Published by Marsilio, in 2008

La Repubblica – November 8, 2008

On the night of August 15, 1947, while the Indians celebrated in the streets of Delhi ‘s independence and heard the word of freedom of their prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the author’ of that victory, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was lying on a cot and fasted .  The hunger strike, which was sometimes used as an instrument of its policy of non-violence would stop the bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims.  The day of triumph was also the fact of division, so his defeat.  Gandhi had not only fought to liberate ‘India from colonial rule, wanted a’ India where caste and religions could live with having the right to equal recognition.  An ‘India where the God of Hindus and Muslims would have been a Ram-Rahim.  But in the name of Ram and Rahim in behalf of Indians massacred.  Gandhi had won the ‘independence with a’ weapon that had never been used before, nonviolent resistance.  He won against the superpower then contrasts the rights of ‘man.

This assured him a place in history.  But it was also a political theorist, an original thinker, although this role has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, perhaps for the fact that he has left a ‘systematic exposition of his thoughts, scattered across a myriad of speeches, letters, comments.  A thinker – as Ramin Jahanbegloo writes in the book Reading Gandhi in Teheran (Marsilio, pp. 111, euro 10, the book will be presented in Rome at 17.30 on Monday at the Foreign Press, ed) – can teach us a lot about issues critical current as religion, the state violence.  Gandhi wants the religion as an expression of the spiritual perfection, enters all fields of life and politics, but this does not waive ‘secular ethics of the modern state.  The “transformation of religious politics” will be through the ‘interaction of two basic elements of his concept of religion – the Truth and Non violence.  For the Mahatma, is a religion, even if the confessions are many: it represents “the common truth” of all religions, even more: the common truth accessible to all human beings.  Gandhi proclaims the truth, there is proposed the constant, endless search.  The truth is that he understood as a communication process that allows statements completed.  and can only be achieved through non-violent means.  So the discussion of Gandhian non-violence to extend beyond the ethical dimension to the political, says Jahanbegloo: non-violence and democracy are inextricably linked.  In the presence of violence, democracy is untenable.  It weakens those who practice violence even more than the sufferer.  The distinction between Weberian ethics of responsibility and ethics ‘s intention is superseded by the’ Ethics for the ‘other’, and thus for all.  The ‘self-determination (swaraj), one of three key words’ order in Gandhian struggle for’ independence – along with satyagraha, truth force, and Sarvodaya, elevation Universal – did not mean only political and economic autonomy.  It was a moral quality of the spiritual self that everyone had to achieve, and which would have resulted in the ‘elimination of social evils like corruption and exploitation.  Gandhi saw the ideal society as a decentralized company, organized in a way that the village was the heart of social relations.

“Only in the simplicity of the village we live the truth and nonviolence,” he wrote to Nehru.  But the prime minister, Social Democrat and modernist, said that “a village is a backward place culturally and intellectually, and that more people are behind, the more prone to non-violence and truth.”  Violence Ramin Jahanbegloo has a ‘personal experience.  Iranian philosopher, taught at the ‘University of Tehran before being imprisoned for five months at the infamous Evin prison in 2006 with the’ absurd accusation of spying.  And ‘possible’ a Muslim Gandhi, “Gandhi as it is capable of maintaining deep roots in their culture and religion while drawing freely to other forms of spirituality and culture, he asks Jahanbeglo.  Leads to examples such as Ghaffar Khan, a friend and follower of Gandhi, a Muslim “who spiritualized politics instead of politicizing religion” and intended to raise awareness of non-violent means, ‘beyond’ s intolerance of fanatics. ”  Thus demonstrating that there is a universalism not violent, that dialogue is possible, but that it should be reading “soft” of scripture, just as it was to Ghaffar Khan, as opposed to the radicals to bin Laden. – VANNA Vannuccini