Sons Fail The Legacy Of Gandhi

AT THE Regal cinema in this monsoon-sodden city this week, audiences have been watching the descent of a famous mans son into insolvency and early death from liver cirrhosis.

Having Mahatma Gandhi as a father would always be a hard act to follow. For Harilal Gandhi, it was too much. Rebellions to win independence from the great ascetic — in business, in conversion to Islam, in alcohol — ended in failure.

"He is the worlds greatest father," he says in a new Hindi movie about his life, Gandhi, My Father. "But I cant bear the burden of being his son."

Harilal died at 61, just six months after his father was gunned down by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948 because of his fasting and other protests at Hindu-Muslim violence at the countrys birth.

Gandhis name was much invoked as India celebrated the 60th anniversary of independence from British rule on Wednesday — and his message much distorted.

"Sixty years ago the people of India began a new journey as a free nation, inspired by the message and vision of Mahatma Gandhi," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Delhis Red Fort. "But Gandhis dream of a free India would only be fully realised when we banish poverty from our midst."

In Mumbai, banishing poverty has come to mean getting rich if you can, and flaunting it.

On upmarket Altamount Road overlooking the Arabian Sea, the countrys first "rupee trillionaire" Mukesh Ambani, heir to a vast petrochemical empire, is building a luxury 27-storey apartment block for himself and his associates.

Between the slum-fringed airport on the north and the crumbling Raj-era mansions on the southern tip, the urban landscape is taking on a Shanghai look as crumbling textile mills and slums are cleared for high-rise offices and apartments.

Property values matching those of New York and London are sweeping aside restrictive tenancy laws.

"Margins are big enough to pay off the slum dwellers," said Debashis Basu, publisher of MoneyLife, an investment magazine. "You dont have to go and burn their houses down."

"You dont require gangsters when you have government officers to help," said Yogesh Pratap Singh, a former police official who published a novel depicting a nexus of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, gangsters, and businessmen in Mumbai. "You can get any irregularity condoned by paying bribes."

Wealthy young professionals haunt boutiques, art galleries and fusion-style restaurants, consuming wine from Indias burgeoning vineyards, and sometimes a bit more.

"India consumes about 10 tonnes of cocaine a year, most of it coming through Mumbai in cargo," said Mr Singh, who is now a barrister.

A hubristic mood was set for Independence Day when Washington and New Delhi announced a draft treaty that essentially confers US recognition of Indias status as a nuclear weapons power.

In special newspaper editions, tycoons predicted that India was set on Chinese-style growth of 9 to 10 per cent, and heading for economic superpower status by mid-century.

In Mahatma Gandhis old house on Labernum Road, now a museum, the visitors were mainly foreign tourists. A framed quotation put his views on nuclear weapons.

"The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bombs, even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages."

Over the previous fortnight, the history of India and the Gandhi tragedy were played out as farce in the trial of another of Indias prodigal sons.

Sanjay Dutt is the son of screen royalty in Bollywood. His mother was the actress Nargis, a great beauty and a Muslim who died of cancer in 1981. His father Sunil Dutt was a high-caste Hindu and also a screen idol who became an MP until his death in 2005.

Sanjay, now 48, was a spoiled brat with several bouts of heroin addiction before launching into a successful acting career.

During filming in Dubai in 1991, the entire cast was invited to dinner by the exiled Mumbai criminal don Dawood Ibrahim.

After Hindu extremists demolished a mosque at Ayodhya in 1992, Mumbais large Muslim minority took to the streets in protest, sparking counter-riots and killings by Hindus over following weeks.

As Sunil Dutt, the father, worked tireless to halt the slaughter, Sanjay Dutt was persuaded by two associates of Dawoods gang to accept weapons for self-defence.

In mid-January 1993 they delivered three AK-56 automatic assault rifles and ammunition to the Dutt household. Sanjay returned two and kept one.

In March, a series of bombs ripped through the Bombay Stock Exchange and other city hubs, killing 257 people. Police quickly traced a conspiracy involving local Muslims back to Dawood and Pakistani intelligence — and Sanjays AK-56 to a consignment landed by Dawood several weeks earlier.

When Sanjay was released on bail, he returned to films, establishing his crowning role as a bumbling mafia don who starts practising a version of Gandhis non-violence teachings.

With this benign image, Sanjay finally faced Judge Pramod Dattaram Kode on July 31. India was stunned when Judge Kode handed down a six-year term of "rigorous" imprisonment.

Awaiting appeal, Sanjay is in Punes Yerwada Jail, where the Mahatma spent a long stretch for resisting British rule, and where inmates are offered a "Gandhi Darshan" course in his teachings.

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