PM Pays Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi
The following is a message from Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama marking the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday today
The Gandhi Jayanti celebrations this year are a wonderful occasion for India and the entire world, as we come together to pay tribute to the extraordinary life and teachings of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and to rededicate ourselves to the values of peace, tolerance and non-violence. Gandhi rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential persons in human history. He is revered not just because of his words, but because of his ability as a leader to empower those around him.
Through his works, his prayers and the force of his character and personality, Gandhi helped India gain its independence from British Colonial rule. His nonviolent philosophy of passive resistance helped Indians gain control of their future and lay the groundwork for peace and basic human rights in his country—and it has inspired peaceful, democratic movements of people around the world.
His humility was reflected in him in totality. Gandhi was often dressed in cloth that he spun himself. He was imprisoned several times and undertook a number of hunger strikes to protest the oppression of India’s poorest classes, those who had long been deemed unworthy in Indian society. He showed them compassion, upheld their human dignity and gave them hope that change was possible.
Fiji joins the rest of the world in its gratitude for the life, teachings and values of Gandhi. Tolerance of all religions, all ethnicities and all people are enshrined in the Fijian Constitution, and we must practice it. For Gandhi taught us that ideals must be lived, or they may be swept away. He has taught us that there can be no progress without collaboration of all people, and none must be excluded or overlooked.
Fiji is a multiracial country, and like many countries, we have struggled with what it means to be one nation of many different kinds of people. We have struggled with discrimination and even violence over our history.
But we have learned that being Fijian is a source of unity, that our identity as Fijians helps all of us achieve far more together, as a united people.
But it is because of the teachings of leaders like Gandhi and those he inspired, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, that we know that there is always opportunity for peace and progress.
I would like to ask all people to reflect on the simple concept often attributed to Gandhi – that we must be the change that we want to see in this world.
That we must seek out opportunity for growth by shaping the world we live in, through our own actions.
On behalf of Fiji and its people, I wish the people of India and the India Government a very happy anniversary.
Amidst so much violence, he invented his greatest weapon of non-violence. Truth, as he perceived it, became his search for his personal God.
The 19th century is generally regarded as the greatest imperial century in modern history.
The sun of the British Empire was burning brightly over at least a quarter of the globe and on many millions of people in many colours of the ‘discovered’ world.
The British Empire wasn’t the longest, but it was the largest. It changed, for good and ill, the configurations of our consciousness, cultures, ideas of countries and peoples, in enduring ways, assisted by Christianity, conquests, conversions, commerce, technology, ideas, and ideologies of human civilisations.
And it gave us one truly global language.
In its pursuit of civilising missions of explorations, exploitations, and colonisations, it encircled much of the world. London was the great city of lights. It attracted many melancholy moths from obscure corners of the world.
The British Empire, many believed, would last at least a thousand years, with India, the jewel in the imperial crown.
Gandhi’s journey begins
Gandhi, aged 19, arrived in London to be trained as a lawyer towards the last quarter of the century. He was born in 1869. He spent almost three years studying in the city, walking the streets, trying to be an English gentleman. And meeting people of different faiths, flaws and fads.
He returned to India after three years. In 1893, after his failure as a lawyer in Bombay courts, he was sent to South Africa to help settle disputes between feuding Indian merchants.
As fate would have it, he spent 20 years of his most formative life in South Africa. Sometimes in the wrong train you reach the right station in life. He returned finally to India, aged 46. And hardly ever went overseas, but travelled within the vast subcontinent.
Altogether he spent almost a third of his very active, formative life away from India, this made all the difference to him, to India, and to the world we inhabit today. London, Durban and Johannesburg shaped him more subtly than Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi or Delhi. Exile can be the most creative force and modern civilisation is shaped more radically by exiles and émigrés than any other species of humanity: from Marx to the Mahatma is an exhilarating journey, voyages of discovery and revolutionary disasters.
No Indian leader of Gandhi’s or our times had his education, experience, faith and convictions: his creative energy or legislative creativity.
Compared to him, most of his contemporaries left behind monstrous reputations – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao – to name a few. Even Winston Churchill’s statues are now being toppled.
See all around us today and you can imagine the light Gandhi was and is. Most of today’s leaders of men and women are yokels compared to this extraordinary man who came out of an ordinary coastal town riddled with its own limitations and views of the world. His transformation from a mediocre man to a magnificent mahatma is truly the miracle the 20th century: the most genocidal in history. So one might attempt to understand what went into the making of this more than a remarkable outsider. Let’s not forget that more than Indians loved him, but it took a so-called Hindu Indian to kill him. Or so Godse and his accomplices thought.
The critical outsider
Mohandas Gandhi was the great ‘critical outsider’. But he was much more than that: he was a profoundly creative genius of his society, his self and soul.
His capacity to transform himself with a transcendent love, I feel, is unique. To have done this without denying any aspect of life as irrelevant or insignificant. No life was expendable, no cause too small. No human soul was beyond redemption.
He did not seek any divine inheritance either. He was human and showed us by his life and living what it means to be truly human. He revealed himself to humanity in his acts and words. And his mortality.
He tried to change a culture, a civilisation from sanitation to satyagraha; first with himself, then his family and companions, then his community and his country.
Today in COVID-19 his message is most meaningful for our lives, livelihood and liberties.
With hope, he always put our shared but unfinished humanity above everything else. He cared deeply.
London opened his world in many directions; he read widely; met people of different complexions and creeds. In an alien landscape, he discovered the spiritual richness of India in a few texts he hadn’t read in the place of his birth. He read these in translations.
In that sense, he was a translated man. From Sermon on the Mount to Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, to Ruskin’s works among others, he garnered wisdom as a miner gathered diamonds from the deadly dark South African mines.
Nothing was alien to him: from Plato to the works of lesser philosophers. He was challenged, but he challenged others also. He knew the most creative ground was below his feet, rooted in the India’s diverse spiritual soil, rivers and mountains. The widows of his mind were always open to other ideas from other worlds.
Europe was the dominant civilisation emerging out of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Gandhi must have felt that Britannia ruled the waves and also seen how the imperial rulers waived the rules when it suited them, done mostly under royal assent.
Even in India of castes, petty
princelings, a palimpsest polity, many were loyal to the Raj to preserve their influence and advance their interests.
The marvellous transformation
But Gandhi saw his public life quite differently: as public service par excellence.
To understand this marvellous transformation one has to go to the ‘Dark Continent’: Durban in South Africa was the darkest as he remarked, in that ‘God-forsaken continent, I found my God’.
Here he found his life’s mission that gave him a vision of public service unprecedented in Indian public life with a totally new idea of service coupled with a spiritual dimension: part of the Indian heritage: Satyagraha and Ahimsa became his sword and shield, so to speak. Swaraj was the freedom of the spirit, body and body-politic. If he had succeeded in Bombay as a lawyer, he might have upheld British Raj with convictions. Instead his sojourn in South Africa made him defy the unjust laws at every opportunity which enabled him to sharpen his weapons of Satyagraha which he deployed against a ruthlessly racial regime.
It took another century to dismantle the terrible system at least partially because we know those battles are going on in our most exciting democracies with race and caste as the front wheels of the crushing, rattling chariot of prejudice and persecution.
It was in South Africa that Gandhi discovered a vision of public work, political activism, as service to humanity rather than to one’s community or country.
In the welfare of all was the welfare of everyone: sarvodaya. The pain of others is our pain. His favourite bhajan is about that human sorrow.
He sharpened this insight in the midst of people of various faiths, prejudices, colours, interests and motivations.
Interfaith harmony and living together were his basic tenets of human dignity and equality. In that battle he was almost killed twice in South Africa: finally, fatally in New Delhi.
It was seen, by many, as the Second Crucifixion.
But he never showed the bitterness against those who opposed him so brutally.
The weapon and non-violence
Amidst so much violence, he invented his greatest weapon of nonviolence. Truth, as he perceived it, became his search for his personal God.
In his ripening understanding of the nature of ultimate truth and of the essential nature of humanity, there emerged a realisation that how inter-connected our words, actions, and thoughts are.
The action of one affects, by some mysterious alchemy, the reaction of all.
He realised that the mystery of salvation or moksha is to be found in the outcaste, in the afflicted, the poor and the dispossessed. The seeker of this truth could not separate himself from God’s creatures. To achieve this, political commitment was as important as any spiritual quest. Indeed they were two sides of the human coin with harsh edges in between.
It’s outside among the European migrants, Indian small merchants and the indentured that he discovered his life’s mission.
No Indian leader of that time had gained that insight in the subjugation of a people under foreign yoke in a migrant society. He touched the life of millions and found great courage among the most ordinary men and women in Natal and Transvaal.
They gave him their trust; and Gandhi was the great gift of the girmit people and small merchants to Mother India.
True he didn’t pay attention to the condition of the native peoples, but Gandhi knew that if he carved a way, showed a path of resistance with his known community paying the price, the indigenous people would find their own means to fight tyranny and discrimination. Without the Natal Indian Congress there would be no African National Congress or a Nelson Mandela. There are, therefore, connections and inter-connections. Significantly his own idea of Indianness he found not on the subcontinent, but on the African continent. As someone remarked: ‘ You sent us a lawyer, we gave you back a mahatma with the invincible weapon of Civil Disobedience’.
Pity he never went to the USA, but without him there would be no Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, among others, including Barack Obama. Let’s hope Kamala Harris shows the Gandhian touch in her pursuit of peace and happiness and a new awareness of our troubled world.
Wisdom of Hind Swaraj
Gandhi believed Indian liberation was to be pursued not through the European idea of a nation-state or through violent revolution which had done so much damage to western Christian civilisation, but true
Swaraj must come from a society’s moral transformation and social upliftment of the poorest, the loneliest and the lost.
Self-respect and self-reliance were the two feet on which the humblest and the powerful stood together. Gandhi would never have written
Hind Swaraj, his seminal book, if he hadn’t been to Europe and seen what European ideas of progress and revolution had done and was doing not only to Europe, but to the world.
Here he also met many patriotic, derivative Indians and foresaw that their methods will destroy the very world whose freedom was so dear to them.
That he didn’t fully succeed is, of course, a tragedy of immense sadness; that history will continue to hurt and haunt the subcontinent for centuries. Still his achievements were magnificent: and he left a standard against which Indians and others will measure themselves for generations.
Gandhi propagated an alternative vision to counteract the forces that led to two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima amidst numerous tragedies, including the Partition of India.
Today some parts of Hind Swaraj appear outdated, but in the menace of COVID-19 we can see the insightful wisdom in the book: it has lessons for us and may yet help us see the catastrophic consequences of climate change or blowing up of 50,000-year shrines of the Aboriginal people for mining.
Greed, not need, is the modern creed.
From personal hygiene to political healing, his message is crucially relevant and profoundly timely to any self-respecting individual or community, particularly on the subcontinent.
He was most critical of himself and then his society with its oppressive structures in so many forms, facets, faces, frameworks and fundamentalist expressions. In posing those challenges to himself, his compatriots, his fellow human beings, he became a recurring inspiration to men and women of all times and all places on our one and only wounded planet. These battles continue unabated on the streets of London and Berlin, New York and New Delhi.
Another gift of Gandhi overseas was what he experienced among the indentured labourers in South Africa. This gave him his deepest sense of Indianness and made him see what was being done to thousands in remote places of the empire: from South Africa to the South Pacific, via Mauritius and the Middle Passage.
Who can ever forget his meeting with the bullied, bleeding Balasundram.
His efforts with a few others led to the abolition of this abomination. Significantly this year marks the century of the termination of the last indenture. The other was truly your brother.
He wrote relentlessly; no human hands have written more than Gandhi’s. None of his Indian contemporaries have written anything as thought-provoking or as noble or honest as the mahatma’s.
I think he understood this great gift when he was abroad to influence the thinking of others. Words were powerful weapons for good and ill. And he deployed them with stunning effect. He knew the British islanders not only wrote: they read.
He showed the penned word was truly mightier than the sword. Gandhiji used his pen, mainly in his mother tongue to reach millions in translations. That remains, in my opinion, his deepest and most enduring gift to humanity’s journey beyond the self.
As the late John Briley, the author of Gandhi, the Screenplay, put it: It is in his writing that I found the brave, determined man with his unsentimental honesty about the complexity of men and his unshakable belief that on balance they are more inclined to good than evil. And that on that slight imbalance they can build and achieve and perhaps survive--even in a nuclear age. Gandhi lived the most fundamental drama of all: The war in our hearts between love and hate. He knew it was a war, a war with many defeats, but he believed in only one victor.
Even Vyasa or Valmaki , I think, couldn’t imagine such a human being, such a heroic heart with such humane holiness.
Mahatma Gandhi’s life is India’s greatest and finest epic, created overseas and within India.