Vinoba Bhave

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Vinoba Bhave (born Vinayak Narahari Bhave ; Marathi विनोबा भावे IAST Vinobā Bhāve ; born September 11, 1895 in Gagode , Maharashtra ; † November 15, 1982 in Paunar , Maharashtra) was an Indian freedom fighter and follower of Gandhi . He saw himself as its spiritual successor. After independence he appeared as a social reformer who achieved the peaceful mass redistribution of land through the Bhudan movement he founded .

Life path

Vinoba and Gandhi

Vinoba Bhave came from a wealthy Brahmin family . His mother was the deeply religious Rukmini Devi. He was the oldest of five children and had a sister. Of his three brothers, one died young and two, Balkoba and Shivaji also became celibate social activists. At the age of 10, he is said to have decided to lead a holy life and remain unmarried.

He attended college in Gagode and was supposed to study engineering in Bombay . But he left home as a student. In addition to English and French, he spoke eight Indian languages. At the age of 46 he began to learn Arabic. He was imbued with Hindu ideals throughout his life and drew his moral principles from the Bhagavad-Gita .

Initially, he had contact with a terrorist group and wanted to attract attention with a bomb attack. In 1916 he heard from Gandhi. In the Kochrab Ashram in Ahmedabad , he met Gandhi on June 7, 1916, who soon afterwards wrote to his father, who had not heard from him for a long time: “Your son is with me. Spiritually, he has reached a level that I was only able to achieve after a long struggle. ”After the successful Champaran campaign , he finally joined the national independence movement. From then on, Vinoba lived almost without possessions and devoted himself to spinning khadi and cleaning latrines. He realized that he should gain a deeper understanding of the sacred Hindu scriptures, so he studied Sanskrit and theology in Benares for a year . Then he returned to Gandhi.

When Djamnalal Bajaj , one of the richest Indian capitalists, wanted to give Gandhi land for an ashram , Gandhi sent Vinoba with Bajaj (April 8, 1921). Two kilometers from Wardha , they laid the foundation stone for the Mahila Ashram, which became the center of Gandhi activities. In 1923, he was first in Nagda , then in Akola imprisoned for several months because he in the satyagraha of Nagpur had played a leading role.

During his campaigns for Gandhi's Satyagraha , Vinoba was arrested again in 1932 and in Dhulia (also: Dhule ). West Kandesh, Bombay , detained for six months. During his imprisonment in Dhule, he spoke on 18 consecutive Sundays from February 21 to June 19, 1932 to his fellow inmates in prison about the Bhagavad-Gita . He gave these lectures in his mother tongue, Marathi . They were later translated into numerous Indian languages ​​and English. More than a million copies have been sold so far. The lectures were published in German in 1974. After his release, Bajaj provided him with a holiday home for recreation. On December 23, 1932, he moved to Nalwadi (about 3 km from Wardha), where he tried to entertain himself only by spinning. Vinoba kept returning there, and his Sabarmati Ashram developed around it.

In 1940 Gandhi, surprising for his surroundings, chose vinoba for his first individual satyagrahi. The announced action - the public reading of an insurgent text that was forbidden by the censors - brought him to Nagpur prison three times in 1940-41, for 3, 6 and 12 months, respectively. There he wrote the Svaraj Shastras on the maxims of independence. Disappointed by the bloody partition of India and the new nationalist government, he withdrew to Paunar. To serve the common good he formed the Sarvodaya Samaj ("Society for the Service of All;"; founded March 8, 1948) and Sara Seva Sang ("Assembly for the Improvement of Living Conditions"). In later years he founded and led the Shanti Sena movement ("Peace Volunteers"), which, in the spirit of Gandhi, is supposed to contribute to peaceful conflict resolution and socio-economic reforms.

It was not until 1951 that he came out of seclusion and devoted himself to land redistribution as part of his Bhudan movement. In total, he is said to have covered 60,000 km on foot through India. Vinoba undertook his only “trip abroad” in 1962, when he was promoting his ideas in East Pakistan for 19 days. After the Sarvodaya conference in Rajgir , he returned to his ashram, where, after 13 years of migration, he devoted himself to setting up a women's department ( Brahma Vidya Mandi ). After a year, the 75-year-old started another four-year campaign through Bihar .

He spent the last years of his life in Paunar. He supported the Indian Emergency of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi , which he called Anushasana Parva ("Time for Discipline"). In particular, the - in itself sensible - measures for birth control were right, for which he was criticized, as well as for his excessive imitation of Gandhi, among others by VS Naipaul in some essays.

He started his last campaign in December 1976. He opposed the slaughter of cattle and fasted for a corresponding protection law.

When he suffered a heart attack on November 8, 1982, he realized he was approaching death and refused to take any medication or any further food. He died on the 15th of the month. Indira Gandhi visited him shortly before his death.

Bhudan movement

Immediately after independence, the introduction of an upper limit for rural land ownership was discussed within the government. This concept was laid down in the first five-year plan in 1951, the limit being three times the size of an economically viable farm. States should enact executive laws. However, a lack of cadastral data, and later the growing resistance of the possessing classes, prevented rapid implementation.

In an atmosphere in which the landowners feared expropriation, Vinoba called the Bhunidan-Yagna movement, abbreviated Bhudan, ( Hindi भूदान IAST bhūdān ; Urdu بھو) into life. The idea was to keep the peace within society through the voluntary surrender of farmland. In the area of Telangana , where the ruthless exploitation of the peasants had led to communist uprisings and their bloody suppression, he demanded land for the landless for the first time. This stood in contrast to the efforts of left forces, which he considered godless. Rama Chandra Rao was the first to offer 100 acres in Pochampalli (in the Krishnagiri district ) .

He vowed to wander India in June 1951 until he collected 5 million acres of land from landowners for landless villagers. "I have come to plunder you in love." To the astonishment of all skeptics, he was able to achieve commitments for this first goal within the first 5 years. By 1957, Vinoba had walked around 20,000 km and had been given around two million hectares of land for redistribution. In total he collected about 2.5 million hectares (= 4.1 million acres). The Nehru government promoted his program from 1954 to the extent that it introduced measures to simplify land transfer and waived the levying of land transfer tax and typing fees. Even so, it was often low-value land that was given up. Corruption and other difficulties resulted in the fact that by 1974 "only" 1.3 million useful acres were being transferred to new owners. As a further development of the concept, Gramdan, communal ownership of all rural land under the administration of an elected self-governing body usually consisting of five people, was propagated. The eminent socialist politician Jayprakash Narayan dedicated his life to the movement in 1954, but a rift broke out 20 years later.

After 1974, when Vinoba withdrew from the leadership, the movement lost momentum; the Indian government's swinging into neo-liberal capitalism since 1990 has almost completely killed it.

Honors

Vinoba was the first recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay International Prize for Community Leadership in 1958 . Pope Paul VI , who was in India for the 38th World Eucharistic Congress in December 1964, had the Prime Minister present him with a gold medal. He received the highest Indian order Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1983.

The state-run Vinoba Bhave University in Hazaribag , a spin-off from Ranchi University , was founded on September 17, 1982.

Works

Vinoba usually wrote Marathi in his native language . His books, translated into English, were also published by the Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan publishing house in Varanasi, which is part of his movement .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jean J. Lanza del Vasto: Vinoba: King of the Poor. 1988; First part: Vinoba's life
  2. ↑ In Harijan , the leading article on October 20 was Who is Vinoba?
  3. ↑ deviating: Lanza del Vasto (1988), p 220: Nov. 5.
  4. ↑ Bipan Chandra et al .: India Since Independence; New Delhi rev 2008, ISBN 978-0-14-310409-4 ; Cape. 31, p. 537 ff.
  5. ^ Planning Commission (India): First Five Year Plan. New Delhi 1953, pp. 188-191.
  6. ↑ Acharya Vinoba Bhave. In: The time. June 27, 1957.
  7. ↑ a b Vishwanath Tandor: The Boodan-Gramdan Movement (1951-74): A Review. Gandhi Marg. Nov./Dec. 1983; quoted in Lanza del Vasto (1988), p. 221 ff.
  8. ↑ Lanza del Vasto (1988), p. 216.
  9. ↑ ( page no longer available , search in web archives: foundation ) (English).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.vbu.co.in

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bhave, vinoba
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bhave, Vinayak Narahari (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION spiritual successor to Mahatma Gandhi
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Gagode , Maharashtra
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1982
Place of death Paunar , Maharashtra