Since I put forward the questions let me answer a few of them. I was born in the same country as M. K. Gandhi, the apostle of non violence recognized the world over. Since I am fairly old, at present 53, I have grown up reading about Gandhi. I have also seen the film Gandhi directed by the famous David attenborough on the life of Gandhi several times. In fact I saw it once again yesterday only, on a TV channel.
Let me brief you what I think this personality was and how did he become what he became.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in a prosperous family; prosperous
enough to educate him enough so that he could attain qualifications for
a barrister from the Oxford University.He was also lucky enough that he
got a contract from some prosperous clients in South Africa. It is during his journey to meet these clients in South Africa that he came face to face for the first time the atrocities based on apartheid of the British Empire. He was thrown out of the first class railway compartment in the night even though he had a valid ticket for the journey.
After he somehow reached his destination, he came to know of the culture based on apartheid there. He wanted to react. He realized that any kind of violent struggle would be futile because the law and the power of force was only with the government. He therefore experimented with a non violent struggle and ultimately succeeded. Because the large immigrant population was impressed by this credentials and also because he was ready to suffer imprisonment and injuries. He was ultimately asked to leave S. Africa by the local government. In the meanwhile the news about his experiment and the success spread far and wide mainly because he impressed several English journalists who wrote professedly in the international press about him.
Moral: It always helps to be educated and mingle with your adversary.
When he came back to India, a country that had been under British rule all his life, he came in contact with many prosperous and influential Indians, namely
Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and
BalGangadhar Tilak who were somehow trying to find a base in Indian politics but were not very successful because they had hardly any mass appeal amongst the poor and illiterate Indians who constituted a major chunk of the population.
It is at this juncture that it dawned on Gandhi the sufferings of his fellow countrymen and the relevance of the non violent power struggle he had experimented in South Africa. He discarded his western attire so that he could be identified with the people. He underwent a long struggle accepting many hardships and failures that came in the way, because he realized that an armed struggle would not be as effective because it would lack mass participation.
Ultimately the British Empire had to yield and grant independence, but it was this stage where Gandhi did not achieve a spectacular success. And he was christened as the Father of the nation. The independence brought about a Government led by the prosperous educated landowners, who were keen to cash on their closeness to the leaders of the freedom struggle. After the independence the adversary was not so easily identifiable, in fact it was the sense of communal ism which was present in the majority of the masses.
Today, the youth and the children of India are hardly aware of this
personality. Lately a Bollywood film called
Lage raho Munnabhai is much a topic of debate in India, because it has tried to place the philosophy of Gandhi in the current context.
