Many decades ago, back in 1948, when Gandhi was killed by an assassin’s bullets, the world responded with shock, grief and tribute. Today, seventy years later, he continues to be referred to in all sorts of places.

Why does the world take notice of Gandhi?

A clue may lie in what Albert Einstein said in 1939, nine years before Gandhi’s death and eight years before India’s independence.

A leader of his people, unsupported by any outside 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.

These lines can be found in Einstein’s book, Out of My Later Years, published in New York in 1950. Mark the absence of any reference to India. The Einstein of 1939, the year when Germany attacked Poland, sees Gandhi as a resident of Planet Earth. Yes, he situates Gandhi against a Europe that had conquered far continents and ruled over vast populations.

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What was the dominant passion of so singular a person?

Many of Gandhi’s imperial opponents were sure that driving the British out was Gandhi’s primary if not sole goal. Thus Penderel Moon, the Punjab-based civil servant who became one of the Empire’s leading historians, would write:

The deliverance of India from British rule, which admittedly was Gandhi’s chief political aim, would appear also to have been the dominant purpose of his life. He himself would have denied this.

Aware of Gandhi’s involvement in social, economic and moral questions, men like Moon and Lord Wavell, India’s viceroy from 1943 to 1947 (whose papers Moon edited), called that involvement window-dressing. Denying the evidence of Gandhi’s lack of interest in money or in office, they called him a hypocrite.

Wavell wrote in 1946 that he felt anti-British ‘malevolence’ in Gandhi and that Gandhi’s goal was ‘the establishment of a Hindu Raj’.

Today, however, a Gandhi statue stands next to the British Parliament, and people in London, New York, Beijing, Tokyo, Cape Town, Nairobi, Canberra, Ottawa, Islamabad and elsewhere associate Gandhi not with a dislike of races, nations or faith communities differing from his, but with the idea that humanity is one, and that we should be the change we wish to see.
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In the India of today, with its population of 1.2 billion, and perhaps elsewhere too, the following pictures or words seem synonymous with Gandhi:

One, the pocket watch that always hung from his waist.
Two, a simple pair of eye-glasses under a bald head.
Three, a broom that cleans.
Four, the charkha or the spinning wheel.
Five, a pinch of salt.
Six, ‘Vaishnava Jana’, the song by the fifteenth-century Gujarati poet Narsi Mehta, defining a good person as someone who feels a stranger’s pain.
Seven, an ancient line from an unknown author declaring that Ishwar and Allah refer to the same God; and also, yes,
Eight, the call addressed to the British in 1942, ‘Quit India!’

This Quit India Gandhi is suggested I think by the Gandhi holding a walking stick, what Indians call a lathi, which is the Gandhi seen in many places in India, including as the vanguard in the Gyara Murti constellation in New Delhi.

If we reflect on these Gandhi symbols, perhaps we may get to know what drove him.
Let’s start with the Quit India call. There is no doubt that the world saw him as a champion for the dignity, equality, and independence of peoples lorded over by others.

In 1921, when under Gandhi’s lead the campaign of Non-Cooperation with the Empire was sweeping across India, Marcus Garvey, who was leading a fight in the United States for African Americans, cabled his support for the campaign. In August of that same year, The Crisis, the journal edited by the African-American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois, published the entire text of Gandhi’s ‘Open Letter’ addressed that year ‘To Every Briton in India’.

After Gandhi’s famous arrest and trial in the following year, The Crisis wrote: ‘White Christianity stood before Gandhi the other day and, let us all confess, cut a sorry figure’. Seven years later, in 1929, The Crisis published on its front page a signed message from Gandhi, perhaps the first he addressed directly to American Blacks:

Let not the 12 million [African Americans] be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.

Three years later, in 1932, an editorial in the African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, said:

What we need in America is a Gandhi who will fight the cause of the oppressed. One who, like Gandhi, can divorce himself from the greed for gold, one who can appreciate the misery of the oppressed.

The Chicago Defender had identified the quality of Gandhi’s fight. All over the world people knew that Gandhi was fighting racial domination, and they also instinctively understood what Einstein would point out: Gandhi was showing that in dignity the oppressed could rise superior to the oppressor.

Throughout his life, moreover, Gandhi seemed to be as firmly opposed to wrongs committed by and among Indians as he was to the Empire’s high-handedness. Look, for instance, at his trek in the winter of 1946-47 across the Noakhali area, now part of Bangladesh, where minority Hindus had faced death, rapes and forcible conversion at the hands of the Muslim majority.

On this journey, much of it conducted on foot, Gandhi ministered patiently to victims and their families. Serving as his interpreter and aide, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose thought that Gandhi’s ‘tenderness’ towards sufferers ‘soothed them and lifted them above their sorrows’.

Yet this Noakhali Gandhi was also frank about the Hindu practice of untouchability and the need for caste Hindu repentance.

Noticing that East Bengal’s ‘untouchables’, the Namashudras as they were called, had been braver than caste Hindus in responding to attacks, Gandhi insisted that village peace committees of Muslim and Hindu residents should include Namashudras; and he warned caste Hindu women that if they continued to disown the ‘untouchables’, more sorrow was in store. To Hindu women, he proposed a radical step on 3 January 1947 (in Chandipur):

Invite a Harijan every day to dine with you. Or at least ask the Harijan to touch the food or the water before you consume it. Do penance for your sins.

Those aware of the India of 1947, even those aware of the India of 2017, know what a bold suggestion this was.

Recalling what Penderel Moon and Lord Wavell had said, it may be asked: wasn’t fighting untouchability also a political goal? Gandhi indeed argued, right from 1916, that if high-caste Hindus did not alter their treatment of low castes and ‘untouchables’, they would neither deserve nor get independence. Yet for him the fight against untouchability was above all a requirement of simple humanity.

When in June 1947 an unhappy Gandhi acquiesced in the Partition to which leaders of the Indian National Congress had agreed as the price for Indian independence, he reminded the Congress of the time, where high-caste Hindus formed a large majority, that independence, or the departure of the British, was only a step towards goals that were as big or bigger.

‘What about the “untouchables”?’ he asked the All India Congress Committee (AICC).

If you say that ‘untouchables’ are nothing, the Adivasis are nothing, then you are not going to survive yourselves. But if you do away with the distinction of savarna and avarna, if you treat the Shudras, the ‘untouchables’ and the Adivasis as equals, then something good will have come out of a bad thing [the Partition].

Talented colleagues, men who would lead the future government of free India, also spoke at this crucial AICC meeting, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abul Kalam Azad and Govind Ballabh Pant. But Gandhi was the only one there to address the question of the ‘untouchables’.
His speech of less than ten minutes was more forward-looking than the utterances of younger colleagues. It underlined two other challenges that a free, if truncated, India would immediately face: Hindu-Muslim relations and the question of the princely states. Said Gandhi:

In the three-quarters of the country that has fallen to our share, Hinduism is going to be tested. If you show the generosity of true Hinduism, you will pass in the eyes of the world. If not, you will have proved Mr. Jinnah’s thesis that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations…
[T]hat some [princely] States should [want to] secede from India…is a very serious thing… [The princes] must recognize the paramountcy of the people as they recognized the paramountcy of the British Government…

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Excerpted from Why Gandhi Still Matters by Rajmohan Gandhi