Gandhism
The term "Gandhism" also encompasses what Gandhi's ideas, words, and actions mean to people around the world and how they used them for guidance in building their own future.
Second, one should never resort to violence to settle inherent differences between human beings at any level: from between two people to two nations to two races or two religions ("non-violence").
He asserted that fighting in the war would provide Indians necessary self-defense skills that had been eroded by the deep-seated influence of India's ascetic culture, which he disdained.
To support this argument, Gandhi criticized the ethics of love and absolute ahimsa (non-violence) he observed in the teachings of Swaminarayan and Vallabhacharya.
According to Gandhi, this love was mere "sentimentalism", and its concomitant absolute ahimsa "robbed us of our manliness" and "made the people incapable of self-defence".
While arguing in a Navjivan newspaper editorial that it was a duty to resort to violence for self-defense against Afghani terrorists, Gandhi admitted that he could not personally adopt this approach because he had chosen the path of love even against his enemies.
[18][19][20][21] Indian sociologist and Gandhian contemporary, N. A. Thoothi, had argued by 1935 that Mahatma Gandhi was "most influenced in his inner-most being… by the teachings of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya above all".
Thoothi concluded that "most of [Gandhi’s] thought, activities, and even methods of most of the institutions which he has been building up and serving, have the flavor of Swaminarayan, more than that of any other sect of Hinduism".
He envisioned a more agrarian India upon independence that would focus on meeting the material needs of its citizenry prior to generating wealth and industrialising.
He focused on persuading all members of the Indian National Congress to spend some time each day hand-spinning on their charkhas (spinning wheel).
[citation needed] Many prominent figures of the Indian independence movement, including Motilal Nehru, were persuaded by Gandhi to renounce their Western style-dress in favour of khadi.
Gandhi was opposed to the partaking of meat, alcohol, stimulants, salt and most spices, and also eliminated different types of cooking from the food he ate.
Fasting would also put the body through unusual hardship, which Gandhi believed would cleanse the spirit by stimulating the courage to withstand all impulses and pain.
In the end, Gandhi and Ambedkar both made some concessions to negotiate the Poona Pact, which abandoned the call for separate electorates in turn for voluntary representation and a commitment to abolish untouchability.
Later, nonviolence leader Vinoba Bhave used the term to refer to the struggle of post-independence Gandhians to ensure that self-determination and equality reached the masses and the downtrodden.
Sarvodaya workers associated with Vinoba, including Jaya Prakash Narayan and Dada Dharmadhikari, undertook various projects aimed at encouraging popular self-organisation during the 1950s and 1960s.
[citation needed] Nehru also pushed through major legislation that granted legal rights and freedoms to Indian women, and outlawed untouchability and many different kinds of social discrimination, in the face of strong opposition from orthodox Hindus.
Some of his economic policies were criticised for removing the right of property and freedoms from the landowning peasants of Gujarat for whom Gandhi had fought in the early 1920s.
Nehru had neglected the defence budget and disallowed the Army to prepare, which caught the soldiers in India's north eastern frontier off-guard with lack of supplies and reinforcements.
Gandhi's deep commitment and disciplined belief in non-violent civil disobedience as a way to oppose forms of oppression or injustice has inspired many subsequent political figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. of the United States,[34] Julius Nyerere of Tanzania,[35] Nelson Mandela[36] and Steve Biko[37] of South Africa, Lech Wałęsa of Poland[38][39] and Aung San Suu Kyi[40] of Myanmar.
From the 1950s, the ANC organised non-violent civil disobedience akin to the campaign advanced by the Indian National Congress under the inspiration of Gandhi between the 1920s and 1940s.
Mandela made a special visit to India and publicly honoured Gandhi as the man who inspired the freedom struggle of black South Africans.
The non-violent Solidarity movement of Lech Wałęsa of Poland overthrew a Soviet-backed communist government after two decades of peaceful resistance and strikes in 1989, precipitating the downfall of the Soviet Union.
He admitted in his autobiography to hitting his wife when he was young,[41] and indulging in carnal pleasures out of lust, jealousy and possessiveness, not genuine love.
In 1942, while he had already condemned Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, Gandhi took on an offensive in civil resistance, called the Quit India Movement.
In its meeting committee recommended to the Ministry of Education to prepare three books incorporating Gandhiji's contribution in important fields one each for primary, secondary and University stage.
[48] Harold Dwight Lasswell, a political scientist and communications theorist, defined propaganda as the management of eclectic attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols.
It is not a happy position for a big country like India to be merely helping with money and material obtained willy-nilly from her while the United Nations are conducting the war.
I believed even at that tender age that the Hindus in India, if they wished to live in peace and amity with the other communities, should assiduously cultivate the virtue of neighbourliness.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his allies condemned Gandhi, accusing him of politically appeasing Muslims while turning a blind eye to their atrocities against Hindus, and for allowing the creation of Pakistan (despite having publicly declared that "before partitioning India, my body will have to be cut into two pieces"[57]).
