150 Years And Beyond

Tushar Arun Gandhi on the Mahatma

150 years after the Mahatma’s birth, do we deserve to be the bearers of his legacy and do we deserve him? He did what he had to do in his lifetime and whether or not he is relevant today does not matter; the pertinent question is whether we deserve to claim that he is the Father of the Nation.

When the first interim Government of India was formed and the Council of Ministers took charge, they went to meet Bapu and asked him to give them messages so that they could work according to his wishes. He gave them a message that has come to be known as his talisman: when you think of doing something for the betterment of the public, picture the face of the weakest of weak and poorest of poor. Then ask yourself if what you intend to do will make a difference in that person’s life? Will it enable them to climb out of the hopeless situation they find themselves in and become self-reliant? If the honest answer to that question is yes, then what you are trying to do is of relevance; otherwise it will just make you feel good and there will be no consequence to the people it is intended for.

Unfortunately this talisman, like everything else, has become a nice quote in a book and governments in independent India have forgotten the spirit of it. Welfare policies of governments from Independence till today have made people dependent and not self-reliant. If you look at the very well intentioned MGNREGA, all it does is make the rural poor create a lifestyle that can sustain on hundred days of guaranteed income. They keep themselves impoverished so that that benefit can keep coming instead of using that to climb out because there is no limit for it. You can just keep
availing it for the rest of your life.

India has a unique reputation of both capitalism and socialism fading in it. We tried to be socialist republic and we did not succeed in that. We tried to embrace capitalist values, philosophies and ideologies, and we are not doing a great job of that either. So the cure for everything that ails the nation today could be modelled on the concept of trusteeship that my great grandfather laid great store by. Bapu did not just preach about trusteeship of wealth but he talked about the trusteeship of ability. He said that everything that is unique to an individual should, beyond a certain point, be utilised for the benefit of the society. And not out of the sense of being benevolent but from the sense of being duty-bound because whatever you have achieved, whenever you live in a society, it is never all by yourself.

Society has contributed to your successes and abilities, knowledge and everything that you are capable of at that point of time. Somewhere or the other, the society has contributed to it. So you owe it to society that you utilise all your talents, abilities, time, wealth to give back to the society in a way that you create a situation where it is not dependent on your aim or your benevolent. You create things that will then become self-sustaining and empower a targeted audience. That is the concept of trusteeship that we have never adopted.

In contrast, many people in villages have gone beyond their capabilities to share with the community their abilities to make the life of the people better. I have just been on a tour of India going through the NGOs in the rural areas and there are such shining examples of why India is able to sustain itself although we are such a diverse and contradictory nation within our nation. People are sometimes surprised how we survive as a nation. And yet there are some things that bind us together because if you look at what we have achieved remarkably in independent India is the fact that we have created divisions to such an extent that the only thing left now that is not divided into an unbridgeable manner is the individual. Otherwise every other factor divides us, education, facilities, rights, community, caste, religion, gender, economics and it keeps widening.

That is why the relevance of Gandhi comes back because in the figure of Gandhi you see the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak of the nation. His entire image is of that and that is why he has become the icon of the have-nots.

Unfortunately we made him into a Mahatma, we created him into a larger than life person and that is why one of my unstated objectives in life is to free my great grandfather from that prison of being a Mahatma and making him into an ordinary, believable human being because what he inspired is not what he became. What is inspiring is how he achieved that from being a frail, weak, and prone-to-make-mistakes, young man to getting to that stage where the world considered him to be an icon and a Mahatma. That is the journey we can identify with and we can encourage ourselves to take that path. We may not reach the same destination. The destination is not important, it is the journey, the will to take a few steps towards that.

While the nation celebrates the 150th anniversary of Bapu, we have reduced him to become an icon of cleanliness and that too external cleanliness. There is no inward ability to look, or intention to look inwards and cleanse ourselves from inside, whether it is in governance or civilian life. The glasses that have come to symbolise clean India, the design shows only the frame there are no lenses in it, so the vision through those glasses is always going to be blurred. That is convenient because then you don’t see the nitty-gritty of the problem or the issue.

The greatest pity of our nation is that for the past six years, on every Independence Day, our Prime Minister is forced to appeal to us to make a clean India and yet it shows no results because it is not just cleaning up of India that is of importance, we have to inculcate the habit of not littering in the first place. That is our societal tradition because our caste based society has conditioned first us for centuries that there is a group of people whose duty is to clean up after us. So it is our duty to make filth so that they have a reason to live and work. That is why the greatest failure of Bapu was to fight to eradicate the caste hierarchies in our society.

Not only Bapu but every social reformer who tried to fight caste hierarchy and prejudices has failed. Dr. Ambedkar tried it with a legal provision and today you see the whole process of reservation which was meant to create a level-playing field has created rifts and divisions. It is not just Dr Ambedkar to be blamed for this, it is us. We are so expert in corrupting everything that could be good and making it bad. Thus, this 150 anniversary of Bapu is time to introspect, not celebrate. We don’t deserve to celebrate his life anymore unless we introspect and try to find Gandhian quality within ourselves.

PP Rtn. Haresh Jagtiani: You talked about the theory of Trusteeship. I think there should be a way to capture the essence of Gandhi in some way or the other, teaching or by getting people to address a University.
As Bapu said, if you really want to make a difference you must start with children. I find it exhilarating because students are not convinced easily and have a lot of questions. Gandhi can only be understood if you keep asking questions, if you accept what somebody says, you only accept one facet of Gandhi. One of my favourite analogies of understanding Gandhi is the onion. I say Gandhi is like an onion; you keep peeling the layer and a new shape and new layer is apparent to you till you have nothing left and that is when you realise what Gandhi is. The nothingness of the onion. If we put in a practical use, the definition of Gandhi is in its non-existence. So I subscribe to Gandhigiri much more than Gandhism because the latter is too philosophical to be practical whereas Munna showed us Gandhigiri to be applied in day to day situations. Gandhi gives the inspiration to find the cure by ourselves, he does not give us the cure.