On the birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, his countrymen find themselves grappling with a motherland that seemingly hasn’t made her ‘peace’ with the past. The hard-won independence acquired through sacrifice, civil disobedience and nonviolent movements, propagated by Gandhi, now stands threatened by the forces of divisiveness and partisanship. Sadly, Gandhi Jayanti has been reduced to a day when the fourth estate, among other institutions, pays lip service to his memory, and his legacy by reimagining Bapu as a millennial, and helping spur an industry that lives off merchandise, memes, tweets and virals.
One of the things that isn’t striking a whole new generation of citizens as an oddity, is the crackdown on peaceful protests in India – the militaristic fashion in which nonviolent dissent is being quashed under the boots of authority figures. Why it doesn’t strike us odd is because we are aware of the fates encountered by those who have, forgive the pun, asked us to smoke a peace pipe. Everyone who has ever stood his or her ground on account of seeking a peaceful resolution from a government that did not speak the same language has ended up paying a very heavy price.
The experiences of Gandhi in South Africa, where he was discriminated against on the basis of his colour, predated Nelson Mandela embarking on his peaceful agitation against apartheid. The South African revolutionary served 27 years for believing racism could be wiped out from the face of the earth. Like Gandhiji, Mandela returned to a nation he had presumed had changed for the better, but human nature seldom fails to disappoint.
Concurrently, Gandhi and Mandela inspired the likes of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. A prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was instrumental in the US achieving pivotal gains through its Civil Rights Act. His life was tragically cut short five years later by an assassin, similar to how his spiritual guide Gandhiji met his end.
Bullets over bouquets ruled supreme even in the case of the man who sang Imagine and Give peace a chance. John Lennon, a member of the Beatles had forged an own path at the height of the British band’s popularity and fashioned himself to be one of the leading figures of the Flower Power generation, which spearheaded the Sexual Revolution in the US with slogans like ‘Make Love, Not War’, and had stood up to the American government’s needless military involvement in Vietnam. Of course, Lennon is also known to have said once that his band was more popular than Jesus, which was certainly not something that merited capital punishment. But a deranged gunman Mark David Chapman thought otherwise.
But there are silver linings to the pacifist order too. The story of US Army Corporal Desmond Doss who served as a combat medic with an infantry company during World War II is something for the record books. Doss happened to be a conscientious objector to the War and had vowed that he would not bear arms in combat. Nevertheless, he ended up saving as many as 75 men during the Battle of Okinawa. This is not to imply that Gandhi was an influence. Nevertheless, there were people who sought for peaceful answers, even in the thick of gunfire and shelling. All the more reason why October 2 shouldn’t be treated as just another public holiday.