On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, revered world over as the greatest human to walk on earth in the 20th century, was gunned down by a fanatic. That heinous crime and what followed have confirmed a historical truth: history takes very little time to negate, nay, invalidate the history-makers.
Gandhiji had done everything to free the minds and bodies of men cross the world, and yet, seems to have become irrelevant to his own people and country. No single human had achieved so much to change the history and geography of the world as the Mahatma did and yet, he became an instant victim of his supreme achievement.
Born out of struggle based on Satya and Ahimsa (truth an non-violence) India, today, has the most diversified forms of violence on its soil, from teen-age murder, gang-rape, custodial killing at the micro level to student violence, mob violence, bandh violence, Naxalites massacre and terrorist carnage at the macro level.
Today, more than ever in the past, India misses Mahatma Gandhi. The rightless Indian citizen needs him. The normless rulers thrive on the gift of freedom-bestowed power an pelf solely on the fact that there is no Mahatma to question them an lead the people against immoral governance and unjust laws.
The man who experimented with truth all his life would find his heirs basking in the comfort of not having to adhere to truth or allow truth to triumph in almost all spheres of public life and activity. The man who used the weapon of Truth – Satyagraha to fight oppression of any sort and fought for safeguarding human dignity, would not have viewed with horror the tragedy of millions of tones of precious food grain rotting in ill-equipped god owns on the one hand, and thousands of poor farmers committing suicides due to starvation and depths, on the other, year after year?
The Mahatma had actually realized even at the dawn of Independence, that his uncompromising insistence on honesty, truth and austerity, would be an acute embarrassment to the governance and politics of India, and that the most probable casualties of India’s independence would be its culture, tradition and values. In a sense, the Mahatma’s usefulness to the making of new nation had ended with the birth of a country. They made him the Father of the Nation, Bapu, and the child disowned the parent promptly and unmistakably.
No one saw it more clearly than the Mahatma himself. According to Pyarelal (Gandhij’s personal secretary) in “Mahatma Gandhi: the Last Phase”, Gandhiji told the CWC in June, 1946, that he was not happy with the latest British proposals but ‘I admit defeat, you are not bound to act on my suspicion. I shall now leave you’. Pyarelal recalls: ‘Every body was silent. Everybody understood. In that hour of decision, they had no use of Bapu. They had decided to drop the pilot’. Further, on May 1, 1947, when the partition plan was approved, according to Pyarelal, Gandhiji said: ‘Today I find myself alone, my writ runs no more, no one listens to me. I can see clearly that the future of independence gained at this price will be dark’.
Clearly, our isolation of the Mahatma from ourselves is India’s biggest error. Therefore, while we pay him our grateful homage on his 145th Jayanti, it is also time to look beyond government, public life and business and bureaucracy to the ordinary people of India to invoke the Mahatma to secure and insulate the nation from the scourges of violence and untruth.
