We have made Mohandas Gandhi untouchable. Not in the way he claimed to fight untouchability, but in the way we’ve placed him beyond critique, beyond history, beyond the messy contradictions of the man himself. His face adorns our currency, his statues our public squares, his birthday our national holiday. We invoke his name like a mantra. But when did reverence become wilful blindness?
The Gandhi we refuse to see is the one who actually existed. And that Gandhi demands a reckoning.
On racism
Let’s start where Gandhi’s moral authority supposedly began: South Africa, where he developed satyagraha and fought colonial oppression. Except he didn’t fight for all the oppressed. In 1903, Gandhi wrote that “white people should be the predominating race” and described Black Africans as “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.”¹ These aren’t youthful indiscretions or mistranslations, they’re published in his own Collected Works.
When protesters toppled his statue in Ghana in 2018, when Malawi renamed a road that bore his name, they weren’t erasing history. They were finally telling the truth about it. As historians Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed document in The South African Gandhi, his worldview was soaked in colonial racism.² The man we call a prophet of universal dignity couldn’t see past the colour of African skin.
On casteism
Gandhi’s relationship with caste is perhaps his most damning contradiction. Yes, he coined the term Harijan—”Children of God”, for Dalits. How generous. How paternalistic. Meanwhile, for most of his career, he defended the varna system as natural and divinely ordained.³
B.R. Ambedkar saw through this charade. When Ambedkar fought for separate electorates to give Dalits real political power in 1932, Gandhi fasted unto death to stop him. Not to end caste, to preserve Hindu unity at Dalit expense. The Poona Pact that resulted was coercion dressed as compromise.⁴
Gandhi’s eventual call to destroy caste in the 1940s? Too little, too late, and suspiciously timed as independence approached. Ambedkar spent his life fighting a system Gandhi had spent decades defending. We built statues to the wrong man.
The “Saint” Who experimented with Young Girls
We speak carefully around this, if we speak of it at all. But there’s no delicate way to say it: in his pursuit of brahmacharya, Gandhi regularly slept naked with young women, including his teenage grandniece Manu, to “test his celibacy.”⁵
Call it spiritual experimentation. Call it asceticism. But strip away the Sanskrit and you’re left with an elderly man of immense power placing vulnerable young women in situations no ethical framework can justify. Even his grandson-biographer Rajmohan Gandhi admits the practice is “impossible to justify.”⁶
If any other public figure did this today, we’d call it what it is: abuse of power. But we make exceptions for saints, don’t we?
Political Failures We Forgive
Bhagat Singh: When the revolutionary who terrified the British faced execution in 1931, Gandhi’s intervention was tepid at best. He chose the comfort of negotiation over solidarity with those who gave their lives for freedom.⁷ India’s youth haven’t forgotten, even if we’ve airbrushed it from the official story.
Partition and the Massacres: Gandhi’s final years were consumed by the communal catastrophe he couldn’t prevent, and his response to the worst atrocities reveals the most troubling dimension of his moral vision.
When the Great Calcutta Killings erupted in August 1946, Gandhi held prayer meetings and called for peace. Noble enough. But when organized massacres targeted Hindus in Noakhali later that year, Gandhi’s four-month “peace mission” there exposed a deeply problematic approach to victimhood.
Walking barefoot through devastated villages, Gandhi reportedly told Hindu women facing abduction and sexual violence to “learn how to die” or commit suicide to avoid dishonor. To survivors of the massacres, he said: “quit or die.”⁸ᵃ Read that again. The prophet of ahimsa counseled suicide over resistance, death over survival. This wasn’t non-violence, it was surrender dressed as spiritual purity, demanding victims shoulder the moral burden of their own persecution.
Then came the revealing part: Gandhi quickly pivoted from Noakhali to Bihar, where retaliatory violence against Muslims had erupted, reportedly at the request of the very Muslim League leaders whose followers had orchestrated the Noakhali massacres.⁸ᵇ Critics saw a pattern: selective application of non-violence, harsher standards for Hindu victims, accommodation for their persecutors.
The violence continued despite his presence. Muslim leaders boycotted his meetings. Hindu refugees fled East Bengal by the thousands, their communities shattered. Gandhi’s strategy of moral force collapsed when it mattered most, leaving a million dead and ten million displaced across Partition.⁸ His final fast demanding payments to Pakistan in 1948 enraged Hindus and changed nothing. Within days, he was assassinated.
The Village Fantasy: Gandhi wanted an India of spinning wheels and village republics, rejecting industrialization and modern medicine as corruptions. Noble? Perhaps. Practical? Nehru knew better.⁹ Had we followed Gandhi’s economic vision, we’d have condemned millions to poverty in the name of purity. Sometimes saints make terrible policymakers.
The Hypocrite’s Medicine
When Kasturba fell ill, Gandhi refused her penicillin, adhering to his principles of natural healing. She died in 1944. When he contracted malaria, Gandhi took quinine.¹⁰
Consistency, apparently, was negotiable when it was his own life at stake.
Why This Matters Now ?
We don’t need to destroy Gandhi to understand him. But we do need to stop sanctifying him. Joseph Lelyveld called him “an inspiration and a disappointment, a beacon and a puzzle.”¹¹ That’s closer to the truth than any statue can capture.
The real danger isn’t criticizing Gandhi, it’s the nationalism that treats criticism as blasphemy. When we make historical figures into gods, we lose the capacity to learn from their mistakes. We inherit their contradictions without examining them.
Gandhi achieved extraordinary things. He also believed and did indefensible things. Both are true. Both matter. And until we can hold both truths at once, we’re not honouring history, we’re worshipping mythology.
The Mahatma is dead. Perhaps it’s time we buried the myth and faced the man.
References
- CWMG (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi), Vol. 2: Gandhi’s Indian Opinion editorials, 1903.
- Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford University Press, 2015).
- Gandhi, Harijan, various editions (1930s writings on varna).
- B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936); Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s India.
- Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1956).
- Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, The Father, The Mahatma (1995).
- Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (1989).
- Ian Talbot & Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (2009). 8a. Multiple historical sources document Gandhi’s controversial statements in Noakhali, including discussions on BBC News and academic analyses of the 1946 riots. 8b. Historical accounts of Gandhi’s movements between Noakhali and Bihar in 1946-47, documented in partition historiography.
- Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India (1946).
- Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (2011).
- Ibid.
About The Author
BJP has made Gandhi irrelevant.