I do not know why all of a sudden evaluation of Gandhi Ji who had died 74 years ago has become important? And how come all of a sudden so many people have become qualified to evaluate or criticize Gandhi Ji? Whether people are in favor or against Gandhi Ji, we need to understand how complete are their knowledge and how capable is their intellect to evaluate someone of Gandhi Ji’s stature. I can still understand if someone making a study on him in academic interest. However, most opinions about Gandhi Ji are preconceived and are formed on the basis of evaluations made by third persons. Now these third-person evaluations themselves could be biased or incorrect. It could be possible that they have depicted Gandhi the way they have understood, however, it is not necessary that their viewpoints are correct or from a neutral angle.
And this could be true for both kinds of opinions who want to describe Gandhi as a saint and the others who think that Gandhi deserved to be assassinated. There is a section that believes that Gandhi Ji should have gone for armed struggle instead of Ahimsa or nonviolence to fight for freedom. Putting up arms in the hands of people may be easy, but taking back arms from people is not easy. We have seen how the nations have gone into anarchy where people have taken up guns.
Many of us give expert opinion sitting in front of the TV, that Tendulkar has played a wrong shot, he should have played it this way or that way. We all become kind of experts who are capable of finding mistakes in Tendulkar's batting. This included people who have never even played cricket. Most critiques of Gandhi Ji are also like that.
Even though Tendulkar is rated amongst the all-time greatest batsmen in the world, he also has made errors in judgment while choosing his shot or leaving a certain ball, or in making strategy against bowlers. But that is part of the game and his stature doesn’t diminish because of those errors. there are no full-proof measures. Just think if a batsman of Tendulkar’s stature couldn’t negotiate a certain ball, is it possible for an ordinary batsman to do better than him?
In a similar line, it is absolutely possible that Gandhi Ji also might have made certain errors in judgment. However, those errors make him more human. And his stature and contribution don’t diminish because of a few mistakes. the evaluation has to be made in totality. You wouldn’t evaluate Tendulkar only on the basis few of his failures. The problem is that the impact of both the achievement and errors in judgments of people of Gandhi Ji’s stature is quite big. So if we count only his errors in judgment, possibly he could look to be a big villain. But that is not the complete picture. Secondly, the failure on account of error in judgment should be counted as errors only not as intention. Tendulkar doesn't get out at zero or 99 intentionally. His failures were in spite of his best effort, or on someday, he was simply not at his best form.
I have read an article very recently, where the author has questioned why Godse didn’t kill Jinnah instead of Gandhi? My question is that If one of them had to be eliminated why it was Gandhi, why not Jinnah? Did Godse have a special love for Jinnah and hatred for Gandhi for the same mistake? Do we have an explanation for that? Gandhi didn’t ask for a separate nation, it was Jinnah who asked for a separate nation. And Jinnah’s demand for a separate nation was there for quite some time and everybody knew it. Till then Godse and his team decided to eliminate Gandhi only, that too after the partition not before that.
With my limited knowledge, I have not been a great fan of Gandhi Ji. However, I feel I am not competent enough to make a proper evaluation even though I am critical of many of his actions. Every time I take a critical view against his action, I feel an internal urge to go back and check why he took such a call, what were his compulsion, did he have an alternate option available?
Possibly five years back my judgments on Gandhi were more raw, rude, and crude like many of us find our parents wrong in our youth. Unfortunately, nowadays we see a increasing trend to hold Gandhi & Nehru responsible for every wrong happening in India today.
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