messages of support

"The stories of freedom movements throughout time and around the world  – their successes and failures – are a goldmine of experiences to tap in these challenging times. A deep feeling of oneness between Indian, African, African American freedom struggles, and anti-fascist movements around the world, drew Jawaharlal Nehru and my grandfather, Paul Robeson, into a lifelong friendship in the 1930s and inspired both families. The efforts of Vishwabandhu Magazine to ensure peace and democracy in India will surely spark new ways of thinking globally and help illuminate a path for many peoples and nations around the world."

Susan Robeson, Writer; producer; director of Robeson Family Trust

​

"Today, humanity faces several existential threats; climate change, pandemics and even the prospect of nuclear war. Our current mechanisms of international cooperation and dialogue appear totally inadequate to meet these challenges, which require a new form of communication that transcends nationalist and sectional limitations. The Vishwabandhu initiative, which focuses on civilisational dialogues aimed at equity and welfare for all human beings, is one such small but welcome response. Let us wish this venture all success!"

Ravi Bhoothalingam, Founder and Chairman of Manas Advisory 

“Sending Greetings to the founders, writers, and readers of ‘Vishwabandhu Magazine’ as well as support for its success from Philadelphia, PA USA — where the grass is not greener on my side of the Pacific nor Atlantic.  I join many other comrades in welcoming this new and sorely needed web magazine for the purposes of expressing Ideas, relaying the News, and providing Discourse on and about ‘things that matter.’ I know all who cherish Peace, Love, Freedom, Truth, and Humanity will support Vishwabandhu’s success.”
​
Catherine Blunt, Educator and Community Activist — Member of the Saturday Free School​

"I feel encouraged that young persons across the continents are getting together to start a journal ‘Vishwabandhu’. It should provide a platform for intercivilisational dialogue.

We are passing through critical times. 

In the midst of active hostilities, nuclear superpowers are referring to nuclear options in a casual way. That was not the case only thirty years ago. All international dialogue for reducing the nuclear arsenal stands suspended for decades. The UN looks like a helpless bystander.

The real danger of climate-warming and the disastrous consequences that it is bringing in its train are sought to be fought within the systemic framework which has brought them about in the first place.

Globalization, which has accelerated the existential threat to the survival of the planet, has exposed the double-talk: it only means seamless integration of markets across political and geographical divisions. Humanity has little place in it.

Dialectics of history has produced a challenge to the system from within. The unipolarity is being challenged, although the nature of this challenge and the alternative system that it will shape into is not clear.

For the alternative to emerge, the vast masses of people affected adversely have to make a beginning. The social, political and economic struggles they are waging at the nation - state level need to be set in a planetary context. The objective clearly is not merely survival of humanity and its cooperative co- existence with nature. It should be to assure dignity and full opportunities for self- development to every individual.

The task is difficult as it is inspiring. That it has acquired a sense of immediacy casts a special responsibility on the youth. 

The task calls for a creative approach where struggles hone the analysis and analysis helps sharpen the struggles.

The first requirement is that we rise above narrow bounds. Intercivilisational dialogue that "Vishwabandhu" aims at is a right first step, a timely initiative.

I would be glad to associate myself with it and contribute my mite."

In Solidarity,
S.P. Shukla, former Finance Secretary and Ex-Ambassador to GATT, India.

"I feel honoured to be invited to send a message on the launching of the journal Vishwabandhu, inspired by thoughts and writings of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. His name had become familiar in the early 20th century to many Indians both in South Africa and India through, among other sources, Indian Opinion,  M.K. Gandhi's South Africa-based journal.     

Dr. Du Bois, the United States-based pioneer of the Pan-African movement, who would later spend his days in Ghana, was an outstanding scholar and man of  courage whose ideas illumined both his age and ours.  He wielded vast intellectual influence especially over activists against racial prejudice, advancing the cause of human equality and dignity.

Gandhi's personal contacts among leading African-American personalities included Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. He had been repeatedly referred to in Gandhi‘s Indian Opinion in South Africa. In 1911 Indian Opinion carried laudatory references to Dr. Du Bois and his contribution. Gandhi, for his part, had been referred to in the pages of Dr. Du Bois‘ journal, Crisis, since at least the early nineteen twenties.

Leading Indians and African-Americans kept themselves abreast of developments in each other's lands instancing, in a way, the implicit civilisational unity that both Dr. Du Bois and Gandhi would come to be associated with. For example, Dr. Du Bois and the Harlem radical Hubert Harrison had condemned the events surrounding the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, India, which occurred in  April 1919.

Dr. Du Bois' journal, Crisis, was the New York-based organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In March 1922, the month in which Gandhi was to be arrested, Crisis carried a five-page long appreciative article on Gandhi. The Crisis article referred to the massacre in Amritsar in 1919 and set out in detail the content of Gandhi‘s non-cooperation and boycott movement. Crisis went on to observe that an  "... outstanding factor in Mr Gandhi‘s program is the idea and practice of non-violence or passive resistance. Like the principle of non-co-operation, it kills without striking its adversary."[1]. Years later, writing in 1957, Dr. Du Bois was to recall that "(w)ith the First World War came my first knowledge of Gandhi" [2]. Referring to the NAACP, Dr DuBois wrote, "I remember the discussion we had on inviting Gandhi to visit America and how we were forced to conclude that this land was not civilized enough to receive a coloured man as an honoured guest." Gandhi sent Dr. Du Bois a "love message" for Crisis on May 1, 1929.

In the 1940s Dr DuBois made a reference to Gandhi‘s fast in jail in February-March 1943, which is "setting four hundred millions of men aquiver and may yet rock the world" while suggesting that such methods would probably not work in the West. 

At the beginning of 1945, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois criticised the British colonial tendency repeatedly to detain leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. Syed Mahmud [3]. 

Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois referred to Gandhi in the context of resolving racial conflict especially in the American South, "If we .... solve our antithesis; great Gandhi lives again. If we cannot civilise the South, or will not even try, we continue in contradiction and riddle." [4].

He wrote that it may well be that real human equality and brotherhood in the United States will come only under the leadership of another Gandhi [5]. 

I am sure that the new publication initiative being started in the last week of August 2022, which while marking the death anniversary of Dr. Du Bois, is informed by his ideals, would meet  the expectations of its inspired movers."

Anil Nauriya, New Delhi, 27 August 2022
Anil Naurya is a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India, a historian and writer.

[1] 'Gandhi and India', Crisis, New York, March 1922
[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Gandhi Marg, Bombay, July 1957, Vol 1, Number 3, p.175
[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1945, p. 32
[4] W. E. B. Du Bois, 'Will the Great Gandhi Live Again?', National Guardian, February 11, 1957, in David Levering Lewis (ed.), W E B DuBois: A Reader, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1995, p. 360 
[5] W. E. B. Du Bois, Gandhi Marg, Bombay, July 1957, Vol 1, Number 3, p.177