MAHATMA GANDHI AND THE GREAT INDIAN WAY

In my book, ‘The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi’ (Penguin 2015), I said that more than anyone else, Gandhi is the ‘man we hate to love and love to hate’. This paradox explains his enormous persistence, if not appeal, in India.

- MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE

The year-long sesquicentennial celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth came to an end on 2nd October, 151 years after his birth in 1869. it was a somewhat tepid close, at least from the intellectual point of view, with hardly any new ideas or ways of understanding the Mahatma. Kicked-off last September by a committee headed by the President of India, it saw a number of programs and events subsumed under one rubric, “Gandhi in action.”

It was PM Narendra Modi’s idea, according to the official Gandhi@150 website (https://gandhi.gov.in/karyanjali. HTML), that most of the programs during the celebrations should focus on government initiatives. Hence the title, Karyanjali. naturally, the celebrations were integrated with the government’s own flagship activities, such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, whose symbol was the easily recognizable pair of Gandhi’s spectacles.

It was as if Gandhi was looking at us as we struggled to clean up our actions and surroundings. But more, in the time of a global pandemic, Gandhi’s emphasis on both physical and moral cleanliness was sure to resonate across the globe. Gandhi, we must not forget, was also the father of public health in South Africa and India, showing us how to stay healthy in his two very popular books, ‘Guide to Health’ and ‘Key to Health’.