THE APOSTLE OF LOVE

Father of the nation

Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Indian since the Buddha, revolutionised India’s nationalist movement after he returned from South Africa by launching his first nationwide satyagraha on August 1, 1920, inspiring millions of illiterate peasants and brilliant intellectuals to follow him with his passionate promise that fearless tapasya (suffering) would, after one year, bring them national freedom or swaraj (self-rule) from British imperial tyranny. That did not, of course, happen so swiftly, but Gandhi never abandoned his faith that satya (Vedic truth) joined with Buddhist ahimsa (non-violence)— which he believed to be god and love—would together “move the world”. And that did happen, more than two decades later, after the half-naked “great soul” led his final satyagraha, ordering every British official to quit India, adopting as his most powerful mantra, “Karenge ya marenge! (Do or die!)”, convincing the most powerful empire on earth finally to abandon South Asia.

Mahatma Gandhi was the only great Indian leader who adamantly refused to agree to Partition, which he called “vivisection of Mother India”, knowing as he did that its hasty inept division of Punjab and Bengal would leave rivers of blood to rush through the heartland of the richest, most sacred Sikh fields and gurdwaras of Punjab and through the mid-section of the once “Golden Bengal”. It was the worst and most tragic disaster of recent Indian history, the civil war that ravaged most of North India throughout the final years of the British Raj, blood-drenched trains filled with Sikh corpses steaming into Amritsar station, others choked with murdered Muslims headed back to Lahore. “Have we all been possessed by madness, now that we have freedom?” Gandhi cried aloud. “How shameful it is!” Still he never abandoned his hope that such mad violence could be stopped, leaving New Delhi on the eve of its glorious celebration of Freedom, to hurry off to Calcutta, where he did whatever he could to abate the communal murders that had turned that long great capital of British India into a graveyard of dreadful night.