Gandhi’s Legacy in Today’s Crisis
- Gandhi’s Early Struggles: From South Africa to Champaran
- Global Upheavals of the 20th Century and Gandhi’s Path
- Nonviolence vs. Violent Revolution: Gandhi’s Unique Contribution
- Gandhi’s Compassion for Revolutionaries and Patriots
- The Vision of Hind Swaraj: Gandhi’s Warning to Modern Civilisation
- Gandhi and Climate Change: A Prophet of Ecological Balance
- Religion, Nonviolence, and Gandhi as a Moral Leader
- Language, Inclusivity, and Gandhi’s Hindustani Vision
- Hindutva Politics vs. Gandhi’s Inclusive Nationalism
Can Humanity Embrace Gandhi’s Path Today?
Explore Mahatma Gandhi’s enduring relevance in today’s age of climate change, violence, communal tension, and democratic decline. His principles of nonviolence, simplicity, inclusiveness, and ecological balance still offer humanity a path forward.
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| Mahatma Gandhi |
In Memory of Mahatma Gandhi in Today’s Age of Crisis
In today’s world, due to the reckless advancement of technology, the entire globe is passing through a phase of scientific, ideological, economic, social, and cultural transition. Everyone is trying to churn and re-evaluate their respective beliefs. Marxists, socialists, Gandhians, Hindutvavadis, and followers of religions such as Christianity (Jesuits), Islam, and Buddhism are attempting their own approaches.
People like us turn to Mahatma Gandhi’s life of 79 years, out of which, excluding the first 20–25 years, his 65 years of active public engagement were devoted to the attempt to improve the world. This began with his struggle for the rights of Indian immigrants in South Africa and, after his return to India in 1915, continued with the farmers’ struggles in Champaran (Bihar) and Kheda (Gujarat). After the death of Lokmanya Tilak (1 August 1920), the leadership of India’s freedom struggle fell upon Gandhi’s shoulders.
Around the same period, the world was also witnessing massive upheavals: Lenin and the communists in Russia overthrew the Czar in 1917, World War I (1914–1918), and, twenty-one years later, World War II (1939–1945) gave rise to fascist dictators in Italy and Germany. In China, Mao Zedong led a revolutionary movement from 1911 to 1949. In short, the early 20th century was a time of political, social, economic, and especially cultural transformation across the entire globe — and mostly through violent means.
At the same time, Gandhi permanently returned to India (9 January 1915) after 21 years in South Africa. His mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, repeatedly urged him to come back. However, within a month of Gandhi’s arrival, Gokhale passed away (19 February 1915). Before his death, Gokhale had urged Gandhi to first travel across India and carefully study the conditions of the people before plunging into the freedom struggle. Accordingly, between 1915–1917, Gandhi deliberately travelled across the country by third-class train compartments, which gave him deep insights into India’s economic, social, religious, and cultural conditions.
That is why Gandhi concluded that Indians themselves were responsible for British rule in India: a handful of foreigners could rule over 35 crore (350 million) Indians only because of Indians’ own weaknesses. True change would come only when ordinary men and women acquired fearlessness (nirbhayata) and freedom from hatred (nirvair).
Already in 1906 in South Africa, Gandhi had tested and discovered Satyagraha — the insistence on truth through nonviolent means and purity of methods (sadhan shuchita). Both he and his followers repeatedly went to jail for it. This became the central principle of his life, which he applied and refined in India’s independence struggle.
Meanwhile, others in India were taking the violent path of revolution from 1905 (after the Partition of Bengal) onwards. For roughly 40 years, until 1945, violent revolutionary efforts were attempted, culminating in the death of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Yet, compared to the limited, localised reach of these movements (mainly in Bengal, Maharashtra, and Punjab), Gandhi’s nonviolent mass movements mobilised millions across all regions of India. Without the need for secrecy or weapons, even the poorest and most ordinary people could participate by simply making a mental resolve to join. This inclusivity explains why Gandhi’s movements touched every corner of India.
By contrast, violent revolution required secrecy, weapons, training, and dealt with collateral damage, and thus could never mobilise the masses in the same way. That is why, across the world today, Gandhi’s model of collective nonviolent resistance is studied. History shows that no ruler can withstand the sheer force of people’s collective nonviolent protest.
Importantly, although Gandhi disapproved of violence, he never doubted the patriotism of revolutionaries such as Subhas Bose, Bhagat Singh, or the leaders of 1942’s Quit India armed actions like Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia, or Aruna Asaf Ali. He opposed violent methods but respected their intent, even intervening to ensure justice for them. For example, Gandhi wrote to Viceroy Lord Irwin on 20 March 1931, pleading that executing Bhagat Singh and his comrades would be an irreversible error. He urged clemency. Though Irwin initially considered softening the punishment, resistance from the British officer cadre in Punjab prevented a reprieve. Moreover, Bhagat Singh himself had told his mother that he did not wish his sentence to be commuted merely out of popular appeals, as that would diminish his sacrifice for the nation.
Originally, Gandhi had gone to South Africa simply to earn a livelihood for his family. But after seeing the plight of Indian indentured workers under apartheid, he dedicated 21 years of his life there to organising resistance against racist laws. Thus, by the time he returned to India, he was fully seasoned to confront injustice. His first Indian struggle was the Champaran Satyagraha (1917), followed by the Kheda peasant movement (1918). Over the next decades, his major campaigns — the Salt Satyagraha (1930), Quit India (1942) — mobilised millions. Even at the age of 70+, he continued intervening to stop communal riots in Calcutta, Noakhali, Bihar, and Delhi after the traumatic Partition of India. Eventually, however, Hindu nationalist extremists, enraged by his reconciliation efforts, assassinated him in Delhi (1948).
Gandhi’s Relevance to Today’s Global Crisis
Today, humanity faces global crises such as climate change and global warming. Strikingly, Gandhi had foreseen these dangers over a century ago in his 1909 tract Hind Swaraj. There, he sharply critiqued Western industrial civilisation, warning how mindless modern development, obsessed with greed and machinery, would destroy both nature and society. He even described parliamentary democracy metaphorically as being like a “prostitute” — acknowledging later that he regretted the offensive analogy, but his critique of its corruptibility resonates even more today when we witness global democratic institutions deteriorating.
The predictions of Hind Swaraj echo warnings by thinkers like John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, E.F. Schumacher, and, in present times, Greta Thunberg, as well as scientific warnings since 1992 by more than 1,700 scientists about climate collapse. Now, with rising global temperatures, erratic weather cycles, melting glaciers, floods, cyclones, forest fires, and droughts — Gandhi’s foresight rings urgently true.
In India, blind imitation of Western “development” by building destructive projects in fragile Himalayan regions is already causing landslides, cloudbursts, and long-term ecological disaster. Gandhi’s alternative vision — based on simplicity, local self-sufficiency, restraint, and harmony with nature — appears more rational than ever.
Gandhi, Religion, and Nonviolence
Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence drew heavily from the teachings of Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ. That is why he is sometimes called a modern Buddha or Christ. But unlike other revolutionary leaders of France, America, Russia, or China — who themselves took political power after their revolutions — Gandhi always refused state power. This is why he remains a unique phenomenon: a political leader without ambition for office, a saintly figure whose authority was moral rather than institutional.
Language and Inclusivity
Gandhi himself was Gujarati, but in South Africa he realized the need for a common language for Indians from diverse regions. He adopted a simplified Hindustani (a blend of Hindi and Urdu) as the lingua franca to unite people. On returning to India, he introduced Hindustani in Congress sessions, moving away from English elitism. His idea of promoting Hindi as a national language was thus motivated solely by the need for inclusive communication across India, not to insult or suppress other languages. However, later politicians (such as the Shiv Sena and BJP) exploited language for divisive identity politics, distorting Gandhi’s intent.
Languages like Bengali, with its rich literary and cultural legacy (from Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Chaitanya, Vidyasagar, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Kazi Nazrul Islam, to the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and Amartya Sen), must never be disrespected. The tragic episode of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, where people sacrificed their lives merely to protect their mother tongue, stands as testimony. Gandhi would never have condoned the communal targeting of Bengali Muslims as is seen today in certain political narratives.
Hindutva Politics and the RSS
The birth of Hindutva politics itself was a reaction against Gandhi. When Tilak was alive, Hindu revivalists did not feel the need for a separate organisation. But after he died in 1920, observing Mussolini and Hitler in Europe and Gandhi’s inclusive leadership in India, they established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925, advocating a homogenised one-nation, one-language, one-religion philosophy — akin to fascism. Despite their efforts, they could not win over all Hindus, and eventually, an RSS-linked extremist assassinated Gandhi out of envy and resentment. That conflict — Hindu versus Hindutva — continues today.
In the present era of ecological collapse, communal tensions, the decay of parliamentary democracy, violence, and global inequality, the world once again looks hopefully toward Gandhi’s principles of compassion, fearlessness, inclusiveness, and purity of means. More than 150 years after his birth, Gandhi still offers perhaps the most relevant way forward for humanity. The question is: are we willing to adopt his path of nonviolent resistance and sadhan shuchita (purity in means) in order to become truly fearless and free of hatred?
— Dr. Suresh Khairnar,
23 August 2025, Nagpur
