Brand Gandhi is about to get bigger on the global stage. As many as 114 UN member-countries joined hands on Monday to support India’s resolution to declare Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday on October 2 as the ‘International Day of Non-Violence’.
The move to get the international community to pay tribute to Gandhi’s ideology was a follow-up to the Satyagraha conference organised by the Congress early this year and a subsequent campaign launched by the government.
Speaking at the conference, titled ‘Peace, Non-Violence and Empowerment — Gandhian Philosophy in the 21st Century’, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had called for steps to get the Mahatma’s birthday marked as the International Day of Non-Violence.
Anand Sharma, minister of state for external affairs who was Sonia’s point person for the conference, welcomed the outpouring of global support to the campaign. ‘‘It’s great to see the global response to the declaration adopted at the Satyagraha conference.’’
Read More @ Indiatimes.Com’s Times of India
The idea of Ahimsa Day, International Day of Non-Violence is originally an initiative of an English class of mainly Japanese and Korean children in Paris, working on Attenborough’s film ‘Gandhi’. This proposal was taken to the 2004 Bombay WSF by Peace Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, and supported by Romila Thapar, Asma Jahangir, Noam Chomsky, K.R. Narayanan, Immanuel Wallerstein, etc. Krishna Kumar (now director NCERT) had predicted that this call will take 3 years to be properly heard…
Hard News, the Indian associate of the international French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, supported the initiative. Editor Sanjay Kapoor discussed it with Mohsina Kidwai, General Secretary of the Indian National Congress, who took it to party president Sonia Gandhi just before the January 2007 Satyagraha convention where archbishob Desmond Tutu on January 30th formally proposed that a call for an ahimsa day (not on 30th January, however, but 2nd October) be sent to the UN.
For more, search “Ahimsa Day, Shirin Ebadi” or Non-Violence Manifesto. Also see FAQ on Ahimsa Online.