3 Review(s)

Mahatma Gandhi’s relevance to India and the world is much more than ever before.Driving this urgent need for bringing back Gandhi in our lives are two main factors: firstly,contemporary politics lacks moral leaders, and, secondly, democracies around the world haveabandoned the empowerment of the weakest in favour of the economic and political supremacyand hegemony of the strongest. Gandhi’s view of democracy was exactly the opposite. He said, ‘Theweakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest. That can never happen except throughnon-violence.’ The Gandhian paradigm is based on truthfulness and non-violence and establishingan essential relationship between social awareness and common humanity. For him, politics as theart of organizing the society was a path to self-realization and autonomy of the individual and thecommunity.Gandhi usually spoke of truth in terms of self-experience, rather than universal cognition. He said,‘Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there and to be guided by truthas one sees it.’ Gandhi considered the search for truth as an integral part of his non-violence and as a vital component of the relationship of the private to the public. Living in Truth is therefore aneffort to go beyond (para) of our ‘everydayness’, to show (deiknynai) the relationship between theideal and the real. It is a manner of raising the ethical aspiration of citizens and the non-violentessence of the government.