Gandhi, Kashmir .. Attack on the heritage of the Mahatma on his 150th birthday

The beginning of October marked the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth. Many around the world view with appreciation and admiration Gandhi's intellectual legacy, his political and peaceful struggle, his self-reflections and his dream of a more just world.

On the anniversary of his birthday, which is a national holiday in India and is considered a "World Day for Non-Violence", Indian police said thieves stole the remains of his remains from monuments in Babu Bahwan in central India.

Gandhi, who was a Hindu religious, was cremated after his assassination by a Hindu extremist in 1948 for supporting rapprochement with Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, but the remains were kept in a monument in India.

Gandhi's remains are not the only ones attacked. After his death in the middle of the last century, the Indian subcontinent has witnessed a series of bloody riots that contradict his established peace theory and his vision of civil coexistence between communities, especially Hindus and Muslims.

India is now leading the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political arm of Hindu militant groups, many of whose affiliates accuse Gandhi of betraying them, on the back of his advocacy of unity with Muslims on the subcontinent.

The Mahatma called for the restoration of national unity between Indians and Muslims, calling on the Hindu majority in the Indian subcontinent to respect the rights of Muslims, which were unpopular calls for fanatic Hindus, one of whom fired three bullets that killed him in the sixth attempt on his life.

Indian Contradictions
As official and popular India celebrates Gandhi's memory these days, Prime Minister Modi wrote an article in the New York Times titled "Why India and the World Need Gandhi?" Considering that Gandhi's methods of resistance gave hope to many African countries, praising the praise of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela for the inspiring Indian leader whose nonviolent resistance inspired the anti-colonial and capitalist movements.

In contrast to Moody's article, 102-year-old Indian activist Dorswimi, who took part in the armed struggle against India's colonial rule, said before he lost confidence in the feasibility of violence and was convinced by Gandhi's nonviolent solutions, that there were clear attempts to erase Gandhi's memory now. Gandhi was murdered where writers and activists were assassinated for their views citing unprecedented contemporary violence and suppression of opposition by the state.

Gandhi in Kashmir
In response to a question from The Hindu newspaper about his opinion on what Gandhi would do if he was alive today, Dorswimi said if Gandhi were alive, he would have launched a peaceful civil struggle in Kashmir and asked the Indian government to reverse the abolition of Article 370 (an Indian decision that ignited Of the protests in Indian Kashmir), adding that he would have hosted a dialogue between the Indian and Pakistani presidents to prevent war.

The nationalism promoted by the BJP today is "a very narrow idea based on ethnicity and chauvinism," Dorswimi told the Indian newspaper, noting that Gandhi had a greater idea of ​​Indian civilization, and proposed decentralization at the village level, which would accommodate all communities. And interests through autonomy.

Although Gandhi's biography, images and statues are ubiquitous across India's vast landscape, his legacy in Indian memory is at stake and the issues he championed rapidly, including the friendly relations between Hindu and Muslim Indian communities, are rapidly receding, and Gandhi has gone on hunger strikes to stop riots between Muslims and Hindus. After a year of independence, he was assassinated by a murderer who did not accept his ideas open to Muslims.

March of Independence
Mahatma Karmshand Gandhi led India's independence movement through the philosophy of Satyagraha, which he invented in South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century when Indian society was struggling for civil rights there, and started in India since 1917, seeking to resist tyranny through mass civil disobedience and nonviolence.

For Gandhi, nonviolence was not merely the absence of material violence, but autonomy and the radical democracy in which everyone participates in the process of government were part of Gandhi's idea of ​​nonviolence, arguing that autonomy should be extended to all people - rich and poor - and Gandhi's consideration of power over Others as a form of violence.

The weapon of nonviolence
The most powerful weapon in Gandhi's protest was fasting. The 1930 salt march led by Gandhi under British colonial rule against India against an unjust law restricting salt extraction to British authorities, challenged the law and led a popular march to the sea to extract salt from there, where they faced reprisals. Violent from the colonial authorities.

In 1940 he reverted to disobedience again, launching a new campaign to protest against Britain's declaration of India as a state fighting the Axis armies without gaining independence, but retracted his hope in the hope of gaining independence after the war. India Until religious unrest prevailed across India and reached a level of violence that exceeded all expectations, Gandhi painfully called for unity and renunciation of violence and religious harmony.

For Gandhi, resistance meant putting his body in harm's way, injury, imprisonment, or even death. This made his resistance a powerful political tool. The news of beating unarmed Indians in the salt march drew global sympathy, and inspired Gandhi's march after Martin Luther King's years in America. Later Nelson Mandela in South Africa and even Arab Spring activists.

But the philosophy of India's mission is falling back to the first square and is merely propaganda used by Indian political leaders who embrace radical right-wing ideas incompatible with Gandhi's biography and struggle for peaceful and religious coexistence on the Indian subcontinent.