Bhapu Gandhiji, Father of the Nation, conscience of all men

(Part 2 of a series on Mahatma Gandhi)

NEW DELHI, India — The simple accommodation of Chintam Guest House at the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) was a welcome to us, participants of the first Asia Pacific consultation of the Category 1 Institute of Mahatma Gandhi for Education of Peace & Sustainable Development. This included UNESCO Paris representative Linda King, APCEIU Director Lee Seung-Hwan (Korea), Prof. Kai-ming Cheng (University of Hong Kong), Dr. Madoka Futurama (UN University, Japan), Dr. Carol Anonuevo (Category 1 Institute for Lifelong Learning, Hamburg), Carl Lindberg (Swedish National Commission ESD Advisor), Dr. John Pace (Australian Human Rights Centre, University of New South Wales) and me representing the Philippine Category 2 Southeast Asian Center for Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development.

At $50 a night, it included a choice of American or Indian breakfast. Following the maxim of “when in India, do as the Indians do,” Debbie Apiado and I chose the latter. The hot puff bread “puri” taken with “baghee” spicy mash potato with herbs and tomato and onion omelet was truly a wakeup meal. One breaks the bread and dips it in the very hot sour Indian pickles. Then everything is washed down with refreshing cold lassi, the yogurt drink taken sweet or salty.

When India became part of the British Crown

The foundations of British rule or the Raj was laid only after the Indian Mutiny. An Act of Parliament in 1858 brought its rule to a close and its Indian territories became part of the British Empire - PAX Britannica. India was now ruled by the Crown through a viceroy. Though the Raj was very Victorian and conservative with its main objective of economic profit and political control, its abiding legacy was the political unification of the subcontinent and the introduction of modern Western education, a centralized civil administration and judicial system, along with a wide network of railway and postal services.

THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT. The Founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 gave Indians a platform from which to demand freedom from foreign rule. Their ideology was provided by Gandhi whose message of non-violence and economic self reliance gave them moral confidence and united castes and communities under a common cause. At first the movement for freedom was ruthlessly suppressed, but by the 1930’s it became too large for the British to handle. Finally weakened by World War II and under growing international pressure, England granted India formal independence in 1947.

The true story of the man and his people

Bhapu Ghandiji is the endearing name of the Indians for Gandhi - “Father Gandhi”. It would be chanted by crowds wherever he went.

Also called Mahatma (“great spirit”), British trained barrister MK Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 as a protest against apartheid. He traveled across the subcontinent launching a moral crusade that encouraged non-violent Civil Disobedience against colonial rule. Gandhi delivered his powerful message of freedom at public meetings. Huge crowds turned out to register their support.

Gandhi persuaded the Indians that they must persist in non-violent non-cooperation to prove to the British their right to self rule their country. They burned the western suits from Leeds and Manchester England and made their own homespun cotton cloth, the “khadi” which they wore in public as a statement of their patriotism. The police surrounded such public assemblies often brutally beating the audience. Brilliant lawyers Nehru and Jinnah, who joined Gandhi’s national movement, enjoyed iconic status in India and Pakistan after Independence.

‘Back to the villages’

Gandhi states that its time for us to go “back to the villages.”

“I believe that India is to be found not in its few cities but in its 700,000 villages... I have found that the town-dweller has generally exploited the villager... Many a British official has written about the conditions of the people of India. They have admitted that the bulk of the population lives on the verge of starvation and 10 percent are semi-starved, and that millions have to rest content with a pinch of dirty salt and chilies and polished rice or parched grain.”

“The task before every lover of the country is how to reconstruct the villages of India... The village movement is as much an education of the city people as of the villagers... Indian villages produced and supplied to the Indian towns and cities all their wants. India became impoverished when our cities became foreign markets and began to drain the villages dry.”

This has been happening in the Philippines specially now that shopping malls have killed the small local businesses and further discouraged local industries.

Every village a self-reliant ‘federal state’

“My imaginary village consists of 1,000 souls. Such a unit can give a good account of itself, if it is well organized on a basis of self-sufficiency.

“An ideal Indian village will be so constructed as to lend itself to perfect sanitation. It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation, built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling the householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free of all avoidable dust.

“It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to all. It will have houses of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a cooperative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which industrial education will be the central factor, and it will have village Panchayat courts for settling disputes.

“The villagers should develop such a high degree of skill and artistic talent. When our villages are fully developed, there will be village poets, village artists, village architects, linguists and research workers. Today the villages are dung heaps; tomorrow they will be like tiny gardens of Eden, where dwell highly intelligent folks whom no one can deceive or exploit.”

Extinction of the village industries

“The extinction of village industries would complete the ruin of the 700,000 villages.

“Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers. Mechanization is good when the hands are too few for the work intended to be accomplished. It is criminal to displace hand labor by the introduction of power-driven spindles unless one is at the same time ready to give millions of farmers some other occupation in their houses (such as crafts, local preserved foods for tourists, etc.). But simple tools and instruments and such machinery as saves individual labor and lightens the burden of the millions of cottage industries, I should welcome.

“When production and consumption both become localized, the temptation to speed up production, indefinitely and at any price, disappears. All the endless difficulties and problems than our present-day economic system presents, too, would then come to an end.”

What the government can do

“It is legitimate to ask what Congress Ministers can do. In these times of scarcity of food and clothing, the government can render the greatest help.

“It is possible to clothe today the whole of India in homespun cotton cloth, called ‘Khadi’, on the smallest outlay in the shortest time possible. Each provincial government will supply the villagers with cotton seed or cotton whenever required, at cost price and the tools of manufacture also at cost, to be recovered in easy installments payable in, say, five years or more. They will supply them with instructors wherever necessary and undertake to buy surplus stock of Khadi, provided that the villagers in question have their cloth requirements supplied.

An exhibition should be encouraged to present the ideal village. “There should be no necessity for games and other entertainments. It should not be a source of income nor become an advertising medium for traders. No sales should be allowed, even of Khadi and village industry products. But, books, charts and products should be used to show what industries give increased income and how.”

Mahatma Gandhi, the man of peace and self-reliance

It is very apt for India to name its UNESCO Category 1 Center as Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Mahatma Gandhi is the most influential Indian of the 20th century whose shadow continues to loom large over the country even 60 years after his death. He struggled and dreamt of an India free not only from the yoke of the British rule but also free from the evils of poverty, illiteracy, untouchability with all its citizens enjoying equally the fruits of freedom and prosperity.

Many of his revolutionary ideas, termed as idiosyncrasies then, are fashionable concepts followed by today’s generation. And the resurging popularity of “Gandhigiri” is proof of Gandhi’s continuing relevance in the 21st century.

(Reference: Gandhi, Mahatma. India of My Dreams. Rajpal & Sons, Delhi. 2008)