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One cannot help but wonder what Baba Amte's reaction would have been to the current violence on the streets of Maharashtra's towns and cities. The veteran social activist and campaigner died at the age of 94, on February 9, at Anandvan ashram where his remarkable journey began some five decades ago. Baba Amte's life was driven by a clear vision and principles. "I believe that as a society we have to evolve through experimentation, a system which combines the principles of individual freedom and common ownership...a true revolution is not destructive but creative. Only a revolution which leads to a higher sense of human dignity can lead to a higher and nobler way of life," Amte told his biographer Hans Staffner S J.

This also explains why he was irresistibly drawn towards people who were afflicted and suffering.

What Amte really fought for was the future of India. He was extremely disturbed throughout his life by the disrupting forces of regionalism and communalism. He launched the Bharat Jodo Andolan or Knit India Movement as a reaction to the growing regionalism, communalism and casteism in the county in the 1970s and 1980s.

Amte felt the conflict had reached a point of explosion and that in any other country such a state of affairs would have led to armed revolt. He saw the country in agonising pain, with Punjab, Assam and Gujarat bleeding while elsewhere the situation was not much better.

Not an idle spectator

To remain an idle spectator in such a situation was against his conscience. Baba Amte was deeply convinced of the truth behind Burke's famous words: "For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing."

So he set out on a march from Kanyakumari to the Himalayas, from Assam to Gujarat, promoting the concept of oneness among people of different states and communities.

The first march started in Kanyakumari on December 24, 1985, and concluded in Jammu on April 9, 1986. The marchers covered 5,250 km in 107 days. The second 'knit India' march from Itanagar in Assam to Okha in Gujarat was conducted in November 1988-April 1989, with Baba Amte insisting throughout: "Raise your hands for construction, not to beg or destroy. Raise your hands in unity to build a New India."

Staffner notes that the most enthusiastic response to the Bharat Jodo call was from Maharashtra, especially the adivasi areas.

“Bharat Jodo is not an end in itself. It is only a starting point," he would insist.

During the march, Amte was distressed by the happenings in Punjab and went there six times to talk to Hindus and Sikhs.

When Babri Masjid was demolished

It may also be timely to recall Baba Amte's 'healing mission' to riot-torn Mumbai in 1993 in his own words.

"My first pacemaker was not cooperating with me so I had to have it removed and another implanted. When I returned from the hospital in Indore to the banks of the Narmada , some foreign visitors who were camping switched on the BBC news. We heard that the first dome of the Babri Masjid had been pulled down, then the second, then the third. I began to worry where we were heading as a nation."

Amte's blood pressure began to rise steadily and medication offered little help. His wife, Sadhanatai, diagnosed that it was because of the violence that had gripped many parts of India. The couple immediately decided to rush to Mumbai, which was in the grip of communal violence, rather than watch passively from the banks of the Narmada.

The next day, Baba Amte's appeal appeared in several newspapers: "I am setting out on what God may deem the last and most important pilgrimage of my life, a journey into the hearts and minds of the people of India. The blinding haze of dust raised by the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya forces me to break my self-imposed exile on the banks of the Narmada. Today, at the age of 79, I pray to God that my disobedient, broken body obey the compelling dictates of my conscience."

"My opposition to the construction of large destructive dams on the Narmada will remain to my last breath. But today I must set out to dam the enormous river of tears that the devastation in and after Ayodhya has unleashed. All that we cherished and lived by, that unassailable spirit of oneness that invigorated us, that carried this great nation through the sternest of challenges, has been delivered a deathblow. It is as if the soul of the nation had died. This spirit has to be rebuilt, renewed and revived."

Amte, accompanied by Sadhanatai, was aghast at seeing the intense violence in Mumbai and thought of settling in Behrampada to set an example: "My mission to Bombay is not for a week or two. It is a mission to get the silent majority to listen to the promptings of their conscience. I am worried about the silent majority of this country. It is this majority that is my hope, my only hope. I went to them, talked to them and said that if they remain silent now they are in danger of becoming a silenced majority with fascism making a bold thrust..."

On leaving Mumbai, Baba Amte issued the following appeal: "As I leave Bombay to return to my old struggle on the banks of the Narmada I reach out and touch the silent majority through these lines once more."

In his appeal, Baba Amte urged the silent majority "to relentlessly combat, without compromise of conscience, the forces of division and hatred...to resist the evil forces in the offices, on the streets, in the courts, in the schools and factories and, most important, at home...to tear apart the fabric of lies of the rabid communalists who use history to mislead, and culture to deceive..."

Early life

Muralidhar Devdas Amte was born on December 26, 1914, to a wealthy Brahmin family in Hinganghat in Maharashtra's Wardha district.

His father owned 450 acres of good cultivable land and at the age of 14, Amte already owned a gun and used to hunt wild boar and deer. Later, he went on to own a Singer sports car, cushioned with panther skin. He was fond of cinema and was in regular correspondence with Hollywood actor Norma Shearer who became one of his first foreign donors.

In 1951, Baba Amte was given 50 acres of land by the state government to start his work with leprosy patients. He did not believe in charity but in creating a life of dignity and hard work for the patients.

Anandvan was a laboratory for his vision of a life imbued with respect and self-reliance, a model he wanted for the whole nation. Be it enabling victims of leprosy to live a life of dignity, or supporting the movement of those displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam, or the Lok Biradari projects for adivasis, his actions always spoke eloquently for themselves.

Source: Infochange