Gandhi – How Modern India Can’t Understand This Man

More often than not, those who have hit puberty recently (or are in such a mental state. This of course would include most of the Indian youth), try to convince me that Gandhi was flawed, his ideologies were backward (some have even gone on to call him a racist – I don’t know where you pull that one from but whatever.) and so on.

This pains me. Gandhi was an individual whose thought was far beyond what any education can bestow on a man. What our history books fail to tell us (I think this is a fault of the authors or maybe they are under oath to not analyze so the details are left to interpretation) is that when Gandhi arrived in the Indian political scene, India was represented by an elite super-educated group whose understanding of British atrocities was limited to the violence they saw on the streets. What they didn’t understand was that iron-fist imperialist rule doesn’t merely extend to military might but also to a law-and-order system designed to crush and keep the masses impoverished. Gandhi was the only person who understood this. Not one other leader ever bothered to listen to the economic policy that the British empire used to keep the indigo farmers deep in debt and poverty. What every other freedom fighter failed to understand was that the military of the British empire was maintained to enforce unjust law in the subcontinental colonies. If you didn’t comply, you would be forced into poverty, so comply you did. Well, complying forced you into poverty too. Retaliating using violence would be met with sternly. This was a hallmark feature of their style of governing. Well, Gandhi was the first man who managed to understand the problem here, think of a solution (active civil disobedience) and to confuse a law and order system that assumed that dissent would come in the form of a crude attack, adopted the policy of non-violence. So, essentially, whenever Gandhi went to prison, his own fame would ensure that people knew of his arrests on no charges defined by law. This was how advanced his thought was. Gandhi was smarter than most men.

My fellow Indians, corruption in the public sector is not Gandhi’s fault. He led by example and you failed to follow. He wanted to ensure that modern India was secular, and yet we allowed our imagination to run wild and partitioned ourselves. Gandhi did not just fight for independence, he fought to ensure that India would be led by individuals who wouldn’t exploit the minorities or engage in harebrained foreign policy. He refused to accept help from those who were responsible for most of Asia’s and Europe’s suffering. This man had the power of analyzing the effect of every action he took. We have only benefitted from Gandhi’s life, we have lost almost nothing. He truly deserves the title – “Father Of The Nation”.