Retracing Gandhi's steps

Page 4 of 4 -- 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.

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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.

Near a small lean-to that served as a family home during growing season, Lalita Raman, a young mother who didn't know her age, wrapped her arms in the fine cloth of her pink shawl as her husband, squatting beside her, turned a ball of cotton in his fingers, spinning a long, fine thread. When the parade had passed, Raman placed flowers around the neck of Rahul Gandhi, unaware that the Harvard-educated parliamentarian was not a blood relative of the mahatma.

Raman said she supported the Congress Party over the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose member Narendra Modi continues to serve as chief minister of Gujarat despite accusations he stoked the 2002 Hindu violence against Muslims, then did little to stop the carnage.

''When Congress ruled, sugar only cost 16 rupees [37 cents] a kilo," Raman said. ''Now it costs 20."

The sun rose toward its noontime ferocity. Raman pulled her shawl across her shoulders as she stood with her back to the rutted lane walked by the Gandhi procession.

''The road is difficult to walk on," she said. ''They've walked on it one day. Imagine walking on it every day."

The walk will continue for three more days until marchers reach the beach in Dandi. Along the way, there will be T. Venkat Ramayya, 72, son of a freedom fighter and a political activist himself, wearing worn cotton robes and floppy leather sandals, hoping the young will move again toward a more spiritual world. There will be Alka Lamba, 29, a rising star in national Congress politics, who said before pumping a fist and leading a cheer among a crowd of children in the village of Utshat, ''Gandhi never died!"

They will be there, in Dandi, at the break of dawn, most likely surrounded by a crowd of thousands near the monument that marks Mahatma Gandhi's defiant breaking of the British salt law.

They will celebrate as they have all along:

''Mahatma Gandhi! Amar rahe!"

The salt harvest will continue 5 miles south, where eight young men live in a one-room shack and each earn $1 a day raking salt from the flats. Beyond, the world will be at war, in nearby Afghanistan and Iraq, and farther, in Sudan, and Colombia. Race, class, and culture will be dividing people in cities such as Bombay, a few hours south of Dandi, and Boston, half a world away.

The Indians, from a nation where half of all people are younger than 25, will know the urgency.

They will chant to a long-dead man and his old ideas, looking, still, for a new mahatma to take them further.

Tom Haines can be reached at thaines@globe.com.