Satyagraha in Today’s India

COMMUNICATION

I have seen Shri Alok Bajpai’s article on ‘Duragraha’ (“Duragraha in the Name of Satyagraha: A Gandhian Perspective” in the Mainstream issue of July 30, 2011) in which he has concluded that the peaceful and non-violent Satyagraha by Gandhiji was conceived as a strategy against the British rule and that ‘once people were free and had a parliamentary government, the legislature can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and non-violence’. This was Gandhiji’s dream.

Today we know our legislators. For most of them, politics is a business and they are there to make money, a good profit on the investment they have made. How can the people entrust them, corrupt as they are, with the task of fighting corruption? Our democracy has become a government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves and our governments are insensitive to the woes and miseries of the people. The Gandhian method of Satyagraha has to be applied by the people as the situation demands.

New Delhi Syed Shahabuddin