Gandhi is dead. Long live Gandhi!

The tempest of madness issuing from the hideous depths of communal hell after covering a considerable part of our unfortunate land with destruction and death has extinguished that Heavenly Light which had not only been flooding it with spiritual luster from end to end but had also been transmitting immortalising warmth and energy to it. Mahatma Gandhi, who presented in his peerless personality the rarest combination of bhakti yoga and karma yoga and who infused life into the millions of extinct Indian bones and converted the biggest graveyard of ancient achievements and future hopes into a glorious ivory-ground of the revived spirit of man, has ceased to walk this earth. The ringing of murderous shots at New Delhi was like the crack of doom for Indian culture and civilisation. But they would not only be able to bear the shock of the sudden disappearance of their greatest representative, interpreter and “populariser”, but also shine forth more resplendently, for the Mahatma lived and worked and bled and died to make them the beacon light of the world. He was not just the father of the Indian nation — he was more; he was the father of humanity. And as the Mahatma’s blood drawn by the demented assassin’s bullets dries up on the Mahatma-made pages of Indian history — the brightest pages darkened with the biggest and blackest blot of the most fanatical crime — orphaned and agonised humanity cries out, “Bapu! Bapu!”

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