As the nation celebrated its 55th Independence Day, freedom fighters yesterday recalled the past with nostalgia and wondered why Indians have forgotten Mahatma Gandhi and his path of non-violence, the man and his values responsible for attaining freedom.

Those were the years that were charged with emotion when the entire country was throbbing with the same beat to attain freedom from British rule, recalls Chunibhai Vaidya, an 85-year-old Gandhian and social worker. Talking to Gulf News over telephone from Ahmedabad where he works with the Gandhi Ashram, Vaidya said: "As a young boy I was moved by this great struggle and read about it. Many of us participated by taking part in processions, shouting slogans and singing national songs."

He remembers seeing Gandhi when he was 12 or 13 years and that made a deep impact on him. Later, he joined the Quit India Movement in 1942 and went underground to issue bulletins in Surat, Gujarat. "All my friends were arrested though, surprisingly, I was left with a warning. I left Surat and fled, wandering for months."

By the time the movement subsided, Gandhi had left a profound influence on the young mind, thus changing his course of life. "Gandhiji told us to go to the villages and work for the people. When Indian won her independence on August 15, 1947, I was in a village in Mehsana district to do social work. And then, in 1948, when Gandhiji was assassinated, all of us were numbed with shock. I was saddened that the sectarians, namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had killed a person who was revered across the world."

What kind of ideology could goad a person to violent ways, he asked. Today, the very same ideology and its proponents are having their say in Gujarat, he feels, but "rationality will not allow this to live longer".

He is disappointed and disillusioned that India has not carried the message of Gandhi to the grassroots level even as universities across the world have Gandhism as a subject. "It is our failure that Gandhians have not asserted themselves," and cites this failure for the upsurge of fundamentalism which is presently posing a challenge to the Indian Constitution. "Though the sectarian Jamat-e-Islami groups may not be able to do much, the Hindutva forces could carry the country on the wrong path and at the same time mislead the world."

To Vaidya, the present way of Hindutva thinking can harm the entire world. Yet, he hopes that the intelligence of humanity will eventually prevail.

Another freedom fighter in Mumbai, Kisan Mehta, also echoes the same kind of disappointment and confesses that the nostalgia of the past has gone. "We fought for freedom so that we could improve the lives of our people and wanted to take development to the most needy sections of our society," he says.

Unfortunately, the disparities between the rich and poor have widened and describes the hard-won freedom as turning into slavery "as we have become a colony of the U.S. India was the largest exporter of textiles in the Fifties and now we are importing these goods. With competition from China, Indian industry is breaking down."

Mehta, who is fully involved in the Save Bombay Committee, says it is a shame that 60 per cent of the city's population live in slums. "It is a shame when we hear of cases of children dying of malnutrition when the Indian Constitution provides for Right to Life."

At the age of 17, he was arrested during the freedom struggle and spent eight months in the Yerawada jail in Pune in 1943. When he was released, World War II had started and many businessmen found a good opportunity in providing civil supplies even as the freedom movement took a back seat.

He joined Wilson College in Marine Drive, and spent the next few years preparing an Indian National Exhibition showing the fight for independence from 1857 onwards. It was inaugurated in Ahmednagar Fort on August 15, 1947 as all the national leaders - Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and others - had spent the last days imprisoned in that fort. His proud moments were when "Panditji inaugurated my exhibition in Bhopal and Madras even as the exhibition was taken all round the country and to Pakistan, too."

During May and June 1947, he and his wife, also a freedom fighter, travelled with the exhibition in Pakistan "where we were welcomed with affection and invited to people's homes. It was also a time of sorrow as all of us, as brothers, felt we would be separated by Partition. Even today we are in touch with social groups in Karachi and Lahore as they are interested in our solid waste management projects."

He says the tragedy of Partition was mostly felt in Punjab where there was a build-up of violence.