LIVING IN TRUTH (HB)

 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.