Thursday, December 10, 2009

Who is the Real Gandhi?


When thinking about world peace and nonviolence, the name Mahatma Gandhi comes to mind. Students have been taught that Gandhi used his peaceful hunger strikes to defy British Raj, or British Reign, in India around the time period of 1859 to 1947. Although, when Mr. G. B. Singh finished twenty years of research on the unedited information on the life of Gandhi, the truth was revealed about how Gandhi really became widely known as a promoter of peace. It all began when white Christian clergy, in an attempt to convert the great influence of India, spread misinformation that convinced the West that Gandhi was "The Greatest Man Since Jesus Christ". These clergy are the reason that people still today believe Mahatma Gandhi to be a peaceful person. The clergy made an attempt to convert the so called apostle at the height of his popularity in order to introduce Christianity to the many Hindu followers of Gandhi. Along with this propaganda is the fact that when working as a lawyer for the natives of South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, who closely followed the Hindu caste system, believed Africans to be of a lower status than the Untouchables, the lowest level of the system. In an instance where Gandhi was put into jail with the Africans, he revealed his true racist self by refusing to live with the very people he was fighting for in courts. In the end, the biggest lie that Gandhi won Indian freedom without violence. It was in fact that, because of the harshness of World War II on Britain, all of the links to their colonial powers had to be severed. After being told the other half of the story of Mohandas Gandhi, one must be curious to know more about the man behind the mask of divinity.




Kainaat K. Bajwa

Period 7‏

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