First posted October 3, 2020 India’s greatest leader had moved to a village called Segaon two years earlier. He had renamed it Sevagram or a village of service. He built an ashram, a commune which was home to “many a fateful decision which affected the destiny of India”. Gandhi had moved in with his wife, Kasturba,… Read More Soutik Biswas: Rare photos of the last ten years of Gandhi’s life
First posted May 24, 2014 On May 27, 2014 it will be 50 years since the passing of Jawaharlal Nehru. Can one ever imagine him instigating or conniving in a pogrom? Or becoming a plaything in the hands of corporate capital? Or spending on a general election amounts bearing comparison with American Presidential elections? – Anil… Read More Anil Nauriya: Gandhi on secular law and state (2003)
First posted June 15, 2020 NB: Since the Black Lives Matter movement, some intellectuals have begun (yet again) their campaign to slander Gandhiji as a ‘racist’. An interview published in The Caravan in January 2019 reiterated this. Much can be said about the prejudices of various leaders, and I have appended some comments beneath that interview. Leaving India… Read More Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”, September 1958
Final immersion ceremony of the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi at Allahabad on February 12, 1948. Credit: Photo Division, GOI Pavan Kulkarni Five months after India’s independence, on January 14, 1948, three members of the Hindu Mahasabha – Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge, an arms dealer regularly selling weapons to the Mahasabha – arrived… Read More How Savarkar Escaped Conviction For Gandhi’s Assassination
First posted Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2014 NB: This article was written for an edited volume on contemporary terrorism, more specifically, terror in the name of Hindutva. I disagree with the habit of approaching terrorism with a prefix, but nevertheless wrote it, in order precisely to make my point more explicitly. It was completed more than… Read More A matter of time
First posted January 18, 2017 Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan In November 1933, following his fast against a separate electorate on caste lines and the subsequent political settlement known as the Poona Pact, (Mohandas Karamchand) Gandhi embarked on a year-long nationwide campaign against untouchability. Thanks to his extensive travels across the country, he got… Read More Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economy
First posted August 27, 2016 Oh what a tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive Sir Walter Scott The Supreme Court recently took up a PIL challenging a statement made by Rahul Gandhi alleging that the RSS killed Mahatma Gandhi. (Rahul Gandhi was then reported to have amended his statement, and the RSS demanded an apology. A comment sent… Read More The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
Pheroze L. Vincent Former students of the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya (SPV), the capital’s crib for children of liberal parents, have written to the management in protest against a scheduled visit by Union home minister Amit Shah to the school on Monday to commemorate Vallabhbhai Patel’s 147th birth anniversary. In an email to principal Anuradha Joshi… Read More Sardar Patel Vidyalaya alumni oppose Amit Shah visit
First posted October 1, 2012 Even though India’s British rulers considered him a dangerous anarchist and repeatedly put him in jail, Gandhi always proclaimed his friendship for the British people. When he was in London for the Round Table Conference in 1931, he decided to visit the mill areas of Lancashire. He was warned by the police not… Read More Gandhi visits the poor people of England in 1931
Dilip Simeon First posted April 11, 2017 Lecture presented at the Champaran Satyagrah centenary celebrations, Patna, April 10, 2017 A pdf of the lecture is available here. A fuller argument on satyagrah and nihilism may be read here The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it: Mary Catherine Bateson Nihilism doesn’t stand… Read More The search for new time: Ahimsa in an age of permanent war
After the truth-shower 