Hyderabad: ‘At the time that communal unity possessed me, I was a lad twelve years old,’ said Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi whose ‘boyhood dream’ was ‘amity’ between Hindus, Muslims and Parsis.
It was no ordinary coincidence that the Indian National Congress founded by an Englishman four years later had a Hindu as its first President in December 1885 at Bombay, followed by a Parsi at Calcutta in 1886, a Muslim at Madras in 1887 and an Englishman at Allahabad in 1888.
The continuation of this pattern in the years that followed marked the consolidation of cultural pluralism and secularism. The exhortation of the founder of the Indian National Congress Allan Octavian Hume to India’s youth ‘to act upon the eternal truth that self-sacrifice and unselfishness are the only unfading guides to freedom and happiness’ was timely and appropriate.
Mohandas, the boy from Porbandar who imbibed such values as cultural pluralism and oneness of human spirit at the Rajkot school, knelt at his mother’s feet promising to lead a life of purity and discipline before going to England to become a barrister.
South Africa, where lawyer Gandhi spent more than two decades of his early life braving a torrent of mental and physical assaults, transformed Mohandas into a crusader for the down-trodden and champion of the non-violent movement against arbitrary and racist authorities. 1906 was a turning point in his life and in the history of the modern world as well. Satyagraha was born in South Africa.
Its power was such that as Ramachandra Guha quotes from a Kannada weekly “not a sword was drawn not a gun fired…but heroism displayed by Mr.Gandhi in making inequity’s defeat its own end is without a parallel.” As Guha sums up quoting a letter of a South African friend ‘you gave us a lawyer and we gave you a Mahatma.’ Gandhi himself described satyagraha as ‘perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth.’
India was in a state of disarray, if not chaos, when Mahatma Gandhi returned to his motherland. His mission was to liberate the groaning millions of his countrymen from the yoke of foreign rule and to emancipate them from exploitation and injustice.
The suit-wearing barrister from England who had become an iconic crusader for the non-white oppressed South Africans returned to India to a hero’s welcome. He swung into action with his weapons of Satyagraha, non-violence and love.
As Rajmohan Gandhi movingly narrates the transformation quoting an Arab poet Mikhail Noema: “The spindle in Gandhi’s hand became sharper than the sword; the simple white sheet wrapping Gandhi’s thin body was an armour plate which guns from the fleets of the Master of the Seas could not pierce; and the great goat of Gandhi became stronger than the British lion.”
The rest is history, brilliantly summed up by Romain Rolland thus: “Mahatma Gandhi has raised up three hundred millions of his fellow-men, shaken the British Empire and inaugurated in human politics the most powerful movement that the world has seen for nearly two thousand years.”
Gandhiji epitomized the power of love, compassion and forgiveness. In personal life, there were occasions when he sought the forgiveness of even his kin when he felt that the occasion demanded it. To his angry and protesting son, he once gently said: “Forgive your father, if you think he has done you wrong.”
His saintliness stunned and silenced his harshest critics, be they the venom-spewing political adversaries or sulking near ones. He was likened to the Buddha and Christ. No wonder that some Christian missionaries from England said during their visit to India that they saw Christ in Sevagram.
The question that haunts humanity in the world of today afflicted with lust for power, endless greed for wealth, violence, corruption and growing poverty is whether there is any hope for the future. The answer lies in the legacy bequeathed by Mahatma Gandhi that is light in the midst of darkness.
As Kingsley Martin put it “Gandhi’s life and death will remain a witness to the faith that men may still overcome misery, cruelty and violence by Truth and Love.”
This time, every year, we reaffirm our faith in those timeless values that constitute a beacon of hope for the future.
Also read: Mahatma, Congress and the Independence–Partition Dichotomy
