Remembering Gandhi

Extract

Gandhi is much too easily dismissed, sweepingly over-simplified, decried as an unpractical idealist, and thought to have failed in what he set out to do. It depends on what you call failure. Jerusalem stoned the prophets, the Messiah was crucified, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and their teaching seems only to survive precariously. But as Horace Alexander writes, ‘The impression he has made in circles where people are trying to break away from the hideous tyranny of violence and counter-violence, which threatens quickly to destroy the whole world, is specially worth examining’. This interest seems to be more in his philosophy of life than in this or that political action, but Gandhi himself never separated politics from his religious philosophy. He is a world figure, who has a message for mankind, and we have in this book an account of his message less in words than in events, although the illuminating reasons for his decisions are always given.