"...it is often assumed that within India Gandhi suffered the fate of all political saints - he was placed on a pedestal and forgotten..."

The relevance of Gandhi's philosophy today

Gandhi was in himself a legacy of philosophy. The longer-term impact of the man warrants every comment on him in its own right. If all those individuals and movements that have been influenced by Gandhian ideals were to be listed it would read like a roll-call of the great moralists of the twentieth century, and of its great crusades. The careers of men like Danilo Dolci and Martin Luther King or the numerous civil rights campaigns and peace movements were inspired by the ideal of passive disobedience and non-violence. Gandhi has inspired operas like Philip Glass's 'Satyagraha', and novels, such as R.K.Narayan's 'Waiting for the Mahatma'. Very briefly, the questions raised here will concern only the continuing influence and relevance of Gandhi's ideas to the world and to those two countries with which he was mainly concerned, South Africa and India.

It is often assumed that within India Gandhi suffered the fate of all political saints - he was placed on a pedestal and forgotten. This is untrue. The ideas of Gandhi continued to be debated among Gandhians, his opponents, especially the Indian communists, and the ruling elite, particularly during the Prime Ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru. Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's heir-apparent, took over the Gandhian constructive movement, giving it a more radical edge through his attempt, in the Bhoodan Movement, to bring about a voluntary redistribution of land to the poorer peasantry, above all, to the landless. He was to be strongly supported by Jayaprkash Narayan, whose socialism took on an increasingly Gandhian complexion, and who began to devise sophisticated programmes for the modernization of Indian villages but still inspired by the Gandhian anarchist vision of decentralisation and self-sufficiency. Narayan, or J.P., as he was familiarly known, exerted enormous moral influence by the 1970s and became the leader of national opposition to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Nehru's daughter, no relation of the Mahatma) during the Emergency period of 1975- 77. His leadership does much to explain the astonishing defeat of the Congress Party in the 1979 elections.