"My life is my message", wrote Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the foreword to his autobiography, "My experiments with truth". The Mahatma did not write "My timepiece is my message" or "My spectacles are my message" or "My bowl is my message" or even "My sandals are my message." And yet these are some of the Gandhi memorabilia whose auction in New York by collector James Otis was sought to be pre-empted by the government of India. In "Lage raho Munnabhai", the Bollywood movie released in 2007, the Mahatma tells the goonda turned Gandhian Murli that he is dismayed by the fact that his portrait is hung in government offices all over India but that his message of truth and non-violent protest is hardly practised anywhere in the country. And yet, in real life, 61 years after the Mahatma was assassinated, almost everyone in the government of India, from the PM to the country's minister for tourism and culture, got into the act to try and ensure that the Gandhi memorabilia collected by Otis was not auctioned.
It need not be a coincidence that the auction was held some 41 days before polling for India's fifteenth Lok Sabha parliamentary elections. Did the proximity to the general elections focus the government of India's attention to an extent where it was decided that these items of Gandhi memorabilia not be auctioned? Or did Otis feel that holding the auction at this time would catalyse the process of government decision-making to the extent where it was decided that the Gandhi memorabilia belonged to the nation and, therefore, should be returned to the country whose inhabitants had put the Mahatma on a pedestal by calling him "the father of the nation" and "a saint in politics", thereby absolving themselves of the need to practise what he had preached.
The process by which the government of India took the decision that the Gandhi memorabilia should not be auctioned was undergone without any of the soul-searching the Mahatma indulged in whenever he was confronted with the need to listen to his inner voice on matters of importance. For someone who believed that the means were as important as the end, the process by which he took critical decisions during the freedom struggle was facilitated by the daily discipline he subjected himself to at his ashram in Sabarmati where he not just grew what he consumed but also wove what he wore on his charkha.
The question of whether or not the Gandhi memorabilia should be auctioned would have been a no-brainer for the Mahatma. For someone who believed that nothing should be wasted and thrown away which could be used, the question of how best his glasses, his bowl, his timepiece and his sandals could be used would not have required much thought. If he had been around today, the Mahatma would have insisted that all these items be handed over to someone who needed them but could not afford to buy them. Which is why neither Otis' move to auction the Gandhi memorabilia nor the government of India's plan to preserve them in a museum would have met with the Mahatma's approval.