Ram Madhav on Gandhi | For too many Gandhians, Gandhism is only a facade or a tactic

Ram Madhav on Gandhi | For too many Gandhians, Gandhism is only a facade or a tactic

Written by Ram Madhav |Updated: October 2, 2019 10:03:21 am

The writer is national general secretary, BJP, and director, India Foundation.

For too many Gandhians, Gandhism is only a facade or a tactic

Gandhi-haters are still there, though Gandhi wouldn’t mind it. “If I had no sense of humour,” he wrote in 1928, “I would long ago have committed suicide”. Gandhi used to say that, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

XGandhi was a phenomenon; a phenomenon that wouldn’t perish.

What is common between Dominique Pire, a Belgian priest, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, a teacher in Argentina, Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela? The immediate answer would be that all four were recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. Also common to all four is the fact that they were all followers of Gandhism, the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi was one Asian leader in the last century who wielded such a powerful influence and had such an impact across nations and continents. His ahimsa and satyagraha — non-violence and truthful resistance — were the only original political programmes offered by any leader from the southern hemisphere in the last two centuries.