Tulsi Prajna 1995 04

SR No.: 524583
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Parmeshwar Solanki
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
Publication Year: 1995
Total Pages: 158
Language: Hindi
Classification: Magazine, India_Tulsi Prajna, & India
File Size: 7 MB

Page 124

Vol. XXI, No. 1
nor enforceable. India was an harmonious blend of different cultures, a mosaic and a beautiful picture of unity in diversity. “My experience of India tells me that Hindus and Muslims know how to live in peace among themselves. I refuse to believe that they have said goodbye to their sense so as to make it impossible to live in peace with each other.'India is a big nation composed of different cultures which are tending to blend with one another, each complementing the rest. If I must await the completed in my day. I should love to die in the faith that it must come in the fullness of time. I should be happy to think I have done nothing to hamper the process. Subject to this condition. I would do anything to bring about harmony."
Imposition of any one culture would be against the spirit of Ahimsa, against the plurality and multipolarity of Indian traditions and its heritage.3
Facing the formidable challenge of the British Imperial power, Gandhi could visualise that Hindu-Muslim unity was a precondition for waging the struggle for independence. Gandhi placed his spirituality at stake, played with the serpent of politics and thereby not only transformed the basic moorings of individualistic orientation of Hinduism and grappled valiantly for the regeneration and freedom of India. Gandhi's religion was not one of dogmas, rituals, superstitions and bigotry. His religion was synonymous with ethics. Gandhi rightly maintained that his religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity etc. It does not supersede them, It harmonises them _"I believe in the Bible as I believe in the Gita--I regard all the great faiths of the world as equally true with my own. It hurts me to see any one of these caricatured as they are today by their own followers." With Gandhi religion meant "belief in the ordered moral government of the universe.”
Dealing with the "coil of the snake” (politics), he insisted on the inseparability of religion and politics, "I have teen experimenting' he said. "with myself and friends by introducing religion into poli. tics and now believe they cannot be divorced. Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not Hinduism.. ... It is the struggle for truth-for self-expression. I call it the truth-force-the permanent element in human nature constantly struggling to find itself, to know its Maker", Commenting upon Gandhi's views on religion and politics, Arnold Toynbee observes, "Gandhi's objective was to raise the spiritual level of life in a spirtual slum--the slough of politics....... This gives the measure both of Gandhi's own spiritual stature and of the magnitude of his service to mankind at a turning point in human history." Thus inseparability of religion and politics means, subordi.