.: The Red Brick – Dubai College's Student Newspaper :.

At midnight on the 15th August 1947, a nation made its “tryst with destiny.” The true dimensions of India had always been in her masses, and on that day, a vibrant, seething mass descended on Delhi drowning the British under a horde of brown humanity. Yet, in Calcutta, a man lay despondent on a straw pallet besides his spectacles and his Gita.

While India awakened to life and freedom; the pain of partition, a divisive future between Hindu and Muslim, rendered Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi sound asleep. Gandhi was far more than a freedom fighter or a “cunning Hindu politician” as labelled by the acerbic and blinkered Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It is not in connection to India’s destiny alone that his life has significance- since we anyway have callously abandoned most of his philosophies. He was essentially a moral force whose appeal was to the conscience of man and therefore universal. He was no child prodigy like a Vivekananda or Tagore, just an ordinary child like the rest of us with a shyness that handicapped him for years. Yet, there was something latent in his spirit that combined with an unshakeable faith in God, an iron will and a moral sensibility of right and wrong borne from the study of Hindu, Muslim and Christian scripture that made him what he was- a “Mahatma” ie: “Great Soul.” His genius in my opinion was his infinite capacity to strive to fulfill an inner moral urge, out of which sprang his doctrines of “Satyagraha” and “Sarvodaya” his gifts to an India that rendered Nehru’s words of “His light will illumine this country for many years to come” hollow, as 60 years hence, we have eschewed all of Gandhi’s principles.

At the root of “Satyagraha” is self-upliftment. It is about ensuring the good of the individual first and foremost as the good of the individual will lead to the good of all. The individual must seek to control his senses and desires, overcome his ego, thus enabling him to sacrifice himself for the good of his family, the community, and the nation. Gandhi believed that the development of India’s villages and a simple lifestyle was our salvation, yet instead of curing the ills of the perversions of our society we strove to imitate the West and yearned for great industrial complexes where regimented workers and urban youth were forced to sell their values for the sake of progress and a better material standard of life. The interests of the villages are now firmly subordinated to those of the towns and cities and the liberalization of the economy in 1992, brought economic growth to these cities at the cost of great social and moral degradation. Not only have we succumbed to the trappings of a hedonistic, promiscuous, so-called civilized but actually degenerate society, we’ve proved susceptible to the lures of technology and industrial progress. India has fallen into a perhaps irreversible social and moral decay. This is well illustrated by the failure of Anna Hazare’s movement against corruption. Anna’s movement failed to stay the distance and the reason is simple: public apathy. We could stir ourselves to celebrate a song like Kolaveri di but were unable to churn up anywhere near enough kolaveri (rage) to combat the scar that has eroded the nation for sixty years, ever since the Congress rejected Gandhi’s notions of becoming a socialist People’s Service League and abandoned spiritualized politics. The Indian people failed to rise to Anna’s occasion, seeking salvation either in bad-mouthing Hazare, or opting cynically to cast corruption as a long term resident in the nation. Hazare lost because a billion possible soldiers prematurely decided this was not their fight; they had a life to lead and if a bit of payment was under the table, acha theek hai (that is okay) as we say.

Gandhi’s premonitions with regards to Partition have also borne fruit. Since 1947, India and Pakistan have faced each other on the battlefield 3 times. What is far worse is this sense of enmity and discord between Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Pakistani that has burrowed into our minds. Rather than glory in our shared, almost identical culture, a disturbing antagonism pervades in the respective countries hinterlands. Just as Gandhi feared in 1947, the bloodbath of Partition has left wounds that fail to heal, leaving us estranged as a people. While many in India initially agreed with Gandhi’s claim that an intrinsic link exists between the Indian and Pakistani and only grudgingly agreed to partition, the Muslim terrorism of recent times has led to a disturbing undercurrent from radical Hindu parties that propose doctrines that seek to unite the subcontinent from the Indus to the Brahmaputra under Hindu rule. This notion is for now merely political propaganda that is subdued by the Congress to gain the Muslim vote but ultimately it is up to us, the masses, to contravene this nonsense and restore warmth for each other. Gandhi’s pyre at Rajghat on the banks of the Yamuna elucidates his Platonic dream of Khudai Raj- “making India the Kingdom of God on Earth.” Perhaps idealistic but the real travesty is that not that India and its people have failed, it is that they haven’t even put one foot on the path to Khudai Raj, instead blindly pursued the West’s model of power and success, driven by the need for an intrinsically materialistic society. Forgive us Gandhiji.

Richard Nixon’s most prominent childhood memory was of him falling and then running. He was riding in a horse drawn buggy with his mother and when the horse turned a corner too fast, Nixon fell out and the buggy wheel ran over his head, inflicting a deep cut. Despite this, he somehow managed to get up and run after the buggy while his mother tried to make the horse stop. This incident aptly sums up his whole life as Nixon always seemed to be running and falling and running again. He was a man of many masks and few, if any, can say they saw the real Nixon. To many, he was a shadowy conspirator; someone who was coarse, vindictive and paranoid, harbouring hatred within and lacking any sense of emotion or sentimentality. To some, he was an intellectual genius, a foreign policy statesmen and one of the great liberal Presidents. To twenty-first century historians and political junkies, he will forever remain an enigma-a character from a Greek tragedy perhaps; doomed to self-destruction due to fatal character flaws. 

He grew up on the poorest lemon ranch in California and his dad, a social outcast, always struggled to make ends meet. Thus, Nixon was condemned, at a very young age, to a childhood of work and labour. To add to his woes, his two older brothers died when he was just twelve. Nixon’s refuge was his schoolwork. Having graduated first from his local school, he won scholarships from both Harvard and Yale but even with the tuition paid for, his family could not afford to send him so far away and instead enrolled him in a local Quaker institution. This event fed into Nixon’s deep rooted feelings of insecurity and inadequacy as he was never able to shake the sense of having missed out on the Ivy League, which in his eyes was, ‘an exclusive club populated by the bright young men.’ Nevertheless, Nixon continued to work with trademark determination. However, even at college, he struggled to overcome his outsider status. Intensely private and socially awkward, he never felt truly accepted by anyone and instead drowned himself in self-pity. These feelings of inadequacy continued to torment him for the rest of his life.

His lack of self-esteem though, never dulled his burning sense of ambition and his rise to Washington was nothing short of spectacular. Building himself up as a fierce anti -Communist crusader, Nixon won a seat in the Senate aged only thirty-seven. Two years later, he became the youngest Vice-President ever, serving under Eisenhower. Eight years on, he had his eyes on the big one and nothing, it seemed, could stand in his way. He was up against John F. Kennedy, the youthful Senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy challenged Nixon to a series of debates, a novel idea at the time. Nixon agreed and on September 26th, 1960, 70 million Americans switched on their television sets to watch the first ever televised Presidential debate. Those who listened to the debate on their radios believed that Nixon clearly seemed the stronger candidate. However, the television audience thought JFK won the debate, claiming that he was more confident, better looking and simply ‘sexier’ than Nixon, who looked tired, stiff and unsure of himself. Nixon went on to lose the closest general election in US history. He was bitter and developed a deep animosity towards the Kennedy’s. JFK exemplified what Nixon was not: charismatic, handsome and extremely likeable. Thus, Kennedy exacerbated Nixon’s lack of self-worth as he highlighted the flaws within Nixon’s character. (While looking at a portrait of JFK hung in the White House, Nixon once remarked, ‘when they look at you they see what they want to be, when they look at me they see who they truly are). Unable to recover from the defeat, Nixon resigned himself to eight years of political wilderness but in 1968, in an amazing comeback, something that perhaps only he was capable of, Nixon secured his party’s nomination for President and then defeated the Vietnam-burdened Democrats. The six years of his presidency would alter the balance of power in the world and change the face of politics forever…..

During his first term, Nixon made some surprisingly liberal innovations: he cut military spending, expanded Social Security and set up the Environmental Protection Agency, awakening the American conscience to climate change and sustainable development. Nixon was not like the Republicans of today; instead, he was intelligent and was willing to reason rather than cling onto right-wing ideology. However, it was in the sphere of foreign policy that Nixon wanted to make his mark and ‘give history a nudge.’ He certainly left his mark, making peace with the Russians and stunning the world by travelling to Beijing to open up diplomatic relations with China. These impressive achievements meant that Nixon won comfortably in the election of 1972.

In the lead up to the election though, Nixon was paranoid of defeat. This fear led him to draw up an official ‘enemies’ list and the creation of a re-election committee which was filled with ex-CIA operatives. They bugged, planted false evidence and knew no limits when it came to tainting Nixon’s opponents. It was this group that bungled up the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters but it was Nixon and his aides who bungled up the handling of the affair, choosing to engage in an elaborate cover-up, filled with lies and deceit that culminated into the ‘long national nightmare’ of Watergate. The scandal has tainted the image of politics and politicians ever since and has made people lose faith in the systems of government all over the world. According to Nixon, it was the ‘mistakes of the heart and not the head’ that led to his downfall. Unfortunately though, Watergate was a burden that Nixon always had to carry for the rest of his life. In the final meeting with his staff before his resignation, Nixon was overwhelmed with emotion. ‘Always remember,’ he said, with tears in his eyes, ‘others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them-and then you destroy yourself.’ Talented in so many ways, but always harbouring an inner core of hatred, Richard Nixon had destroyed himself.