T

oday we remember a great human being, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or Mahatma Gandhi. As we commemorate the 143rd anniversary of the birth of this apostle of peace and non-violence, we also mark the 106th anniversary of the launch of Satyagraha, a movement of peaceful resistance, which was founded in South Africa on Sept. 11, 1906.  

This movement created a sequence of events that had hitherto not been seen in human history and it ultimately led to the political liberation and creation of representative democracy in India, South Africa and in many post-colonial and other developing countries.

Mahatma Gandhi came from a family of modest means, which lived in the state of Gujarat of India.  He was the son of a senior government official. Born on Oct. 2, 1869, he studied in a local school and college. He traveled to London in 1888 to study law at University College and trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple.

He returned to India in 1891 after being called to the Bar and made efforts to establish a legal practice in Bombay and subsequently in Rajkot. He accepted a 12-month contract from an Indian company near Durban in South Africa and sailed there in what turned out to be a major voyage of political discovery.

Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa where his political skills were honed. He suffered discrimination in its full force.

The incident where he was forcibly removed from a first-class compartment of a train at Pietermaritzburg, and landed with a thud on the platform, led to a blow against the discriminatory political system in South Africa.  

He extended his stay in South Africa, and worked with Indians facing discrimination there. He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and continued his work there experimenting with Satyagraha till he returned to India in 1915.

Upon his return home, Gandhi slowly and carefully transformed the movement for the freedom of India into a people’s movement by applying the principles of Satyagraha and taking it out of the drawing rooms and courtrooms and on to the streets.

Until he took the leadership, the Indian freedom movement had largely followed the legal process and worked within the political institutions in colonial India. The sheer momentum of the popular expression of unwillingness to be governed by the unequal and oppressive laws of colonialism led to cracks in the seemingly solid edifice of colonialism in India.

Satyagraha was an important element of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and action. It initiated political processes to challenge injustice without violence, without hating the administrators and challenging the system on its own terms. It is interesting to remember that he held a contest in South Africa to give this movement a name and from various suggestions that he obtained, he chose “Sadagraha” which translated into “insistence on truth”.

Satyagraha propounded non-violence and non-aggression as a means to an end. Essentially, it altered the terms of power and authority and provided ordinary people with the ability to challenge the system without resorting to violence or accentuating divisions within segmented societies.

Between his experiments in South Africa and his leadership of the national movement in India, Gandhi created a spirit of participative democracy which held people in both these countries and many others in good stead.

Satyagraha and its political dimensions were clearly manifested in Gandhi’s own insistence on ends and means being inseparable, he believed firmly “as the means so the end”. Gandhi said that if a person pursued change with hatred in the heart towards anyone, the person would only get hatred in return and if injustice was to be fought with violence and other injustices, it would mar the results obtained.         

In 1925, when the transformation of the national movement into a mass movement had already taken place, Gandhi wrote “No sacrifice is worth the name unless it is a joy. Sacrifice and a long face go ill together. Sacrifice is ‘making sacred’.  He must be a poor specimen of humanity who is in need of sympathy for his sacrifice”.

Gandhi as a person was deeply religious though socially he promoted harmony among various religions and religious entities. It was his belief that spiritualism could be attained through prayers and fasts and that could create people with an absence of fear, hatred or greed. His own spirituality was based on religion generating the belief that many people, in spite of their extant differences, were all members of one family and that is what the new nation state could strive for.  

It was his firm belief that individual religiosity could contribute to the creation of good people and such people would be the cornerstones of good societies. He was appreciative of many religions and faiths because he affirmed that tolerance and acceptance of this diversity of faiths was an instrument for the development of good society and for good governance.

One of the greatest attributes of Mahatma Gandhi was the simplicity with which he spoke, wrote and communicated. In his time, there was no Internet or its offspring, like Twitter and Facebook, to spread a message. Yet, his message travelled rapidly within India and abroad, each time he undertook a fast, a protest or a campaign.

In many ways, Gandhi was what today we would call a blogger for he wrote every day, whether he was incarcerated in a jail or traveling. He wrote for Young India and Navjivan, newspapers that carried his thoughts on a daily basis and some other publications in addition to which he wrote daily letters to people and newspapers, whose message was widely circulated and these contributions were looked forward to every day much like the blogs of today.

Gandhi remains an immortal symbol of love and understanding all over the world. The two aspects of Gandhi as a human being and Gandhi as a political leader were summed up by him in 1922, “The only virtue I want to claim is truth and non-violence. I lay no claim to superhuman powers. I want none. I wear the same corruptible flesh that the weakest of my fellow beings wears and is, therefore, as liable to err as any. My services have many limitations, but God has up to now blessed them in spite of the
imperfections.”

Oct. 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, is celebrated in India as Gandhi Jayanti and is one of the three national holidays. In January 2007, a Satyagraha Conference was held in New Delhi to mark the centenary of the launch of Satyagraha in South Africa and a resolution at the Conference called for the day to be observed as an International Day of Non-violence.

This was accepted by the United Nations General Assembly on June 15, 2007.  The resolution by the General Assembly requests all member countries to commemorate Oct. 2 in a fitting manner to disseminate the message of non-violence including through education and public awareness.

This year, the Embassy of India will commemorate Gandhi Jayanti and the International Day of Non-Violence by instituting the annual Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture, the first of which will be delivered by Boediono, the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia.

Several Indian cultural associations will organize events to increase people-to-people exchanges and enhance philanthropic activities, including a blood donation camp, donation of wheel chairs, and artificial limbs, cataract operations and the like.