LAGE RAHO GANDHIGIRI

 

27. LAGE RAHO GANDHIGIRI

Lillian said: my life was saved by Gandhiji.

Have you met Gandhiji?

No.

Then how did Gandhiji save your life?

What she had to narrate was not a story. But an experience.

“We are Jews,’ she said. ‘My family was in Warsaw. The Second World War was raging and the elaborately organised drive under Hitler for the extermination of Jews had reached its crescendo. The dreaded ‘holocaust. ’ We lived in terror and one midnight what we feared came true. There was a knock on the door and my parents were sure it must be Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo. Their fears were not misplaced. When the door was opened we found a group of soldiers, the leader of whom held a gun in his hand pointed at my father. We knew the end was close at hand, just a moment away. My elder brother was then three years old. He was amused at the shining button on the officer’s uniform. He touched it, patted it, kissed it. Tried to pluck it, saying he wanted it. The soldier with his pointed gun looked at the child with tenderness for some time. He then put his revolver back in its case, patted the child’s cheek and told my parents: ‘He saved your life. Looking at him I remember my grand-child. ’ He then left the place. ”

It was ten years after this event that a sister was born to this child. Lillian. Today she is a Gandhian, spreading the message of peace and goodwill. ‘If we are able to touch the goodness in the mind of the enemy, then violence will end there. ’ It was her own life that taught her this lesson. A person had lived in this world who had personified this idea. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhiji realised that it was possible to change the mind of the enemy with the help of truth and sacrifice. He realised this not because of his observations but because of his experience. Gandhiji who was in South Africa as an attorney had once faced the impact of the extreme case of racial discrimination that existed in that country at that time. He was kicked out of a first class carriage in a train by a white man who objected to his presence there. Forced to spend the night at the Pietermaritzburg station, shivering, exhausted and humiliated, Gandhiji made a momentous decision, to stay on in South Africa and fight the obnoxious practice of racial discrimination. He was turning himself into a new man. That night also heralded the dawn of a new era of hope for mankind.

Gandhiji in fact had two options before him. To return to India or file a petition in a local court against the railway company. But the latter would only provide a temporary solution to the problem. The problem was fundamental and its solution also should be fundamental in character. He decided to fight racial discrimination. That was the moment when Gandhiji became a Mahatma.

There were as many as 100,000 Indians in South Africa then. The attitude of the white men towards them was beyond tolerance. To add to the problem, the Transvaal Assembly passed a law in 1906, the Asiatic Law Amendment Act, which in effect stamped the Indians and Chinese as a community of criminals. Gandhiji felt that this draconian measure had to be opposed. He convened a meeting and about 3,000 Indians in Transvaal assembled in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg in response to his call.

Gandhiji himself explains what happened there: In complete silence they listened to every word I said. Other leaders also spoke. They spoke about everyone’s responsibility and the responsibility of the assemblage. In the end all of them stood up and, raising their hands, took a pledge in the name of God that they would not succumb to this measure. I can never forget that scene. Even when writing this I have that scene live in my mind.

When it was decided that a pledge should be taken to fight the law, Indian merchant Seth Hajee Habib sprang up and said the pledge should be made the name of God. There is no doubt the the pledge would have added strength if it received the support of the Almighty.

It was not all on a sudden that Gandhiji’s mode of agitation got the name Satyagraha. In an apeal made in his publication Indian Opinion, Gandhiji had in fact requested the readers to come up with a name for this struggle. An Indian named Madan Lal Gandhi suggested the name ‘Sad Agraha’. It was Gandhiji himself who slightly modified that name to ‘Satyagraha’.

The echoes of Satyagraha were not confined to India’s struggle for Independence. Also, it was not only in India that the world saw that it was possible to reach and touch the goodness in the mind of the enemy to bring about a change in his outlook. There were many great souls who had touched the unseen power of Satyagraha.

In 1954 the Korean War had reached a crucial stage. China was facing an acute food shortage even as American warehouses were overflowing with food grains. A charitable organization in America took upon itself the task of averting famine in China. They made countless packets of food grains and sent them to the White House with a note containing a Biblical quotation from Isaiah. If your enemy is hungry, feed him.

No one knew then how the White House reacted to this charity initiative. It was revealed after the lapse of a quarter century. That was the time when pressure was being exerted on President Eisenhower for a shower of bombs over the Chinese mainland, exploiting the precarious food situation in that country. The President asked for the number of foodgrain packets that had reached the White House. When the information was received, he told the army commanders that 35,000 Americans felt that it was time to feed the Chinese. Definitely this was not the time for bombing them. What transpired was yet another vindication of Gandhiji’s vision that in the fight between Good and Evil, one had to side with the Good.

What Gandhiji gave us was what appeared to be an dialectical vision of love that made one oppose sin and love the sinner. Instances are umpteen before us on what relevance this has in practical politics. India and Algiers became independent almost at the same time. The strength of India was the power of Ahimsa. Algiers chose armed struggle. The result: in bloody revolutions Algiers lost 900,000 people. After independence friendship between India and Great Britain grew very fast. As between Algiers and France, animus and antagonism they have for each other have still not died down.

It is indeed a contradiction that Gandhiji who gifted the world with the all powerful weapon of non-violence was himself felled by bullets.

While that was totally unexpected, more unexpected was the resurrection of Gandhiji. In front of a generation that had spurned Gandhi and Gandhism, we see in every city and town young men and women carrying Gandhiji on their shoulders. Perhaps it is a quirk of fate that for the resurrection of Gandhiji the medium of a film was needed - Lage Reho Munnabhai. ‘Gandhigiri’ today is a watchword among the youngsters for passive resistence against the wrongs of society.  

Youngsters proudly show off Gandhiji on their caps, t-shirts and stickers on two wheelers and try to learn the teachings of Gandhiji and implement them in their lives. This should serve as an eye opener for us. We have to take steps to see that the Gandhigiri that grows as a craze among the youth does not subside. There is no death for Goodness. For Gandhiji too. Lage Reho Gandhigiri.