Shah launches four-month drive to propagate Gandhi’s principles

NEW DELHI: BJP president Amit Shah kicked-off a four-monthlong exercise, titled “Gandhi Sankalp Yatra”, on Wednesday from Shalimar Bagh area of New Delhi on the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

Being organised with a theme of “Mann me Bapu”, the drive aims to propagate the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, including cleanliness, use of khadi, non-violence, etc.

Top BJP leaders — such as Amit Shah, party working president J P Nadda and Union minister Prakash Javadekar — undertook ‘padyatra’ (foot march), Gandhi’s favoured way to reach out to the masses, as part of “Gandhi Sankalp Yatra” as they gave a call to people to follow the ideals of the Father of the Nation.

Addressing the BJP workers and public, Shah said, “Gandhiji’s satyagraha movement brought the Britishers to their knees. He showed the path of truth and non-violence to the world.”

The Union minister also asked the people to follow PM Narendra Modi’s call to shun single-use plastic and said he is the only prime minister who has made cleanliness a mass movement, after Gandhi. BJP leaders, MPS, MLAS, organisational leaders and other party members undertook 2-km-long foot march and spoke about non-violence, peace, use of khadi and cleanliness in events held across the country.

In the run up to Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Modi had given a call to his party to make the day memorable and asked its leaders to organise events and foot marches to mark the day.

MAHATMA GANDHI has done more than any other person of history to reveal that social problems can be solved without resorting to primitive methods of violence. In this sense he is more than a saint of India. He belongs — as they said of Abraham Lincoln — to the ages. In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi’s method of non-violence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a c o n t i n u a l r e mi n d e r to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence.

The Gandhian influence in some way still speaks to the conscience of the world as nations grapple with international problems. If we fail, on an international scale, to follow the Gandhian principle of non-violence, we may end up by destroying ourselves through the misuse of our own instruments. The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is now either non-violence or non-existence.

Oppressed people can deal with oppression in three ways. They can accept or acquiesce. Under segregation they can adjust to it. Yet non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The minute one accepts segregation, one cooperates with it. Oppressed people can, on the other hand, resort to physical violence, a method both whole nations and oppressed peoples have used. But violence merely brings about a temporary victory and not permanent peace. It