Let Gandhi Return

The nation is gearing up to celebrate the 150^th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi with an array of year-long programmes. Undoubtedly the great soul deserves the celebration. Gandhi was one of the greatest souls that ever walked on the earth. India has been converted into a quagmire that inevitably submerges any Gandhian value or principle that dares to make its presence palpable.

Gandhi was religious but genuinely so. For him religion was a tool to make himself a better human being day after day. It was his spiritual sustenance. It helped him see other human beings as sparks of the divine. It enabled him to love every person as his brother or sister. He had no enemies. Even the British were not his enemies, as he declared time and again. Religion would never make Gandhi sectarian; on the contrary, it gifted him with universal love.

Truth was the foundation of Gandhi’s morality. Every genuine life is an endless quest after truth and Gandhi’s life was nothing else. He experimented with truths as the title of his autobiography says. Such experiments are learning processes meant to understand the reality better and better. Gandhi knew that truth was not something given to us readymade in the scriptures or anywhere. Truth reveals itself to us every day if we care to see it. Gandhi would never concede to claims about our age-old scriptures as the ultimate sources of truth including scientific truths.

As in the case of every genuine saint, compassion was an integral part of the Gandhian vision. He never forced anyone to do anything that went against his own conscience or fundamental inclinations. If you cannot give up certain things such as, say, a particular food, you needn’t. If you force yourself to do something and then become a surly person, it is of no use. Gandhi’s infinite tolerance arose from his infinite compassion.

Gandhi envisaged an India in which every citizen – irrespective of differences born of religion or language or whatever – is a free and happy person; free from narrow prejudices and silly superstitions. Free from the shackles that enslave the human soul’s potential greatness. Genuine happiness is a product of that inner freedom.

India today is just the opposite of all that Gandhi envisaged. We are given tall promises and beautiful slogans. Pretence has become the national character. Chicanery is the most legitimate political tool. Religion is poison.

While we start the great celebrations in the name of the Mahatma, it will be good to try to understand what he really was.