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Yesterday, on Mahatma Gandhi’s 138th birth anniversary and the centenary of the Satyagraha Movement, Maharashtra Governor SM Krishna, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and other State officials took the ‘India of My Dreams’ pledge from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, at the Raj Bhavan.
The Prime Minister read out the pledge from the Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi, which was broadcast by Doordarshan. The Governor and the Chief Minister repeated the pledge along with eminent invitees in front of a large screen put up at Darbar Hall.
What is ‘The India of my dreams pledge’? It is a paragraph taken from the vision statement, which Gandhiji had written on his way to the Round Table Conference.
Salaam Mumbai...
“I shall work 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 and low class of people; an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony.
There can be no room in such an India for the curse of untouchability, or the curse of intoxicating drinks and drugs. Women will enjoy the same rights as men. We shall be at peace with all the rest of the world. This is the India of my dreams,” wrote Gandhiji about his ideas for this brave new India.
And a hundred years later — how has this India panned out? Is it by any stretch of imagination an India in which the poorest feel it is their country? In whose making they have an effective voice?
An India in which there is no high class and low class of people? In which all communities live in perfect harmony? Where there is no room for the curse of untouchability? In which women enjoy the same rights as men? An India at peace with the world?
But regardless of the irony that these words evoke a hundred years later, the heavyweights present on the occasion pressed on with the rituals of the function.
The Governor garlanded the photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, while the Minister of State for Finance Jayant Patil, Chief Secretary Johny Joseph, and other fat cats looked on.
When I grew up in Juhu, I used to pass a statue of the Mahatma daily on my way to school. Over the years I have watched as the statue has gone from being a simple, appealing replica, open to the elements, and on whose lap children could sit, to one resembling a mausoleum.
They first erected a wooden fence around it, then a heavy grilled one, then a pagoda on the top, then painted it all silver. And with every addition, every new coat of paint, every fancy flourish, Gandhiji seemed to look a little sadder, a little more lost, a little more uncomfortable.
I haven’t seen the statue for some time now, but I can bet that they have made it even more remote, inaccessible, and distant.
And when I hear about all the formal celebrations and rituals performed in Gandhi’s name and memory, I am reminded of that mausoleum, and of that sad and lonely man trapped inside it.