LIVING IN TRUTH: The Gandhian Paradigm

Mahatma Gandhi’s relevance to India and the world is much more than ever before. Driving this urgent need for bringing back Gandhi in our lives are two main factors: firstly contemporary politics lacks moral leaders and secondly democracies around the world have abandoned the empowerment of the weakest in favour of the economic and political supremacy and hegemony of the strongest. Gandhi’s view of democracy was exactly the opposite. He said ‘The weakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest. That can never happen except through non-violence.’ The Gandhian paradigm is based on truthfulness and non-violence and establishing an essential relationship between social awareness and common humanity. For him politics as the art of organizing the society was a path to self-realization and autonomy of the individual and the community. Gandhi usually spoke of truth in terms of self-experience rather than universal cognition. He said ‘Truth resides in every human heart and one has to search for it there and to be guided by truth as one sees it.’ Gandhi considered the search for truth as an integral part of his non-violence and as a vital component of the relationship of the private to the public. Living in Truth is therefore an effort to go beyond (para) of our ‘everydayness’ to show (deiknynai) the relationship between the ideal and the real. It is a manner of raising the ethical aspiration of citizens and the non-violent essence of the government.