Dr Syed A. Samee, while welcoming the speakers on behalf of the Coalition, recounted how it came to be established in 1993 in the wake of the Masjid demolition in Ayodhya, which had sent shock waves across the sub-continent and beyond, with only Professor Shukla as his co-founder. That the Coalition has burgeoned over the years beyond his expectations was a phenomenon he credited to the ever- growing number of supporters and sympathizers present as audience for the seminar.

Dr. Prabhu in his speech acknowledged Gandhi’s great contribution, which was the principle and practice of satyagraha in fighting adversaries. Formerly, it was either diplomacy or war. But Gandhi broke this bind of primitive negotiations and imaginatively came up with something infinitely more humane. Gandhi also synthesized in his person the ethical and the political, he said.

Before making his formal presentation, Professor Kapoor made special mention of the eminent co-panelist Reverend Lawson whose lifelong work for social justice for the Afro-American community has been the inspiration of so many. "It is the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that culminated in the immigration laws under which quotas were fixed for immigrants from Asia and Africa for the first time. Indians would not be in the US but for that struggle waged by the Blacks.

Dr. Vinay Lal: Indians need to make common cause with other minority groups in the US by forging links in the networks of exchange and solidarity and hoped that this symposium was the first step in that direction…

For Gandhi, India was much more than a state with geographical boundaries. His India was a magnificent and magnanimous way of life exemplified by its harmonious accommodation of so many strands of thought, so many streams of culture. To diminish it would be too violent a desecration of Gandhi.

Reverend Lawson (a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he spent three years in Nagpur —1953-56): Gandhi’s obsession for human values made him a favorite reference manual for the Blacks struggling for social justice and against racist bigotry. How Gandhi helped to enlarge our vision is evident from the fact that many of us, due to his influence, started regarding the civil rights movement as too narrow a category of human emancipation. It was not only his method of non–violent resistance and civil disobedience that Black leaders, including Dr King, started increasingly to use towards effecting change, but also his vision of an all–encompassing compassion and camaraderie that we found so ennobling and desirable in all affairs human.

In his summation of the Gandhian legacy, Professor Shukla quoted a few lines from Mahatmajir Proti, a Bengali poem by Sukanto Bhattacharya, a communist, who died very young in the 1940s, and from an editorial by a Pakistani journalist. Bhattacharya (Written the day after Gandhi was slain): "Rokte bejechhe utsav, aaj haath dhoro Gandhi, Mone hoy, shudhu tomari moddhye aamra je benche aachhi ,Tomake peyechhi onek mrityu–uttoroner sheshe, Tomaake gorobo prachir, dhwansho-bikirno ei deshe.(A festival stirs my blood, hold my hand, Gandhi.... It seems we are alive only in you. We got you after transcending many deaths. In this devastated land we’ll make you our wall).

Mazhar Ali Khan (In an editorial entitled, Glorious Dust in the Pakistan Times, January 31, 1948): It would be hard to name any (hero) who has fallen fighting his own people to preserve the honor of a people not his own. No greater sacrifice can be rendered by a member of one people to another and no greater tribute can be paid to the supremacy of fundamental human values as opposed to passing factional squabbles....There is little hope for the world, however, if it has no use for the noblest of deaths except to make it serve as a proof of so obvious a thesis.

The people of India and indirectly the people of Pakistan...have added to their losses the most grievous loss of all — the loss of Gandhi."

Coalition for Egalitarian & Pluralist India,  552 W 12th St., San Pedro, CA 90731, USA

Under the banner of the Federation of Coimbatore District All–Muslim Organisations. 11 Muslim groups participated in the campaign that included street corner meetings, wall posters and distribution of handbills. The Federation members moved around the city in two phases on the first day, addressing people from vans and speaking out against terrorist acts.

While launching the campaign from Vincent Road in Muslim–majority Kottaimedu, the president of the JAQH, A.M. Mustafa Kamaal, exhorted members of his community to shun extremist elements and called upon members of other communities to join in the movement to restore a "permanent and lasting" peace in Coimbatore. He urged that those resorting to violence be condemned irrespective of the religion they belonged to.