Mahatma Gandhi: In memory of a short man who still walks tall, 74 years after his assassination

Anywhere in the world that Indians travel to, the biggest identifier of the country remains a man assassinated seventy-four years ago. A short man, who did not hold any post but held sway over millions in his pursuit of non-violence.

He was not awarded a Nobel Prize, nor was he the Prime Minister of the newly independent country. When the terrorist Nathuram Godse pumped bullets into the saint, he may have rendered the body dead, but Gandhi’s soul lives on, in his teachings, among his followers spread across the world, with politicians needing to bow before his statue wherever they go.

It has been said often that nobody deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than Mohandas Gandhi. He was nominated a total of five times -- in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and in 1948, but the prize went to someone else each time. The Norwegian body said that it considered awarding him the prize posthumously, but this was something it had never done before, and hence the idea was flirted with and dropped. In the year the world lost the Mahatma, no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for “lack of any suitable living candidate”.

Mahatma Gandhi never needed the Nobel, or any other epithet. In 1989, when the prize was awarded to Dalai Lama, the committee said it was “in part to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi”. It is heartening to note that in the following decades after Gandhi’s assassination, known proponents of Gandhian values have been honoured with the coveted prize – Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama among them.

In his memoir, A Promised Land, the former US President Barack Obama says that his primary reason for visiting India was that it was a pilgrimage to the country where Gandhi’s ideals lived. He says he had studied the Mahatma’s writings and “found him giving voice to some of my deepest instincts.

His notion of satyagraha, and the power of nonviolent resistance to stir the conscience, his insistence on our common humanity and the essential oneness of all religions, and his belief in every society’s obligation to recognize the equal worth and dignity of all people.” Obama goes on to say that Gandhi’s efforts to rid India of its colonial masters had “set off a moral charge that pulsed through the globe.”

When Martin Luther King Jr visited India in 1959, he was an official guest, who dined with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and was accorded the protocol reserved for a head of state. King was visiting India to “feel the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi”, who had inspired him to fight for justice for the blacks in America. King is on record to say that he had learned from the Mahatma and wanted to visit the land he was from.

He had already led the Montgomery bus boycott and was a force to reckon with. He had said that “to other countries, I go as a tourist, but to India I go as a pilgrim.” It was the land of his guru, the Mahatma. When MLK Jr paid a visit to Trivandrum in Kerala, he was introduced to the students in a village school as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

This sobriquet took him by surprise for a moment, but he reflected on the plight of the untouchables in India, which Gandhi had fought for, and the similar conditions of the blacks in America, whose rights King was fighting for.

It was in December 1982 that all children in our school were taken to a local theatre to watch Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi which had recently been released worldwide. I had watched the movie with rapt attention and wondered if such a man lived. Up until Gandhi, I had never watched a biopic and had only understood movies to be stories.

Albert Einstein’s words about Gandhi hold true that ‘Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.’

As an elementary school student in 1982, I was aware of Gandhi’s role in Indian history but hadn’t known his life story. To my young mind, it was difficult to comprehend the public leader as a real person, he seemed like a leaf out of a fairy tale comic.

Gandhi’s impact on society and the sanity of a nascent nation ensured that his killer was not lynched. Godse was given a hearing, the opportunity to air his views and to advocate his case. The fact that his side of the story was allowed to be aired and stays alive in the common realm, is testimony to the times we lived in. Would that be allowed today, remains a question we need to ask ourselves.

Those were not only simpler times, as some would opine, but a time when the society listened to a Mahatma and his protégé.

Mahatma Gandhi will forever be the force his baiters will need to compete with, and with, one assumes, little or no success. They will eternally be pitted against this 5’5” man whose spirit is poised to outlive their pronounced hatred.

In all the attempts to re-write India’s history, Gandhi will immortally stand tall, with or without a statue. His name and legacy will eternally be intertwined with Modern India.

(The author is a former Chief of Communications with UNICEF in New York, where he worked for more than a decade. Views are personal).

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday)