Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been an enduring hero of mine since my childhood. I have always felt awed and inspired by the legend of the man who brought the people of India together to fight against the British and bring freedom to India without violence. As I have grown older and older, I have learnt to separate the fiction about him from what could be fact. I aver many a time that Gandhi is celebrated and ostracized in this country for all kinds of wrong reasons. I say this because we either accept him uncritically as a faultless person, a God so to speak, or we focus only upon his weaknesses, neither of which project him the way he should be projected.
Gandhi is no God. He like us is a mortal but unlike us is a great man. His concepts of satyagraha, ahimsa and his model of development based in self-sufficient rural communities that solve problems at the level at which they arise itself are what make him the great man that he is. What saddens me today is that his detractors, of which there are many, project him as a casteist and a communalist or someone who believed in appeasing the Muslims of the country. Without understanding the true intent of his disagreement with Ambedkar (I have their correspondence in the form of a book and I can assure you while they differed on some issues, both respected each other immensely) he has been now projected as someone who wanted to keep the caste system alive and continue the oppression of the lower castes. The Hindutva brigade see him as a betrayer of the cause of the majority Hindus for the sake of appeasement of the minority Muslims. The Muslims on the other hand see in him someone who wanted to establish the hegemony of Hinduism and subordinate Muslims to it. The reason, he said he would like to see the establishment of a Rama Rajya post independence. Nobody wanted to see that he was using the concept of Rama Rajya as a metaphor for a society that is based in equality and justice. Sadly Gandhi was the anti-hero in his own life time. And it is that which made him pay a price with his life. But for me Gandhi will always be the man who had the courage to speak out his thoughts, had the conviction in the rightness of his thoughts and converted his thoughts to action. His martyrdom is also an act of courage. He died because he believed that India should not be divided. He was killed because he believed that all religions had taught the same morality and that it did not matter if it was a Hindu or a Muslim who was the Prime Minister of the country. When as a child I first read Freedom at Midnight by Dominic La Pierre and Larry Collins tears welled into my eyes, especially when I reached the end of the book where pictures of the fallen great man were printed. I have read that book again and again and for me Gandhi became the true apostle of peace and selflessness. India produced one of the greatest human beings of all time who in turn produced for us, his posterity a free country. But we do not value him or our country today and that is the irony of life perhaps.
P.S: I wanted to post this yesterday i.e the day on which his life was taken away but due to paucity of time I could not do that. Hence I am late as usual.
P.P.S: The usual again. Did not proof read. Please excuse errors.
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