Heading Placeholder

Gandhi’s significant impact and legacy is evident in many ways:

Gandhi received numerous nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. As noted in Module 2, the Prize was not given in the year of his death, possibly as a ‘placeholder’ for him.

In 2007, the United Nations created the International Day of Non-Violence, to be marked annually on October 2 – Gandhi’s birthday.

Already in 1930, Time magazine named him ‘Man of the Year’.

Numerous peace awards and institutes are named after Gandhi.

He is highly venerated in India today and considered the Father of India; his image appears on most of India’s currency.

About 250 stamps were issued bearing Gandhi's image, from eighty different countries.

His ideas and methods of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation have been followed in subsequent peace movements around the world. 

Of course, most public figures have another side to them, which includes ideas and actions that are not positive, indeed reprehensible by some critics. Gandhi is viewed with less adulation by religious minorities in India, who felt he was a Hindu nationalist and less supportive of Muslims and other minorities. He is described as racist towards black Africans during his time in South Africa. Some analysts of gender describe as sexual abuse Gandhi’s practice of lying naked with young woman as a test of his own celibacy – even while he tried to raise up women’s status in India. While Indian independence was a goal achieved by Gandhi’s movement, the partition of India that followed resulted in many violent deaths and human displacement on a vast scale.

Like all peace movements, Gandhi’s movement had both strengths and challenges.

Among many other strengths:

• the leader lived by his thought and strategy;
• it focused on local impacts and a grassroots application of strategy;
• it connected spiritual ideas with practical strategies.

Among other challenges:

• religious differences between Hindus and Muslims;
• regional differences in a massive country;
• political differences with moderates who wanted to cooperate with Britain and militants who wanted to use violence;
• suffering experienced by protestors.