It has become quite easy to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti. Order nationwide
newspaper advertisements, sport a white cap for a photo op or two, then go home
and enjoy the holiday. When ritual replaces duty, life becomes simple. It
becomes simpler still when celebrating Rajiv Gandhi is more rewarding than
remembering the real Gandhi. Notice the way advertisements increase in size,
number and effusiveness when the dynastic hero's birthday falls due.
The contrast is natural. Rajiv Gandhi is alive because praising him is
an investment that yields dividends. The Mahatma is dead and singing hallelujas
to him will not fetch even a panchayat membership. One symbolises today's kind of politics and privileges. The
other stands for yesterday's kind of
values. One stands for taking, the other for giving. Godse only killed Gandhi the man. The rest of
us killed Gandhi the idea. In the India of coal blocks and 2G spectrums, one
will have to be either foolish or
incompetent to follow Gandhi's idea of frugality and service.
But in the wider world, Gandhi lives. At the time of independence, Gandhi was a defeated man,
seeing his country divided and his people killing one another in the name of
religion. Dejected, he kept away from Delhi's celebratory limelight and spent
his days fighting communalism and
leading group prayers. By contrast Jawaharlal Nehru ascended the pinnacles of
power and glory, his glamorous figure
winning international prestige for himself and for India.
How ephemeral that glamour turned
out to be. Even before the China war reduced him to a pitiable figure, Nehru's
wisdom had come under a cloud. The main reason was his succumbing to the advice
of Mountbatten and his wife on Kashmir even though it was clear that they were
promoting Britain's interests and not India's. Then came Indira's dynastic concept and the Emergency, two
blows to the very root of Nehru's legacy of democracy.
Bookshelves today tell an instructive story. Nehru is hardly a subject
of study for modern scholars and historians. His own books are of the classic
kind because of their scholarship and the elegance of language. But he does not
inspire writers, film-makers and the like the way Gandhi does. Stuff coming out
on Gandhi is amazing.
There are serious research studies like Jinnah vs. Gandhi, The
Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Gandhi's Religion. There are serious yet
unconventional studies, like Joseph Lelyweld's Great Soul. There are
compendiums from Gandhi without tears to Epigrams from Gandhiji
and from The Bhagwat Gita According to Gandhi to The Mind of Mahatma
Gandhi.
There are many movies from Gandhi and The Making of the
Mahatma to Hey Ram and Mein
Gandhi Ko Nahi Mara. Munnabhai contributed a new word – Gandhigiri. The
Mahatma also figures in pop culture garbs – as a tap dancer in Cartoon Network,
a stand-up comedian in a TV series, as an element in a video game. There was a
poster competition in Cairo: Gandhi in Tahrir Square. This Gandhi Jayanti day, vandals put a
garland of glass bottles on a Gandhi statue in Simla. That too was a kind of
recognition.
Gandhi's appeal has become universal.
By influencing the thought and actions of people like Martin Luther King
and Nelson Mandela, he influenced the
course of world history. Ultimately it was the originality and daring of Gandhi's mind that made him a
world force. Just think of the concept
of non-violence, or the technique of civil disobedience . We take these for
granted today, but Gandhi invented them
out of nothing. It took time for the world to grasp the significance of what he had done. Once it sank it, the
world stood stunned at the vastness of his imagination.
Gandhi of course had numerous weaknesses. Perhaps the most paradoxical
one was that he was an unkind father who
once wrote: “Men may be good, not necessarily their children”. But the negative
side of his personality has simply added spice to his cult status. Our sarcar
will never succeed in containing him in annual advertisements.