50 Years Have Taken Toll on Gandhi’s Influence in India

With one of the century’s great freedom struggles nearly behind him, Mohandas K. Gandhi looked to India’s future and glimpsed his own irrelevance.

“Everybody is eager to garland my photos and statues,” the Hindu leader said seven months before his assassination on Jan. 30, 1948. “But nobody wants to follow my advice.”

The frail, bespectacled prophet of nonviolent revolution still dominates India’s consciousness. Fifty years after a Hindu fanatic shot him to death, Gandhi--as with George Washington or Abraham Lincoln--is invoked to remind his nation of what it admires most in itself.

Yet for a growing number of Indians, Gandhi’s example seems distant. To many, Gandhi’s personal philosophy--a utopian blend of nonviolence, rural virtues and religious tolerance--appears to have lost its meaning in the roiling, modernizing India of 1998.

“Gandhi is past now,” Shikha Gupta, 19, said as she sat in the New Delhi McDonald’s, clad in an Armani shirt and eating a mutton burger. “People are just too busy to remember him. This is the Jet Age, and everyone has to keep up with the times.”

The 50th anniversary of Gandhi’s death comes as this nation of 950 million people is searching for ways to cope in a world for which Gandhi’s philosophy did not always prepare it.

“Gandhi’s philosophy is a good one, but it is limited,” said Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, one of India’s foremost Islamic scholars. “People want jobs. They want licenses to start businesses. Gandhi didn’t address those things.”

Half a century ago, Gandhi unified this diverse land by walking the dusty paths of its villages carrying a message of freedom and peace. His revolution, which ended three centuries of British rule, inspired a generation of leaders--from Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela--who sought to deliver their people from oppression and despair.

Gandhi’s vision extended beyond independence. In an India fraught with communal and caste tensions and beset by millions of poor, he carried the twin messages of religious tolerance and economic self-reliance.

Gandhi advocated a break from the West’s rush toward mechanization and materialism, which he said sapped the human spirit and offered no solution for India’s impoverished. Instead, he suggested the concept of swadeshi, in which the Indian economy would be based in the village and anchored in small industries such as weaving.

“What I object to,” Gandhi said, “is the craze for what they call labor-saving machinery. Men go on ‘saving labor’ till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation.”

Today, India is entering its seventh year of an economic liberalization program that is dismantling much of the old economy, some aspects of which drew inspiration from Gandhi. Foreign investment is pouring in, and along with it Western consumer names such as Coke, Nike and Levis. Western music, movies and television networks are crowding out homespun fare.

In the heart of India’s big cities--Bombay, New Delhi and Madras--a growing urban middle class that some economists number at 200 million is rising to dominate the country’s culture and economy. For many such people, Gandhi’s appeal to lead a simple life has little resonance.

“No one follows Gandhi’s ideas, because everyone is after money--it is the only thing one needs to survive,” said Ajay Saxena, a 21-year-old marketing executive in New Delhi. “Gandhiism does not give anyone any money, and so he is very irrelevant now.”

Economic reforms are anchored in the cities, drawing millions of Indians from the villages and allowing Gandhi’s vision to wither. Despite progress in some parts, the reforms have done little to ease the suffering of the 350 million Indians who live in absolute poverty or the 150 million who occupy its lowest, “untouchable” caste.

As the country lurches toward economic modernity, it also seems to be lapsing into a period of religious intolerance at odds with Gandhi’s vision of an India peacefully cradling the world’s religions. The past decade has seen the rise of a chauvinistic, staunchly pro-Hindu movement led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

In the months leading to India’s independence, Gandhi walked India’s villages to keep Muslims and Hindus from killing one another. He staged fasts, threatening to starve himself to death if communal war broke out.

“If not during my lifetime,” Gandhi said, “I know that after my death both Hindus and Muslims will bear witness that I had never ceased to yearn after communal peace.”

Gandhi’s yearnings soured in 1947 with the division of India and Pakistan along largely Hindu and Muslim lines. The violence that followed partition left a million people dead and sparked one of history’s great migrations, forcing 10 million Hindus and Muslims to flee their homes.

Religious fanaticism ultimately led to Gandhi’s death. The Hindu nationalists who conspired to kill him did so for what they perceived to be Gandhi’s role in the partition of India.

Today, tensions between India’s majority Hindus and its Muslim minority are rising again. The Hindu nationalist BJP appears headed toward a plurality in Parliament in elections next month and in early March.

Among the changes pushed by some members of the BJP are an abolition of the legal code that governs domestic relations among Muslims; a ban on the killing of cows; and the destruction of several Muslim mosques where Hindu temples once stood.

Regardless of how far India has strayed from Gandhi’s vision, many here still believe that the country will come back to it. One such person is Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of the Mahatma--”Great Soul”--and a candidate for Parliament on the Socialist Party ticket in Bombay.

If elected, Tushar Gandhi promises to carry on the legacy of his great-grandfather--if not by policy, then by example. He pledges to conduct himself with honesty and humility, preach tolerance and lead a simple life.

Eventually, he hopes, the rest of India will catch on. “The day that India forgets Gandhi,” he said, “is the day that India loses itself.”

Amitabh Sharma of The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.

* CREATING A DREAM: The nonviolent legacy of Mahatma Gandhi will be honored in a 64-day campaign. B3