World Peace - Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia

Timeless Appeal
A Simple Man from India Continues to Influence the World
What is it about Gandhi that still fascinates the world?
Sixty-three years after his death, books still pour out at
regular intervals exploring his life and personality. People
are supposed to be shocked by revelations about his
life. But as always we find that there is nothing any one
can expose about Gandhi which he has not already put
down in writing with brutal honesty. In terms of frankness
about private life, Mahatma Gandhi breached the
outer limits of possibility. Yet if the President of the
United States, Barack Obama, wants him as his dinner
guest—hoping of course that that is not one of Gandhi’s
fast days or worse yet one of his silent days, then Gandhiji
must have 21st century appeal. He was chosen as
one of the three most influential persons by TIME magazine
on its 20th century issue along with former President
of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
physicist Albert Einstein. He must have something timeless
in his appeal.
Of course what makes Gandhi perpetually relevant is his
ability to make people fearless in the presence of superior
force. Most importantly, he did this for men and
women equally thus removing the very idea that bravery
or fearlessness were intrinsically male endowments.
He was the first major political leader to treat women
equally as men. He was a pioneer of the Gender Revolution.
In Tahrir Square or in Tunis, the people who defied
the Army were Gandhi’s students. We also saw for the
first time women coming out with men practising the
Gandhian methods of struggle.
The greatest thing he did was to make people fearless
against the forces of power and authority. He taught ordinary
people not to fear armed adversaries. This lesson
has been learnt in Tahrir Square and in Tunis; it is
still being used in Bahrain and Yemen and even during
the bloody confrontations in Syria. Gandhi armed the
unarmed masses with courage. It does not matter
whether the oppressed are larger in number than their
oppressors or whether they are different people. The
16 | Bhavan Australia | August 2012
A man born in the middle of
the 19th century, at the
height of the Victorian Era,
still has relevance a centuryand-a-half
later. The secret
has to be his simple and
transparent humanity.
poor and oppressed are always many and their oppressors
are always few. It was this lesson that Martin
Luther King Jr. absorbed from his study of Gandhi’s
works and deeds. In this context, the African-Americans
were a minority in the USA. Faced not so much with
alien power but fellow Americans in whose presence the
Black people felt deprived and alien, he used his Christian
faith and Gandhian techniques of unarmed and
peaceful struggle to shame those who wielded power
and overstepped human limits.
I well recall those summers in the early 1960s, while I
was in America as a student on the East Coast and a recent
graduate working on the West Coast, how patiently
the civil rights marchers faced the highway patrols and
the National Guard arraigned against them. It was when
the adversary saw their wish to resist change they inflicted
damage and often that damage was on their own
neighbours and fellow citizens. This was what shamed
them. Satyagraha—the insistence on truth—works by
revealing to the oppressor the truth of his situation