Tags:
Journalism of Courage
What relevance does Hindu scripture have today?” sneered a Lefty (who shows no sign of joining the productive classes, but tends his beard in a university subsidised by taxpayers’ money). I was too ennuyee then to point out that American philosopher Thoreau was heavily influenced by the great universalist substance of the Upanishads. Bapu was inspired by Thoreau and launched satyagraha. Martin Luther King Jr was influenced by Bapu and launched the civil rights movement in the US. In fact didn’t Bapu’s notions redraw the world map?
But a recent run-in with former American Senator Harris Wofford added more info to this argument. Wofford was Martin Luther King Jr’s lawyer and the founder of the American Peace Corps. In his late 70s, he’s touring the world now with his 14-year-old grandson Gabe, because when he was a little boy, his mother, a single parent, gamely took him on a world tour. Wofford remembers seeing Mussolini’s soldiers marching in Rome and Gandhi driving in an open car to address a huge rally at Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai. He heard Winston Churchill’s famous broadcast on refusing to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.
Wofford said that in the early ’50s, he’d taken Dr Ram Manohar Lohia around American colleges in the South and Dr Lohia had asked why Bapu’s ideas were not in the syllabi. A year later they were, and one of those who attended a workshop on Gandhian civil disobedience in Montgomery, Alabama, was a Black American called Rosa Parks. On December 1, 1955, she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. She was arrested by the rules of segregationist law. The resulting uproar changed the apartheid history of the United States and eventually, South Africa’s. Funny to think how it all links up with the Upanishads. In particular, I think of Sage Bhrigu’s words in the Taittiryopanishad 4:1 — Manaso hy khalv imani bhutani jayante/manasa jatani jivanti/ manah prayanty abhisamvishantih. Life comes from the mind, is sustained by the mind, returns to the Mind.
Senator Wofford was born an Episcopalian but turned Catholic “because it has a broader world base”, he says. An admirer of General Powell, he accused me of sounding like Rumsfeld because I said even Punjabis seem fed up now of Pakistan’s perfidies. But goodwill has simply run out, hasn’t it, like how Lord Krishna gave Shishupala a hundred chances, no more, to misbehave? Wofford compared India-Pakistan to Athens-Sparta and referred me to Greek classics — isn’t that sweet, an American telling an Indian about Yunan? It’s not quite the Peloponnesian Wars, Senator. For those who have sent terrorists into India for over twenty years now, perhaps we prefer what Cato thundered in the Roman senate: Delenda est Carthago. Carthage must be destroyed.
