By Pushkar Raj*
MELBOURNE, 2 October 2020: As we celebrate another birth anniversary of the father of the nation, it is worth recognizing that the thinkers, writers, and activists are valuable for society. Gandhi represented all of these, leaving a mark on humanity that even his enemies find hard to deny.
Some argue that it was a matter of time and Independence would have come in anyways,
Gandhi, or no Gandhi. However, in that case, it was more likely that India would be
authoritarian like its neighbors such as China, Pakistan, Burma, to name a few.
Besides being a great democrat, Gandhi represented the highest values of humanity in
personal life and envisioned the same for social and political conduct, well explained in his
book the Hind Swaraj, glimpses of which are found in the directive principles of the state
the policy of the constitution.
Thus, when writers and activists are targeted, fined, jailed, and even killed in contemporary
India, it diminishes the Gandhian spirit and erodes the vital social and constitutional values,
essential to a good, civilized life.
Transformation of a Lawyer
Gandhi, by his own admission, was a British educated lawyer who struggled to establish
himself as a barrister in Bombay and Surat before setting “forth full of zest to try my luck in
South Africa”, he wrote in My Experiments with Truth, his autobiography. He was 24 then
and well acquainted with the cruelties of British rule and atrocities of the caste system at home
that he seemed to have reluctantly accepted as the distressing facts of life.
But South Africa was worse. The thinker in Gandhi emerged when he was thrown out of
the train at Maritzburg while he traveled from Durban to Pretoria. He spent the cold night
debating the cause of white hostility against Indians and the means to counter it, concluding
that the cause was racial superiority legislated into the law and weapon to counter would be
the non-violence.
The renouncing of violence became Gandhi’s truth for the rest of his life which he defined
as, “the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is
not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the
relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is
God.”
Before he arrived in India in 1915, Gandhi was a writer, having penned An Appeal to Every
Briton in South Africa and Indian Franchise-An Appeal, better known as, The Green
Pamphlet, Hind Swaraj and The Story of Satyagraha in South Africa; he was an activist,
having led Satyagraha against unequal treatment of Indians persuading Gen Smut to abolish
£ 3 tax on Indians under an agreement signed just before he left South Africa for Home via
England.
For the next three decades, Gandhi proved to be the greatest modern asset for the country,
playing a pivotal role in steering the change that he wanted to see in the country. So
presently, when Harsh Mander and Prashant Bhushan are comparted with Gandhi on social
media, I am neither surprised nor consider it an exaggeration. In fact, all the social and
political activists (numbering in thousands) who are booked under the Unlawful Activities
Prevention Act and sedition sections of IPC symbolize Gandhi in one way or the other.
Value of Writers and Activists
It might be of scholarly interest, whether the writers and activists are getting worse treatment
presently than the 1920s; or they are freer to write and speak as compared to freedom fighters
like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Prem Chand, and others.
Be that as it may, it is safe though to state that all societies require writers and activists as
they reveal social truths about people around them and create attitudes, morals, ideals, and
values for a nation or the country.
Jawahar Lal Nehru, for instance, discussed some of such values, i.e., humanity, tolerance and
peaceful coexistence in his books such as The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World
History; they were also recorded in the constitution, besides becoming part of the country’s
foreign policy.
The writers provide alternative narratives and solutions to complex social problems.
William Plomer, for example, in 1925, proposed a radical resolution to apartheid in South
Africa, in the novel, Turbott Wolfe. The book, perhaps, inspired B. M Ambedkar to write the
essay Annihilation of Caste (1936) that continues to impact and inspire millions of Dalits in
the country.
The writers point to reality, exposing inequalities and injustice that Koestler termed as the
“sore spots in society.” The writers and activists aspire a world of their belief and vision, a
“desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas of the type of
society that they should strive after”, surmised Orwell.
By adopting a state policy to persecute the writers and activists, the government is damaging
Gandhian legacy as well as the international image of ‘Wonder that is India.’ A reversal of
this practice can only be a true homage to the Mahatma.
* Pushkar Raj is a Melbourne-based researcher & author.
The views in the article are the author’s own.
