Gandhi and His Message | Arun Gandhi on the Anniversary of
His Grandfather’s Assassination
Weeks before his assassination, a journalist asked the great
Indian leader and champion of non-violence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi what
would happen to his philosophy of nonviolence after his death. His reply was
both prophetic and poignant. He said: “The people of India will follow me in life,
worship me in death, but not make my cause their cause.â€
These words could have been uttered by any of the people we
worship today. Gandhi’s cause was simple: Bring peace through religious, ethnic
and cultural harmony among the people of the world. Our emphasis on nationalism
and patriotism, narrowing people’s perspectives to a small geographical area,
was repugnant to Gandhi. In fact, he said, the acceptance of the
interconnectedness and inter-relatedness of all beings is what will save this
world from strife and destruction. No country, however rich and powerful, can
be safe if the rest of the world destroys itself. The security and stability of
any country, he believed, depends on the security and stability of the whole
world.
What we are doing today is just the opposite. We are not
only torn apart as nations but even in our belief in God and spirituality. The
world is witnessing violent chaos. People killing each other in the name of God
although God and religion are about love, respect, compassion, understanding
and acceptance. If the world does not appear to have accepted Gandhi’s message
of nonviolence and a life of harmony, neither has his own country of birth and
dedication – India.
Not even his own Congress Party believed in or accepted his
philosophy and way of life although this party has ruled over India for
almost 60 years after independence in 1947. The Congress Party paid lip-service
to Gandhi, printed his image on all currency notes and observed his birth and
death anniversaries. Beyond that Gandhi’s legacy gathered dust on the shelves.
If India
could not give the lead to the world in sane living can one expect other
nations to follow Gandhi’s ideology?
I believe Gandhi was a universal personality and his
philosophy should appeal to anyone who believes in civilized behavior. After
all he did influence many leaders in different countries! The tragedy is that
everyone sees his philosophy of nonviolence as a strategy of convenience and
not as a way of life. The consequence is that individually and collectively as
nations we subscribe to a Culture of Violence that dominates every aspect of
our lives. Nonviolence is selectively used as just another weapon of
convenience.
Peace has, consequently, come to mean the absence of war and
that if we are not fighting physically we are nonviolent. We do indulge,
however, in passive (or non-physical) violence like exploitation, oppression of
all kinds, wasting resources, encouraging disparities, and the countless other
ways in which we hurt people emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. It
is this passive violence that generates anger in the victim and ultimately
results in physical violence. It is the fuel that ignites war and violence.
India
is now at the crossroads. The extreme right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) and its multiple off-shoots have come into power. Their
genesis is in the Hindu supremacist and militant RSS organization, that was
responsible for the assassination of Gandhi. Since the assassination of Gandhi
in 1948 the Hindu right wing claimed they had nothing to do with the conspiracy
and that it was all engineered by Nathuram Godse, his brother Gopal and a few
friends. The reality is that Godse was a member of the RSS, and withdrew
himself from membership only to protect other RSS functionaries, during his
trial.
With the sweeping majority that the Hindu Right wing now
enjoys in the Indian Parliament their Members of Parliament have been
emboldened to demand that Godse be considered a hero of the Indian
revolution, that the killing of Gandhi was an act of patriotism and that
Gandhi’s image be removed from the currency notes. To me this sounds like
tacit admission that they were morally responsible for empowering Nathuram
Godse to carry out the assassination plot, just as the Prime Minister, Narendra
Modi, is morally responsible for the slaughter of more than 2,000 Muslims in
the State of Gujarat in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister, the equivalent of
a US Governor. The slaughter was the result of police inaction and the
Government’s lack of intention to call in Federal troops. Either Mr. Modi
wanted the slaughter to take place or he was a weak leader incapable of
controlling the government and the bureaucracy. Most people believe it is the
former and not the latter
The Hindu nationalists, like bigoted people anywhere, are
adept at speaking from both sides of their mouths. This includes the Prime
Minister, Mr. Modi, who has almost overnight become America’s wunderkind. The BJP and
its numerous allies firmly believe in the Nazi theory that a lie repeated often
enough will eventually be accepted as truth. Unless the people of India come together against hate, intolerance
and fascism, lies, deceit and corruption could be India’s fate in the foreseeable
future.
ABOUT DR. ARUN GANDHI
Dr. Arun Manilal Gandhi
Born 1934 in Durban South Africa, Arun was sent by his
parents to India
when he was 12 years old so that he could live with and learn from his
grandfather, Mohandas Gandhi. It was then that young Gandhi learned the
principles of non-violence that he continues to espouse until today. Dr. Gandhi
spent much of his adult life in India
working as a journalist and promoting social and economic changes for the poor
and the oppressed classes. Along with his wife Sunanda he rescued about 128
orphaned and abandoned children from the streets and placed them in loving
homes around the world. They also began a Center for Social Change which
transformed the lives of millions in villages in the western state of Maharashtra. In 1987 Arun came to the United States and in 1991 he started the M. K.
Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the Christian
Brothers University
in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2007, the Institute was moved
to the University of Rochester, New York. In 2008 Arun resigned from the
Institute to begin the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute, with its mission
to build basic education schools for the very poor children of the world. The
first school will open shortly in a depressed village in western India
(www.gandhiforchildren.org). Arun Gandhi has taken the message of
nonviolence and peace-making to hundreds of thousands of high school and
university youth around the United
States and much of the Western world. His
publications include The Legacy of Love; The Forgotten Woman: The Life of
Kastur, wife of Gandhi, and several others.
http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/
