THE MAHATMA AND THE MASSES ... 5

THE MAHATMA AND THE MASSES ... 5

Gandhiji's greatest contribution to India's political freedom was his rationalisation of the movement to its lowest common denominator in the masses. A chaotic enervated mass of hundreds of millions of people was energised into life and action by the exemplary life and self-sacrifice of the pleader from Porbandar post his return to his motherland with his newly acquired status as the messiah of oppressed Indians in South Africa. The discipline to which Gandhiji subjected himself in his daily life, his identification in ways and means, attire and culture with the masses struck in them the right chord and catapulted him to godlike status even as the Mahatma's influence inspired the subjugated people of India with fresh hope of their economic, social and political resurrection. The effect was electric and the Indian masses awoke from their political slumber to quicken into non-violent resistance, never quite so passive as the epithet adorning it goes to highlight it but so alarmingly active that it galvanised the entire nation to fight for freedom, a struggle that had thus far remained confined to the deliberations of the elite in the annual Congress sessions and its derivatives thereof. The British for the first time since the Revolt of 1857 were confronted with mass action against them and took to repressive measures to squash it. But the fire had been ignited and the flames would only spread to consume the Empire as the elite and the intelligentsia, the youth and the elderly, the rich and the poor, all came into the orbit of the Mahatma's magical influence to bolster the national movement for freedom. What the Mahatma did had never been achieved before, this, the rationalisation of the masses that gave the movement indestructible strength.

Written by Sugata Bose