though the whole system has disowned Gandhiji and declared him irrelevant to its present and future, if indeed he was relevant to the past. The critical question here is whether this judgment and the mood and presuppositions behind it are good and valid for the future of the country, and whether a future can be built without a past.

No socio-political unit, which forgot or dismissed its founder’s or foundational charisma, has flourished and prospered historically in its genius. Instead, it has disintegrated into sinister separatist ethnic units, which constituted it. The history of all our larger political parties, including the All India National Congress, is a proof of it. Those who do not know history have nothing constructive to preserve and hand on to the next generation. They could be the most dangerous contributors to national disarray and disunity.

In this context, the principal area of Gandhiji’s relevance to us Indians is in terms of being true to our national history. The central fact of that history is that the consciousness of India as a nation dawned on us only in and with the Independence movement. It was largely left for Gandhiji to forge our masses in that consciousness. It is true that the Indian National Congress had been founded with this objective. But until Gandhiji joined it, the Congress had only remained an annual gathering of educated and professional elite from the urban centres rather than the teeming rural millions.

The other area of relevance is ahimsa or non-violence as the surer way to establishing true justice and durable equity in the share of power and wealth than violence and terror. Violence breeds counter-violence or its own opposition, which, in its violent revolutionary blindness, will undo whatever has been done by the previous regime, irrespective of whether it was good or not. Gandhi’s belief in and practice of non-violence is a stark contrast to our youth’s aggression and impatience.

Compared to the selfish consumerist, luxury-loving economic atmosphere of the present, Gandhi’s was a life of voluntary simplicity and identification with the poor. He gave up even his highly lucrative legal profession as a Supreme Court lawyer in South Africa, for public socio-political work in the cause of the poor and illiterate labourers there. Therefore he can be a different, shining role model to inspire the idealism still found in at least some of our spoilt youth.

Gandhi complained openly against the incipient, small-scale corruption in the newly independent India, in order to ring it to the notice of the public. He wanted the Indian public to be aware of it and get organized to fight it. Citizens concerned for clean administration can still take up the challenge and example of Gandhiji and develop it further into a public movement against the rampant and large-scale corruption in public life and administration.

Gandhiji introduced and perfected during India’s Independence struggle, acts on cooperative, civil disobedience, political agitation with peoples’ participation, against the high-handed repression of civil rights by the foreign rulers. While the opposition and aggrieved parties are keeping these lessons alive occasionally on the floor of the Parliament and the State Legislatures, the public will have to take to it that the way the working of the Parliament and the State Legislatures are stalled by creating scenes hereby hindering the passages of the much needed bills. Besides the Public has to understand the loss our poor exchequer suffers because of such acts. Finally, we have been witnessing threats to indigenous market economies from regulations related to global trade; danger to female life from dowry deaths, and female infanticide and foeticide; and abridgement of labour rights by the Supreme Court’s verdict that has taken away the right of government employees to strike. The mention of Gandhiji’s Swadeshi Movement and his spearheading of the cause of women and of labour by organizing and leading workers’ strikes in South Africa and at many locations and regimes in India must be a beacon light to us Indians.