With Baba Amte's passing, India has lost someone who dedicated nearly half a century to the treatment of leprosy patients, and who also set up hospitals and educational institutions, mostly to treat and benefit the under-privileged. Baba Amte was also a tireless social campaigner, one of the issues on which he felt strongly being the controversy-ridden Narmada dam. On the passing of such a titan, some questions arise.First and foremost, why does leprosy remain so widespread in India? Nearly two-thirds of all new leprosy cases in the world (the disease is prevalent in nine countries) are in India; the number of new cases in a year totals about 300,000. That is a smaller number than it used to be, and there has certainly been progress in tackling the spread of the disease. Indeed, this very success has resulted in a lowering of the priority attached to the treatment of leprosy patients, and a reduction of the money flowing into the leprosy programme. Increasingly, treatment and care have been integrated into the general medical system. All this may be sensible and logical, but the total number of patients still runs into many millions. And though the treatment of leprosy is simple, and early detection remains crucial, the general medical system is not coping with the level of success required. That makes private initiative, by people like Baba Amte, important "" especially because of the need to treat the social stigmatisation of the disease as well as the rehabilitation of leprosy patients who may have lost the use of their fingers and toes, on both of which Baba Amte's Anandvan placed emphasis.Second, in the death of Baba Amte, has India lost its last Gandhian of consequence? Perhaps, and it had to happen someday, because post-Independence India has not been a very Gandhian country and it is no surprise therefore that it has not given birth to genuine Gandhians. Arguably, the last true Gandhians were born in the decade between 1910 and 1920. The people of that generation saw Gandhi in action when they were in their teens and, like other teenagers through history, they were hooked for life. It took a special sort of what would today be described as attitude, to be a genuine Gandhian. This was because Gandhi demanded that you do not ask others to do what you yourself will not or cannot do. In his autobiography, he wrote about the woman who came to him and asked that he tell her son not to eat so much gur. Gandhiji asked her to come back after seven days. She did, and he asked her son as bidden. As she was leaving, she asked Gandhi why he had asked her to come after seven days for such a simple thing. "Because," said Gandhi, "I too was addicted to gur."Baba Amte's passing provides an opportunity for Indians to reflect on the essence of Gandhi. Importantly, he provided the benchmarks for social and private conduct. He didn't expect everyone to attain those benchmarks, but the very existence of those benchmarks provided people with something against which they could measure themselves. And, as Gandhi often said, trying to get there was as good as getting there. On that reckoning, Baba Amte scored, as it were, a century in both innings: he tried to get there and he got there. Few Indians can make that claim. Gandhi and genuine Gandhians like Baba Amte fulfilled the essential Kantian criterion for goodness, which is that the only thing genuinely good in the world is goodwill. Everything else, said Emanuel Kant the German philosopher, fails to measure up.
