This calling Gandhiji 'a British agent' must stop. He was preeminently a patriot and one of the greatest human beings to have walked on the face of this earth.
I now quote Albert Einstein from his speech delivered on the occasion of Gandhiji's seventieth birthday in 1939 :
'A leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority : a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor the mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality ; a victorious fighter who has always scorned the use of force ; a man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflexible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplifting of his people and the betterment of their lot ; a man who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being, and thus at all times risen superior.
Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.'
Surely, Einstein who could see through the mysteries of the universe and who had endured Nazi atrocity on his self, in a minor way, and on his brethren in annihilating terms, ought to know better than ill-informed people of the hour who, out of pettiness of personality that seeks the ulcer in an otherwise wholly healthy body, like the fly that feeds on it, keep hurling abuses on a soul supremely sublime. It is a shame that we, as free citizens of a nation that prides on its spiritual heritage, fail to pay our respects to our greatest leader at whose feet just the other day sat the most towering personalities of the age. Indeed, we have sunk as a people in having failed to read history right and so done the Mahatma such an enormous injustice that prompts us to make fun of him and cast all sorts of aspersions on him that only go to prove the hollowness of our own love for the motherland.
Written by Sugata Bose
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