THE MAHATMA OF THE MASSES ... 2

Gandhi's appeal lay in his simplicity of living, with his wearing the apparel of the masses, his practice of 'continence', his outer religiosity, his simplified formula of mass participation for the freedom struggle by means of the spinning wheel and his obvious mass contact and undeniable sympathy for the people at large. He identified in his outer self with the peasant, sharing their sorrows and sufferings in his heart while in his inner self he remained the politician perfected who could face up to the might of the British Crown single-handed, without arms save his own and that too held in abeyance when it came to actively using it in combat against an aggressive enemy. The masses simply obeyed him, such was his magic and herein lies the mystique of the Mahatma despite his apparent failings, his follies and his foibles, his idiosyncrasies of nature and his perverse sense of righteousness et al.