Remembering Mahatma Gandhi: Light that did not go out

This is the second of two articles by our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin on his memory of the impact of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination fifty years ago, analyzing the ways in which the great Indian leader has been both forgotten and remembered.

HONG KONG (JP): For one thing, Gandhi saw life as one long "search after truth" -- the subtitle of his autobiography. He responded to circumstances as he found them, but never with fixed preset ideas. This is in total contrast with those who pretend to follow Gandhi by asserting that Gandhi found "the truth". The Mahatma made no such claim. "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within," he once said. His conscience led him in many different, sometimes contradictory, directions.

Critically, that still voice within never prompted Gandhi to advocate appeasement. Resistance to tyranny and injustice was one of his paramount concerns -- and he made one vital point very plain: non-violent resistance was the supreme good, but violent resistance was preferable to passive acquiescence in the face of evil. Like Edmund Burke, he believed that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Too many of those who claim to be followers of Gandhi have focussed primarily on the techniques he advocated --- while paying insufficient attention to the broad aims which Gandhi espoused.

So how should we remember Gandhi 50 years on?

Forget about the old debate over whether the Mahatma ("great soul") was a saint who stooped to politics, or a politician who masqueraded as a saint. He was neither.

He was essentially one of that increasingly rare breed, a leader and a statesman who sought to integrate political advance with moral imperatives. "If I seem to take part in politics" he once said, "it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake, from which one cannot get out no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake".

As a political leader Gandhi achieved his primary aim, suffered one great failure and has enjoyed enduring influence at home and abroad.

Gandhi's great achievement was contained in six of Nehru's words -- "taking this ancient country to freedom". It was not simply that Gandhi persuaded Indians to agitate for freedom from the British Empire. Gandhi also inoculated Indians against passivity, imbued them with the true spirit of freedom, so that the nation has continued its search for freedom throughout the last 50 years.

The very fact that, at this moment of deep crisis in Southeast and East Asia, India is seeking, amidst avid discussion of all the options, to solve its political problems with an election in which 600 million will enjoy the right to vote is but part of Gandhi's enormous achievement.

Both in South Africa (at the end of the last century) and later in India, after his return there in 1912, Gandhi found he was up against complacency in the face of injustice, and widespread compliance in the face of foreign rule. He did not seek freedom for India merely in terms of a domestic clique ultimately replacing a foreign faction. He saw the need for the people as a whole to stand up and be counted.

In a very real sense, he thereby set in motion the anti- colonial revolution, which came to fruition in the third quarter of the 20th century. Thus, if Indians had remained apathetic in the face of the British Raj, it is highly likely that colonial rule over Asia and Africa would have lasted considerably longer than it actually did -- once Gandhi had lit freedom's flame within India.

The greatest failure was Gandhi's main worry the day he died -- and may even have been a cause of his assassination. The truth was -- and this is where Nehru's valedictory was misleading -- that Congress leaders were less and less willing to seek solace and advice from Gandhiji in the months before his death. Congress, pursuing power, had ultimately accepted the division of the Indian subcontinent as inevitable, even desirable. Gandhi, seeking truth, saw the partition of the subcontinent as a sin, and strove mightily to try and avoid it.

Prior to his death, Gandhi was talking of going to visit Pakistan during 1948, hoping thereby to modify the partition tragedy. This plan, together with Gandhi's willingness to try and see the Moslem point of view, were almost certainly among the reasons which aroused Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin, to do his dastardly deed.

Gandhi was already 78 when he died, so it remains questionable whether Gandhi's projected trip to Pakistan could have done much to limit, let alone undone altogether, the enormous sin of partition. But it is conceivable that, had he lived, Gandhi might have reduced the economic and social damage accomplished by partition in the ensuing decades.

Instead, the enormity of the "sin" was brilliantly illustrated when the Prime Ministers of Pakistan and India met recently in Dhaka. It was "progress" that Indian Prime Minister I.K.Gujral suggested that the present 10 to 15 trains a month between India and Pakistan be increased to one train a day, while Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif suggested three trains a day as an appropriate goal.

Such "progress" was only a reminder of what partition had accomplished -- the almost complete disintegration and unraveling of a nation which had been integrated in terms of transport, infrastructure and economics. Once, dozens of trains daily had passed through the region that first became two, and then three nations. The infamy of partition became, through five decades, and three wars, a vast negative "achievement". Alone of the leaders of the previously united India, Gandhi sought to point politics in a less damaging, more positive direction.

Meanwhile Gandhi's continuing influence has been best demonstrated not by those who elevated his thoughts to a dogma, but by those who sought to practice what Gandhi preached, even if they never invoked his name. One who did invoke Gandhi's name was of course Martin Luther King, the U.S. civil rights leader, who pithily remarked that "Gandhi is inevitable. If humanity is to progress Gandhi is inescapable".

Or, as Gandhi himself phrased it as he sought to turn mankind away from violent paths --" Hatred ever kills, love never dies...what is attained through love is retained for all time".

Gandhi's enduring influence was demonstrated by the people power movements in Asia in the 1980s, two of which succeeded (South Korea 1987 and Philippines 1986) and two of which (Burma 1988 and China 1989) failed,

As Chinese students made a great show of fasting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they lacked a clear Gandhian sense of direction which just might have persuaded their communist rulers that they were truly revolutionary, not counter-revolutionary.

As Filipinos in their millions obstinately blockaded the streets of Manila in 1996, Gandhi's name was rarely invoked, but his presence was very real.

As Thai students and citizens in the early 1970s, and again in the early 1990s, struggled tenaciously against the inherent violence of unpopular military regimes, they projected the courage and the refusal to be cowed by injustice which lies at the heart of Gandhian teaching.

Conversely, as first Sikh, and then Kashmiri separatists within India pursued their goals with violent means they demonstrated anew the relevance of Gandhi's insistence that violence diminishes both the suppressor as well as the suppressed.

Perhaps Gandhi's enduring hold over the popular imagination was best illustrated by one Indian leader in 1969 when she said "The exaltation which a truly great teacher produces in his time cannot last long. But the teaching and thought of such people have a reach farther than their own time".

The speaker was Nehru's daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Six years later, Gandhi's thought and teaching reached out, as Indians first opposed and then overthrew Mrs. Gandhi's attempt to demolish Indian democracy.

As her father had predicted on Jan. 30, 1948, the Light had not gone out.