 I'm very deeply grateful to the School for Democracy and to particularly to Ms. Aruna Roy for extending this invitation to me to be part of this series, which they are doing on the field. And through this, we would be able to make especially the younger generation more aware of the basic ideas and principles on which our struggle for freedom was based. This is extremely important because today, many of those values and those ideas are under threat. And therefore, those who are fighting to retain those ideas, to revive those ideas, need to be aware of how those ideas originated, how those movements were fought, what were the essential principles on which they were based. I'm going to be speaking about Gandhiji today. And as all of you know, he was the preeminent leader of India's struggle for freedom. There was already a powerful movement which existed in India before Gandhiji came to the fore. He started his political life in South Africa, where he built up a very important movement he pioneered. In fact, the first movement of Indian diaspora, most of whom were very poor indentured laborers. So he had already built up an enormous amount of experience and goodwill and expertise. By the time he came to India to take his part in India's struggle for freedom, and he had already conceptualized his basic method, what he called Satyagraha, about which I'll be talking at some length today, trying to explain to you what exactly it meant. And so when he came to India, this was in 1915, the national movement had already been around for a good 40 years or more. The Indian National Congress itself had been established in 1885, and even at least a decade before that, nationalist ideas had become current among the people, especially through the agency of the Indian language newspapers, who were the first forum where nationalist ideas, anti-beralist ideas were first articulated. So we already had a well-established movement, but the movement was twofold. One, it was under his leadership that the national movement assumed a mass character at an all-in-efficient level. The Swadeshi movement, which had taken place from 1905 to 1908, had already assumed a mass character, but not to the extent that the movement attained this character under Gandhiji, but a considerable mass character, especially in the province of Bengal, where it originated, but also to a large extent in the province of Punjab, where it acquired quite an agrarian character, and also Maharashtra, where the lower middle classes in the towns, as well as sections of the working class, actually flocked to this movement. It is worth remembering that when Lokman Nathilak was exiled by the British government in 1908, he was arrested, the working class of Bombay came out onto the streets, and there was a weak long strike, which in fact Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, had characterized as the first action of the working class in India. So we already had a glorious, there was the whole, the moderates, the extremists, but still the movement had not spread at a mass level beyond the areas that I have just talked about. So among the intelligentsia, among the educated classes, it had already acquired quite an all India character. So when Gandhi came and he brought his new methods, his new ideas, the first one, as I was just explaining, was that under him it acquired a mass character, and I will soon explain how and why. The other very important aspect that he brought, new, fresh aspect that he brought to this movement, was concept of, now Satyagre is not limited to one particular method. Satyagre is the broad concept. And as I go along, as I said, I'm going to spend some time, explaining to you what that is. Within Satyagre, within the notion of Satyagre, also comes in the notion of non-violence. And I will be talking about that also at some length, in order to explain these ideas to you. So this is where we are placed. The year 1915, Gandhiji comes to India, does not take part in any political activity for a year. He goes around the country in a third class railway compartment, visiting various parts of India. But what that also revealed very interestingly was that wherever he went, large crowds flocked to see him, which means that his name was already known in India. His work in South Africa, among the poor indentured Indians for the rights of Indians in South Africa, had already made him a popular figure. So it wasn't as if he was coming to work on a blank slate. And then of course he started intervening and first it was a Champaran and then in Kerala district in Gujarat and then the mill workers strike in Ahmedabad in the years 1917 to 1918. These were three different movements which he led. All very interestingly, movements based upon the needs and the concerns and the demands of ordinary people. Champaran was about the demands of the tenants of Indigo planters who were usually European who and these tenants were forced to grow Indigo on certain conditions. This was in Champaran district of North Bihar. In Kerala, it was the peasants land, small land owning peasants who used to pay land revenue to the government and due to adverse drought, et cetera, conditions, they were not in a position to pay. So he led a movement for non-payment of taxes. And then he led the workers in Ahmedabad in a movement against the owners. Due to the wartime conditions, rising prices, et cetera, the workers wanted better conditions. They wanted more wages. They wanted some modifications in their conditions and he led them in a struggle against the mill owners, many of whom were his personal friends. So already then by 1918, the image which Kandichi had acquired in the country was of somebody who was taking up very novel kinds of demands of ordinary people for whom taking up sectional demands of small movements was not taboo. And yet he very much was interested in and was somebody who had led broad movements and very much he was a participant and keen to get into, in fact, the main struggle for freedom. Then in 1919, an occasion came when the Rowlett, what we call the Rowlett Acts were introduced. These were something like what in fact, people have compared the UAPA, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which is becoming notorious now. Our government is very fond of using it, particularly against nonviolent activists and academics and students. This was something like that, the Draconian Acts named after the person who chaired a committee that recommended them, where you could basically hold people behind bars without any charges being brought against them for considerable periods of time. And these were meant to be used against, guess what, those who were indulging in the people whom we call revolutionaries, who were indulging in methods of individual heroic violence. So it was against these acts then that Gandhi launched his first movement, which was called the Anti-Rowlett Satyagre in February of March of 1919. And it was as part of that protest that the notorious Jalya Malabagh incident happened in which there was a massacre of a nonviolent crowd by a British army official, General Dyer. And the rest, as they say, is history. So here we are placed in 1919 and Gandhi is on the cusp of assuming the leadership of the Indian national movement led by the National Congress. So from 1920 is when really Gandhi's leadership of the Indian national movement begins. And the first movement which he led was called the Non-Cooperation Movement, which started in 1920, where he first introduced the method of non-cooperation, as he said with evil, non-cooperation with things that are wrong, which are illegal, which are illegitimate, laws which are bad. And then non-cooperation was gradually to grow into civil disobedience, where you actively defied those laws and those rules which you thought were bad for you, bad for your country. So the movement which was known as the Non-Cooperation Movement lasted from 20 to 22. The next big wave of struggle was the civil disobedience movement from 1930 to 1933. And then of course, the famous Quit India movement of 1942. In between, of course, there were numerous other smaller, more local movements, but equally important, for example, the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928, where the direct leader was Sagar Patel, which was a movement of the peasants against the British government. Again, on the issue of land revenue, enhanced land revenue, which the peasants felt was unfair, they could not pay. So a very powerful, non-violent civil disobedience movement was launched in one Taluka of Surat district, which was the Taluka of Bardoli. But that movement in that small area, compared to the country, it was nothing actually brought the British government to its knees. So there were numerous such instances of different movements, different struggles, anti-caste struggles, the Vaikop Satyagraha, the Guruvayur Satyagraha movements in the princely states, various fasts undertaken by Gandhiji on specific issues from time to time. So it's a very rich saga that we have from 1920 onwards. Of all kinds of the Akali movement, for example, which merged into the non-cooperation movement, I could go on and on the trade union movement, the Kisan Sabha movement, all different sections, the women's movement, which was also very much part of the struggle for freedom and yet had its own identity. So we have this fascinating panorama of a multitude of movements, you could call them a million mutinies, but which are all somewhere or the other linked with the broader struggle for freedom. Some of the movements, the big ones, as I said, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, Quit India are all directly a part of the national movement and they are led by the national leadership under the ages of the Congress. Others are often led by different organizations, other parties as well, other organizations as well and yet they are in many ways small and big linked with this broader struggle for freedom. So it is this that we will be talking about and here we'll be trying to make some sense about what was specific, what was unique, what was so important and new about what Gangliji brought to this whole panorama that I have talked about. What indeed, if I could phrase it that way, are those essential truths which Gangliji embodied and which indeed have made him indestructible in my view. So there could be many answers and I will try to share with you some of those truths which have left a strong mark on me. I'd like to begin with a comment that was made by Gokhale, the early nationalist leader whom Gangliji called his political guru. Gokhale had once said about Gangliji that I quote, without doubt he was made of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. This was again very perceptive but then it doesn't go much beyond saying that he had leadership qualities. But what Gokhale said in addition to that was far more important and I quote to you that. Gokhale said he has in him the marvelous spiritual power to turn ordinary men around him into heroes and martyrs. And I think if we were to dwell on that sentence for a moment, we could perhaps discover one of the very important qualities of Gambian leadership that he had in him the quality, the marvelous spiritual power as Gokhale called it to turn ordinary men around him into heroes and martyrs. This quality of being able to galvanize ordinary people, to make them perform heroic roles, it is that which distinguishes a great movement. The people at every stage of history are the same. It's the same human material, the same flesh and bones, the same hearts, the same emotions, the same brains. And yet what distinguishes these historical epochs which we call revolutionary epochs when grand changes take place, revolutionary changes take place in society in short periods of time. These epochs are the ones in which ordinary people perform the roles which is otherwise reserved for the leadership, for heroes and martyrs. Here ordinary people become heroes and martyrs because no revolution, no big change happens without the participation of the mass of the people. It was Gandhiji's success in devising this method, this method of turning ordinary people into heroes and martyrs. And this method is what he called Satyagraha. This is the name which he gave it, which gave him the ability to influence decisively the history of India and indeed of the world. So I would say that the heart of Gandhi is we have to understand is this, this ability, this quality. And this quality was there because of the method of the method which he had devised, which is that of Satyagraha. Now, what is this Satyagraha? Satyagraha or truth course, if you translate it for Gandhiji or you can call it insistence on the truth was not an abstract philosophical concept, but it was a weapon forged in the flame of struggle and sharpened on the wet stone of hard political practice. Satyagraha was not something just think spiritual. It was of the here and the now. It was practical. It was something that could be used by people for real everyday objectives. The word literally means to insist on the truth or to stick to the truth. The heart and soul of Satyagraha is resistance, resistance against injustice, resistance against discrimination, resistance against oppression. In fact, resistance to any form of wrongdoing or unfreedom, be it racism, be it colonialism, be it caste oppression, be it patriarchy, be it communalism, be it suppression of democracy and civil liberties, be it inequity or economic deprivation. The heart of Satyagraha is resistance against all forms of suppression or oppression or discrimination. Satyagraha also I would like to emphasize is not one form of struggle. In fact, the method encompasses a vast array of forms of struggle, bounded only by the limits set by non-violence. Gandhiji chose Satyagraha, the word Satyagraha, at least partly because he did not like the quietest sound of the word passive in passive resistance. But of course there was a similarity between the two, but this is why he did not like to use the word passive resistance. He also wanted very much to posit the notion of adherence to the truth rather than to the law. Both these are important. As you know for Gandhiji, the notion of truth was very, very important. In fact, you probably know this or if you don't, he started out with the proposition that God is truth. But he ended up with the proposition that truth is God. And this happened through a long series of arguments and debates with a man called Gora, who was a nationalist activist from Andhra Pradesh, who like many others, ordinary people who argued with Gandhiji and said, I don't think I agree with your proposition that God is truth. And they argued over a long period of time and finally Gandhiji said, okay, I agree with you. I will change my proposition and call it truth is God. Because Gora was an atheist and he would not accept the notion of God, but he believed in truth. So he argued with Gandhiji and ultimately Gandhiji changed his proposition. That was another feature of Gandhiji, his ability to change, his ability to adapt, his ability to incorporate the new. In fact, one of the things which he said was that one of his favorite statements was that consistency is not a virtue that I adhere to. In fact, if you want to know what is my view, you should look at what I have said latest because if I have not changed, then somewhere I'm dead. The fact that I'm alive means that I will constantly go on changing. To come back to the discussion on Satya Gray, which I had just discussed how it was, the important part about it was that it meant resistance and how it talked about adherence to the truth rather than to the law. Gandhiji was always positing the notion of legitimacy of truth against the notion of legality or the law. And in fact, much of the ability to resist much of the ability to resist the might of the state came from this notion that while the state may be doing things legally, that doesn't mean that it is always right. They have the power to make something legal, but that does not make that morally right. And we as citizens have a right to question it and to oppose it with the notion of legitimacy, with the notion of truth. If truth is higher than legality, then truth is what Satya Gray has to insist on. Gandhiji's notion of Satya Gray embodied a complex strategy of militant struggle of which non-violence was one part. It involved a deep understanding of the nature of the modern state, of the capacity of the people to struggle, of the appropriateness of different forms of struggle at different points of time, of when to launch and when to withdraw a struggle. Satya Gray ranged from non-cooperation all the way to civil disobedience. It ranged from spinning of yarn to charkha, was a form of Satya Gray. But so was boycott and burning of foreign cloth. So was the boycott of law courts and so was the non-payment of taxes. Satya Gray also included selling banned literature. It also included making of prohibited salt, defying the salt law as in the Dandi March. Satya Gray also included going on a hard pile. Shopkeepers would downshutters. Shop assistants and workers would go home, refusing to work. At the other extreme Satya Gray could mean, and it did mean going on a fast, including a fast unto death. It also includes rallies and mass meetings, sit-ins and long marches, candlelight vigils, and the offering of flowers to opponents. All this comes within the notion of Satya Gray. And I'm sure one could talk about many, many more examples. Gandhi's basic weapon for the empowerment of the people, therefore, of the masses was the participation of the people in their millions in political action. He believed that if the masses were fully active, they could secure any goal they desired. So the basic task was politicization of the people. And in that, for him, non-violence was extremely important, not only as a moral value, but because it enabled and necessitated the participation of the people. I'm using both words. It enabled, non-violent made it possible for the ordinary person to participate in the movement. But I'm also saying something else. I'm saying it necessitated. A non-violent movement could not be successful unless it had mass support. This was the Gandhian dialectic, that a non-violent movement, I'm repeating, could only be successful if it had mass participation. And mass participation could only be secured if the movement was non-violent. Thus, the choice of non-violence, I would like to emphasize, had nothing to do with any class bias in favor of the property classes, because this is sometimes an allegation that is made against Gandhiji. But in fact, the choice of non-violence was necessary in a struggle that was carried out on the terrain of moral force, in which a disarmed people were not at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the government. To quote Gandhiji, I'm quoting, an able general always gives battle at his own time on the ground of his choice. Non-violence ensured that the ground, the terrain was a moral one. Non-violence was a way of becoming equal in political resources to an armed state. One of the things about struggle, and I'm sure you at MKSS are aware of this, when you are planning how to fight against a particular adversary, one of the ways of ensuring or trying to bring about success is to make the adversary fight on the terrain on which you are stronger and not get drawn into the terrain in which your adversary is stronger. The colonial state was very strong when it came to the terrain of force. They had all the coercive apparatus that was required. They had the army which maintained the British Empire across the world. They had police. They had every form of force that could be available. But what they lacked was the moral ground. That is where they were weak. So the beauty of the Gandhian technique was to force the government to contend with the national movement on the terrain of moral force and not get drawn into fighting on the terrain in which the government was strong or the state was strong. Also, if the movement was to be a mass movement which involved the millions, including the poor and not a guerrilla movement or a movement led by a revolutionary army as in China, then non-violence was the suitable form of struggle. Gandhiji, in his own words, explained this to a group of people, a large group of people who came to the Savarbati ashram on the 10th of March, one day before he was going to start the Dandi March in 1930. I will quote a small passage from what he said. And he explained to them how non-violence enabled the widest participation of the masses and how it put the government in an unenviable quandary, how it confused the government. I quote, though the battle is to begin in a couple of days, how is it that you can come here so fearlessly? I do not think that any of you would be here if you had to face rifle shots or bombs. But you have no fear of rifle shots or bombs. Why? Supposing I had announced that I was going to launch a violent campaign, not necessarily with men armed with rifles, but even with stakes or stones, do you think the government would have left me free till now? Can you show me an example in history, be it in England or America or Russia, where the state has tolerated violent defiance of authority for a single day, but here you know that the government is puzzled and perplexed. The phrase which Gandhiji uses here that the government is puzzled and perplexed, he's actually quoting what Lord Redding, who was the viceroy during the period of the non-cooperation movement, had said in December of 1921, when the movement was quite, when the non-cooperation movement was very strong, he made a public statement where he said that the government that we are puzzled and perplexed. In fact, from August 1920 till December 1921, the non-cooperation movement was allowed to function without any obstruction by the government. Virtually no obstruction. They had no large-scale arrests, no arrests of leaders because they really didn't know what to do with a nonviolent movement, which was breaking the law. They just didn't know how to deal with it. Further explaining the power of nonviolent civil disobedience, he said, supposing 10 persons in each of the 700,000 villages in India came forward to manufacture salt and to disobey the Salt Act. What do you think this government can do? Even the worst autocrat that you can imagine would not dare to blow regiments of peaceful civil resistors out of a cannon's mouth. Therefore, if only you will bestow yourself just a little, I assure you that we should be able to tire this government out in a very short time. Gandhiji demonstrated in movement after movement how nonviolence at their work by placing the government in a no-win situation. It immobilized the government by locking it in an irresolvable dilemma. If it did not suppress a movement that brazenly defied its laws, its administrative authority would be seen to be undermined and its control would be shown to be weak. At the same time, if it suppressed it, it would be seen as a brutal anti-people government as an administration that used violence on nonviolent agitators. In either case, it was the government that would suffer a blow to its prestige and the movement which would gain by witnessing a swelling of its ranks. A British civil servant by the name of C. F. V. Williams, who was based in Madras, expressed this dilemma in early 1930 in the following Pithi's sentence, and I quote him, if we do too much, Congress will cry, repression. If we do too little, Congress will cry, victory. So the crucial words that I quoted earlier are that the government was puzzled and perplexed and as Gandhiji said to the people, we should be able to tire this government out. So the whole strategy was to leave the government to perplexed, confused and tired so that it didn't know what to do. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his famous presidential address to the Lahore Congress in 1929, where the Congress had declared complete independence to be its goal, expressed the connection between nonviolence and mass participation in the following words, I quote again. Any great movement for liberation today must necessarily be a mass movement and mass movements must essentially be peaceful except in times of organized revolt. And if the principle movement is a peaceful one, contemporaneous attempts at sporadic violence can only distract attention and weaken it. Satya Gray, I would also like to emphasize was based on intense preparation and mobilization and extensive mass contact programs. Again, I'm sure people like you who are involved in actually mass contact programs and in movements which actually involved the mass of the people will understand this very easily. You do not call for a demonstration in Jaipur or in Delhi without first preparing the people without putting in a lot of effort at the grass root level in village after village explaining the issues to the people, motivating the people, mobilizing them, training them, only then does a movement come out into the public and express its trend. So Satya Gray was based on intense preparation and mobilization and extensive mass contact programs. Gandhiji himself toured the length and breadth of the country incessantly in his third class railway carriage as well as my mula cart, my foot, my boat, my car, whatever could be the means of mode of transport that was available to him. Others followed in his footsteps. In the Gandhian method, this is another aspect that I wish to talk about. Empowerment was also achieved through inculcating fearlessness in the people. This is very, very important. If you are afraid, if you are cowed down, if you are scared of authority, you cannot ever fight any struggle. It can be a struggle inside your family. It can be a struggle in your workplace. It can be a struggle in your village. It can be a struggle at your college or wherever. The first thing that you need is courage to be able to get up and speak and after that to act. So empowerment was achieved through inculcating first and foremost fearlessness in the people. I'll go to a short passage from Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a very perceptive observer and long-time comrade of the Mahatma. In the Discovery of India, the famous book on Indian history written by Jawaharlal Nehru, 1946, this is how he describes Gandhiji's message of fearlessness. I quote, the essence of Gandhiji's teaching was fearlessness, not merely bodily courage, but the absence of fear from the mind. And then he says, but the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear, pervasive or pressing, strangling fear, fear of the army, fear of the police, the widespread secret service, fear of the official class, fear of laws meant to suppress and of prison, fear of the landlords agents, fear of the money lender, fear of unemployment and starvation, which were always on the threshold. It was against this all pervading fear that Gandhiji's quiet and determined voice was raised. Be not afraid. Unquote. Gandhiji himself pointed out how non-violent struggle was the choice of the brave and not of the weak. In Hind Swaraj, he wrote, I quote, what do you think? Where in is courage required in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces? Who is the true warrior? He who keeps death always as a bosom friend or he who controls the death of others? Believe me that a man devoid of courage can never be a passive resistor. It was this courage of militant non-violence, of Satyagraha, that made heroes out of ordinary men and women, enabling them to defy a mighty empire on which the sun never set. The steely resolve of the Akali jathas at Gurukabad, accepting without retaliation the blows of steel-tipped police latties. The unflinching rhythm of band after band of Satyagrahis determined to raid the salt pans at Dharasana, despite being beaten to pulp when the temperature was 112 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The daily travails of the Bardoli peasants who lived for months in their fields under the open sky to honor their vow of no tax to the government are only some examples of this non-violent heroism which Gandhiji inspired. His emphasis on non-violence was also linked to his deep conviction that you could not separate the means from the end. And I want you to pay special attention to this. In fact, he believed that the means were bound to shape the end. You could not hope to build a humane, caring, inclusive and free society on the Sheikhi foundation of violence. The gun that is aimed at the enemy during the revolution can easily be turned to cow down a comrade with whom you now disagree after you've achieved your revolution. If walls were not to come up between peoples, the methods chosen for resolving differences and conflict must be such that they ensure justice without breaking down communication. I cannot overemphasize this. And Gandhiji was very well aware that in a country like India, in a society like ours where the fault lines of religion, of caste, of gender, of tribe versus non-tribe are always present just below the surface ready to come up. If we do not observe the discipline of non-violence, if violence becomes the means through which these fault lines express their contradictions, then we will never be able to, after we have resolved those contradictions, go back and then function together as a people. That is why non-violence was also very important. And I think when I look around India today, I can see how important that is. If only we had insisted on and if only now we pick up the ideas and insist that only non-violent means can be used for resolution of differences within Indian society, no matter how powerful those differences, I think we are doomed. The Lakshman Rekha of non-violence, therefore is very necessary because it is this which makes it possible to not break down communication, to still heal after we have expressed and resolved our conflicts. Certainly the answer did not lie in more violence in better weapons of mass destruction. To recall, Gandhiji's answer to the use of the atom bomb by the US against Japan in 1945, the moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bombs even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence. Hatred can be overcome only by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred. Another important form of Satyagraha that Gandhiji evolved was that of going on a fast. He used it with great effect against the British in 1943 when he went on a 21-day fast while in jail and showed that non-violent protest was possible even within the confines of prison. The news of his fast spread like wildfire across India and the world and hundreds and thousands of people joined in public protests at a time when draconian laws had suppressed all civil liberties in the name of the Second World War. The fast succeeded in turning public opinion against the British government and even the president of the United States, Roosevelt, put pressure on the British prime minister, Churchill to relent. It's another matter that Gandhiji as usual had the last laugh by surviving the 21-day ordeal and denying the British the opportunity of executing the elaborate plans which they had made for his funeral. The weapon of the fast was, however, more commonly used by him to exert moral pressure on his own people as in 1932 at Pune on the issue of separate electorates for the scheduled castes or in Rajkot against the princely state in 1938 or in Calcutta and Delhi in 1947 and 1948 to quell the communal violence. The weapon of the fast was based on the essential principle of Satyagraha, which is to exert moral pressure on your opponent by suffering. Fasting is the extreme form of self-suffering. It is the crucifixion of the flesh voluntarily chosen. As Gandhiji said, quote, nonviolent pressure exerted through self-suffering by fasting touches and strengthens the moral fiber of those against whom it is directed. Gandhiji also believed that Satyagraha was the means to the empowerment of the poor dumb millions to use his phrase. And this objective was expressed by him through the concepts of Sarvodaya, Antodaya and Dharidranarayana. Sarvodaya or the awakening or empowerment of all was to be achieved by making sure that it was accompanied by Antodaya or the empowerment of the last man or the poorest human being. Gandhiji also bestowed dignity on the poor by the use of the concept of Dharidranarayana or the notion that God resides in the poor. And therefore, if you want to serve God, you must serve the poor. If the people in their millions, as we have said, were inspired by the Mahatma, he in turn drew his strength from them. How else can we comprehend the blazing courage which he demonstrated in the twilight of his life? There are few images more moving than that of this frail 77-year-old man who could have had all that anyone could want for the asking, walking barefoot through the blood-stained villages of Noakali, where his people had descended to the lowest depths, staying only for one night in one village, sleeping in the huts of the poor, searching for an answer, crucifying his flesh in yet another experiment with truth. We can never forget that he was martyred to the cause of secularism. The Hindu communal group led by no other than Savarkar which had planned the conspiracy of his assassination and the assassin who gunned him down believed that he was the chief obstacle to the setting up of a Hindu rastra after partition. And they were right. From October 1946, when communal violence began to spread, Gandhiji devoted all his energies to the taming of the communal monster. I have already talked about Noakali, but beyond Noakali where he spent four months, he went to Bihar, he went to Calcutta, he went to Delhi. He was on call everywhere as a one-man boundary force, which is the name that Mount Batten gave him because what whole armies could not do, Gandhiji could do. His commitment to secularism was absolute. The call for quit India in 1942 was accompanied by the unequivocal declaration. I quote, free India will be no Hindu Raj. It will be Indian Raj based not on the majority of any religious sect or community, but on the representatives of the whole people without distinction of religion. You could not get clearer than that. In November 1947, after independence, when the clamor for a Hindu rastra became very loud, he said, I quote again, the state was bound to be wholly secular. The state of our conception must be a secular democratic state. In August 1947, he had already made it clear and I quote him again, if a minority in India, minority on the score of its religious profession was made to feel small on that account, he could only say that this India was not the India of his dreams. I quote, his life and martyrdom, that is why, continue to inspire and empower all those who are striving towards the India of his dreams. His martyrdom at the hands of the Hindu communalist was the pinnacle of self-sacrifice and had a cathartic effect on the whole nation, ravaged by sectarian strife, which came to an abrupt halt. Many of those who had indulged in communal violence felt guilt and remorse and held themselves responsible for the tragedy. In his death, he gave a new lease of life to the newborn nation, which remained free of communal strife for almost a decade after his death, that which he could not achieve in life he achieved in death. I will conclude with a quote from a great intellectual who grasped the essence of the Mahatma in the following moving words. I quote, a leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a politician who's 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, that by now you must have recognized with the words of Albert Einstein. Thank you.