What Mahatma Gandhi means to us

In this article, Prof. A. Prasanna Kumar, Director Centre for Policy studies, tries to establish what Mahatma Gandhi and his ideas mean to us in modern times. He explains that 'true economics' for Gandhi meant standing for social justice instead of attaining growth by spending and consumption.

New Delhi: India was an infant democracy, having won independence only five and a half months earlier. Still, it was a nation that was thrown into a state of shock and disbelief on that fateful Friday evening, January 30, 1948, when the news spread about the assassination of the Father of the Nation.

Mahatma Gandhi was a different father. He had little time for his own family. His family was the largest in the world. It had no caste or religion. It transcended boundaries and borders. Three hundred and thirty three million people of India wept and many of them went without food that night. The radio, the only available medium for quick transmission of news those days, wept throughout broadcasting doleful music and messages of grief.

We were boys then who did not immediately understand the reason for such mourning and overwhelming grief when we returned home from the playground after a game of cricket. Some of us even heaved a sigh of relief as the sun set on the horizon as there would be no school the following day. Shocking it was to see our elders crying, glued as they were throughout that night to the radio set. Food was not cooked in the house and almost all the elders fasted in grief.

Tears rolled down everyone’s cheeks when the radio broadcast a sobbing Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Light has gone out of our lives” speech. Friday, January 30, 1948 was the gloomiest day in every Indian home. 31st was no less. Millions of people cried inconsolably hearing, Melville de Mellow’s commentary, broadcast live by All India Radio, on the funeral of Gandhiji that Saturday evening.

Seventy-one years after that, raising the question ‘what Gandhiji means to us’ might sound odd if not ridiculous. Still, it has its own relevance even though some question the ‘relevance’ of Gandhiji for today’s India of a billion plus people most of whom do not know much about him.

We have seldom been a nation during the last seven decades to know the value of the Father of the Nation. We are still a backward country, fragmented socially and culturally with a large percentage of population, larger than the population of the United States, living below the poverty line. There are, of course, islands of prosperity where people feel differently from the mainstream.

Romain Rolland called Gandhiji “A Christ without a cross.” Gandhi bore a greater burden, a heavier load of human misery and suffering and for much longer time than Christ had done.

He also led as pure and hard a life as the heroes of our epics had supposedly done to protect righteousness. Gandhiji’s religion was for the entire humanity, not for a region or set of people.

Not a Sunday show, as he himself declared, “but an hourly and minutely mentor and monitor emanating from a belief “ in the ordered moral government of the universe” that is “subject to the acid test of reason.” In short ‘a religion that would free the world of all ills.’

True economics stands for social justice and Swaraj means freedom in terms of empowerment of the weak. Ernest Barker wrote that Gandhi “had a Platonic feeling that governing and administrative persons should live on a pittance, content with the opportunities of service and not expecting greater rewards.'

Such ideas would be considered weird and ‘uncivilised’ in today’s India where the salaries of top leaders and civil servants get revised steeply and regularly as they too have to compete with those in the affluent private sector.

Gandhiji may not mean much to those in politics, especially those in power. But to the vast majority of people not only in India but all over the world he means a lot. Because he stirred up loving hearts to action and lived for as well as in mankind.

Read: Relevance of Gandhian Communication in modern society