The railway station with its colored bricks and people from various classes seemed as the mirror-image of everything the country was at that time; the white masters, their servants, the zamindars, and so on. An elderly lady was sitting anxiously in one of the compartments. She was alone and she couldn’t find anyone to help her buy some drinking water. Though there were so many other passengers in the same cabin, she couldn’t find any innocent faces there. Then, she saw a young man outside; she called him and gave some money and the bottle she had with her. As she waited for him, the train started moving. The fellow passengers started criticizing her for giving money to a completely strange man. However, she looked so calm. When the train moved a bit, the young man came running and gave her the bottled water and the remaining cash. He waved his hands as the train left. Then, the fellow passengers asked her, “How did you trust that completely stranger so much?” With a smile, she replied, “He was wearing khadi.”
I heard this story in a speech by Prof. Muhammad Ahammad. He was referring the trust people had for the Gandhians during the time of India’s freedom struggle. The people who were named as Gandhians were not just workers of Indian National Congress, but those who follow certain kind of lifestyle such as complete simplicity, vegetarianism, adherents of ahimsa, truthfulness, and always felt that serving fellow beings irrespective of caste, religion, race, nationality and so on is their duty. It was not limited to the followers of Gandhi in India alone, but all those who were influenced by his ideas such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Ki and so on. However, in the present day, Gandhians are people who wear khadi, except that nothing is similar with the old values and ideas. Politicians know the market value of Gandhi, but never take any care to follow the footsteps of Gandhi. Though it became a standard practice in India for politicians to wear khadi and conduct special programs on Gandhi Jayanthi, only to woo the people, it became a phenomenon outside India.
Barack Obama, for example, during and after the presidential election, shared how the ideas of Gandhi such as Satygraha influenced his life. Those who observed the way he is running his country will have to find a new meaning for the word “influence.”
The basic principle in which Gandhi built his political philosophy is ‘ahimsa’. Though ‘ahimsa’ is somewhat similar to non-violence, it is not as simple as that. Anyone who is following ‘ahimsa’ as his basic ideology can’t even think of violence. Further, Gandhi maintained the view that ‘both end and means should be pure’, contrary to the long-held view that ‘end justifies the means.’
In other words, in order to fight terrorism, a person influenced by Gandhi won’t send his army to kill people. He will not introduce a motion in the Senate to get permission to attack Syria. In other words, the policies of Obama clearly show that he does not have any respect for Gandhi or the ideas of Gandhi.
It is clear that Obama got elected as the president of the USA by creating an image about him- a black, influence by civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, ideas of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. Of course, the reason for his success is mainly the ‘hope’ he tried to sell to the voters. The point is, if ‘hope’ was the commodity he tried to sell, Gandhi, Mandela, and King were the selling strategies. Later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Alas, what is the meaning of peace then?
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