Gandhi Jayanti remains one of the most significant days of the year to me. Not only does it remind me of one of the phenomena of all times that existed on this earth in the name of Mahatma Gandhi, but also it reaffirms within me the faith in the values he stood for, the values of truth, non-violence and love, the values whose presence in our hearts becomes more and more significant in this increasingly violent world.
However this year Gandhi Jayanti will remind me of the massacre in Khagaria, the massacre in which 100 gunmen, suspected to be Naxalites, mercilessly butchered 16 people, including 5 children. There are several questions that brutally follow this event. Are we actually becoming a violent society? Is armed struggle the only resort a common man finds in order to get noticed politically? Where does this road to violence and curbing violence with further massive forms of violence end?
The country has witnessed fresh attempts to curb naxal insurgencies in the recent times. An overall increase in armed forces to fight terror which includes additional troops, paramillitary forces and the state police force.
One can not help wondering if it would have been much effective to channelize these resources towards curbing the real causes behind this armed rebillion continuing for the past four decades, for this rebillion has been an outcome of an outright failure of government machinery, of social justice, of development. It is an aftermath of serious injustice incurred upon the poor.
There is a lot of mending to be done and it is not an easy task either. But the process has to begin somewhere.
I am reminded of the turmoil during partition. I am reminded of the continuous satyagraha Gandhi led against this violence, a satyagraha no less significant than the one he led against the Britishers. Only this time, to his great anguish, it were his own countrymen driven mad by the surge of hatred that swept away their entire sanity. Nevertheless, he continued his resistence without a hint of violence against this phase that symbolised one of the most bloodiest times of Indian History. And then it all ended, with Gandhi being shot dead by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948. They say that 'Mahatma Gandhi achieved in death what he had striven for in his last months of life. His murder ended forever the insensate communal killing of neighbour by neighbour in India's villages and cities.'
I wonder what it was that evoked such an extraordinary sense of remorse in the masses, that brought back their sanity and their ability to look beyond the blinding fury of hatred? Was it the death of a man who led them in a manner unprecedented in the world history and whom they failed so miserably by the incessant killing of their own brothers? Or was it the values of love, peace and non-violence so deeply engraved in their conscience that resurfaced without much effort when they saw this messiah of love succumbing to death?
Are we not the same people? Have we not inherited the same values? Is there something fundamentally different in the substance we are made of? The questions are disturbing.
