Massacring Mahatma



It's the flavour of the season to write or talk about Gandhi. In India and elsewhere, every writer worth his salt has to write a piece about Gandhi, what with magazines dedicating cover stories and movies eulogising his principles these days. I, an aspiring one, has also been pushed to the corner to prove that I'm worth my salt. So I have piece of Gandhi now.

Unfortunately, many of these writings show me just one thing, that they have grossly misunderstood Gandhi. In the best case, they adopt their own interpretations. I am not referring to Lage Raho Munnabhai because I'm yet to see the movie.

Nevertheless, one of the silliest I can quote is when the writer discusses how Gandhi can be used in everyday life. One of the examples: What if the Auto guy demands extra money. One is to argue or fight with him. Another (the Gandhian) one, is to understand that Auto drivers are poor and the extra money will help them and yield to it.

My question: Won't yielding to the demand encourage the auto drivers from extorting fare from the passengers? What if the passenger herself is poor? And the worst, aren't we encouraging dishonesty? Would Gandhi approve of dishonesty?

On the big picture, this is a passive behaviour and I'm not sure whether Gandhi stood for it. As far as I know, he stood for staunch and active honesty and the tireless effort to hold onto one's principles.

Another essay allured that Gandhi was a success because his enemies were British. The author commented that Gandhi's disobedience succeeded because the ruling British were law-abiding. If you were to replace the English with the Nazi, Gandhi could not have crossed one mile into his Dandi march.

Though the author commented that this is only hypothetical, I consider this blatantly preposterous. This way, we can bring down anybody's success. Your son scored a centum because the paper was easy, you folks won the rowing competition because the head of the competitive team had a flu, etc.

This apart, the colonial British didn't do much with Gandhi because in my opinion, they were clueless. They didn't know how to handle him. Also, during Dandi, he was too big to be touched. Remember that the same British hanged Bagat Singh, Vanji Nathan, deported Tilak and dumped Veer Savarkar in Kalapani. They couldn't do much with Gandhi except arresting him once in a while because it was too sensitive. All hell would have broken loose had he been touched.

I sincerely hope these stupid hypotheses and advices on 'Gandhian Lifestyles' will stop soon. Though he was a legend, many of Gandhi's principles cannot be practiced today. Perhaps his way of life would suit an individual but how can a nation state adopt it as a policy? For instance, can we afford to not hang Afzal Guru because Gandhi was against capital punishment? Can we not multiply our military prowess against Pakistan because Gandhi wanted us to be friends with them?

I consider Gandhi as one of the greatest leaders ever walked on this earth. He was smart, shrewd, honest, and above all, loved the people he fought for. He single-handedly waged a highly unconventional war against a huge and mighty empire and well, won it handsomly. The British, who called him a 'half-naked fakir', years later ended up making a movie on his life. Many of his ideas such as rural-centered governance, an almost-fanatic passion for cleanliness, and environmentalism are still relevant and need implementation on a war-footing.

But going beyond this is unnecessary. And well, preaching things like encouraging dishonest auto-drivers or hypothesising Gandhi vs. Hitler would be insulting his memories.

Let's stop insulting that poor half-naked gentleman.