Remarks by High Commissioner Mr Manish  on the eve of Gandhi Jayanti 2026

I want to begin this evening not with a quotation from Gandhi, but with a question.

When was the last time any of us changed our mind because somebody shouted louder than us?

Probably not very often.

And yet much of our world behaves as though the opposite were true: as though louder means stronger, anger means conviction, humiliation means victory, and force is the quickest way to an answer.

Gandhi spent his life testing that assumption.

Yesterday, Cyprus marked its Independence Day. You know what such a day means: flags, pride, memory, and the sense that history has turned a page.

Now imagine India on 15 August 1947. After a long struggle against British colonial rule, India is free. Delhi is celebrating. A new flag rises. A new government takes charge.

And where is the man who had spent more than three decades helping to make freedom a mass movement?

Not in Delhi. But in a place 1300 kms away then known as Calcutta, and now called Kolkata.

The city had been scarred by terrible Hindu-Muslim violence and remained dangerously tense. Independence had also come with Partition. Millions were being uprooted. Fear, rumour and revenge were spreading.

Gandhi spent Independence Day fasting, spinning charkha, a traditional, hand-driven wooden spinning wheel, and praying.  He is trying to stop Indians from killing one another. He had gone not to where the celebration was, but to where the danger was.

And then comes an extraordinary comparison.

Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India,  wrote to Gandhi:

“In the Punjab we have 55 thousand soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man and there is no rioting.”

He called Gandhi the “One-man Boundary Force.”

Fifty-five thousand soldiers on one side. One unarmed man on the other.

But this is not a story about one man being stronger than an army.

It is something more interesting.

It is a story about two entirely different kinds of power.

One had uniforms, weapons, command structures and the authority of the state.

The other had none.

Gandhi could not command. He could not arrest. He held no office and no army.

And yet people listened.

His great experiment was not simply whether one man could remain non-violent.

It was whether human beings, in very large numbers, could be persuaded to restrain themselves when every instinct around them was telling them to retaliate. And that experiment is still unfinished.

What kind of power was that?

To understand it, I will take your further 17 years back from 1947 to 1930 where  78 people became millions.

In March 1930, Gandhi walked out of Sabarmati Ashram with just 78 followers. Sabarmati Ashram was the residence of Mahatma Gandhi in the state of Gujarat, They were going to walk about 241 miles to the sea near a coastal village called Dandi to break an apparently mundane colonial law: to protest the British salt monopoly and the heavy tax placed on a basic, daily necessity for all Indians.

At first glance, it almost sounds absurd. An empire, and Gandhi chooses salt.

But everybody needed salt. Rich and poor. Urban and rural. Gandhi had found something that converted an abstract argument about imperial rule into something that could be understood in every kitchen.

As they walked, thousands joined. By the time they reached Dandi village there were tens of thousands around him. The campaign spread across India, eventually involving millions, and more than 60,000 people were arrested.

And then they reached Karadi, a coastal town, Gandhi was arrested ), just before his planned peaceful raid on the Dharasana Salt Works.

The arrest of Mahatma Gandhi did not crush the rebellion; it ignited it.

After his arrest, about 2,500 non-violent volunteers advanced towards the government-controlled salt works in the Dharasana coastal town. Police beat the advancing groups with steel-tipped lathis.

American journalist Webb Miller, who witnessed it, later described the scene in these words:

"Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins... The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down."

What kind of leadership persuades thousands of people not merely to march with you when it is easy, but to maintain discipline when they know that the person waiting for them may be carrying a baton?

Gandhi's achievement was not that Indians always agreed with him. They did not.

His achievement was something perhaps even more difficult: He transformed the power itself.

The British Empire possessed the government, the police, the prisons and the army.

Gandhi kept asking a devastatingly simple question:

What happens to power when the person you command refuses to obey you but also refuses to hate you?

That last question is, in my view, much stronger than describing Gandhi as merely a “champion of peace.”

And you could then connect the two stories:

In 1930, he showed that an unarmed population could confront power.

In 1947, he faced an even harder question: could people restrain themselves when the enemy was no longer a distant empire, but their own neighbour?

That is why Gandhi remains relevant.

Gandhi had understood something profound:

You do not always confront power by acquiring greater power. Sometimes you confront it by withdrawing your consent from it.

We could admire Gandhi, honour his memory, and go home reassured.

But look at the title of tonight's discussion:

“Non-Violence in a Fractured World: Relevance, Limits and Possibilities.”

There is one word there I particularly value:

Limits. We kept it deliberately.

Because to revere Gandhi without interrogating his ideas, choices, and contradictions would be to do his legacy a disservice.

So let us ask a difficult question.

Is non-violence really a strategy for the strong, or have we quietly come to regard it as a refuge for the weak?

Anger can be instantaneous. Restraint has to be sustained.

Retaliation can be instinctive. Non-violence has to be chosen — again and again, often at the very moment when it is hardest to choose.

It takes only seconds to destroy trust. It can take years to rebuild it.

And this has particular resonance here in Cyprus.

We are meeting on an island that knows that history does not disappear merely because time passes. It knows the value of dialogue.

It also hosts men and women serving under the flag of the United Nations, entrusted every day with the difficult business of preventing disagreement from becoming confrontation.

So I am especially honoured to welcome Mr Khassim Diagne, Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General and Head of UNFICYP, who will speak after me this evening.

India, too, approaches this subject not as an abstract idea inherited from history.

Gandhi gave the world a vocabulary of resistance that did not depend upon hatred of the opponent. That distinction matters enormously.

Because there is perhaps an even deeper meaning to non-violence:

It refuses to reduce a human being to an enemy.

You may oppose someone's action. You may challenge an injustice.

You may resist with extraordinary determination.

But the moment we deny the humanity of the person on the other side, violence has already begun,  even before the first blow is struck.

That is why Gandhi remains difficult.

He does not merely ask governments to behave differently.

He asks us to behave differently.

At the dinner table. On social media. In politics. In our workplaces. In our communities.

The most dangerous violence today is not always physical.

Sometimes it begins with language. With contempt.

With the casual conclusion that someone who disagrees with us must also be morally inferior to us. And from there, the distance between disagreement and dehumanisation can become frighteningly short.

So tonight, I hope we do something slightly unusual for a commemorative event.

Let us not simply ask:

“What would Gandhi have said to our world?”

Let us ask:

“What does our world reveal about us when Gandhi's questions still make us uncomfortable?”

Later this evening, we will see Gandhi through film, discussion and artistic expression, including a presentation of Vaishnav Jan To Tene Kahiye — a composition associated with the ideal of recognising and feeling the suffering of others. Duty Roster

That may ultimately be the bridge between Gandhi's century and ours.

Not agreement. Not uniformity.

But the capacity to recognise the humanity — and the pain — of another person.

So, as we commemorate the 157th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and the International Day of Non-Violence, let us not leave here merely having remembered Gandhi.

Let us leave having been challenged by him.

Because a world that is fractured does not need another monument to non-violence.

It needs practitioners of it.

Thank you.