Nehru observed that the greatest contribution of Gandhi was that he could put ordinary Indians on a very high plane and he managed to do it for a very long time. This sublimation of the ordinary was a cooperative endeavour in which Gandhi and his people worked together.What Gandhi was doing was to result in the creation of a nation state. But Gandhi valued Swaraj over a nation state;the individual above everything else. Individuals, he said, are not creatures of the state or the nation.Individuals create them. Gandhi strove to create an individual, who with her sense of justice and love, would be able to resist the state or any power which seeks to demean the values of equality, justice and freedom. Coercion, even in the name of a high ideal, was to him unacceptable. “If you put gun on my head and ask me to read Gita, I would not”, is what Gandhi said, “a flag which symbolises violence would never be able to command my respect”. “Bharat mein rehna hai to vande mataram kehna hoga,” is an obscene slogan, Gandhi would have told his admirers in the RSS.What would Gandhi have done, were he allowed to walk on the ruins of his dream? He would have despaired certainly, for he was a human being. But then he would have lifted his staff and started walking, walking on the burning and killing fields stained with the blood of minorities, the marginalised and the weak. He would have stopped to ask every skeleton, ‘what had happened here?’(The writer is a professor in Delhi University and independent commentator & columnist. Views are personal)
Source link
