PM Modi Says Bapu Was an Unknown Entity Till Attenborough's 'Gandhi'. Really?

I would request the prime minister to run a Google search on the tributes to Gandhi after his murder.

For the past 24 hours now, Modi has kept the Opposition and the liberal intelligentsia busy countering his slanderous assertion that the world did not know of the greatness of Bapu till Richard Attenborough made the biopic Gandhi.

(Photo: The Burlington Hawk-Eye, 20 September 1931)

When this statement made by the prime minister was brought to my attention, my instant reaction was to burst out laughing. That was really the only way I could respond to such a ridiculous statement by an apparently ignoramus prime minister. But then it struck me that this is the kind of manipulative deceit that he is known to practice.

Since the beginning of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the prime minister has been under attack from the Opposition for the spectacular failure of his decade-long governance, or rather misgovernance; and one could see that he was getting more and more agitated by the attacks, particularly due to the continued sniping by Rahul Gandhi. The only manner in which the prime minister was responding was with his divisive and hateful speeches.

Now, in the last phase of the elections, he needed a diversionary tactic to keep the Opposition occupied, and so, Mahatma Gandhi was a convenient gambit. And how spectacularly he achieved his objective! For the past 24 hours now, he has kept the Opposition and the liberal intelligentsia busy countering his slanderous assertion that the world did not know of the greatness of Bapu till Richard Attenborough made the biopic Gandhi.

I would like to believe that this comment could only be made by an ignoramus. But one cannot ignore the fact that we have the misfortune of having a conniving, lying person as our prime minister, and so one cannot help but suspect that there is an ulterior motive behind this seeming faux pas.

Even Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela Considered Bapu As Their Icon

Bapu was featured on four covers of Time Magazine from 1930 on.

First, he was declared Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1930. He was also featured in Life magazine. But Bapu had started being acknowledged as a leader of consequence since the time he led the Satyagraha in South Africa. During the Champaran Satyagraha, his friend Charlie Andrews acted as his emissary to the world and carried news of his unique Satyagraha to different parts of the globe.

The two people the prime minister compared Bapu to, in an effort to establish that Bapu was not as well known, were Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela, both of whom have credited Bapu as being their inspirational icon.

They both moulded their people's struggle for justice and freedom on Bapu's practice of non-violent Satyagraha. Senior leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the US came to India and were trained in nonviolent Satyagraha at Bapu's ashrams in Sabarmati and Wardha. They went back to America and trained their Satyagrahis there.

In 1959, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Mrs Coretta Scott King were invited to India as state guests by the Indian government. When they arrived in Bombay, Dr King requested to be taken to Manibhavan first. There, he requested to be allowed to enter the locked room where Bapu spent his day working, and sat in meditation next to the mattress on which Bapu sat and worked.

Dr King insisted on staying at Gandhi's home and spent three nights there. He would go for his official engagements and come back to Manibhavan, meditate in Bapu's room, and sleep there.

When he left, he wrote in the visitor's book, "I have stayed in Gandhi's home. I have felt his presence and have been in communion with his soul. It has recharged my resolve to go back and fight for the rights of my people." This happened in 1959, many years before Attenborough read Luis Fisher's biography of Bapu and decided to make a biopic based on it.

Indira Gandhi's Government Funded the Film

Another target of the prime minister's jibe was the Congress party, alleging that it did not do anything to popularise Bapu. Well, that allegation is also easily busted using the film he himself credits as having introduced Bapu to the world.

After reading Bapu's biography by Luis Fisher in the early 1960s, Attenborough was determined to make a film about Gandhi. He could not find a backer to finance the project for twenty years. He met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and broached the subject. Nehru advised him to make an unadorned, honest film about the man and not be overawed by the persona of the Mahatma, but at that time India could not finance such a project.

Finally, Attenborough convinced Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to fund his project, and she got the National Film Development Corporation of India to fund it and become a co-producer. This encouraged Hollywood studios to finally back the project, and eventually, the film was made and released in 1982.

This is just to enlighten PM Modi that the film he credits as being responsible for Bapu's worldwide popularity was made because the Congress government financed it. On the other side, the NFDC still earns handsome dividends on its investment in the film, even four decades on.

All the PM Needs to Do is Run a Google Search

I would also request the prime minister to run a Google search on the tributes to Mahatma Gandhi after his murder. The list is vast, and tributes and condolence messages poured in from across the globe. Poets expressed anguish and grief in their poems. Evocative obituaries were written, and almost every leading daily in the world published tributes in the form of editorials.

Additionally, consider the effect that Bapu had on Sir Charles Chaplin. When Charlie Chaplin came to know that Bapu was coming to London to attend the Round Table Conference, he asked for an appointment and went to meet him at Kingsley Hall.

There are photographs of Charlie Chaplin leaning halfway out of a first-floor window, trying to catch a first glimpse of Bapu. There are other photographs and even film strips of this meeting where the two had an animated conversation and Sir Charles patiently observed Bapu going about his chores. This meeting resulted in two masterpieces by Sir Charles — Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

All this was much before Richard Attenborough even thought of making Gandhi. I hope this is enough to enlighten our prime minister.

(Tushar Gandhi is an author and the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)