REMEMBERING INDIRA GANDHI
Mrs. Indira Gandhi, a former Prime Minister of India, was
born on 119th November 1917 at Allahabad now renamed as
Prayagraj. Her full name was Indira
Priyadarshini Nehru. She was married to
Feroze Gandhi in 1942. A great politician, stateswoman and a central figure of
the Indian National Congress, she was assassinated in New Delhi on 31st
October 1984 when she was a little older than 66
years. Her resting place in Delhi is known as Shakti Sthal. India celebrates her
birthday as National Integration Day. According to her political party, the
Indian Nation Congress, Mrs. Gandhi is a symbol of indomitable spirit of India’s
unity, harmony and sovereignty. Today
i.e.14th November 2019 is her 102nd birthday.
In this short memoriam, we would have
a cursory look at her peculiarly informal education and also read a few
important one-liners randomly picked up from her innumerable speeches.
Mrs. Indira Gandhi‘s first and most
important tutor was her own father Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru. He was a leading freedom fighter and was frequently
put into prison by the British Government for long periods. As a child, Mrs. Gandhi had no settled life. Her mother Mrs. Kamala Nehru (born in Delhi on
1st August 1899) was also a freedom fighter. She passed away on 28th February
1936 at Lausanne in Switzerland as a patient of tuberculosis which was then. This
pitiable situation of being motherless and having a father who was virtually a prison
bird, her education could not have a regular start in any educational
institution. It was in such circumstances
that her father Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru started educating her through letters written
from the premises of the jail where he was serving his term.
The above-mentioned education through letters lasted
over two years. Subsequently, the whole lot was published in the form of a book
entitled “Glimpses of World History.”
As soon as the tutorial task was over, Pt. Nehru wrote what
he called the Last Letter to Indira in
August 1933. Here is a short extract from that letter:
“Your must not take what I have
written in these letters as the final authority on any subject. A politician
wants to have a say on every subject, and he always pretends to know much more
than he actually does. He has to be watched carefully! These letters of mine
are but superficial sketches joined together by a thin thread. I have rambled on, skipping centuries and
many important happenings, and then pitching my tent for quite a long time on
some event which interested me. As you will
notice, my likes and dislikes are pretty obvious, and so also sometimes are my
moods in gaol. I do not want you to take all this for granted; there may indeed
be many errors in my accounts .A prison, with no libraries or reference books
at hand, are not the most suitable place to write on historical subjects. I
have had to rely very largely on the many note-books which I have accumulated
since I began my visits to gaol twelve years ago. Many books have also come to
me here; they have come and gone, for I could not collect a library here.”
Now, a few one-liners:
1. Communalism, whether it is Hindu or
Muslim or Sikh or by any other community, is deplorable.
2. The older generation will always
think that the younger people are wrong.
3. Life has meaning only through
dedication to great causes.
4. The functioning of democracy should be
judged not merely by the size of the electorate, or the percentage of people exercising
their franchise, but by the faith which they have in representative
institutions.
5. To have discipline among children, it
is necessary to have discipline among the whole population.
6. The quality of education must be
reflected in the quality of life, in its value and grace, in the culture of the
social and individual mind and not the least in our intellectual and
technological competence to face and master the problems before us.
7. Engineers are not only builders in steel and
concrete but also builders of the nation.
8. It is obvious that farmers will pay
heed to the call for national self-sufficiency only to the ex tent that the
programme makes a difference to their lives.
9. The policies of a country are
motivated by its national interests, which are conditioned by Its heritage,
traditions and the requirements of the people.
10.
Dead or dying ideas not only obstruct change
but can considerably harm individuals as well as nations.
11.
We
must strengthen and develop all our national languages and give due attention
to the task of producing inexpensive books and translations in millions, so
that they become vehicles of knowledge and culture, and keep abreast of the
progress of science and technology.
12.
It
is necessary to inculcate a regard for every life, which implies respecting
everything which maintains health and life, respecting the vital elements of
air, water and earth.
13.
Science
is in itself a spirit of enquiry as well as a tool for modernising India a and
Indian thought and liberating men from prejudice and superstition.l
14.
On
the issue of what we call secularism, we can never be aligned with any party
which believes in one religion or one race or one language.
15.
Youth
is really an attitude of mind; youth is eagerness, the desire to know, to
discover the feeling that all of life is not behind us but ahead of us; that
the great adventure is not something that has happened, but is going to happen.
19TH NOVEMBER 2019
------G. R. KANWAL
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