Yesterday was the 137th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. According to the Times of India, places like Rajghat were more crowded than on any on any October 2nd in the recent past. They attribute the increase in attendance, and indeed the enormous enthusiasm for celebrating Gandhi Jayanti, to a recent blockbuster Bollywood comedy called “Lagey Raho Munnabhai”. In Gujarat, I believe Congress leaders paid tribute to the Mahatma by screening the movie for free! After reading this, I found it rather interesting to contemplate on a modern Indian’s relationship to this important leader.
The relationship of modern India to Gandhiji is rather complex. On the one hand, his beliefs and ideals continue to be an important part of every Indian child’s upbringing. His face on Indian currency, his many statues around Indian cities and his photo in most government offices combine to ensure that everyone (almost) knows who he is. Furthermore, his presence in textbooks, patriotic songs and almost any discussion about the freedom movement, combine to give every Indian an awareness of his existence and his importance to the creation of India itself. At a deeper level however, some of Gandhi’s core beliefs--- strong faith in the power of economic self-sufficiency of India as a nation, a determination to alleviate poverty, the belief in the importance of brotherhood amongst diverse communities, and the condemnation of the system of untouchability and caste discrimination---have been challenged by the modern political and economic forces.
Consider for example, Gandhi’s ideal of self-sufficiency. Gandhiji believed in sarvodaya, full employment and the use of a communities own resources as an engine of economic development. He advocated the development of rural economies with the development of agriculture and village industries. He advised Indians to boycott foreign goods, foreign companies, and foreign capital. Clearly, these ideals have been seriously challenged by the forces of modern day politics and economics. Though Gandhi’s policies were never put into actual practice, the idea of “self-reliance” dominated Indian politics and economics for four decades after Independence. Around 1991, India broke with this past and has promoted trade with the rest of the world, embraced foreign investment (at least more than ever before), and taken great steps to integrate into the world economy. The Indian middle class appears to be rather jubilant about these changes, have embraced the capitalism as an engine of economic growth. In this new economic era, Gandhi’s values are not entirely forgotten, but I think there is a huge number of Indians who don’t believe in the policies of the past and feel that the changes to economic policy should have been made far earlier.
Gandhi’s ideals on poverty alleviation died even earlier than his belief in self-reliance. After Independence, both Gandhi and Nehru agreed that the eradication of inequality in India was an important goal. While Gandhi highlighted the role of each individual Indian in attaining this goal (by condemning the caste system, and encouraging Indians to play a role in the process of uplifting poorer Indians), Nehru believed in that the government should address these issues. Ultimately, Nehru’s methods prevailed. In the years that followed, the Indian government became the agent through which the ideals of social justice, fairness and equality were to be attained. The state controlled most resources, restricted private sector activities, and established massive anti-poverty programs. Unfortunately, both Gandhi and Nehru did not envision that as the government became bigger and more powerful, each individual Indian would pull away from his/her responsibilities. Corruption became rampant, attitudes towards poverty hardened (“Why doesn’t the government do something about these people in the slums?” was a common line at dinner parties in the 1970s and 1980s.) This loss of a sense of social responsibility in India after independence was one of the most tragic losses in modern day India. It doesn’t help that at its core, Hinduism generally does not cultivate a sense of social responsibility in its believers. Unlike a Christian or a Muslim, a Hindu’s quest for salvation is deeply individualistic and does not depend on his treatment of people worse of than he/she. The loss of the Gandhian ideology of taking personal responsibility for improving the lot of those who are worse off, compounded with the creation of a corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracy had horrible consequences for India: a staggering number of poor people and an elite that is unconcerned with these realities.
A third ideal that has been significantly challenged in recent times is belief in the unity despite the differences of caste or religion. For reasons that are probably too complicated to go into here, the past 20 years has been marked by the rise of regional electoral parties in India. While India is still secular, religion and religious conservatism and in some cases even fundamentalism has become central to politics. Caste identities have also strengthened. The issue of “reservations” has been a crucial issue in almost every election. While the reservations system definitely attempts to improve the lot of individuals of lower castes, it highlights caste divisions among young people in society and creates frictions. This is not to say that Indians are not united, and do not have things in common with each other. In some respects, Indians are uniting like never before. The take-off of Indian economic growth, the explosion of consumer culture, the unification of aspirations through national advertising campaigns, Bollywood and television that is today cutting through people’s divisions and developing a kind of “Indian” identity even while regional politics and caste politics create mayhem in many places at election time. It is strange to me that today’s unification is taking place through economics rather than through values, cultural beliefs and a belief in secularism. To see the Gandhian ideal of unification be replaced by economic forces (most of which Gandhi disapproved of) is rather startling!
Whether Indians realize it or not, I think most of us cherish Gandhiji’s memory and respect his ideals enormously, but don’t know exactly how to implement them in the modern economic, cultural and political environment we live in. This new Munna Bhai movie may have been phenomenally successful because it provided simple answers to deeply troubling questions. It ignored everything about Gandhi’s teachings that is unattainable in the modern day (like self-reliance) and focused on those teachings that are still attainable….Speaking the truth, being non-violent, being “nice” to people less fortunate than yourself, judging a person by how they interact with a person poorer than themselves, etc. Personally, I think it is rather sad that it takes a Bollywood movie to make this rather simple point, specially considering that Gandhi was a man who believed that the means is as important as the end! I just hope that it sets all of us thinking and more aware of what we believed in 60 years ago and what we believe in today….
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