Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Mahatma Gandhi: The pulse of a legacy in an age of heroics
this world of ours is not interested in history. Its staple is histrionics. This age is not about heroes or heroines, but of heroics. It is about the fabrication of appeal, not the building of understanding
Doctors of politics
and history will tell us that the heart that defines his legacy does not beat
but it seems to, and not so feebly
Birla House, New
Delhi. 30 January, 1948:
Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel, India’s Deputy Prime Minister, had been in deep, earnest conversation
with Gandhi till just a few moments before the shots rang out. He had barely
returned home close by, when he got the flash and rushed right back. “He sat
down,” records Pyarelal, Gandhi’s biographer, “felt the pulse and fancied it
was still beating feebly.” Pyarelal goes on to say that a doctor at hand, Dr.
B. P. Bhargava, examining the pulse and the eye reflexes, said slowly to Patel
that death had occurred 10 minutes earlier. Gloom of a kind that had never been
associated with the Sardar descended on him.
A moment later Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru reached the site. The two - Patel and Nehru - embraced, united
in grief, as a shaken yet self-possessed Governor General Mountbatten watched. But why, why on earth,
should we, on the anniversary, the sparklingly ‘bright’ 150th such, of Gandhi’s
birth be thinking of his death ?
There is a reason: India and the world would have had little interest in the birth or the birth anniversary of this man if his life had not been what it was - a tussle between his passionate, self-consuming faith in ahimsa and his being stalked, unceasingly, by the fiercest violence until the very last step he took on the earth. And because something in many - not all, but very many - of us world-wide wants to feel the pulse, as Patel did that day on his wrist, of Gandhi’s legacy today to see if it is beating, even if ever so feebly.
Does it beat? Doctors of politics
and history will tell us that it does not. And the world around us will concur.
That is, of course, if it can spare the time to think upon this. Time now is
not about that which makes history but that which makes headlines.
Lincoln, as President
of the United States of America spoke his 272 words at Gettysburg in 1863 as he
did, and Gandhi, as an sedition-accused, at his Great Trial in Ahmedabad in
1922 as he did, not because they expected to make or ‘break’ news but because
they needed to, wanted to speak about political facts, civilisational verities,
historical truths. When Lincoln rose to speak, Carl Sandburg, his biographer
tells us, he took out from his coat pocket his notes, put on his steel
eye-glasses, looked at the paper, put it back in his pocket and then made the
speech that the world has not forgotten. A reporter of the Chicago “Tribune”
telegraphed a sentence: “The dedicatory remarks of President Lincoln will live
among the annals of man.”
When Gandhi rose to
speak in the Ahmedabad court room, he too had a text which he read from but
only to go into the judge’s mind, not any annals. No judge before or since
Justice Broomfield has sentenced an accused in a way that makes the penalty
seem like a decoration. That is history for us. But this world of ours
is not interested in history. Its staple is histrionics. This age is not about
heroes or heroines, but of heroics. It is about the fabrication of appeal, not
the building of understanding.
Gandhi said in his Great Trial speech: “Affection
cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a
person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his
disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to
violence.” He stressed that last bit. Violence was not an option... read more
