Amitabh Sharma, Features Coordinator

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh garlands a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on his 138th birth anniversary, in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday. October 2 has also been declared as International Day of Non-Violence. - AP

He has been revered as the apostle of peace, all of 5 feet 4.5 inches, dressed in a loin cloth and leaning on his stick; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or 'Mahatma' (saint), as he is fondly called, shook the annals of the British Empire and led India to independence.

Gandhi has inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. "He was no ordinary leader," wrote Nelson Mandela in his article The Sacred Warrior, "there are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them."

"Mahatma Gandhi's strong will to resist injustice through peaceful means showed the world we can fight against injustice even through non-violence," says Bimal Saigal, acting high commissioner of India in Jamaica.

He was a firm believer in non-violence and led the Indian freedom struggle through Satyagraha, resistance through mass civil disobedience.

Gandhi's teachings are relevant today, feels Saigal, "when there is an ongoing fierce competition to invent and amass arms of mass destruction, the power of the tolerance and non-violence that can bring back peace and order".

Gandhi, honoured in India as the Father of the Nation, once said, "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man."

The United Nations General Assembly, in June this year, adopted a resolution declaring October 2, his birthday, as the 'International Day of Non-Violence'.

Throughout his life, Gandhi remained committed to non-violence and truth even in the most extreme situations. He believed in simple life, living in an ashram that was self-sufficient in its needs. He wove his own clothes and lived on a simple vegetarian diet. As one of his effective tools, he used to fast for long periods which, he said, were both for self-purification and protest.

"Non-violence and cowardice go ill together," said Gandhi. "I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true non-violence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness."

A tribute

Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was assassinated in January 1948. The omission was publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".

"He is the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of non-cooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his non-violent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century," wrote Mandela.

During the freedom movement, Gandhi spent more than six years in jail as a political prisoner during his lifetime.

Time magazine named Mahatma Gandhi the Man of the Year in 1930, he was the runner-up to Albert Einstein as Time magazine's 'Person of the Century'. The magazine named The Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benigno Aquino Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela as Children of Gandhi and his spiritual heirs to non-violence.

Nelson Mandela poignantly recalls Gandhi's philosophy. "...he seeks to liberate the individual from his alienation to the machine and restore morality to the productive process," he wrote.

"As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink the rationale of our current globalisation and to ponder the Gandhia>"We remember and pay our tributes to an outstanding personality of international acclaim," says Saigal, "he has done proud to the mankind through his simple living and winning every war of truth through non-violence."

As a British-educated lawyer, Gandhi first employed his ideas of peaceful civil disobedience in the Indian community's struggle for civil rights in South Africa. He believed that at the core of every religion was truth and love. "As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious," Gandhi said.

Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948. After his death, Albert Einstein said: "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the Earth in flesh and blood."

amitabh.sharma@gleanerjm.com