— PHOTO: PTI

MEETING OF MINDS: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with Nobel laureate and proponent of micro-credit, Muhammed Yunus, in New Delhi on Tuesday. Mr. Yunus, who had come to participate in the conference on Gandhian philosophy, earlier said those seeking alms should be brought into the social fold. They should be given small loans to help them become entrepreneurs.

NEW DELHI: The Congress on Tuesday decided to issue a mission statement-of-sorts on the two-day Sathyagraha conclave to secure for it the mediatory role occupied by the Indian National Congress in domestic and world polity in its early years.Announcing this after the end of all sessions, conference spokesman Devendra Dwivedi said the conclave was a testimony to the fact that Gandhian ideology was alive across the world within small communities.

Speakers at Tuesday's sessions on "Dialogue among peoples and cultures" and "Towards a nuclear weapons-free and non-violent world order" dwelt on the relevance of Gandhian philosophy in today's world but stressed that political will was necessary to make it work, especially to usher in a culture of peace.

Need of the hour

Summing up the conference, Union Youth Affairs and Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, who doubled up as Rapporteur General, said the conclave had "reiterated the fundamental Gandhian truth that the answer to violence does not lie in violence; that hatred should not be countered by hatred; that the moral imperative must prevail; that right ends can be obtained only by right means; that dialogue not militarisation is the need of the hour; that eradication of poverty and service of the poor through education and effective empowerment ought to be the priority goals of economic policy; that there is no clash of civilisations but only a pressing need for the celebration of diversity, pluralism and mutual tolerance..."

The right moment

Earlier, presenting a paper in the session on nuclear weapons-free world, Mr. Aiyar said the prevailing scenario of a world without acute rivalries among nuclear weapons states was the right moment to initiate an earnest dialogue under the aegis of the United Nations at the Conference on Disarmament based on the key concepts of the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for universal and non-discriminatory nuclear disarmament. Even as there was a general acknowledgement of the relevance of Gandhiji in the new millennium, the view from within and overseas was that new mechanisms would have to be evolved to put his ideology into practice.

A paper circulated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of the Kingdom of Morocco said: "Gandhi's thought ought not to be encapsulated in a given Gandhiism that would be presented in the form of a self-contained doctrine. Gandhi does not offer us answers to be used repeatedly; rather he invites us to ask essential questions whose stake bears on the very meaning of our existence and of our history.

"And just like he has tried to do it in his own time, it is everyone's responsibility to invent here and now the best answers possible."

Superfluities

From the custodians of the Phoenix Settlement in South Africa — where Gandhiji first gave the call for Satyagraha — the message was that peace and non-violence would remain "superfluities" as long as human rights were violated. Mewa Ramgobin, chairperson, Phoenix Settlement Trust, said the developing world should challenge the prevailing world order and ask why the WTO, "a multi-lateral system, ostensibly fair and rules based, continues to have preferential trade practices; why the IMF and World Bank lack adequate representation of the developing countries and why the reform of the U.N. Security Council is so vehemently resisted by those in whom the veto is reposed."

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