Gandhi - Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was and continues to be arguably the most admired human being of the twentieth century in India and throughout the world. Polls invariably rank Gandhi at or near the top of the most admired, along with Albert Einstein and a few others. M. K. Gandhi is better known as Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi, the honorific title usually believed to have been conferred upon him and certainly popularized by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. In India he was frequently given the honorific title Bapu (Father), and he is honoured in India as the Father of the Nation. His birthday, 2 October, is celebrated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday. After the United Nations General Assembly vote of 15 June 2007, his birthday is celebrated worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.

Remarkably, Mahatma Gandhi was and continues to be admired by a range and diversity of people. Such admiration was expressed by millions of illiterate peasants, who identified with and often worshipped and even deified him. Of the Indian leaders in the Freedom Movement, he alone was able to capture the imagination, love and trust of the impoverished peasants and to inspire them to transform their values and commitments. As Tagore observed: Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the door of Indias destitute millions, clad as one of themselves, speaking to them in their own language... who else has so unreservedlyaccepted the vast masses of the Indian people as his flesh and blood... Truth Awakened Truth.

Such admiration was also expressed by many of the best-known cultural, political and scientific figures of Gandhis lifetime. In what is probably the most frequently cited tribute to Gandhi, made on the occasion of Gandhis seventieth birthday, Albert Einstein declared: Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. On another occasion Einstein wrote: I believe that Gandhis views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.

On 30 January 1948 Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister, broadcast to the nation that the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere... Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more. Nehru continues that he was wrong in stating that the light has gone out. Even a thousand years later, he said, the light that had illuminated India will still be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living, the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr often spoke of his admiration for and indebtedness to Gandhi in his theory and practice of nonviolence and nonviolent activism. In the section Pilgrimage to Nonviolence in his book Stride Toward Freedom, King writes: Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. King says that the intellectual and moral satisfaction that he failed to gain from Bentham and Mill, Marx and Lenin, Hobbes, Rousseau and Nietzsche, he found in the non-violent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. According to King, If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.

At the same time Gandhi was and continues to be very controversial, with many critics and opponents both during his lifetime and during the more than six decades since his death. To cite only one famous illustration from Gandhis lifetime, Winston Churchill, who consistently opposes Indias independence from British colonial rule, loathes and has contempt for Gandhi. In 1930Churchill states: It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

Even in India today hundreds of millions of Indians oppose Gandhi and Gandhian approaches. These include modern Westernized Indians, who view Gandhi as irrelevant or a threat to their values and way of life, various religious nationalists and others with religious, caste, class and revolutionary positions rejecting Gandhis nonviolence and approach to truth and reality.