How would Mahatma Gandhi have tackled fishermen issue?

Chennai: As the Vice-President Mr Hamid Ansari unveiled a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the ‘Pethub Monastery’ in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar on Saturday, even though, going by media reports, it was a low-profile event, the symbolic ebullience of it, seemed unmistakable.

Usually it is the historic ‘Gandan Monastery’ that often hits the headlines when Heads of States visit Ulaanbaatar, which has all the charm and mystical whiff of a spiritual destination nestling amid mountain ranges.

But for chroniclers of the political theatre, the unveiling of this statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the ‘Pethub Monastery’, established by Kushok Bakula Rinpoche in the 1990s’ when he was the Indian Ambassador to Mongolia, instantly transported one to a counter-factual world of what Gandhi would have meant in the company of Buddhists in a contemporary setting.

While there have been a number of studies on the influence of the Buddha on Gandhi and on the Mahatma’s reinterpretation and re-evaluation of the core values of Hinduism in the light of the Buddha’s message, scholars like Margaret Chatterjee, former Professor of Philosophy at the Delhi University, has placed Gandhi’s position on cardinal issues like ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence), the middle path of avoiding extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, and ceaselessly working for the betterment of humanity, more closer to the tradition of the northern school of Buddhism, the ‘Mahayana Buddhism’.

The influence of Buddha on Gandhi, whose Hindu faith was much tempered by early influence of Jainism on him — particularly the idea of fasting as a means of self-purification, as much as the extent to which other major religions of the world including Christianity and Islam impacted the larger catholic outlook of the Mahatma, is a huge subject in itself. Gandhi’s view on the caste system, though, continues to be a sore point among the Ambedekarites.

Nevertheless, Gandhi, vis-à-vis Buddhism, being more closer to ‘Mahayana Buddhism’, the ‘larger vehicle’ as it is called, than the ‘Hinayana’ or the southern school of Buddhism known as ‘smaller vehicle’ as in vogue in countries like Sri Lanka, in itself is significant. As scholars say, the Mahayana Buddhism ideal of ‘Bodhisattva’-, enlightened ones postponing their individual liberation for the uplift of countless others, appealed to Mahatma Gandhi more and was in tune with his mass-participative political action.   

In that larger backdrop, how would Gandhi be or react among the Buddhists today? Certainly, for someone also influenced by the liberal traditions of the West where individual freedoms are important and not entirely subsumed under the collective, the notion of ‘Sangh’ would have still be an anathema to Gandhi, though Margaret Chatterjee says, Gandhi’s prayers “has Buddhist overtones”, and he saw the yogic value of chanting.

For all the perils of individual freedom, Gandhi, like St. Augustine, would have still defended it, as men and women “freely choosing the good” is more important than any mechanical submission to a supposedly supra-moral order based on fear and repression.

There is an interesting anecdote during Gandhi’s tour of Sri Lanka in November 1927. While expressing his views on Buddha’s message of non-violence and the need to give up animal sacrifices of any kind, Gandhi, nonetheless, took a dig at the Buddhists’ meat-eating practice. If that were any guidepost, Gandhi’s adherence to vegetarianism would still continue to be a talking point in the company of Buddhists, though the Mahatma would have never approved any ‘hatred against the butcher’.

And coming to the most pressing issue today in Tamil Nadu — the almost day-to-day badgering fishermen from this State, particularly from the coastal districts of Nagapattinam, Pudukkottai to Ramanathapuram, face at the hands of the Sri Lankan Navy for allegedly poaching into their territorial waters, — the bone of contention is between the ‘traditional rights’ of Tamil Nadu fishermen and Sri Lankan fishermen’s fears that ‘bottom trawling’ in the Palk straits and Gulf of Mannar area is fast depleting their fisheries resources.

Gandhi under these circumstances, notwithstanding other related issues, would have spoken the language of the Buddhist middle path, namely declare the entire fisheries zone between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka as a common resources zone to be regulated by a joint authority. But that would also mean the Sri Lankan leaders looking beyond their Hinayana Buddhist tradition, to see the Tamils as part of the ‘larger vehicle’ of humanity. It also calls for revisiting the ‘Bodhisattva’ ideal in a new secular context, a dynamic goal that was close to the Mahatma’s heart.