Speech by P.A. Nazareth

Ambassador Pascal Nazareth’s Remarks on Gandhi Jayanti, Oct 2, 2007 (published in Fall 2007 Gandhi Message)

I was much more comfortable when I was ambassador but I feel so much more fulfilled in what I am doing now. After I retired, Rajmohan Gandhi and I decided we must do something in view of all the communal disharmony in India, the communal carnages, and massacres that were taking place. So we decided to try something – better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. We decided we’d set up something called Sarvodaya International Trust. We have presently nine chapters all over the country and an international support base. We have the parent bodies and international trusts with people from all over the world on it, including the great grandson of Leo Tolstoy. But in every chapter in India, we have brought together the Hindu, the Muslim, the Sikh, the Christian, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Bahai, whomsoever we can find in that particular city and state because we want to make the point that we can and must join hands to work for the common good. Gandhiji taught us to pray together, and I believe if we can all work together, united, it will create a certain module which people can replicate all over the country.

When we started, people thought it was a fools dream and a fools effort, in fact no one was more shocked than my mother, she thought that the trauma of retirement had made me a bit soft in the head. But when she saw how many people were brought together from all over the world, she became our first supporter, and she gave Rs. 5000, which knowing my mother as I do, was a very big donation. So, I dedicated my book to her as the first supporter of Sarvodaya Trust.

Now I have been asked to speak on "Gandhi’s Vision" today and I am very happy to do that. And I would like to start by just reading to you a little something from Will and Ariel Durant’s book, The Story of Civilization, where in the very first volume on Our Oriental Heritage, commenting on events in the first half of the twentieth century, this is what they wrote:

“China followed Sun Yat-Sen, took up the sword and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader one of the strangest figures in history and gave to the world the unprecedented phenomenon of a revolution lead by a saint and waged without a gun.”

It was certainly a great phenomenon, and to know what are the dimensions of this phenomenon it is good to recall that at that particular time the British Empire was the largest empire the world had ever seen. When the British said that the sun never sets on the British empire, in one way it was a very arrogant and foolish boast, but in another way it was very accurate. Because their empire extended all the way from Fiji to Vancouver, every moment of the day when the sun was going down somewhere on the British flag and it was rising over head on a British flag somewhere else. Now against this empire this man came forward and brought it down with nothing but truth and nonviolence. The other thing to keep in mind is that at that particular point British India, what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, was one-fifth of humanity. After the British left, India joined the United Nations as a founding member. It was the 55th member. Today there are 192. It became the largest democratization of the international economy, or the political order that the world has ever seen. And it all started with this man, whom Churchill contemptuously described as the half-naked fakir.

The amazing thing for me and why I became so interested to research and write this book, is this man who was so timid. He went to Britain; got himself a British legal degree. Anyone else would have been strutting around like a peacock. He goes to court and he can’t even argue his first case. He divulged in his autobiography that he was trembling all over. So he had returned the money that the poor unfortunate woman had given him for the briefs and doesn’t return to court again. So he is very happy when he is invited to go to South Africa. There something happens to him when he is thrown out of that train. What a transformation! All of a sudden, this man, this timid little man, decides that he is going to take on the local administration and fight for justice. And this for me is the interesting thing that made me do this research: what was his transformation? And I believe it was really the spiritual inputs into him. The Bhagavad Gita was as it was a book of constant reference. And what is the message of the Bhagavad Gita? That when you are faced with injustice and evil you don’t have a choice, you just have to confront it; even if that evil or injustice you see is embodied in your own family or your own brothers, you don’t have a choice. But then he had also read the Sermon on the Mount, and he therefore had also imbibed very much the spirit of nonviolence, of conquering with love, or redemption coming through self-suffering. So, the combination of this, of the messages of the ancient Indian scriptures, most important of which I believe was these three simple words "Tat Tvam Asi" –  "Thou Art That" that all of creation is a manifestation of the supreme energy. God is not an old man with a beard sitting up in the sky, you know as a lot of Christan art represents him. He is the supreme energy, the cosmic energy, whether it is the star that shines or a little flower that blooms; it is all the same energy, and without that energy nothing would exist.

Gandhi’s whole vision really was that. And this other thing that "Udhara charitanam tu vasudeva kutumbhakam" that for the enlightened, for the broadminded, all mankind is one family. These are the two basic premises in Gandhi’s wish. If we are manifestations of the divine, if we have been created in God’s own image, if we have the divine spark in us, then we can only be governed by love and not by hate and by force, and love means really nonviolence. So by combining these two together, it was very innovative actually, because truth and nonviolence until Gandhi, honestly were not two sides of the same coin. But he put them together and he also included elements from Islam, for instance the great emphasis on justice. He says peacefully pursue truth. This truth implies justice. This became the basic premise of his vision.

In his vision, all of mankind was one family – we all have to live together and the bond has to be one of love. It is possible to win over even your enemy by conquering him with love. Abraham Lincoln said something like that a hundred years earlier – the best way to eliminate your enemy is to make him your friend. And Gandhi was saying the same thing, that the objective of all nonviolent struggle is not to grasp power, but to bring about a transformation of relationship. That was the whole approach. And in fact, he says if only we would learn to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents, three-fourths of the world’s problems would disappear, because we have to keep in mind that evidently the word enemy was not in Gandhi’s vocabulary. It was always only an opponent. And justice required that you must consider what are the basic requirements of your opponent. Like you have certain things that you think you must get from him, he also has certain things to get from you. So the important thing is to strive for a mutually acceptable agreement. Because if it’s not mutually acceptable, if you are enforcing an agreement on someone, he might have no option but to accept, it but you can be sure that he will wait for the first opportunity to over turn it and if have hurt him, he will wait for an opportunity to hurt you.

And as 9/11 has shown, even the weak can hurt you very badly, if they are very angry, if they have got a lot of hatred in their hearts, and that really is the basic theme, that if you want better security in the world you have to do everything to bring down hate in this world, because anything that increases hate in people’s hearts is going to greatly endanger your security. You never know how they will hit you. On 9/11 the people who attacked had used US flying schools to learn how to fly, have used US aircrafts, US gasoline, US airports in broad day light to destroy its most valuable assets. So you have a situation like this, in a way all the navies, armies, air forces of the world are obsolete, because all of a sudden your enemy is not some foreign country, some great monster, military might. It is a few people, within your own societies, within your own cities, how do you deal with this? That is why Gandhi becomes so much more important today than he ever was, because unless we find ways of nonviolent conflict resolution, of finding ways of transforming the relationships, of making our enemies our friends, you know, by impressing upon everyone that we are all members of the same human family, that our little planet is not even like a speck of dust in this whole universe. In fact our whole solar system is not even like a pin head at the tail end of one single galaxy upon the Milky Way in the universe. And if we cannot learn to live with each other, we are going to destroy each other. And that I believe was the vision that Gandhi had.

In leadership the most important thing is vision, because the leader if he has to lead, he must have some idea of where he wants to lead you. He must always lead you from your present situation of bondage or of oppression into a better world rather than to a worse one. Hitler and Mussolini led their people to their doom and to their disaster. Leaders can do both good things and bad things. They must have a vision of where they want to lead their people and they should have also a clear idea as to how they are going to do it. And that Gandhi should devise this most powerful weapon called Satyagraha – truth and nonviolence – has been defined as soul force, as truth force, to adhere firmly to the truth. I myself prefer to define it as to confront with the truth. Because the whole strategy of Satyagraha really is fairly confrontational. Gandhi was not a pacifist, Gandhi was a militant, but he was a nonviolent militant. His tactic has been described as war without violence. It had been described as moral jujitsu. So, the basic thing is that the whole technique is to force your opponent on to the negotiating table to make a mutually acceptable agreement, and most importantly, or as importantly to bring about a transformation of relations. And if you think about what happened in India, it is not just that India won independence in a nonviolent fashion, but one of the first acts of independent India was to ask the last British viceroy to be the first governor general of India, and to join the Commonwealth. Isn’t it amazing? Suddenly following a confrontation which went on for many decades, from 1928 to 1947, there is a total transformation of relationship. They became best of friends. In fact when Gandhi was asked at the round table conference in 1931, do you want to break completely the bonds with Britain? He said, "not at all, I only want the end of empire. But I do not want that there should be any break with Britain, in fact I want close relations with Britain. The British people are wonderful people, but it must be on the basis of equality. The emperor and the empire will have to go as far as India is concerned, but we want the closest relations." So it is possible to bring about a transformation of relationship. It is possible to bring about major political and social change through truth and nonviolence. And sadly today it is a very scarce commodity in the world, the simple thing called truth. You say whatever you want, and you repeat it many times over. Suddenly it appears as the truth, and this is what causes so many disasters all over, and it has proved in many instances that because of our leaders, in various parts of the world, that have forsaken the path of truth, both in the political and in the corporate world, there have been a whole lot of problems – wars, devastation, collapses of mega firms, etc. So unless we learn to bring truth back into our lives and we learn nonviolent conflict resolution which Gandhiji stood for, I’m afraid we’re in for a bad patch.

And for each of us, ultimately one important thing we have to remember about Gandhi is his saying that each of us must be the change we wish to see in the world. If we want change to come it has to begin with me and with you. And what is the first thing we’ll have to do? It is to take one simple resolution that we will always speak the truth. If you take that one simple resolution you suddenly find that it is almost impossible to commit any single sin, because every sin has to be covered with one hundred different lies. And people often ask, but how can this work? Look at the last century, all the great successes of nonviolence – truth and nonviolence – "Satyagraha", far outnumber all the military successes you can think about and at hardly any cost of human life. All of communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe in nonviolent revolution, which they very smartly describe as the velvet revolution. In the Philippines they Corazon Aquino who lead the revolution the only armaments in their hands were rosaries and statues of the blessed virgin; here Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez not many people hear about him but it is amazing what this man did organizing all the farm labor, the grape and lettuce farms. Now in every case they were seeking strength from their own religious tradition.

It is important to have inner spiritual growth. Spirituality is what the world needs. The tragedy of the world is it has too much of religion and too little spirituality. What the world needs is spirituality. And the amazing thing about Gandhi is that his entire leadership grows in exact measure with the growth in his own spirituality. The more he grows spiritually, the less fearful he becomes he has lost fear. And then he divulges a simple little slogan – He who fears, fails. And what is the argument – that if you have put your faith in truth which is God, you can never fail because God cannot fail. Of course, you might not live to see your mission succeed, but that is not important, but your cause cannot fail. And once you learn to do that, to put all your faith in God, to do your duty because it is your duty to do it, whether you will succeed or not, then you suddenly find change takes place and you also find that each of us radiates either a positive or a negative energy. So if we can learn really, on the one hand to always speak the truth, never to speak ill of others, in some way trying to be compassionate like the Buddha said or Gandhi said, let us try and wipe just one tear from one eye everyday before they are converted along the path. But maybe there are some others who might need this message, but to all of us here I think we can all join hands together to honor the memory of Gandhi like we have done here today, to recognize that his message is very important, not only now, but for all time. So long as conflict exists, so long as untruth exists, so long as oppression exists, the message of Gandhi, like the message of Jesus Christ, of the Prophet Mohammad, and of the all the ancient Indian sages, the Buddha, will always, always, be relevant. I thank you for your attention.