The Himalayan blunders Mahatma Gandhi made to fit the nation in to his almost doctrinaire creed of non-violence, oblivious of the calamitous consequences for the country thereof, shows him, despite his seminal contributions to the freedom movement, in a rather poor light as a statesman worth the salt in the world of realpolitik for which, of course, partitioned India has paid dear. His idiosyncrasies and instability of judgement and resolve, his unplanned impulsiveness in unfolding a line of action, then suddenly changing course or disbanding a movement owing to the slightest deviation by a section of the people from his intended programme as in the case of the disbanding of the Civil Disobedience Movement after Chauri Chaura in 1922, made him as a revolutionary easy meat for the villainous British. Gandhiji's inconsistency in action also severely decelerated the revolutionary movement in India and allowed the gradual rise of uglier heads like the sinister forces of Partition in the form of Jinnah, Suhrawardy and the like. The Mahatma, despite his obvious protestations to the contrary, never could quite reconcile his dual role of national leader and world teacher and his work, ever oscillating between the two, suffered from conflict of interest and eventually amounted to India paying his debt, interest compounded, by suffering dismemberment, a gory legacy whose illicit offspring on either side of our holy land continues to undermine our peace and security even today in the selfsame way it did when the Mahatma's folly in fondness for the befriended enemy sent a nation to despair amidst the worst fratricidal bloodbath recorded in human history.
To be continued...
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