GANDHI:THE HUMANITARIANS

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Following is an extract about Gandhi and his work, 
courtesy of The Weekend Australian 1/Aug/99.

MOHANDAS GANDHI (1869-1948)

Boarding a south Afriacan train in the 1890s, a dapper young Indian
Hindy lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, embarked on an unplanned
journey that changed the course of the 20th century's struggles against
racism, colonialism and violence. Gandhi was ejected from his
first-class compartment at the insistence of a white passenger and spent
the rest of his life fighting for human rights.

With a childhood legacy of non-violence, vegetarianism and caring for
the poor, and nourished by Hindu, Christian and humanitarian thinkers,
Gandhi gave up his legal practice, renounced possessions and led a
campaign of passive resistance to apartheid. And the active working out
of his beliefs--what Gandhi called his "experiments with truth"-- did
not finish in 1914, when the South African premier Jan Smuts announced:
"The saint has left our shores. I hope forever."

Back in India, christened "Mahatma" (great-souled), Gandhi collided with
the British colonial rulers and with Hindus; particularly over their
treatment of millions of "Untouchables", whom he renamed "Harijans", or
"Children of God".

While western nations butchered each other during two world wars, Gandhi
forged non-violent civil disobedience, which spearheaded by the
nationalist movement and ultimately helped force the British out of
India in 1947. According to the man Winston Churchill called a "naked
fakir", killing was never justified, no matter how desirable the end.
Love was the essence of the spirit of the universe, he believed. In
conflict, your opponent-- a fellow searcher for truth(God)--had to be
met with reason. If this did not work, the sight of suffering would.
Self-discipline, including penance and fasts, was essential for the
pursuit of non-vionlence. Gandhi's dhoti-clad figure, sitting at a
spinnning wheel, came to symbolise his call for a return to village life
instead of industrial materialism.

When communal violence erupted in Calcutta during independence
celebrations, Gandhi, aged 78, and in failing health, announced he would
fast until the bloodshed ended. Seventy-two hours later, it did.

The HIndu fanatic's bullet that killed Gandhi in 1948 did not silence
him. Although the philosophy of non-violence had been preached by Indian
masters for centuries, Gandhi changed everything by rigorously applying
it to modern politics. The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet has called him his
mentor. So did the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King. The
Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 sat in his immense shadow.

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