THE last thing you’d think while traveling abroad is to hear much about your country, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear this huge, strapping Irishman who was chatting with me at a pub, knowing much about India, but a lot of it focussed on the hate campaigns that the country was going through.
A question I saw looming huge on his mind was, “How could you guys who taught the world how to gain freedom through peaceful means, stoop to violence?” Yes, there’s disgust in the world about the hate that’s being instigated.
Just a few days earlier I had been reading about the killer of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. According to Boothe’s diary, the actor had assumed that he would be welcomed by those in the South after he had killed Lincoln. He thought that those who also believed in his desire to return to Confederate law would welcome him with open arms. But soon he became disillusioned as people turned against him.
He was eventually found lying in a barn in Virginia. With his arms raised in the air, Booth’s final words were, ‘Useless, useless!’ He was shot and died a few minutes later as the sun rose.
Is this what the world is thinking as a few from our country try to revere Gandhi’s murderer, and belittle all that the great man did? More than anything else, we taught non-violence to the world, all this through Gandhiji, even as Lincoln abolished slavery and tried to make the USA equal for everyone whether white or black.
Non-violence and equality are beyond, far beyond the petty politics of power-hungry politicians. Yes, for a few days Boothe must have been kept alive in the southern confederate states, just as Gandhi’s killer is glorified today by a few who believe in what the killer killed for. But, beyond the selfish thoughts of these few, the real essence of what these two lived and fought for lives on, bigger and huger!
It is time, we realise that history, remembers and respects great truths people leave behind, and mercilessly rubbishes lies fed for immediate gain. Martin Luther King, used the very formula of peace that Gandhiji created and his civil rights movement using this method, allows blacks and other coloured folk to walk tall in the USA.
Gandhiji worked towards a casteless India, and even brought in a term, calling those who had been treated as low castes and even untouchables, as Harijans, which means, ‘children of God’ Those children of God, love him, and know they owe much to him, for fighting for their rights. There’s only one word that can describe the attempts of those who try to resurrect murderers, and that is what Boothe shouted, as he realised his whole idea was, ‘Useless’..!
