Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said in an interview that nobody knew Mahatma Gandhi— the Father of the Nation — in post-colonial India until British director Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning 1982 magnum opus ‘Gandhi’ was released.
He took a dig at the previous Congress-led governments for “not promoting” Gandhi the way he deserved. “Mahatma Gandhi was a great soul. Wasn’t it our responsibility to get him that level of global recognition during the last 75 years? Nobody knew, please excuse me on this”, he added.
Sure, the movie was popular, but many have called out the Prime Minister for suggesting that Gandhi was a relatively unknown entity till then. But, facts are different. Mahatma Gandhi, fondly called as Bapu ji and known as the ‘Father of the Nation’, was bestowed the title ‘Saint Gandhi’ in 1930 by TIME magazine. That year, the Magazine declared him as ‘Person of the year’.
Nelson Mandela, the first democratically elected President of South Africa, in 1999, had written that he was inspired by Gandhi’s movement in India to end racial apartheid in the country. In the essay titled “The Sacred Warrior,”
However, PM Modi tries to convince us that the first time, when the Gandhi film was made (1982), the world got curious about who he might be. “We didn’t do the needful…If the world knew Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi was no less than them and you have to accept that. I am saying this after travelling the world that Gandhi and through him, India should have been recognized…,” Modi went on saying.
Not just Mandela, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh and Leo Tolstoy were admirers of Gandhi. One of the last letters that Tolstoy wrote was to Gandhi and it was a part of his obituary. The Dandi march led by Gandhi had made front page news in papers like the New York Times.
Reacting to the PM’s comments, Congress shared pictures of Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to London, Switzerland and Paris in the 1930s, where he could be seen with huge crowds.
“Modi is back with a new deflection. He claims that the world heard about Mahatma Gandhi only after a movie was made about him in 1982. He was the most popular leader in the world during his time. India is still known by Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi was known for his principles of Truth and Ahimsa. Try to speak the truth at least when you speak about Gandhi,” they added.