Nelson Mandela, who on Monday told delegates:“In a world driven by violence and strife, Gandhi’s message of peace and nonviolence holds the key to human survival in the 21st century.”

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(By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; 12:05 PM)

NEW DELHI — The world’s nations must heed Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy and provide for all their people while keeping greed in check, India’s prime minister said Tuesday, as the country marked the 59th anniversary of the Indian icon’s assassination.

Directed at the entire world, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s call was resonant in India _ a booming country that’s minting tens of thousands of new millionaires each year but is still home to some 400 million people who live on less than a dollar a day.

“I do sincerely believe that the world cannot sustain the lifestyles of the affluent,” Singh told delegates at the close of a conference marking the centenary of Gandhi’s “satyagraha,” or nonviolent movement.

“We need a new development paradigm that caters to everyone’s need and can keep in check human greed,” he said, paraphrasing one of Gandhi’s best-know teachings.

Gandhi began his satyagraha in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Sept. 11, 1906, where he was working as a lawyer. He lived in South Africa from 1893 to 1914 when he returned to India to start the peaceful campaign that would eventually force Britain out of the subcontinent.

The spark for Gandhi’s satyagraha was a proposed law that would force Indians, brought to South Africa as indentured laborers when both countries were ruled by Britain, to carry identity documents and be fingerprinted.

In the century since, Gandhi’s doctrine of using nonviolent means to strive for justice has spread across the world, inspiring Martin Luther King Jr., South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and countless others.

Among the collection of Nobel laureates and former world leaders who attended the two-day conference in New Delhi was Nelson Mandela, who on Monday told delegates: “In a world driven by violence and strife, Gandhi’s message of peace and nonviolence holds the key to human survival in the 21st century.”

But Gandhi’s legacy in India remains ambiguous.

India’s military, at 1.1 million men and women, is one of the world’s largest, and the government is pushing to modernize its aging weaponry.

The country also has a nuclear arsenal, which many here proudly regard as being key to India’s goal of becoming a global power.

“This became a strategic compulsion for us, born out of the failure to persuade the world to abolish nuclear weapons,” the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, told the conference on Monday.

Apart from peace and nonviolence, Gandhi also preached the redemptive power of thrift _ a doctrine that at times can seem all but forgotten in today’s India.

With the economy growing on average 8.1 percent over each of the past three years, tens of millions of Indians have disposable income for the first time, and some have much more than others: The number of Indian households with yearly incomes above $225,000 is estimated to have more than doubled to 50,000 over the same period.

Gandhi was killed on Jan. 30, 1948, months after Indian won its independence, by a Hindu nationalist enraged by his message of peaceful coexistence between the country’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority.