Certainly he was an intellectual Kshatriya at least. We must also
remember that Gandhi himself fought in the British army when he was
young and in South Africa and was a recruiter for the British army
and may have been reacting against his own past and the kind of
false Kshatriya he saw among the British. However even if we grant that Gandhian non-violence was a useful
policy for the times, it had negative ramifications beyond that
period. This emphasis on absolute non-violence has weakened the
Kshatriya Dharma in India and has created a situation in which many
Hindus feel that it is against their religion to have any Kshatriya
or warrior spirit at all.
It caused Hindus to abandon the political
field to people of different and often anti-Hindu sentiments.
If
a Dharmic Kshatriya is not created through the force of Brahma or
spiritual knowledge, then the law is that an adharmic Kshatriya will
come to fill in the vacuum. This is exactly what has occurred in
modern India. After the excessive non-violence in the Indian
independence movement no genuine Kshatriya could be created in the
country.
This left the country prey to a false Kshatriya, based
mainly upon Marxist ideals, mixed with war lord temperaments, such
as in other communist countries, who similarly have misled the
people and prevented the real growth of the nation. This decline of a Kshatriya Dharma in
India has weakened the character of the nation and resulted in a
situation that would have horrified Gandhi himself. His own Congress
party, which he wanted to dissolve once independence was achieved,
has now become so riddled with corruption that it has nearly lost
all credibility, not to mention integrity.
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