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Relevance of Gandhi Sandip K. Dasverma Published on 02 April, 2006 Anne Applebaum, on Wednesday, September 8, 2004, wrote in Washington Post:
And yet more than 100 years back Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, universally known as Mahatma Gandhi, not only preached but also practiced to counter "brutality without brutality". He showed that: "we could fight a war without losing our own humanity". He practiced it for retrieving national dignity in racist South Africa and later in colonial India. One has to be reminded that in those days there was much less communication and hardly any knowledge of what was going on in far corners of the world. The sympathy of impartial outsiders uninvolved in the local issues was not easy to come by � since they knew not about the local issues till months, if not years after wards. Government repression or police brutality � if they knew at all � due to some daring reporters' expose of the colonial government's actions, was way in future. That is why in the third world countries, the governments still try to control the media, and report much less than the actual numbers � for example in the case of numbers of persons dead in a police firing. This made his task far more difficult in those days. Gandhi had to garner sympathy from the local inhabitants of the opposite side, by his dignified moral actions where he protested the actions of brutal and inhuman regimes. He even volunteered for the British as a Red Cross worker in the brutal Boer War (1905) in South Africa, on the side of the bitter foes, the British. Time and again he commanded and got the pledge of total non-violence from his followers, in the face of extreme provocation and brutality. In the process, when non-violent protesters marched to protest some Government action and the police acted against them by resorting to baton charge or firing, the local solidarity and adversary's sympathy tended to be lie on the side of the non-violent protestors. And thus minimal physical harm and minimal incarceration. This lowering of hurdles led to larger mass participation in subsequent non-violent reaction, to each police action or repressive regulation. It was both brilliant and effective tactics, in those days of isolation, when sympathy had to be earned from among the local partisans of the enemy. Gandhi, though a devout Hindu, got these ideas from Christian ethics. His inspiration were Ruskin and Tolstoy, the great humanists and philosophers of yester years. He never hated his enemy and never targeted innocents. His tactics could be used today � in the days of sound bites and media glare, to resolve many questions of international and national dispute, much faster and with much less loss of life and property. . Both the civil rights movement of America, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela in South Africa against apartheid, succeeded due to commitment to non-violence, lack of hate and an end to fear of defeat if you will. The gruesome Beslan tragedy was a great loss (nearly 400 lives) to the victims' families. Sadly, it achieved for the combatants and their cause, exactly the opposite of what they wanted. Nonviolent methods can be used for better resolution of other hot issues of today, like Kashmir & Palestine.. This brings back to mind the RELEVANCE of Gandhi, in today's violent and unjust world. Response:
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