On 20 April 2017, Professor Rajmohan Gandhi addressed a public meeting at the Kelvin Lecture Theatre, IET, in Westminster. In this booklet, we reprint his speech and also edited highlights from the three introductory statements.

‘We the people of India have, at times, sharply negative opinions about our neighbours… but not knowledge about them’ – Rajmohan Gandhi

Professor Gandhi is a noted writer, thinker and peace-builder, and a former president of Initiatives of Change International. After studying journalism on The Scotsman, Edinburgh, as a young man, Rajmohan Gandhi returned to India in 1957 where he was expected to become a journalist like his father, Devadas Gandhi, editor of the Hindustan Times. Instead he devoted himself to building a national team for tackling corruption and communal tensions, a task, he says, that continues to need attention.

As part of his campaign ‘to build a clean, strong, united India’, Rajmohan led a ‘march on wheels’ from the southern tip of India to New Delhi in the north, holding mass rallies wherever he and his team went. Following the response, he and his colleagues launched a national newsweekly, entitled Himmat (‘Courage’) in 1964.

In the 1960s, he and his colleagues established Asia Plateau, the conference centre of Initiatives of Change in Panchgani, western India. This has become the venue for training programmes in effective leadership for people in business, industry, voluntary groups, public sector organizations and government services.

www.rajmohangandhi.com