Washington, Oct. 5: Gandhi memorabilia is being lapped up by international civil servants and global institutions a year after the UN declared Gandhi Jayanti as International Day of Non-Violence.

The UN General Assembly’s unanimous decision last year is prompting world leaders to publicly invoke Gandhi and is having the same effect on decision-makers that Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi, had on the public mind world wide in 1982.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, revealed at a well-attended observance here of the International Day of Non-Violence this year that he keeps a talisman of Gandhi on a plaque in his office.

This is the first time that the World Bank has celebrated Gandhi’s legacy.

Zoellick said he got the talisman from India’s executive director to the World Bank, Dhanendra Kumar, at the time he became president of the bank in July last year.

At the UN, the General Assembly’s new president, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, keeps a bust of Gandhi in his office.

Last week, at the commemoration of Gandhi on the second International Day of Non-Violence in the plenary hall of the UN General Assembly, Father d’Escoto brought out the bust and put it up next to the podium in the General Assembly hall.

This is the first time that any likeness or image of any leader has been displayed in the General Assembly Hall in the entire history of the UN.

Zoellick, who heads one of the biggest global organisations of this century, said at the commemoration at the World Bank that in an era of large institutions, it was relevant to reflect on Gandhi’s reach and influence as an individual.

He referred to the jargon used by the bank and said it was perhaps time to return to the simple language used by Gandhi to talk about big things.

Institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation are known for their jargon such as community-driven development, poverty assessment and immiserising growth, ideas that Gandhi dealt with in language that ordinary people understood.

Contrary to the usually serious nature of Gandhi Jayanti celebrations that Indians are used to, last week’s maiden observance at the World Bank was refreshingly different.

The bank’s managing director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former finance minister of Nigeria, pointed out that Gandhi’s rimless glasses had returned to fashion while others commented on his sartorial taste.

She made Gandhi relevant to the proceedings by wondering aloud if the Mahatma would have supported the $700- billion bailout for Wall Street if he had been alive today.

“That is what I was thinking this morning,” said Okonjo-Iweala, whose job it is to assess the current global financial crisis and take decisions that are affected by the crisis. By saying so, she admitted weighing Gandhi into her decisions.

India is the largest borrower of the World Bank and it embraced Gandhi with ease when Kumar and others referred to “Isabel behn” at the commemoration: Isabel M Guerrero, the bank’s new vice-president for South Asia, was until recently its county director for India based in New Delhi.

The bank’s commemoration of Gandhi came a week after Zoellick met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York during a period of significant turnaround from a controversial phase when it stopped loans to India’s health sector in a widely trumpeted campaign against corruption.

Sources in Singh’s delegation said the meeting that was to last only 20 minutes extended to 50 minutes.

The Prime Minister probed the bank’s prospective involvement in his pet idea of the second Green Revolution in India, for which he has also been seeking American involvement.

Kumar said at the non-violence day observance that the proposal for the commemoration was a spin-off from the bank’s celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday.

The UN General Assembly president’s official biography lists Gandhi as an inspiration in his life. Father d’Escoto was Nicaragua’s foreign minister in the 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi initiated a special relationship with that country.

He also keeps two pictures of the Mahatma in his office at the UN headquarters.