"Gandhi ( held no political office. Yet he could arouse the conscience of an entire subcontinent! A lean, frail, ‘half-naked fakir’ – armed with a wooden staff and simple dignity of a human being, he fought against the greatest empire, the world has known. It was just the moral grandeur of his soul which enabled him to fight against brute power, in any form, even vanquish it. "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this in flesh and blood walked upon this earth", said Professor Einstein of him.
On 30 January 1948 on his way to prayers Gandhi was assassinated, killed by three bullets in his abdomen and chest. The young assassin was a fanatical Hindu who among others had been inflamed by Gandhi’s efforts to bring reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in riot-torn independent India. With those three bullets came the bitter fruit of the murder of an important political leader. India and the world were saddened. Political leaders and ordinary people alike felt a personal loss.
Significance of Gandhi (Some unusual views....)
Does Gandhi still have any political significance? Now, with the passing of years and the opportunity for a more distant perspective, how is Gandhi to be evaluated?
For a Westerner poses special problems in such an evaluation. Often his eccentricities get in the way so that it is difficult to get beyond them, or to take other aspects of his life seriously. Even for religious people in the West, his constant use of religious terminology and theological language in explanation or justification of a social or political act or policy more often confuses than clarifies.
The homage which most pay to him by calling him “Mahatma” - the great-souled one - usually becomes a kind of vaccination against taking him seriously. As a Mahatma, he can be revered while being placed in that special category of saints, prophets and holy men whose lives and actions are believed to be largely irrelevant to ordinary men.
“I claim”, he once wrote, “to be no more than an average man with less than average ability”. Indeed, in important respects this was probably true.
He was not pleased at the homage given him, although he cherished the affection of people where it was genuine. “My Mahatmaship is worthless”, he once wrote “I have become literally sick of the adoration of the unthinking multitude.” “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 am, therefore, as liable to err as any.”
There are further difficulties in evaluating Gandhi. These include widespread misrepresentations of Gandhi and his political opinions. For example, it is widely claimed that Gandhi approved of Indian military action in Kashmir, that he would have approved of the Indian invasion of Goa, and even that he would have supported the present nuclear weapons program.
Gandhi's thinking, as constantly developing, and early in his career he did give certain qualified support to war. But at the end of his life this had altered. But this did not mean he favoured passivity. Thus, while believing the Allies to be the better side in the Second World War, he did not support the war. Similarly in Kashmir, while believing the Pakistanis to be the aggressors, and while believing that India must act, he did not favour military action.
As we shall note later in more detail, it was Gandhi's primary contribution, not only to argue for, but to develop practically non-violent means of struggle in politics for those situations in which war and other types of political violence were usually used. His work here was pioneering, and sometimes inadequate, but it was sufficient to put him outside the traditional categories. Gandhi was neither a conscientious objector nor a supporter of violence in politics. He was an experimenter in the development of “war without violence”.
A final confusion handicaps our attempt to evaluate Gandhi. His politics are sometimes assumed to be identical with those of the independent Indian Government under Nehru. Although Nehru has long had a very deep regard for Gandhi, and although Gandhi cooperated with the Indian National Congress in the long struggle for independence, the policies which Gandhi favoured are not necessarily those of the Congress government today.
Gandhi had opposed partition into Pakistan and India. Congress leaders had accepted it. His plea for non-violent resistance in Kashmir with non-violent assistance from India was ignored. Gandhi had dreamt that a free India would be able to defend her freedom without military means. Yet in the provisional government before independence, and in the fully independent government, military expenditure and influence increased, while Gandhi warned of the danger of military rule and of India’s possible future threat to world peace. Her freedom could be defended non-violently, Gandhi insisted, just as by non-violent means the great British Empire had been forced to withdraw.
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