George Menezes

The month of October was not just the anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. It was the remembrance and resurrection of several Gandhis and the urge to rework, in wordy debate, the romantic, the not so romantic and even the brutal moments of their lives.

 

I have met several Gandhis in my life. Some of them I have tried hard to forget. One was a class mate and school bully. Imagine us calling him Gandhi. The boys called him  G****u, an expletive not to be found in the dictionary. Not even in the community developed encyclopedia, “Wikipedia”

 

Ironically many years later he came to see me after attending one of my  Management training  programmes. He had become mild mannered and was struggling to do well in his career as a Manager in a Pharmaceutical Company.

 

In some of the exercises we conducted I noticed that he was reluctant to push his point of view. He also had a high score on submissiveness.

 

Over a cup of coffee we chatted and laughed about our days at school. He confessed that he had lost two well paid jobs. He had realized that could not get away with bullying people at work.

 

In sessions the next day he was fascinated with negotiations skills. He was able to work out some “win-win” results in the simulated games we played.

He said Nelson Mandela was his role model.

 

Today we hear of the heated discussions taking place loudly and quietly in private and public arenas about the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi versus the other Gandhy, Kobad Ghandy from Doon School, St Xavier’s College, and a Chartered Accountant from London.

 

Most remarkably but not surprisingly the  discussion while it is subdued amongst  intellectuals, the elite, the leftists and human rights advocates, is loud and clear and unambiguous in the public domain of Government Departments amongst bureaucrats and Ministers including our mild mannered and revered Prime Minister.

 

It appears that our Government has informed its citizens that it will crush the Naxalites once and for all using all the force at its command. The plan is believed to be called “Operation Green Hunt” replacing the old and much discredited “Salwa Judum” where innocent tribals were caught between the fury of the Naxals and the fury of the State.

 

My information comes from news on television, the printed media and, most enlightingly, from a brilliant piece in the “Tehelka” by Shoma Chaudhury.

 

The news is frightening for a people already experiencing inexplicable levels and weird manifestations of violence.

 

I am traveling by train and sleeping on a lower berth in a coupe of four berths. All occupied. It is 11pm and the guy above me has put on the lights and is reading the news paper. The Army officer in the other upper berth requests the newspaper reader to put off the lights. He makes the request three times, the decibel level of his parade ground voice increasing with each request.

 

When the news paper reader does not respond the Army Officer pulls out his pistol and shatters the lights with a well aimed shot. Every one pulls their blankets over their heads and quickly goes to sleep.

 

The incident is not mentioned even when we reach our destination and go our individual ways as if shattering railway lights with a gun is expected behaviour and is recommended in some clause of our out-dated Railway manuals.

 

In Andhra an elected representative of the people finds he has not been invited to an inauguration of a project in his constituency and arrives with his followers and destroys the stone plaque with inauguration details and is feted by his constituency.

 

Relatives of patients dying at a hospital go on a rampage and destroy the place to which they had come for healing. Passengers are regularly thrown out of trains in the fight for space just as the occupation of road space by timid looking car drivers and muscle flaunting bikers lead to sudden death.

 

Fortunately we hear today that the Government is listening to saner voices. Influential people in the bureaucracy, the Armed Forces, their own political Party members and opinion Makers in civic life. Such people have learnt from past errors in Jammu and Kashmir, in Assam, in Manipur and from the lessons of other nations and from what they are watching in Pakistan.

 

The horror of civil war, the reality of understanding that we should not be fighting for territory but for the minds and hearts of disaffected people of our own country, our brothers and sisters living on the edge of despair because even a microscopic percentage of all the socio economic benefits of a prosperous India has not reached them all these many years.

 

Many years ago I had close encounters with another Gandhi. Rajmohan Gandhi. A grandson of the Mahatma. He was involved with the “Moral Rearmament movement” and I was invited to speak on my days as a member of the Laity Council of Pope John Paul 11, a truly great Gandhian.

 

In my speech I mentioned a special encounter with the Holy Father. He was receiving a delegation of young people from a South American country governed by a ruthless military dictator.

 

They told him of sisters and mothers raped, of male family members who had just disappeared, of writers, journalists tortured and maimed for life.

Of banned political parties and dissident student voices crushed under the boots of a ruthless Army. Of years of turning the other cheek, of internal and international attempts at dialogue all in vain.

 

Then they asked. “Holy Father, is violence and an armed revolution the only answer, now?”

 

Pope John Paul 11 knelt down, folded his hands in prayer and I could see that he was crying. In voice filled with emotion he replied. “What would Jesus have done in your place?”

 

Mahatma Gandhi may have replied “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” His context, though, was Capital punishment.