Sees Divisiveness Despite Gains : Gandhi’s Grandson Finds Racial Bitterness in U.S.

He has been the victim of racial oppression and violence in his native South Africa.

He has witnessed hatred and violence based on caste status in India, his ancestral homeland.

Now Arun Gandhi--the 54-year-old grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, martyred leader of India’s hard-won independence struggle--is in the United States conducting research for a book he plans to write comparing discrimination in this country with that in South Africa and India.

Although he believes there are even more serious problems in both South Africa and India, what he has observed here so far--especially in Mississippi, the focus of his study and his base of operations--does not present a pretty picture.

He sees a society that has made impressive gains in granting blacks equal rights and economic opportunities over the last two decades, but one that still is bitterly divided by racial animosities and hatreds.

“I see both sides--whites and blacks--just barely tolerating each other and not being fully understanding or accepting,” said Gandhi, a longtime journalist and social activist who, with his robust physical appearance and Western dress, is far from the wizened, thin-legged Hindu ascetic in sandals and white loincloth that people meeting him for the first time often expect to encounter.

“There is no real integration,” he went on. “Whites have taken a hard position; blacks are taking a hard position. There is no dialogue between them. Tensions are building and confrontations are inevitable.”

Gandhi cites as an example the spate of campus racial incidents across the nation in recent months--which include a personal experience. At Jacksonville State College in Alabama, where he recently spoke, posters announcing his appearance were ripped down and threatening phone calls were made to the university.

In parts of the Deep South, he says, the racial scene appears little changed from what it was before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

“The Mississippi Delta is a very sorry situation,” he said, referring to the fertile cotton-producing region in the northwest corner of the state along the Mississippi River. “You see these white plantation owners in their big mansions and right next to them are black people who work for them living in shacks that are ready to fall apart.”

Gandhi is conducting extensive field research in Tunica County, which has a higher percentage of blacks and more poverty than any other in the Delta. There, he says, blacks frequently are reluctant even to talk to him for fear of reprisals by whites.

Gandhi, a gentle, soft-spoken man with twinkling, dark eyes like his grandfather’s and a broad, swarthy face set off by a silvered goatee, has been in this country since August under the sponsorship of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

An ‘Equal Partner’

He is accompanied by his wife, Sunanda, 56, a slender woman with an engaging intellectual charm whom Gandhi describes as his “equal partner” in marriage and work.

“We’re delighted to have both the Gandhis here,” said William Ferris, director of the Southern studies center. “Parallels between our region’s experience with racial problems and what the Gandhis have known in South Africa and India are particularly important to our own work here.”

In India, which Gandhi has called home since leaving South Africa in the 1950s, he and his wife have been involved for the last two decades in a pioneering organization known as the Society for National Integration. It attempts to uplift rural communities of “untouchables”--the lowest of the low in India--through a brand of self-help economic development based on Gandhian principles.

The success of the society’s ventures played a role in Gandhi’s decision to come to the United States. He was curious to discover if there were any similar projects here worth emulating.

The society’s first project took place in the early 1960s in an untouchable village about 250 miles south of Bombay in the state of Maharashtra.

“The people in this village had suffered indignities and poverty that are indescribable,” Gandhi recalled. “When we first went there, many of the women didn’t have clothes to wear and wouldn’t come out of their huts to speak to us. The people had never drunk milk, and they never had enough food to eat.”

The society, which is composed of seven members including the Gandhis, helped the village of about 300 persons draw up plans for a dairy cooperative and then raised the collateral required for a government grant to buy the first herd of milk cows. Today, besides the dairy cooperative, there also is an agricultural cooperative. Together, they produce $150,000 a year worth of milk and crops and have dramatically improved the villagers’ lives.

Three-Year Drought

To Gandhi, however, the key test of this experiment came in the late 1960s when a three-year drought devastated the region and the untouchable farmers were the only ones to receive government aid.

Would they, in keeping with the principles of benevolence upon which the cooperatives had been founded, share the relief with their less-fortunate upper-caste neighbors? Or would they keep it all for themselves as upper-caste farmers invariably had in past drought years when they were the favored beneficiaries of government relief?

“They decided to share it,” Gandhi said with obvious pride. “The chairman of our group had told them: ‘Look to the future. Hate will only consume your energies and get you nowhere. Shame your oppressors by proving you are better human beings.’ ”

Among the upper-caste farmers who were saved were three who had been on the verge of suicide and now, in a startling departure from tradition, are “proud members” of the untouchable cooperatives.

Today, more than 60 villages have adopted the society’s program of bootstrap economic development with benevolence as a social creed, Gandhi boasts. But in the 10 months he has been in the United States he has found nothing similar.

“Something like this needs to be done in the United States,” he said. “Blacks and whites need to come together and sit across the table and talk and not be so full of hate for each other,” he said. “They need to try to change the attitudes that have built up and break down the myths and stereotypes that keep them from living together in peace and brotherhood.”

Takes Little Money

Moreover, he says, so much can be done with so little money.

That is why he has often been sharply critical of the millions of dollars spent in this country for monuments and memorials to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the martyred civil rights leader whom he describes as the greatest American disciple of his grandfather’s teachings.

For much the same reasons, he scorned the $17-million film “Gandhi” when it was in production. But he changed his mind after seeing the overwhelming public response to the movie and the interest it renewed in his grandfather’s life and work.

Gandhi, of course, imbibed his grandfather’s teachings at the foot of the Mahatma--the “great-souled one”--himself.

Gandhi says his most important lesson came in 1946, when he was 12 and spending an entire year with his grandfather in India. He had had a fight with a playmate one day and told his grandfather that he hated the boy and never wanted to see him again.

“Hate,” the elder Gandhi replied, “will only make you miserable. It is a word you must try to omit from your vocabulary. Hate has caused more agony in this world than anything else. If we could only learn to love, we could solve so many problems.”

However, Gandhi admits, it was years before he realized the importance of that message and strived to live up to it.

By most accounts, he has succeeded admirably. “In early married life,” recalled his wife, “I used to say to him: ‘Are you a human being? Do you have human feelings? Why don’t you get angry when people insult you and do you wrong?’ He just said: ‘You will understand by and by’ . . . and I have.”

Ascetic Standards

However, he is not held in particularly high esteem among those professed followers of his grandfather who feel he fails to conform to the Mahatma’s rigorous ascetic standards.

“They look at me and say: ‘How can you be a grandson? You are so fat and you are always wearing these kinds of clothes,’ ” said Gandhi, who has a middle-aged paunch and favors such distinctively Western garb as polo shirts, jeans and sneakers over traditional Indian dress.

In the last two months, Gandhi and his wife have been on a whirlwind lecture tour of college campuses throughout the South and Northeast. He is frequently questioned about his lack of enthusiasm for economic sanctions against South Africa as a means of pressing the white-controlled government to abolish its rigid system of racial segregation known as apartheid.

“There is this general belief that if the United States is able to implement sanctions against South Africa, South Africa’s problems would be solved,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that easy. Sanctions won’t work unless the entire world decides to implement them at the same time.”

A better strategy, he contends, would be for the non-white community in South Africa--the blacks, Indians and “coloreds,” as persons of mixed races are classified--to overcome their mutual animosities and join together in a massive nonviolent movement.

“This is the greatest tragedy of South Africa today,” he said. “These nonwhite groups have let themselves fall victim to the ruling white regime’s strategy of ‘divide and rule.’ They keep appealing to countries outside to take some action against South Africa, but I don’t think it has happened in history that any country has won its independence by having somebody else fight their battles.”

Caste Rivalries

Of the three countries he surveys in his study of discrimination, South Africa ranks at the bottom, with the United States at the top and India somewhere between them.

“Those who know India know of the violence that continues to take place between the upper-caste and lower-caste people,” he said. “There are riots all the time.” India also is plagued by religious rivalries among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, he added.

Gandhi expects to complete the manuscript of his book by the end of this year. Before he returns to India he hopes to convince someone to found an institute for the study of nonviolent techniques and conflict resolution in this country.

“This is urgently needed in this world,” he said. “What I have in mind is a teaching institution where young people would come and learn the nonviolent way of life just as students go to a military academy to learn to wage war.”

He added with obvious relish: “My wife and I wouldn’t mind staying here a couple of more years to set it up and get it going.”