Gandhiji’s  India: The Dream & the Reality 

Sanhita Saikia

(The writer who is a freelance journalist based at New Jersey, USA, can be contacted at sanhitasaikia@yahoo.com)

The name of Mahatma Gandhi transcends the bounds of race, religion, states and nations and has emerged as a prophetic voice of the 21st century. More than half a century ago, Gandhiji through peaceful activism and promotion of equality and justice, unified a diverse land by walking the dusty paths of its villages carrying a message of freedom and peace. His revolution, which ended three centuries of British rule, inspired a generation of world leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi to seek freedom for their people from oppression and despair. Revered the world over for his nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance, Bapuji’s legacy has been carried down for generations.

On the birth anniversary of Gandhiji, I wonder, what impression the British must have had of him. He was a man who spoke English impeccably, but wrote his first book, ‘Hind Swaraj’ in Gujarati. He could have continued wearing a suit and a tie as he did in England but wore only a dhoti in India. While opposing the British, Gandhiji could have lived in a colonial bungalow, but built his ashram in an entirely Indian way that was authentic yet beautiful. Thoroughly rooted in the scriptures and philosophy of his own faith Hinduism and the other religions of his country, Gandhiji knew the Bible, perhaps in greater detail and with more understanding than most.

As the founding father of India, Bapuji left us with a legacy of pre-independence struggle which we all cherish and still serves as an inspiration for many of us across the country. His unwavering focus on truth, simplicity, caring for the needy, and non-violence are ones that have the potential to keep us grounded and on a proper path for the rest of our lives. The Father of the Nation left his indelible mark on developmental issues as well. The talks he delivered and the articles he wrote speak to issues that still confront India today, and Indians still debate the legacy of the man known as Mahatma, or the ‘Great Soul’.

There is no question of Gandhiji’s incandescent influence on the world stage. However on the home soil, Bapuji’s effect is nebulous. His bespectacled face looks out from the rupee note and streets are named after him innumerous cities. Politicians invoke his name like an endorsement and mark each anniversary of his birth and his passing. It seems today that Gandhiji is everywhere yet nowhere. Bapuji envisioned an India of self-sufficient villages. Caste and religion would grow faint as identity markers. Governance would stress equality and nonviolence. Try finding that today. The huge chaotic cities, the materialist fever of swelling middle and upper classes, an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and endemic violence against women suggest a very different national identity.

When Gandhiji emerged as a leader of reckoning in the freedom movement, the British must have wondered, why he was not a reflection of his colonial masters. How were they to deal with a man who, against every consciously planned consequence of colonial rule, had the courage, quite simply, to be himself, without affectation or hate. This one lesson has often escaped the westernized elite of our country. Somewhere, in the pursuit of modernity, they have failed to realize that ultimately, outsiders respect only those who are culturally rooted, and not nondescript imitators immersed in a cosmopolitanism that has made them drift from their own culture; even as they remain, in more ways than they realize, perpetually alien to the foreign culture they wish to emulate.

One of the many dark spots in India’s history has been its dreaded caste system. What started out in the Early Vedic Age as an occupation-oriented system became a rigid system that could not be altered under any circumstances. Soon, qualities were being defined in terms of one’s caste affiliations and people were either being privileged or ostracized on the basis of the same. This continued in the colonial era in the form of social evils like manual scavenging and still lingers now in the form of ills and heinous acts of crime such as honor killing. Thousands of women and girls each year are victims of gender violence in our country and the most recent statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau show that crimes against women have increased 34% in the past four years.

From an economic point of view, Gandhiji dreamed of a vibrant nation with the village at its economic base. However, ever since Independence, India has walked a different path of development. It all started with a focus on industrial development through the manufacturing and mining industries till the 1990s and followed by the IT and tech boom of the 2000s and thereafter, the boom in the service sector. India is now regarded as a global economic power in the waiting, but agriculture, the largest sector in terms of employment generated, continues to languish. It is important to achieve a semblance of balance between progress and tradition. India, with its unbridled natural resources and well-established agricultural setup, could have attained the sort of self-sufficiency that most countries can only dream of. However, such a possibility never materialized.

Bapuji successfully demonstrated to a world, weary with wars and continuing destruction, that adherence to truth and non violence is not meant for individual behavior alone but also can be applied in global affairs too. He was one of history’s most remarkable human beings. He has been immortalized as a martyr, forever remembered as a man who walked the earth like a colossus, brought down an empire without firing a bullet, and led half a billion people to freedom.

Gandhiji’s greatest ability was to walk his talk at every level and in every way. India continues to be a nation of many diverse nationalities but never did they so unanimously identify with another leader as they identified with Gandhi; across classes and communities that were even more sharply divided than they are these days. Bapuji proved that one man has the power to take on an empire, using both ethics and intelligence. He practiced what he preached at every possible level. Be it how he dressed like the poorest Indian with a hand woven cotton cloth that barely covered his body or the simplicity of his watches and glasses. When it came to personal possessions, unlike today’s leaders both business, political or religious he had the barest minimum.

Another great leadership quality was in his treatment of others: he always looked at everyone as equals. Even as he dressed and lived as the commonest and poorest Indian, he connected equally well with the affluent classes. They understood his sacrifice of renouncing his wealth and affluence. More important though was his ability to articulate a vision in a language that was universally understood that inspired all sections of society. The frail, bespectacled prophet of nonviolent revolution still dominates India’s consciousness. Yet for a growing number of Indians, Gandhiji’s example seems distant.

The legacy of Mahatma Gandhi today is challenged by neglect, obfuscation and cunning co-option. In the present modernization of India, Gandhiji’s personal philosophy of nonviolence, rural virtues and religious tolerance appears to have lost its meaning. Gandhiji understood that the fight against colonialism is incomplete without the assertion, without xenophobia or chauvinism, of one’s own culture and identity. In this sense, he was echoing Chanakya’s view that a nation is not only about territory and an administrative structure, but a cultural construct, based on identifiable markers of a civilizational legacy. When the nation, and the culture that underlies it, are not in sync, we have a Republic that has the paraphernalia of nationhood without a soul.

It would have been very difficult for Gandhiji to see how far the nation has veered away from his vision of India. Communal tensions and violence are at a peak, the economic disparity between the rich and the poor has increased exponentially, the rural urban divide is greater than ever. It’s time for us to wake up and remember the man who once united our great nation. The man, whose ideas inspired hundreds of thousands of people through the world, can once again inspire us to greatness. We can follow Gandhiji’s visions and ideologies which still persist somewhere in the depths of the underlying current history of our nation. It is up to us to explore those depths and the dreams of the Father of our Nation.