Inequality And Injustice Needs Gandhi's Example More Than Ever Today

A planet riven by inequality and injustice needs Gandhi’s example more than ever today

- Rajmohan Gandhi

A safe and non-controversial Gandhi legacy today is his example, currently in vogue in business school courses, as a servant-leader and team-builder. But he is no longer popular in the nation that used to call him father. For Indians who hate his commitment to Hindu-Muslim friendship, Gandhi is in fact an untouchable, which is what he had prayed to become one day, to feel more fully the misery of India’s Dalits.

His fall in India would not have shocked him. He had said in 1915, within weeks of returning from South Africa, where he had devised his satyagraha strategy, that while he foresaw a large following in India for satyagraha, he also knew that one day supporters would throw him overboard, for he would not give up positions they disliked.

If, in our land of different religions, many Indians today openly or secretly detest Gandhi’s prescription of equal rights, mutual respect and mutual friendship, others in India and the world love him for precisely that reason.

Culturally and politically, Gandhi was the unyielding Indian nationalist at whose word millions pronounced ‘Quit India’ to the Empire. In 1931, he went to a Buckingham Palace reception in his usual cold-weather attire, the shawl-and-dhoti of an Indian peasant of his time, causing an African-American journal, the Pittsburgh Courier, to comment that Gandhi was ‘an unusually brilliant man’ who did not ‘bow to the conventions of European civilisation’.