Gandhi has gained worldwide reputation with his efforts to
promote Indian independence from Britain without the use of violence. Thanks to
his mother, he was heavily influenced by Jainism, which rejects violence
against all creatures and promotes asceticism. Gandhi was famous for his long
protest hunger strikes and public appearances only with a piece of cloth around
his loins. From my childhood, I remember a statuette we had for unclear reasons
at home, a half-naked Gandhi, cross-legged, ten
inches tall and bronze, sitting
on a marble tile the bottom of which was covered with green velvet. India
gained its independence in 1947; however, Gandhi did not succeed in preventing
the bloodshed.
Three months ago, the largest statue of history, called the
Statue of Unity, a 182 meter high figure of a politician, covered with bronze, standing
on a 58 meter high pedestal, was unveiled in India. Surprisingly, it is not
Gandhi, but Sardar Patel, first deputy prime minister, towering to the sky.
After the division of India and the departure of the British, 563 principalities
and princely states of the Indian peninsula considered autonomy or even independence,
and Patel, in complicated negotiations, convinced the rulers of 360 of those
states to enter a united India, while 3 unyielding ones he gained by force; so
his statue is called the Statue of Unity. Patel was loyal to Gandhi and Nehru,
but he was not afraid to disagree with frequent concessions to Muslim demands,
for which he gained popularity.
Considering why the largest statue of the world is not
devoted to Gandhi, it will surely occur to us that a half-naked ascetic rising up to 240 meters would be a
materialized oxymoron. However, there are also other reasons that arise from
Gandhi's life and the political situation in India. Let us briefly recall a few
moments from Gandhi's life. In 1900, when he lived in South Africa, Gandhi
organized 1100 Indian volunteers to help British troops in the fight against
domestic Boers. The Boer farmers were descendants of Dutch immigrants, aspiring
in the Boer War for independence; they fought against the professional British
army, ten times superior in numbers. Here, for the first time, concentration
camps for detention of civilians appeared at the turn of the 20th century. The
British let die 26,000 Boer women and children in the camps. Gandhi, who, later
in India, also fought for independence from Britain, was on the wrong side in
the Boer War.
In 1919, Gandhi chose to support the Turkish Caliph and the
Ottoman Empire in order to win favor with the Indian Muslims; he got it wrong again,
as the Turkish president Mustafa Kemal himself abolished the sultanate and
caliphate soon. Many Indian leaders, including Rabindranath Thakur, did not
understand Gandhi's attempt to please Muslims at all costs. Many people also
did not understand Gandhi's emphasis on the non-violence in the anti-British
protests – especially after the massacre of 1600 civilians in Amritsar in April
1919. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Gandhi launched a campaign
against Indian involvement in the war, but unsuccessfully – 2.5 million Indian
volunteers fought on the Britain’s side against Hitler.
Gandhi's last major failure was his unrealistic struggle
against the division of India into the Hindu part, today's India, and two
Muslim parts, today's Pakistan and Bangladesh. Gandhi underestimated Muslim intransigence
and fanaticism. The slogan of the Muslims was: " We will either have a
divided India or a destroyed India," and they started protests
called "Direct Action" to support their demands in August 1946.
Within a few days, 5,000 to 50,000 Hindus were killed in that action; in the
subsequent reprisals, several thousand Muslims were killed. Precise numbers are
not available because the Congress Party politicians tried to hide them in the belief
that this would prevent further deterioration of the situation, and Muslim data
are unreliable. After the partition of India on August 15, 1947, mass migration
of Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims to Pakistan followed; over 14 million
people moved, at least half a million have been killed and tens of thousands of
women were raped. It can be assumed that Muslims were more violent, which is
also supported by the fact that the number of Hindus in Pakistan has dropped
from about 25% to about 1.5% today, while the number of Muslims in India has
risen since from about 8% to today's 14%.
Gandhi certainly belongs to the great figures of the 20th century.
His non-violent activism is, in any case, admirable. From his admirers, he
received the name of Mahatma, a great spirit. He spent more than two years in
British prisons. In the midst of the bloody clashes, he stuck to nonviolence.
He was ascribed the phrase "love conquers hatred". When Gandhi chose
the salt tax in 1930 as the object of a non-violent protest against the
British, neither Gandhi's collaborators nor the British seriously took the
action. Gandhi marched 240 miles to the sea, where he wanted to show that salt
can be produced by the Indians themselves without British control and taxes.
Thousands of people, however, joined, and this event eventually won millions of
Indians for boycotts of British goods and for India's independence actions.
This year will be 150 years since Gandhi's birth.
Gandhi said that when religion leads to love and peace, it
is not important what religion one has but how one behaves, Hindu will become a
better Hindu and Muslim a better Muslim. However, Gandhi was aware of the
violence of the Qur'an and the Muslim traditions, he simply closed his eyes to
the truth in case of Islam, contrary to his emphasis on the truth; it was not possible
to reconcile love and truth in this case. Gandhi was keeping hunger strikes in
protest against the division of India and the ongoing violence instead of
accepting reality and trying at least to somehow organize a defense against
chaos during the division. When Pakistan declared itself a Muslim state, Gandhi
and his party resisted the pressure of the Hindu population to declare India a
Hindu state. It should be mentioned that Pakistan later became one of the major
bases of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Just as in other parts of the world where a territory was being
divided, Muslims cleared their part of the non-Muslims, while multiplying
faster than other people in the non-Muslim part. A similar situation occurred,
exactly at the same time, in another British-controlled area – in the Middle
East. The Jews were being expelled everywhere, while in Israel, the Arabs quickly
multiplied thanks to the sympathetic left. Today, Israel has similar
demographic problems like India. For example, in Negev, 5,000 Bedouins expanded
in 60 years to 160,000 (duplication every 12 years between 1955 and 2015).
Suicidal ideals and ignoring the truth about Islam lead to more violence – this
is a lesson to be carefully learned by Europe today.
Many people criticized Gandhi for speaking on behalf of all,
as if there were no other opinions and other specific interests of many
religious and other groups. Churchill called him Hindu Mussolini. In 1948,
Gandhi was shot dead; the assassin blamed Gandhi of ignoring the opinions of
everyone else and of pushing his own policies that, despite Gandhi's
non-violence, paradoxically contributed to immense violence. Nehru immediately used
Gandhi's martyrdom for silencing Hindu nationalists and to suppress the right,
200,000 people were imprisoned. It is strange that similar active measures had not
been taken a year before that to prevent violence during the division. After
the establishment of the state, similarly to Israel, the left has ruled in
India for many years. Until the year 2014, the National Congress party ruled
the country, with the exception of 16 years, whereas Gandhi's associate Nehru
and Nehru’s relatives served as prime ministers, including Nehru’s daughter Indira
Gandhi (not related to Mahatma), Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia
Gandhi. The policy of the Congress Party was systematically left-leaning and,
until the break-up of the Soviet Union, pro-Soviet.
There is a real danger that Gandhi/Nehru offspring will come
back to power in India this May, as Rahul Gandhi (son of Rajiv and Sonya) is
standing against the current right-wing leader Modi, whereas 14% of the voters
are Muslims. Nearly 200 million Indian Muslims, competing with the Indonesians
for the status of the largest Muslim community in the world, are a terrible
fifth column in India. A friend of mine, who was born in India and regularly returns
there, is of the opinion that Nehru’s family, and Mahatma Gandhi as well, are nowadays
perceived by many Hindus as having been too appeasing to Moslems. This is
another part of the explanation why the largest statue of the world was
dedicated to Patel and not to Gandhi – along with the fact that it was the
ruling right who had promoted the statue.
Muslims do not like, in addition to many other things,
statues, as demonstrated in 2001 in Afghanistan. There, Pakistan-backed Taliban
destroyed 1500 years old Buddha's statues, including a 53-meter-high statue
that had held a world record in height for many years. If once Muslims were to
gain the upper hand in India, the Statue of Unity would be among the first
victims of their reforms.
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