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M.K. Gandhi is a name revered around the world. But truth and non-violence that he championed seem outdated in today’s post-truth world plagued by violent conflicts. Is he relevant anymore?
Critics would scoff at the question. They’d argue Gandhi was not much relevant even his own time. The British left India as colonial era was anyway coming to an end after World War II, and not because of Gandhi and his non-violent tactics. Non-violence, in any case, was an oddity that might have worked with the British but would stand no chance against, say, Hitler: https://www.dailyo.in/variety/mahatma-gandhi-adolf-hitler-nazi-germany-holocaust-gandhi-jayanti-october-2/story/1/32060.html What Gandhi advocated – especially in his key text, ‘Hind Swaraj’ – would be impossible to put into practice. His vision was too idealist – almost a state-less society, in other words, anarchy: https://www.epw.in/engage/discussion/gandhis-hind-swaraj-and-scholarly-engagement-look-through-five-articles-epw Even in India, in his later years, he was becoming irrelevant. On winning independence, the first thing his political heir, Nehru, the first prime minister, did was to dump his ideas of village republics and spinning wheels, and build big factories instead. Gandhi’s stance against big industries and technology is especially anachronistic today when AI is set to replace human labor.
His followers, however, balk at the idea of a politics bereft of values. What Gandhi’s life and thought show is how religious values of love and peace are not to be restricted to personal life but can be brought alive at community level. That is what Martin Luther King Jr learnt from him: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/my-trip-land-gandhi and that is what inspired Mandela and Suu Kyi. How can he be irrelevant if Gene Sharpe – the man whose work “inspired velvet revolutions that toppled dictators on four continents” – was only reiterating what Gandhi said? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/obituaries/gene-sharp-global-guru-of-nonviolent-resistance-dies-at-90.html Obama too has acknowledged he could not have become the president but for Gandhi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwYYhT0zJXs
Indeed, his relevance is more today than in his own times, as he offers the best way out of climate crisis.
Maybe, the question is wrong. Gandhi said he did not ‘discover’ truth and non-violence – they are “as old as hills.” https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/truth-and-nonviolence-new-dimensions.html He made them relevant, and it is up to us to make them relevant in our time.