Is Gandhi Relevant?
MENON, B. P.
Is Gandhi Relevant? Mohandas Gandhi By George Woodcock Viking. 128 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by B. P. Menon Former correspondent, the "Times" of India During his lifetime Mohandas Gandhi was...
...As Gandhi himself insisted many times, he was not a saint dabbling in politics but a "politician trying desperately to be a saint...
...For he had done more than lead the Indian independence struggle...
...he had demonstrated that "nonviolence could become the philosophical basis of total reconstruction of society in such a way that excesses of power and violence are eliminated...
...It is unlikely to be forgotten, Woodcock points out, that there is a "viable revolutionary alternative to violent revolution...
...Would he have succeeded if, instead of the British, a man such as Hitler had ruled India...
...His murderer was hanged under a law inherited from the British, and none of Gandhi's old comrades in the government was moved to protest that denial of his beliefs...
...Neither political defeat nor the betrayal of his most cherished ideals, however, could diminish Gandhi's importance or reduce his life to mere history...
...If India had been governed by the Nazis, no doubt Gandhi would still have appealed to the highest ideals and beliefs of the German people...
...A dull, unexceptional boy, as a callow youth Gandhi strained to be the compleat Englishman in London, then became the moral revolutionary in racist South Africa, and finally emerged as the uncontested leader and "Mahat-ma"????the Great Soul of India...
...Even violence, he said, was preferable to cowardice in facing life...
...Thus he was always pragmatic in the development of his tactics...
...Being a politician, he seized upon any means that he considered moral and just to achieve his ends...
...Although Woodcock obscures a few significant details in the interest of brevity (for example, the growth of animosity between the Hindus and Muslims), he provides a valuable introduction to a personality who was "the first of the great activist theoreticians who changed the shape of our world and the form of our thought during the present century...
...The salt march, the Khilafat movement, nonviolent civil resistance, the long fasts—all were conceived with particular political objectives in mind, and they were remarkably successful...
...Woodcock does not think so, but I disagree...
...Today his portrait hangs alongside those of Vishnu and Shiva, the two primal gods of the Hindu pantheon, in millions of Indian homes, and framed photographs do him dusty honor in thousands of government offices...
...At the end of his life, he experienced a personal political defeat when his erstwhile lieutenants deserted him to accept Britain's offer of independence to a partitioned India...
...In formulating and executing his philosophy, Gandhi displayed an innovative political genius unequaled in the 20th century...
...Yet the questions are often asked: How relevant is Gandhi today...
...They "seemed seized with a kind of insanity that made them act as if to prove that all he lived for had been irrelevant," Woodcock writes...
...Given his genius, I think there is every reason to believe that he would have conceived of methods to touch its conscience as he did that of the British...
...Reviewed by B. P. Menon Former correspondent, the "Times" of India During his lifetime Mohandas Gandhi was considered a god by the Gond tribesmen of Central India...
...Moreover, in view of the growing influence of that other great activist theoretician from Asia, Mao Tse-tung, Mohandas Gandhi is especially timely...
...Having said this, he goes on to raise the familiar issue of whether Gandhi's methods could have worked against a truly ruthless opponent...
...Politicians invoke his memory at election time, and every October 2 ????the aniversary of his birth?Indiapays homage to the "father of the nation...
...George Woodcock offers us a brief, briskly written, revealing study of India's legendary leader...
...And following his assassination by a fanatic Hindu, his closest associates showed how basically unprepared they were to honor Gandhi's beliefs in practice...
...Are his ideas any longer a force to be reckoned with...
...The disposal of his body became a vast state occasion, organized by the military authorities...
...Is his elevation to godhood an acknowledgement of his outdatedness...
...Gandhi was taken on a weapons carrier to the place of samadhi beside the holy Jumna, with the Governor-General's bodyguard of lancers riding at the head of the procession of thousands of soldiers, airmen, policemen, and sailors...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 1
