Retracing Gandhi's steps

Page 4 of 5 -- Then she returned to her time-stopped world, guarded by near-deafness, fading eyesight, and bad legs that confine her to the bed. She sang a protest hymn common among marchers of her day, seemingly oblivious to the conversations around her.

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When asked about the 2002 riots, Rajeshbai Patel, who is Hindu, shrugged. The attacks against Muslims, Patel said, were tit for tat, payback for the killing of the Hindus on the train.

Three blocks away, on a shaded corner, a small group of Muslim men, among only 100 in this town of 11,000, declined to discuss modern Hindu-Muslim relations. A teenager wearing the traditional Muslim dress of a flat brown cap and long shirt left for prayer at a nearby mosque. Another man explained in a whisper: Were local Hindus to overhear the conversation, they would attack the Muslims as they slept that night. There had been no violence in Ras during the 2002 riots, but perception, at least, trumped reality.

On the road to the mosque, a plaque on a doorway noted that on March 19, 1930, Gandhi had stopped for midday rest at the community hall before continuing toward Dandi. The entry foyer led to an empty yard. The old building had been razed. Only its brick foundation remained.

The next day, Tushar Gandhi took his own midday rest in a leafy courtyard in the village of Kareli, where a man sang out ''Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare," as he massaged marchers' feet.

Tushar Gandhi is a big man, with broad shoulders and a full belly that casts a long, flowing shirt before him as he walks. He has thick black hair and a patchy beard. He is quick with e-mail and a cellphone. Yet in a conversation interrupted only to receive the greetings of well-wishing passersby, Gandhi the great-grandson played a familiar role: Look from the outside, push from the inside.

He told how several temples have opened recently with Mahatma Gandhi as the central deity, and agreed that Gandhi may one day be seen, like Jesus or Buddha, as the founder of a religion.

''It's worthless," Tushar Gandhi said. ''People are making him a god and then saying, 'What he did was because he was a god, so we can never be able to do that.' "

Tushar Gandhi decried modern religious divisions and a society in which executives live in luxury high-rises while millions live in shanties in the shadows.

''The emancipation effort hasn't reached the results that Bapu wanted," Gandhi said. ''Electoral politics have created a lot of mischief in India. The famous divide-and-rule doctrine of the old imperialists has been adopted by the new imperialists, who are the democratic parties."

That morning, Gandhi had led the march during a sunrise crossing of a wide estuary. Bare foot followed bare foot for more than an hour, as the marchers, toes spreading wide in slippery mud, focused on the measured progress of single steps. They climbed to a one-lane road caked at times in six inches of dust, and passed a cotton farm set a few hundred yards from the estuary's bank.   Continued...