mahatma Gandhi you are immortal. Give 1000 word letter.
Answers
Dear Bapu,
You left this world or rather you were mercilessly snatched from us years ago, even before my father was born. Obviously, I never saw or met you. But my grandfather who had seen and heard you a couple of times would often talk about you. We would try to imagine you with the description he provided. “Woh patle duble the lekin bahut tez chalte the (He was lean and thin but walked briskly),” my grandfather would inform. “But don’t get misled by his frail frame. He was a man of steely determination.”
Today’s generation, brought up on countless tales about you told through books, cartoons, movies, music, documentaries, and God knows what else, relate with you also through the cheeky chant: “Bande mein tha dum, Vande Matram.” This October 2 you would have turned 150.
As we celebrate your 150th birth anniversary, I imagine, just imagine, what if that original ‘desh bhakat’ Nathuram Godse had not pumped three bullets into you at point-blank range on that cold January 30 evening in 1948. That dark evening you were not on a joy walk; you were on your way to the prayer meeting.
If the Mahatma still towers over others among the pantheon of freedom fighters, how did someone get away by building a temple for Godse? How did a self-declared nationalist get off the hook after shooting Mahatma’s poster as part of her revenge on the Father of the Nation?
Oh, did I say Father of the Nation? Just the other day wife of a state’s chief minister became subject of much ridicule and trolling on the social media when she called PM Narendra Modi “Father of the Country” on twitter. But bigger shock but no surprise awaited us when the US President Donald Trump hailed India’s PM as “Father of India” on the sidelines of United Nation’s General Assembly (UNGA) recently. Did you turn in the grave, Bapu, when you heard this?
You must be uncomfortable at the perilous path India is following. The values you lived and died for are in tatters. Your mantra of non-violence seems to have been tossed out of the window. Justice, another leitmotif that punctuated your persona, is receiving a mortal jolt at the hands of the seekers of “revenge”. You experimented with many things in life, including asceticism in loincloth and celibacy in the company of women. These are there your autobiography—‘My Experiments with Truth’.
You used non-violent protests to bring the oppressive British imperialism down on their knees. The mighty regime buckled when you broke the ban on salt by defiantly picking up a fistful of it at Dandi. You made Hindus and Muslims a united force of resistance against the foreign power by stitching an alliance through Khilafat Movement, aided and abetted by the Ali Brothers (Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali).
You couldn’t stand violence. It dismayed many of your supporters when you abruptly called off the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922 after violence was reported from Chaurichaura. And yet those who claim to swear by your name either condone or shut eyes to violence perpetrated on fellow Indians through mob-lynching.
You championed women’s cause. On October 2, as part of a tribute to you, the magnificent Maulana Azad Library at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) would show Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic “Gandhi.” It is here that I first saw this film in the late 1980s. One scene is etched in memory till date: Gandhi squirming at the sight of a nearly naked, poor woman bathing under a railway-bridge somewhere in Bihar. We have moved miles ahead from there. Now, if a rapist is powerful and politically connected, he can twist the arms of the law and get the victim arrested if her silence is not bought through inducements or threats.
And how can I forget to tell you, Bapu, how the media behaves in the new millennium. A prolific writer, you passionately used the platform of your journals to air your honest, truthful views. Now the truth is being murdered daily, mostly at the studios of news channels. News anchors have become executioners, outperforming each other at mouthing half-truths and fakery. For you, the news was sacred. For us, fake news is a reality we must live with and fight against. The border between fact and fiction has been blurred. Many conscience keepers of the nation have made profitable careers out of cannibalising facts.