Mahatma Gandhi’s relevance to India and the world is much more than ever before.
Driving this urgent need for bringing back Gandhi in our lives are two main factors: firstly, contemporary politics lacks moral leaders, and, secondly, democracies around the world have abandoned the empowerment of the weakest in favour of the economic and political supremacy and hegemony of the strongest. Gandhi’s view of democracy was exactly the opposite. He said, ‘The weakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest. That can never happen except through non-violence.’ The Gandhian paradigm is based on truthfulness and non-violence and establishing an essential relationship between social awareness and common humanity. For him, politics as the art of organizing the society was a path to self-realization and autonomy of the individual and the community.
Gandhi usually spoke of truth in terms of self-experience, rather than universal cognition. He said, ‘Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there and to be guided by truth as one sees it.’ Gandhi considered the search for truth as an integral part of his non-violence and as a vital component of the relationship of the private to the public. Living in Truth is therefore an effort to go beyond (para) of our ‘everydayness’, to show (deiknynai) the relationship between the ideal and the real. It is a manner of raising the ethical aspiration of citizens and the non-violent essence of the government.
Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian-Canadian political philosopher. He is presently the executive director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies and the vice-dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, Delhi. He is the author of thirty-two books in English, French and Persian, including: Gandhi: Aux Sources de la Nonviolence, The Gandhian Moment, Introduction to Nonviolence, The Disobedient Indian: Towards a Gandhian Philosophy of Dissent, The Global Gandhi and, more recently, Mahatma Gandhi: A Nonviolent Perspective on Peace.
Pooja Sharma is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. An alumnus of Miranda House, she completed her master’s degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics, followed by MPhil and PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and PhD fellowship at the University of Agder in Norway. An avid Gandhian, she has worked extensively on issues related to energy security, energy transition, renewable energy, human capital and the Gandhian perspective on energy transition.