When did Mahatma Gandhi become famous? If you go by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then it was only after a movie released on Gandhi.

Speaking to a news channel, PM Modi said, “Mahatma Gandhi was a big personality. It was our responsibility that the world must have known more about him in the last 75 years. But nobody knew him. It was only after the release of the film Gandhi that the world became curious about him.”

The movie that the Prime Minister is referring to is probably the 1982- film called Gandhi by Richard Attenborough starring Hollywood-actor Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Sure, the movie was popular, but many have called out the Prime Minister for suggesting that Gandhi was a relatively unknown entity till then. 

Mahatma Gandhi, fondly called as Bapu ji and known as the ‘Father of the Nation’, was bestowed the title ‘Saint Gandhi’ in 1930 by the TIME magazine. That year, the Magazine declared him as ‘Person of the year’. Nelson Mandela, the first democratically elected President of South Africa, in 1999, had written that he was inspired by Gandhi’s movement in India to end racial apartheid in the country. In the essay titled “The Sacred Warrior,” Mandela wrote, “He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self." It was in 1945 when the United States dropped two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Not just Mandela, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh and Leo Tolstoy were admirers of Gandhi. One of the last letters that Tolstoy wrote was to Gandhi and it was a part of his obituary. The Dandi march led by Gandhi had made front page news in papers like the New York Times. 

Reacting to the PM’s comments, Congress shared pictures of Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to London, Switzerland and Paris in the 1930s, where he could be seen with huge crowds. “Modi is back with a new deflection. He claims that the world heard about Mahatma Gandhi only after a movie was made about him in 1982. He was the most popular leader in the world during his time. India is still known by Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi was known for his principles of Truth and Ahimsa. Try to speak the truth at least when you speak about Gandhi,” they added.

Here are a few reactions on Modi’s statement: