Mahatma Gandhi is one leader who sparks so much passion and attracts so much attention even after 150 years of his birth and 71 years after demise. There are many who love and admire him; there are many for whom he is the political capital; there are some who hate him. You can love him, pretend to love him or hate him—but you can’t ignore him. “I am not going to keep quiet even after I die”—Gandhiji declared gleefully once long ago. He was right.
Mahatma Gandhi was Asia’s greatest contribution to the world in the last century. His Ahimsa and Satyagraha—Non-violence and Truthful Resistance—were the only original political programmes that any leader had offered in the last century. After Gandhi’s successful experimentation with those programmes in India, they became the essential modus operandi in almost all the struggles for freedom and independence that shook the world in last 70 years and freed people in over 50 countries from the yoke of dictatorships and monarchies. Except for a few countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia that had witnessed violent communist revolutions, all the other countries that have transformed into democracies, had imprints of Gandhian ideals of non-violence and peace in their transformation.
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