Well, it’s not a very good day to count the flaws of Mahatma Gandhi and to reveal his dark side since it is 2nd October, his birth anniversary. But that’s the price great personalities often have to pay for being great.
Mahatma Gandhi, famously known as the father of the nation, has a lot about his personal and political life which is not known to the general public, only to sustain his glorified portrait. Many researchers and historians have found out the hidden secrets of his life, which are not as inspirational as the public figure we worship.
Those who know these things, find them hating Gandhi, and rightly so. Here are some of these revelations:
1. He is regarded as an “odd husband”, who denied his wife Kasturba Gandhi sexual pleasures for years after she bore his children. According to some critics, Gandhi even mistreated his wife and hated even looking at her, calling her a “meek cow”.
Gandhi left his wife at the mercy of gods when she was hemorrhaging badly and denied doctors to treat her with foreign medicines.
He wrote to her: “My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be unhappy.”
2. One can very conveniently call Mahatma Gandhi a hypocrite, on the basis of the way he used to treat his own son, Harilal. He denied his wish of becoming a barrister like him but wanted him to follow his footsteps in politics. Harilal called Gandhi’s ideology to be delusional, and later converted to Islam disowning his father publicly.
3. In his praise of poverty and suffering, Mahatma Gandhi, in 1909, professed “unlearning” whatever India has learned in last fifty years. He wanted India to do away with the railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and whatever was developed in past fifty years.
4. We all must be familiar with the glorified figure of Mahatma Gandhi which fought against racial discrimination in South Africa. But what if you come to know that Gandhi himself was a racist, using derogatory words like “kaffir” in his speeches and having a stereotypical image of Africans as cattle hunters and wife-buyers.
5. Researches have claimed that Mahatma Gandhi was an illuminati pawn whose sole motive was the Partition. It was due to him that Mohammad Ali Jinnah could come to power and claim Pakistan.