Religion

Gandhi said “God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these, God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. For in His boundless love God permits the atheist to live.”

Gandhi was primarily a man of religion. He had a steadfast view on religion, and his religion was the basis of all his other ideas. Truth and non-violence were the two principles that helped Gandhi in evolving a comprehensive view of religion that went beyond narrow sectarianism. For Gandhi there is no higher way of worshipping God than serving the poor and identifying God in them.

He considered different religions to be merely the different paths towards the same destination. Gandhi out of his own experiences and readings came to the conclusion that all religions are based on the same principles, namely, truth and love. He claimed that religion is a binding force and not a dividing force. He said that each person should follow his or her own religion freely. He would not conceive of a state without religion, for the basic tenets of his religion were at the base of his idea of state too.

Subhash Bose believed in Upanishadic teachings. He revered the Bhagavad Gita and was inspired by Vivekananda. He was also inspired by the India of the past as reinterpreted by thinkers. According to many scholars, Hindu spirituality formed the essential part of his political and social thought throughout his adult life. However, he was free of bigotry or orthodoxy. He was for total non-discrimination on the basis of religion and in context he took up the Hindus’ cause when he demanded that Hindu prisoners be given the right to do Durga Puja just as Muslims and Christians were allowed to celebrate their festivals. Bose motivated Indians towards freedom struggle through Hindu symbolisms as appropriate for the audience. On December 9, 1930, he called upon the women to participate in the liberation struggle, invoking the imagery of Durga, a form of Shakti, ready to vanquish evil. However, he was not a sectarian. He named his force Azad Hind Fauz, and there were many non-Hindus in that army and who were close to him. The INA was to be a mixture of various religions, races, and castes with total social equality of all soldiers. They were served food cooked in the common kitchen and shared space in common barracks breaking the age old caste bonds and practices. Common celebrations of all religious festivals took place in the INA.

Bose was a secularist with an impartial attitude to all religions. He said that Free India must have an absolutely neutral and impartial attitude towards all religions and leave it to the choice of individuals to profess or follow a particular religion of his faith. Religion is a private matter, the State has nothing to do with it. He opined that economic issues cut across communal divisions and barriers.