The Congress Slips In Indian Politics
The Congress Slips In Indian Politics
India is celebrating this year the 100th anniversary of its modern “saint,” Mahatma Gandhi. Saints, as George Orwell once pointed out, are difficult people. We like to believe that the Mahatma would have looked with disdain upon the idolatrous ceremonies now taking place throughout India. If Gandhi’s life ended in defeat (the tragic partition of India), the struggle for possession of his “image” in the country he created is a still more depressing spectacle. One is reminded of Kautsky’s chapter “The Struggle for the Image of Jesus” (in his Foundations of Christianity), where he writes about the period after the death of the Messiah:
… a crown of legends began to form about this character, into which pious spirits would weave whatever they wished their model to have spoken or done. But as Jesus thus came to be regarded more and more as a model for the entire sect, the more did each of the numerous contending groups, of which the sect had consisted from the start, attempt to assign to this personality precisely those ideas to which each group was most attached, in order then to be able to invoke this person as an authority. Thus the image of Jesus … b...
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