On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday on 2nd October, the challenges facing Gandhians and Gandhian thought are economic reforms as initiated by Dr Manmohan Singh since 1992 and their effects, direct and indirect, such as global warming and climate change, the ever-expanding war machinery, communalism and sectarianism, and the perverted form of democracy as we have today in India, and the manmade Frankenstein of terrorism. Let us consider them one by one.
Needless to say, economic reforms are a mere imitation of the American order of individual capitalism. The capitalist thesis advocates individual initiative, unrestricted earning, the accumulation of wealth etc. These have given birth to two evils, disparity and unemployment, which again have their adverse effects, one of them being in the words of the poet: “Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”
But the worst thing that happened was that the common citizen became money minded, having money as the sole goal or value of life. And money has it own ways — hook or crook. It has destroyed the very character of the nation.
The antithesis was communism, which replaced individual capitalism with state capitalism and the centralisation of economic power and political power, the ever-expanding war machinery etc, remained the same as it was in the capitalist order.
It was a sort of benevolent dictatorship in which the common man was only a production machine and had no say of whatsoever in running the society. The Russian and China communist machineries crumbled. It is all too recent a history.
Gandhi provides us with a synthesis in the form of trusteeship, wherein the individual initiative is given its scope and yet it curbs the possibility of exploitation through ownership of means of production. So far as the emission of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases from gigantic industrial complexes are concerned, he suggested decentralised eco-friendly industries run mostly on renewable energy. Even in cases of small complexes causing pollution, he gave us a way — “Think globally and act locally.”
The ever-expanding war machinery grabbing huge chunks of budgets deprives the poor classes of the necessities of life. Sarvodaya thought suggests to us world community, world citizenship and a world without borders, the non-violent ways of solving problems.
Sarvodaya treats all sects as diverse ways of people and asks us to organise future humanity on the basis of spirituality, i.e. equality for all living and non living things.
In India, we have the reality of the castes and classes mixed up. Added to it the minority and majority syndrome and stark poverty make voting itself a saleable commodity. The size of the constituency makes it impossible for a commoner to contest. This is created a strange situation of only moneyed ones holding the monopoly of representing the poor.
We have more than 300 crorepatis sitting in the Lok Sabha. For all these ills Sarvodaya prescribes decentralisation of the administrative machinery, making participation of the people real; Gandhi called it Gram Swara.
The manmade problem of terrorism requires an altogether different approach; reaching out to the promoters as well as tools of terrorism, solving the cause of unrest, educating them in non-violent ways of solving problems can also root out terrorism. Suppression is just incapable of rooting out the human urge of right or wrong.
And lastly he showed us a way of life which if adopted, would help to solve the problems. It is the ‘life of restraint’ as against the life of affluence and unrestricted limitless Epicureanism.
(
The author is a noted Gandhian)
