Binoy Shanker Prasad holds a PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. A native of Darbhanga, Bihar (India), Binoy currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada). He is a former University Grants Commission teacher fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru Univ. (JNU) in India and a Fulbright Scholar in the USA. Beginning his career as a college professor from Delhi and Mithila Univ in India, Binoy was on the faculty of Ryerson Univ, Centennial College and McMaster Univ in Canada. In addition to several research papers and book chapters, Binoy is the author of Violence Against Minorities: Riots and the State in the United States and India (2010) and Dynamics of the State of Bihar and Other Essays (2023). Binoy has also published a collection of his own poems, Kabhi Arsh Par Kabhi Farsh Par (2009).
Dr Prasad has taught courses on Peace Studies, Comparative Politics, Globalization, International Politics and Political Sociology. Invited speaker at several organizations, Binoy has guest-lectured at such institutions as the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), George Mason Univ., Univ of Madison-Wisconsin, and Redeemer Univ. Socially active, Binoy has also been a two-term president of Hamilton based India-Canada Society.
Today, 2 October 2024, is the 155th birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was hailed as the Father of the Nation at the time India was getting independence from the British Raj in 1947. Upon his arrival in India from South Africa in January, 1915, Gandhi became a nationally known figure in a relatively short time. As a crusader of the Hindu social reforms, he represented largely the moderate-pacifist population of Indians who sought in the beginning incremental freedom from British colonial rule. During the entire period of freedom struggle that culminated in the painful vivisection of the Indian subcontinent and creation of two countries based on irreconcilable faiths, Gandhi was practically on everyone's mind through his writings and actions. Even after Indian independence and his assassination (January, 1948), he remained one of the prominent figures in the world dominating socio-economic-political or religious discourse.
This book is a collection of my short essays on Gandhi that have sporadically appeared in different publications for the last 20 years. In the process, it reflects unequivocally the evolution of my own thoughts around a person who emerged as an iconic figure during his life and long thereafter.
As I present this book to the readers, today's 'global village' is faced with - in addition to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East - myriad new problems like tech-overuse, weaponization of human-trafficking, drug overdose, gun-violence or supply chain disruptions. The threat of pandemic-causing viruses, either invented in a lab or produced due to environmental reasons, is omnipresent. Under international humanitarian law, there are 110 armed conflicts going on around the world: some of them make the headlines, others don't. In the United States, still the most powerful country in the world, the food, drug, defense or high-tech industries have almost transformed their people in many different ways there have been 31 mass shootings in nine months of 2024 alone.
If we take a macro-view, the conflicts are all about establishing one's supremacy civilizational, racial or otherwise over others or over forcibly snatching others' rights away for self-aggrandizement. In the cut-throat competition, the resourceful parties are resorting to inhuman-unethical means to add more power to themselves. They are developing and deploying all kinds of new weaponry and technology to run over their challenger.
Today's world is a lot more integrated and as it knows more about each other, astonishingly with the help of science and technology, the global citizens began to examine their own relative conditions on earth their past, and their future. With the tools of inquiry revolutionized and a plethora of new materials laid bare, they were curious to ask new questions.
On Gandhi, too, they were asking incisive questions and not getting satisfactory answers. For instance, self-pronouncing that he was a devout Hindu and 'preferred death to cowardice,' why did Gandhi, in the name of non-violence, prevent Hindus from resorting to violent resistance even in self-defense? Violence against aggressors was very much a part of the Hindu philosophical ethos. Contrast this with Gandhi's attitude towards Islam and Islamist Muslims whose atrocities and misdeeds were never referred to with objection. Gandhi never pointedly preached Muslims the lessons of non-violence.
A British-educated attorney, steeped in his commitment to non-violence, Gandhi must have familiarized himself with the Islamic history. Even the Islamic historians have recorded that during the first four Caliphs since the founding of the faith: Abu Bakr (632-634), Umar (634-644), Uthman (644-656) and Ali (656-661), Islamists' invading army had conquered and rampaged Persia, Syria, Armenia, Egypt and Cyprus through violent aggression. They destroyed their indigenous civilisations, religions and culture. As an advocate of Ram-Rajya, did he ever talk at length about what the Islamists' Mughal rule had done to India and the Hindu civilization?
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
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