Sarvodaya International Trust, Bangalore - Dedicated to promoting the Gandhian ideals of Truth, Non Violence, Peace, Universal Brotherhood and Humanitarian Service.

Dedicated to promoting the Gandhian ideals of Truth, Non Violence, Peace, Universal Brotherhood and Humanitarian Service.

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The Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi
(Synopsis of lecture by Ambassador (Retd) P. Alan Nazareth, Managing Trustee, Sarvodaya International Trust, at University of Hawaii, Honolulu on July 27, 2001)

Winston Churchill contemptuously described him as a "half naked fakir" and "an old humbug" adding that it was "alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, striding half naked up the steps of the Vice Regal Palace, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor". However, the eminent historian Will Durant, in his 'Story of Civilization' commenting on historic developments in China and India in the first half of the twentieth century wrote "China followed Sun Yat Sen, took up the sword and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader one of the strangest figures in history, and gave to the world the unprecedented phenomenon of a revolution led by a saint, and waged without a gun.......He did not mouth the name of Christ, but acted as if he accepted every word on the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assissi has any life known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, simplicity and forgiveness of enemies."

That Gandhi, who came to be widely revered in India as the Mahatma (Great Soul), successfully used Truth and Non Violence as his principal tools to secure Independence for India from the British, is now well known. What is not so well known are the principles embodied in these unusual tools, and the fact there was a well established revolutionary movement in the Indian provinces of Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab when Gandhi first introduced them in India's struggle for independence.

Gandhi ardently believed that Truth was an objective moral reality as real and mighty as God himself. Truth was what constituted the 'Right Path'. Therefore it was not 'Might which was Right' but 'Right which was Might'. For him there was no greater strength than the strength of the Human Spirit when it is imbued with Truth and is unafraid to die, unarmed, upholding it. Two well known affirmations of his were "Strength does not come from physical capacity, it comes from an indomitable will" and "A small body of determined spirits, fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission, can alter the course of history". He felt that since Humans have been created "in the image of God" and have the "Divine Spark" in them they have to be motivated and governed by Reason and Love rather than by fear and violence. When one is steadfastly rooted in Truth, reason will always lead him along the path of Love and Righteousness. One has to live, and be ready to die, for Truth, Love and Righteousness, but never to kill. "Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is a certainty", "The objective of all non violent activity is always a mutually acceptable agreement, never the defeat, much less the humiliation of the enemy" and "Peace will come when Truth is pursued, and Truth implies Justice" are the three cardinal principles of Gandhi's concept and strategy of Truth and Non Violence.

When Gandhi arrived on the Indian political scene in 1919, there was strong revolutionary fervour among Indian nationalists. Their father figure was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838 -94), the Bengali novelist, whose popular novel 'Anandamath' had become the bible for secret societies, and its hero Satyanand, the model for "revolutionaries". It contained the rousing hymn 'Bande Mataram' dedicated to Mother India. The other influential figure was Aurobindo Ghosh, who had studied in Cambridge, and was selected for the coveted Indian Civil Service but gave it up to join the revolutionary movement along with his brother, who has also studied abroad. They both, like other Indian students who had studied abroad including Jawaharlal Nehru were much impressed with the achievements of Mazzini and Garibaldi in unifying Italy, and of Japan in defeating Russia in 1905. At the same time there was much outrage in India over the British decision to divide Bengal on religious lines in 1904. In this scenario Aurobindo wrote 'Bhabhani Mandir', urging that the humiliation and exploitation of Mother India could be ended only by invoking Kali, Goddess of Energy, and making great sacrifices in her name to liberate the motherland. Yugantar a new weekly launched in 1906 by a friend of Aurobindo "breathed bombs in very line". 'Bartaman Rananiti, ('Modern Art of War') published in 1907 propagated Bakunin's idea that destruction was another form of creation and that funds for revolutionary activities might be raised by any means including dacoities. There was a spate of assassinations of British officials not only in India but also in London during the 1905 - 1915 period. Among those attacked but escaped death were Vicerorys Lord Minto (in April 1909) and Lord Hardinge (in December 1912). At the Amritsar Congress in 1919 when Gandhi spoke about Truth and Non Violence, B. G. Tilak a senior nationalist leader who sympathized with the revolutionaries, contemptuously retorted "My friend, Truth has no place in politics". Two decades later another important nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose openly disagreed with Gandhi's non violent strategy and secretly left India for Germany and Japan. With the latter's collaboration he set up the 'Indian National Army' with British Indian troops taken as prisoners of war by them. Gandhi's task in promoting Truth and Non Violence was therefore not an easy one. He succeeded only because of his great moral strength and determination, his total identification with the poverty stricken Indian people and the impressive results his non violent campaigns based on mass participation, began to produce 1920 onwards. Besides Tilak died in 1920, and left a more open arena for him.

Not only did Gandhi succeed in inducing the mainstream national movement and the Indian people to accept his strategy of Satyagraha (confront with Truth) and Ahimsa (non violence), he even succeeded in getting the violence tribal Pathans on India's north west frontier, led by their outstanding(6'6'' tall) and charismatic leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan to adopt non violence. Ghaffar Kkan came to be called "Frontier Gandhi" and latterly has even been extolled as a "Moslem St. Francis" Deeply impressed by these incredible achievements Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote "At Gandhi's call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before in earlier times when Buddha proclaimed the Truth of compassion and fellow feeling, among all living creatures " The erudite psychologist Eric Ericson minutely examined one of Gandhi's early non violent "events" (the 1919 Ahemdabad mill workers strike") and in his book 'Gandhi's Truth' wrote " When I began this book, I did not expect to rediscover psychoanalysis in terms of truth, self suffering and non violence; but now that I have done so I see better what I hope the reader has come to see with me, namely that I felt attracted to the Ahmedabad event, because I sensed an affinity between Gandhi's truth and the insights of modern psychology". Ericson went on to construct an extended parallel between the Freudian technique for renewing growth in neurotic individuals and that developed by Gandhi to restore hope to a downtrodden and dejected people. Whether or not Gandhi consciously employed a Freudian technique, the fact remains that his achievement in inducing a whole nation of over 300 million people to accept his gospel of non violence, notwithstanding strong opposition from an influential minority within the national movement is a stupendous one.

Gandhi's steadfast pursuit of Truth made him perceive clearly not only the inequities of British Colonial rule in India, but also the dark side of Indian society, particularly the indignity and oppression of the caste system for those at its lowest level. These unfortunate people, then called "untouchables", Gandhi renamed as "Harijans" (children of God). He made the point forcefully, and repeatedly, that Indians could not justifiably complain about indignity and oppression at the hands of the British, if they themselves imposed similar cruelties on their Harijan compatriots. In Young India (May 25th,1921) he wrote "Swaraj or independence is meaningless if we continue to keep a fifth of India under perpetual subjection. Inhuman ourselves, we may not plead before the throne for deliverance from the inhumanity of others". Subsequently he also wrote "If it was proved to me that untouchability is an essential part of Hinduism, I would declare myself an open rebel against it." He regarded untouchability "an excrescence", a perversion of Hinduism and worked strenuously to eradicate it by fearlessly speaking, writing and standing up against it. When he set up his first Ashram in India just outside Ahmedabad, he named it Harijan Ashram and admitted a Harijan family, whose daughter Lakshmi he adopted as his own daughter. This resulted in the loss of financial support from high caste Hindus, but he remained firm and unconcerned. Subsequently, he launched a campaign for Harijan entry into Hindu temples (forbidden then). When India's constitution was being framed he insisted that Dr B. R. Ambedkar, the US trained constitutional expert and untouchable leader, who was his strong opponent, should be named Chairperson of the Constitution Drafting Committee. Dr Ambedkar thus had an almost free hand in including various safeguards in the Constitution for disadvantaged groups like his own. In the five decades since Independence, the Harijans have emerged as an important and well organized group, with a political party of their own since the early 1980s. One of them rose from an extremely deprived background to acquire a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics, to subsequently become India's Ambassador to Turkey, China and USA, Vice President, and then President of India from 1997 - 2002.

India has traditionally been a man's country par excellence. The woman's role had been strictly confined to the family and home. Besides, until 1829 when 'Sati' was banned, she was widely expected to immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre. The only Women's organizations such as Women's Indian Association and National Council for Women in India which were founded at the turn of the century, were composed of aristocratic women like the Maharanis of Baroda and Bhopal, who maintained close connections with the British and focused their activities mainly on "charities". It was Gandhi who first brought middle class and rural Indian women out of their homes and into the public domain. Quite early in his public life he had declared "As long as women do not come to public life and purify it, we are not likely to attain Swaraj. Even if we did, I would have no use for that Swaraj in which women have not made their full contribution" Subsequently he had affirmed "Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in the minutest detail in the activities of man". Indian women responded to his call in large numbers and played an important role the national movement. They showed that temperamentally they were well attuned to non-violence. In the initial phase they came mainly as volunteers at Indian National Congress sessions and took no part in the proceedings, but by the time of Gandhi's anti foreign cloth and salt satyagrahas, thousands of them were active participants, and Sarojini Naidu had emerged as one of his deputies At his gentle urging many women donated their jewellery to the national cause, marched in processions, picketed liquor and foreign cloth shops, sold khadi (handspun cloth) at street corners and provided sanctuary in their homes to 'satyagrahis'. In 1930 the Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution paying "grateful tribute to the women of India for the noble part they were progressively playing in the present struggle for national freedom, and the readiness they have increasingly shown to brave assaults, abuses, lathi charges and imprisonment." When the 1942 Quit India Movement was launched and Gandhi and other important leaders were suddenly arrested and taken away from the Gowalia public meeting in Bombay, a brave young woman named Aruna Asaf Ali unfurled the Indian flag. Another such woman Usha Mehta, along with three others set up and operated a secret "Congress Radio from somewhere in India" All these activities boosted the morale of the ordinary 'satyagrahis' and in the process also enabled Indian women to liberate themselves from age old taboos. Through Gandhi's non violent movement, Indian women could for the first time combine their roles as wives and mothers with their new roles as "non violent warriors" When Independence came they were unanimously accorded full legal equality with men as also some high public offices. In Independent India's first Union Cabinet there was a woman health minister. In 1949 Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (sister of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru) was elected President of the UN General Assembly. Within twenty years thereafter, Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India and continued in that position for 16 years, with only a two year break. Since then, numerous other Indian women have risen to high positions in politics, diplomacy, business, banking, newsmedia and other professions including aviation. The present Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, is a harijan woman. All these significant developments are another direct outcome of Gandhi's non violent movement.

Gandhi argued that India's poverty was partly the result of its own making, since it willingly produced the cotton for Britain's textile mills and then purchased the imported, high priced cloth made by these mills; the difference between the low price paid for the Indian cotton and the high price charged for the imported cloth was what produced the profit which financed and motivated Britain's colonial presence in India. It also created the mass unemployment among Indian weavers. If Indians would spin and weave their own cotton and refuse to buy British cloth, they could undermine colonial rule and bring new hope to India's unemployed. With this simple argument he persuaded India's nationalists, many of whom had studied abroad and had never before touched a spinning wheel, to make the daily spinning of cotton and wearing only handspun and handwoven clothes an essential element in the national struggle. This was the initial stimulus for the revival of India's traditional spinning and weaving industries. Today, this industry, predominantly located in rural areas, is providing employment to over 30 million spinners and weavers, and annually earning India over ten billion dollars in exports. Gandhi's maxims that "The cure for unemployment is not an unemployment dole but the provision of employment" and "production by the masses rather than mass production" have been been amply validated.

Because of his insistence on hand spun hand woven cloth and on "production by the masses" some critics have alleged that Gandhi was anti - machinery, anti-science and anti progress. This criticism is unfair and unjustified. In 1924 when specifically asked why he was anti-machinery, he replied : "How I can be anti-machinery when I know that even this body is a delicate piece of machinery? The spinning wheel is a machine, a little toothpick is a machine. The machine should not atrophy the limbs of man.... What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. Today machinery helps a few to ride on the back of the millions". Subsequently he also declared " I would welcome every invention of science made for the benefit of all"
Before Independence, India was a land of Maharajas, rajas and paupers. The former (about 565 in all) lived in incredible splendour while for most other Indians abject poverty, malnutrition, disease and premature death was their lot. The national awakening, which Gandhi's focus on the poor, unemployed and oppressed brought about, created widespread antipathy for these regal life styles. Speaking at the inauguration of the Benares Hindu University in 1916, at which Viceroy Hardinge and many Indian Rulers were present, he spoke thus : "His Highness the Maharaja of Benares spoke about the poverty of India. Other speakers too laid great stress upon it. But what did we witness in this great pandal. An exhibition of jewellery which made a splendid feast for the eyes of even the greatest jeweller from Paris. I compare these richly bedecked noblemen with the millions of the poor and say to them, there is no salvation for India unless you strip yourselves of this jewellery and hold it in trust for your countrymen in India" Though several of the rulers resented this speech, some were moved by it and subsequently became sympathetic to the national struggle. Even those rulers who remained opposed soon discovered that the strong nationalist fervour Gandhi's satyagraha movement had engendered in the country as a whole had also effected their subjects. This left them little option but to fall in line with the national upsurge. Hence soon after Independence, the Indian Govt was able to peacefully integrate all except three (one of which is Kashmir) of these royal kingdoms into the Indian Union.. The rulers were compensated with privy purses. Some of them finding these privy purses insufficient to maintain their former life styles, converted their palaces into Hotels, and gave India about a dozen exceptionally luxurious hotels. This smooth and bloodless abolition of India's royal kingdoms and feudal life styles is another significant outcome of Gandhi's non-violent national movement.

It is instructive to recall the considerable bloodshed in the American, French, Russian, Chinese and Ethiopian Revolutions before Independence was achieved, and feudalism and slavery abolished. In most European countries, as also in the US, women secured the right to vote only in this century, and after many years of arduous struggle. Gandhi's Non Violent movement achieved all this much more painlessly. Prof. Alan Brinkley of Columbia University, writing in the New York Times Magazine in an article titled 'The Peace Maker' wrote: "Most revolutions create enormous aspirations and never really fulfill them; some betray them utterly. The American Revolution quickly drew boundaries around notions of freedom that were its inspiration, excluding African Americans, native Americans, and to a considerable degree women. The French Revolution produced a frenzy of murderous rage, followed by nearly another century of monarchies. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions created tyranny, oppression and stagnations…..Gandhi has been so mythologized since his assassination in 1948, the real man has almost disappeared. But he deserves his position as a resonant symbol of one of the most important phenomena of modern history: the simultaneous assault on colonialism and the oppression of individuals, which has transformed much of the 20th century world".

Gandhi's views on rights are notable and significant. He linked rights directly to duties and held that all the individual's rights have been provided by society. Therefore for the continued provision of these rights they had to be in the interest not only of the individual but of society as a whole. "The man who neglects his duty and cares only to safeguard his rights does not know that rights that do not spring from duties done, cannot be safeguarded." Thus, for instance, the right to free speech would survive only if individuals did their duty of not using speech in a way that is anti-social. Similarly the right to a free market would be best protected if individuals did their duty of ensuring that markets did not destroy society. In other words, every time a duty is not properly performed it erodes the ability and will of society to protect the corresponding right. By society, Gandhi meant not the state but society as the collective entity of individuals. He was skeptical about how much the state can achieve on its own in this respect.

Though India's national struggle for independence ended sadly, much against Mahatma Gandhi's will, in the partition of the subcontinent on religious lines he had always striven for national unity, inter religious harmony, and universal brotherhood. He always commenced his public meetings with readings from various sacred texts and often declared he was as much a Moslem, a Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Parsee as he was a Hindu. Writing about this aspect of him, his eminent American biographer Louis Fischer wrote " Mahatma Gandhi, a supremely devout Hindu was incapable of discriminating against anyone on account of religion, race, caste, color or anything. His contribution to the equality of untouchables and to the education of a new generation which was Indian instead of Hindu or Moslem or Parsee or Christian has world significance".

Gandhi's strategy of Truth and non-violence has had notable success outside India. Using this strategy, Martin Luther King managed to bring about more beneficial change for his fellow blacks in the US in the single decade of the 1960s, than a bloody civil war, the assassination of a great president, and one hundred years of constitutional and legal struggle thereafter, had achieved. It also brought about a fundamental transformation among the blacks. King described the transformation thus :"When legal contests were the sole form of activity, the ordinary Negro was involved as a passive spectator. His interest was stirred, but his energies were unemployed. Mass marches transformed the common man into the star performer he became. The Negro was no longer a subject of change; he was the active organ of change. The dignity his job denied him, he obtained in political and social action".

Since India's independence in 1947, over 130 European colonies in Asia and Africa have achieved independence. This has happened partly because most of them used the same efficacious tool of non violent struggle, and partly because the national movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King effectively changed the global mindset on the acceptability of colonialism and racialism. In the 80s and 90s non violent movements have successfully brought down oppressive regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Philippines, South Africa and the Soviet Union. Using the same technique, one lone, frail woman, Aung San Su Syi has bravely stood up against oppressive military might in Burma and effectively swung world public opinion in support of her democratic cause. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has done likewise for the tragic Tibetan cause. In accepting his Nobel Prize in December 1989 he spoke thus : " I accept the prize with profound gratitude on behalf of the oppressed everywhere, and all those who struggle for freedom and work for world peace. I accept it as a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of non violent action for change - Mahatma Gandhi - whose life taught and inspired me. And of course, I accept it on behalf of the six million Tibetan people, my brave countrymen and women inside Tibet, who have suffered and continue to suffer so much…."

Gandhi's non violent strategies have aroused much interest in the US, Europe and other parts of the world not only among national liberation, civil rights, peace and peoples' resistance movements - the Hungarians used them after the Soviet Invasion of 1956 - but also among military strategists. Paul Wehr in his article on 'Non Violence and National Defence' in the Book 'Gandhi in the Post Modern Age' writes "Gandhi's ideas on non violent national defence made their way to a western world on the brink of war. Pacifists there were looking desperately for a viable alternative. Kenneth Boulding's essay 'Paths of Glory: A new way with War' (1937) proposed non violent resistance as a functional substitute for war. He observed that the technological revolution has made war dysfunctional. This point he made so many years ago continues to provide the basis for contemporary social defence research as does his concept of transarmament. Boulding appears to have been the first to suggest that a nation, in this case Great Britain, adopt a non violent defence policy, though others like Lindberg in Denmark, and Vrind in Holland were thinking along the same lines. In Norway, Johan Galtung and Arne Naess extolled Gandhi's thinking about non violent national defence as a representation of James's moral equivalent of war. Their work was a direct link between Gandhi and modern social defence policy. By the late 1950s, the real threat of nuclear war further confirmed Bouldings prognosis that weapons of mass destruction rendered war dysfunctional in the extreme. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, social defence seemed more credible as an option for national defence." The 1964 Oxford Conference on Civilian Defence brought together peace researchers, military strategists and people having direct experience with non violent resistance. By 1980 'Social Defence' or 'Non military resistance' had in one form or the other become an integral element of national defence policy in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Mahatma Gandhi's advocacy of non violence extended also to the environment. He urged simple living, avoidance of profligacy and waste, economy of every resource and respect for all life. His aphorism "The world has enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed" is now the prime slogan of the United Nations' Environmental programme.

Martin Luther King eulogised him thus :" Mahatma Gandhi was the first person in human history to lift the ethic of Love of Jesus Christ, above mere interaction between individuals and make it into a powerful and effective social force on a large scale".
Albert Einstein, renowned scientist and contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi, paid him an even greater tribute as "A leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a victorious fighter who always scorned the use of force, a man of wisdom and humility who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being and has at all times risen superior .......Generations to come will scarce believe that such a man as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth".

In the newly dawned millennium, with the world constantly ravaged with terrorist violence from determined, well financed terrorist outfits and ominously threatened with weapons of mass destruction, Gandhi's gospel of Truth, love, justice and non violent action might well be a more rational and effective way of handling the many difficult problems that confront most nations. Prof. Ralph Bultjens, Toynbee History Prize Laureate, concurs. In his foreword to the book 'Gandhi in the Post Modern Age' he writes " The fragility of modern civilization is exposed by the frighteningly ineffective way in which our world approaches conflict resolution. In international relationships, neither conventional diplomacy nor various uses of military deterrence have improved the thin margin on which the world exists. This somewhat pessimistic reading of history is challenged by one major exception, Mahatma Gandhi's application of policies and techniques of non violence in India. Gandhi's success both redeems human nature from the inevitability of its historical experience and also suggests the viability of non violence in modern situations".

GANDHI ON RIGHTS