Every Indian grows up hearing stories of Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat. He had once said, “I shall strive for an India in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice; an India in which there shall be no high class or low class of people; and above all, an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony.” But what does Gandhi mean to people today? Are his values still alive?
In Ahmedabad, Gandhiji made a speech eighty years ago that he hoped would change India’s destiny, “My aim is to get the Salt tax abolished. This is for me the first step towards complete freedom. As the Independence movement is essentially for the poorest of the land, the beginning shall be made with this evil.” Immediately after, he started the historic Salt March against the injustice of British rule. Accompanied by 81 fellow marchers, Gandhi walked for 23 days covering a distance of almost 350 kms. to Dandi, where he broke the British colonial law by picking up a handful of salt. This was a leader for the poor.
In present Ahmedabad, the face that you can see staring down at you from every billboard is of a very different leader – the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. Quoting him, “In the global economic era, India cannot win the financial battle without a level playing field. If we lose the opportunity now, we will fall behind in the 21st century as we did earlier.” I don’t know what would have Gandhi made of Modi’s India, where Shining India is one of the fastest growing economies of the world; where the freedom to buy & spend seems to be the greatest freedom of all. But Gandhi would definitely have had a lot to say about the other India that they did not like to advertise in the government brochures; the India in which 300 million poor people dream of freedom from hunger and fear.
Gandhi always strived for Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. However, in modern Gujarat, his words seem like empty slogans from the distant past. Hindus have unleashed their accumulated hatred against the Muslims time and again post-independence. At the instigation by BJP, the Babri Masjid was destroyed. Quoting a Bajrang Dal member, “I believe that the Muslim community is like a dog’s tail which remains crooked forever. They have such a history of more than 500 years. Ever since Muslims came, they have looted millions of rupees, stole our jewels, destroyed our temples and idols, took away our women & raped them. They’re like demons of a kind.” In the Godhra riots – India’s worst massacre in fifty years - Hindu fundamentalist groups comprising of such like-minded people targeted the Muslim community all over the state. More than 2000 Muslims were killed. More than 400 women were raped & more than a lakh were displaced & homeless. The police and the administration simply turned a blind eye to the violence. Narendra Modi’s stand against the Muslims won him the Hindu vote. He was re-elected as the chief minister and became more powerful than ever before. How could this have happened in Gujarat of all places?
We just observe the various Gandhiji’s statues and his Ashrams, but the values that Gandhiji stood up for are non-existent. In a sense, the Father of the Nation, Gandhi, sacrificed his life for the minority community of the country as he was killed because of the Partition of India. But where are those values that Gandhiji talked about? Today, one can hardly see Gandhi in Gujarat.
Again quoting Modi, “Our focus areas are the Special Economic Zones. SEZs are going to be the driving force. Gujarat has visualized this & so we are facilitating SEZs.” What Modi fails to visualize is that these SEZs could displace thousands of poor people from their homes, giving their land to MNCs. These companies would not have to follow the Indian labour laws or pay normal taxes. Modi’s dream is to transform Ahmedabad into a global megacity. Every day, thousands of villagers migrate to the city to find work. But in the city there is no relief. Modi also claimed, “I will remove every single slum in Ahmedabad”. But as much as he can try, the slums won’t go away because if you make the poor poorer, slums will keep cropping up. Modi wants to construct high-rise buildings, gardens, swimming pools & shopping centres in place of the slums. He wants to build to entertain the tourists, but he does not think about the poor slum-dwellers. He hasn’t envisioned anything for the hundreds of thousands of poor families living in the slum. They want nothing but two meals a day & a place to live. If they are thrown outside the city, where will they work and how will they earn & feed their family? These people help maintain the city. But the city has no place for them any longer.
Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling to ruins. Exploiting of villages is itself organized violence. Gandhi’s dream for the villages is dying. In the U.S. & in Europe, farmers receive subsidies & protection. But here in India, farmers are left at the mercy of global market forces – only one of the many reasons that lakhs of farmers have committed suicide over the past few years.
The Gujarat BJP government is trying to erase Gandhi’s ideas. In Gandhi’s name they want to take the land in Dandi, where farmers grow rice, & sell it to a MNC. Even the soil of Dandi has not been spared. Do we really need 5-star hotels in Dandi? I wonder what they will call that place once they get rid of the farmers; the Mahatma Gandhi SEZ? I wonder if the tourists who will come to shop at the Dandi mall will find time to visit the museum there. And if they do, will they see anything more than an old man walking barefoot, making a big fuss about a fistful of salt?
We have made Gandhi irrelevant. We have frozen him in time. We have not bothered to reinvent his ideas and we are living with the consequences. We drove away the white-skinned to become slaves of the black-skinned. The poor never got their independence. The sweepers, carpenters, domestic workers & labourers make it possible for us to have a comfortable life. But we would like them to be invisible.
Gandhiji won our freedom sixty years ago, but what has really changed? We proclaim an economic miracle, but the inequality, poverty & violence still continue to grow. There is a new colonialism in India which we don’t seem to care about. After all, we are the colonizers.
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