Gandhi

Running Head : Gandhi

Gandhi

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Mahatma Gandhi was one of the finest leaders any country has ever had He was the person of Great Spirit and knowledge with extra ordinary leadership skills

MARTIN LUTHER KING , JR , was deeply fascinated ' by the life and leadership skills of Mahatma Gandhi , reading about them first in his senior year at theological seminary . King found the power of Gandhi 's passion profoundly significant ' and recalled : As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi . I came to see . that the

Christian doctrine of love , operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom '1

As pastor of the Montgomery (Alabama ) Dexter Avenue Baptist Church , King helped to liberate the United States from the poison of racial discrimination and nonviolently transformed America 's civil rights movement , leading to his own assassination in 1968 . King never met Gandhi , but he was so inspired by his life and work that he visited India in 1959 , eager to meet Gandhi 's disciples . To other countries I may go as a tourist ' the thirty-year-old King told Indian friends but to India I come as a pilgrim . This is because India means to me Mahatma Gandhi , a truly great man of the age '2

British rule in India was Gandhi 's inevitable starting point and a constant framework of reference . He wondered why the British had come to India in the first instance , had been capable to join their rule and render it adequate to their subjects with apparent ease , what it had done to them and how they must respond to it . These and linked questions worried him even as a young boy and continued to exercise his mind throughout his years in England and especially in South Africa . His reflections led him to conclude that the answers to them were to be found in the character of modem civilization

The British had come to India as of the inner compulsions of modern civilization they had been capable to consolidate their rule as of their ability to legitimize it in the ideological language of civilization their rule was not simply political but also moral and cultural in nature and India had to react to it not only at the political but mainly at the moral and cultural levels .3

For Gandhi the British came to India not by accident , nor in the exploratory spirit of a political buccaneer , but in search of new markets for their goods 'Many problems can be resolved by remembering that money is their God ' They desired to trade because their economic life was geared to unlimited production and could not endure without turning the whole world into a vast market 'Europeans pounce upon new territories like crows upon a piece of meat . I am prone to think that this is due to their mass-production factories '4

As to why their economic life was so geared , he...