Why Gandhi’s Legacy has no successors in today’s time…
In contemporary times supporting Gandhian ideology is nothing short of a crime, the moment you buttress or admire a Gandhian thought people flock to attack you as if it is their national duty to do so. It’s like everyone has opinion about him and unfortunately most of them has a negative one. So if so many people has same thoughts does it mean that they are right?
Well the answer is partly yes and substantially no.
See Gandhi is an enigma. The more you try to understand him the more you get confuse cause even Gandhi himself was not sure about himself. All through his life his perspective was constantly changing although the basic principles of truth and non violence was always there but the path leading to it was always experimented with trials and errors. So there was huge difference between the Gandhi who arrived from Africa in 1915 from the Gandhi at the time of partition. That’s why his autobiography is also named as ‘ My experiments with truth’ as he was constantly with trials and errors perfecting his ideology by experimenting it on himself.
When Gandhi finished his law , he was more British than Indian, and believed in British sense of Justice and had no issues with British ruling India. He was proud and haughty and was just like a common person with common ambitions in life. But when he was thrown out of First class compartment of train in South Africa only because he was a non white, something changed in him.
Something like this has never happened to him not in India where his Family were big landlords and not even in England when he was pursuing his law there. But it happened and it was a jolt to him as if like some epiphany, where the reality has finally dawned on him.
And this incident turned a man into a mahatma of the future. For most of us when we are attacked or assaulted the first reaction is of revenge and violence but Gandhi was different he chose non violence and tried to hate the crime and not the criminal.
Britain had colonised half the world through force and underhand diplomacy. And they justified their actions in the name of providing welfare and order in the colony and termed it a white man’s burden to uplift the non white or should I say uncivilized and uncouth according to them. They took great pride in it and so even using force and repression against the colonised people when they revolted is justified in the name of greater good for the colony as a whole.
But when they encountered Gandhi and his method of protest they were at their wits end. They don’t know how to counter it. Previously whenever there was any revolt or protest against the British it was always in some form of violence and thus British had a justification in countering force with force but when Gandhi used Nonviolence and non cooperation , there was no tactical precedence of countering such protest. How can you hit a person continuously when he is not hitting back. Gandhi’ method hit right at core of British pride and uncovered the veil of fake morality that the Brits were harboring it for so many years and showed their real face to the world.
Before Gandhi’ the masses were not much involved in fight against British cause the sense of nationalism was not there, nobody used to address themselves as Indians as for most of them there regional identity was more dominating. But things took a u turn when Gandhi arrived from Africa ,it was he who first said that India lives in her Villages and if you want to connect with India connect with villages. Before him Congress was a organization which used to meet annually discuss few
contemporary issues and again go back to hibernation for a year without having any real contact with masses. It was Gandhi who made the freedom struggle a mass led movement by traveling to villages , understanding their problems , sympathizing with them. It is here by looking at the poverty of masses he discarded his Western wear which he endeared most and started adopting khadi that too woven by himself. There was also a hidden objective in promoting khadi, it was to give boost to the production indigenous textile which was source of livelihood to many poor Indians.
It was he who made the illiterate masses understand the importance of self rule and swaraj. He not only talked about political swaraj but also moral swaraj and said the latter was more important than the former. So in a way he was also getting the masses ready for the post independence situations and trying to build a moral society. So in a way he had a post brexit plan also about how to redraw the future of post British India.
The legacy that Gandhi left was left un inherited by all. Congress became pro Nehruvian after Gandhi’ s death. Gandhian ideologies were packed in neat box decorate and put in a museum where they could be hardly propagandized.
Being Gandhi in today’s world is the most hated thing when there is prevalence of half baked , prejudice information. It is easy to malign his name but before saying anything against him just imagine a person who abdicated his wealth his future his personal life even his clothes, spent more than half of his life in jail, lived like fakir and even after independence did not take anything in return not even a constitutional post when others were crowning themselves as prime minister and other ministers, is it right to malign his name ,is it Justice. I leave it to your fine sense of judgement.