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Always a lone and little understood voice, despite the evidence of a massive reverential following, Gandhi seems no better understood a whole six decades after his assassination. Behind his calm and detached exterior, he was all his life a restless questioning soul, warring with himself and with the outside world. He has since refused to lie restfully in the pages of history books.

Gandhi requires an engagement that is empathetic, critical, self-reflexive, and unhampered by prevailing notions of the possible. Because he speaks a language that we, schooled into a certain universalist notion of rationalism, begin at some point to find incomprehensible, alien and even obscurantist, it is imperative to understand him in his terms. Even if, having so understood him, we end up rejecting him.  One of the best ways to understand him is through personal engagement. Personal in the sense of one’s direct engagement with him, and also in the sense of keeping a vigilant eye on oneself during that engagement.

The best on Gandhi, historian V.N. Datta says, is Gandhi. But Gandhi, with his deceptive simplicity, is also elusive, mystical, unpredictable, and unapologetically contradictory.

I have had a relationship with Gandhi that began – so I remember – with me, as a six-year old, crying inconsolably and going without food with the rest of my family as the news of his assassination reached our small town that winter evening. That osmotic veneration gave way to irritated rejection when I reached the college. Years of reading and reflection have since brought me to a point where I start with faith in Gandhi and only later, in some instances, end up with a critical stance.

Surely this is how that votary of Truth – with a capital T – would have liked to be approached. I remember having read – I forget where – the account of a foreign lady who was staying at Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha. One evening, inclined to take a short cut, she decided to walk through Gandhi’s room. As she entered the room, she got the feeling that Gandhi was asleep. So she started tip-toeing. Gandhi noticed her and asked what she was doing. Hearing the lady’s explanation, Gandhi remarked impishly: ‘Make sure, when you write about me, that you don’t tip-toe to my memory.

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The real tragedy for Gandhi, of which other developments were mere symptoms, was the fact – so he saw it – that satyagraha had at no point been part of the Indian freedom struggle. He realised, as he strove to heal the violence all around, that he had merely laboured under the illusion of having led a unique non-violent struggle. For him there was no greater force in the world than the non-violence of the brave. Opposed to it was the non-violence of the weak and the hypocrite. That is what had been practised during the freedom struggle.

As Gandhi explained at his prayer meeting on 4 July 1947:

Ahimsa never goes along with the weak. It [the non-violence of the weak] should, therefore, be called not ahimsa but passive resistance…. Passive resistance is a preparation for active armed resistance. The result is that the violence that had filled people’s hearts has abruptly come out.

Equally distressing for him was the fact that even the violence that had filled people’s hearts was the violence of the impotent. If there were violence, he would rather have the violence of the courageous and the strong. Instead, he lamented: ‘We have become such rogues that we have started fearing one another.’

Shattering as this realisation was, Gandhi needed to know how he could so completely misjudge the non-violence of the Indian freedom struggle: ‘How could I persuade myself that ahimsa could be a weapon of cowards?’ He came up with an explanation that our secular sensibility might find specious. But to Gandhi, believing that he danced to the divine tune – ‘If this is delusion, I treasure it’ – the explanation was impeccable. He said: ‘When God needs someone to get a particular work done, He renders him foolish. I remained blind all these years.’

Now that he had got back his sight, he could see that ahimsa was at the root of his differences with his ‘intimate friends’ within the Indian National Congress: ‘Ahimsa is my dharma. It was never the dharma of the Congress. The Congress accepted ahimsa only as a matter of policy…. The Congress has the right to change a policy which it no longer requires. Dharma is altogether different. It is eternal. It can never change.’

It was, however, not only as dharma – an overriding duty – that Gandhi backed ahimsa. He was convinced, despite all the difficulties of practising it, that this was also the only straight and clear path for our unhappy world. Referring to the queries he had received from different parts of the world whether, in the face of unceasing bloodshed in his own country, he would still offer the message of non-violence, Gandhi said: ‘I may have gone bankrupt, but ahimsa can never be bankrupt.’ ‘Violence’, he insisted, ‘can only be effectively met by non-violence.’ For, retaliatory violence can only result in an ever-renewing spiral of violence.

But human beings are so inured to thinking in terms of the immediate and the short-term that they fail to note the colossal cumulative damage done by their unquestioned faith in the efficacy of violence. The same unconcern for the long-term makes them impervious to the working, and ultimate efficacy, of non-violence. In an editorial on ‘How to Combat Violence’, Gandhi wrote:

… the weapon of violence, even if it was the atom bomb, became useless, when matched against true non-violence. That only a few understand how to wield this mighty weapon is true. It requires a lot of understanding and strength of mind. It is unlike what is needed in military schools. The difficulty one experiences in meeting himsa with ahimsa arises from weakness of mind. (Tendulkar, VII, 404.)

Scholars familiar with the details of the freedom struggle may feel sceptical about Gandhi’s explanation. They may argue that the Congress had never accepted non-violence as a creed. If anything, it had resisted Gandhi’s attempt to make faith in non-violence an essential feature of its constitution. Gandhi could not possibly have forgotten that history when he complained of the hypocrisy of the non-violent resisters. Yet, there is an element of truth in Gandhi’s lament. As early as 1920, when it agreed to launch the Non-co-operation movement under Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress had ‘adopted’ the policy of ‘progressive non-violent non-co-operation’. The same year the Congress had defined its ‘creed’ as ‘the attainment of Swarajya by all legitimate and peaceful means’. Besides, no chance was missed to proclaim the moral superiority of the Indian struggle. Indeed, the myth continues to inform not just popular remembrance but also the nationalist historiography of modern India. The self-projection of the Indian National Movement under the Congress is one of a morally charged non-violent struggle.

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The communal cruelty that Gandhi was seeking to eliminate from people’s hearts and minds was connected with the country’s partition. His first response was the famous declaration that the country’s partition would take place over his dead body. This has since passed into popular lore as a double-edged weapon. The country was divided. And the man of truth survived. Many, in India, felt betrayed. They still do. Why did Gandhi not undertake a fast unto death? It was, it is believed, a cause worth dying for. Because he did not stake his life at that crucial juncture, he was accused, and still is, of having brought about the partition.

The belief that Gandhi betrayed the nation is significant. It highlights a fundamental cleavage between Gandhi’s concerns and the concerns of those feeling betrayed on account of his not fasting for the country’s unity. The betrayed are moved by an overriding patriotic/nationalist attachment with the idea of undivided India, Akhand Bharat. They could not, and cannot, get over a fundamental distinction between nationalism and communalism that had come to form part of received wisdom. Pakistan, in this division, marks the unfortunate culmination of Muslim communalism or separatism, not the triumphal fruition of a rival nationalism. Even the best of Indian scholarship carries traces of those unexamined patriotic/nationalist assumptions. It can, as a result, think of Partition only in terms of a tragedy on account of the holocaust that accompanied it. It has no notion of the great hijrat that, for all that tragedy, Pakistan was for so many.

What is needed is a complex understanding of Pakistan as a conflicted phenomenon, one simultaneously fulfilling and tragic. What that understanding would be like can be imagined from Intizar Husain’s novel, Basti, and short story, ‘Ek Bin Likhi Razmiya’ (‘An Unwritten Epic’).

Gandhi’s vision, it may be admitted, had no room for any celebration of Pakistan. Even after accepting the reality of Pakistan, he accepted it only as a separate ‘state’, not as a nation. For him both India and Pakistan were two ‘states’. In fact, he even admonished Mountbatten for using the expression ‘two nations’. Gandhi’s concern was not about retaining – no matter what it cost – the existing, and supposedly inviolable, geographical limits of ‘Mother India’. His primary anxiety related to the happiness of people in the two political units.

Partition, Gandhi remained convinced, was wrong. With characteristic perspicacity, he warned that partition was no solution to the problem it was intended to solve. In an interview given a month before the official announcement about the creation of Pakistan, he was asked by a special correspondent of the Reuter’s: ‘Is the communal division of India inevitable? Will such division solve the communal problem?’ Gandhi replied: ‘Personally, I have always said “No”, and I say “No” even now, to both these questions.’ (Mahatma, VII, 388-89.)

However, the moment the creation of Pakistan was announced with the consent of all the concerned parties – his own Congress party and beloved colleagues Nehru and Patel included – Gandhi decided to accept it. He stood all by himself: ‘Who will listen to me? You don’t listen to me, the Musalmans have left me, and I cannot make the Congress accept my view fully. So let’s accept whatever has happened.’

When he opposed the idea of Pakistan, Gandhi was convinced that popular opinion was with him. He soon realised it was not. He also realised that people could not be compelled to live together. If compulsion was attempted, Pakistan would enter people’s hearts: ‘And when that happens, we will in no way be ready to live peacefully with our brothers, and Hindustan will not be able to remain free.’ Besides, he could not be so presumptuous as to believe that the Congress should in everything act at his behest. ‘Whatever I am’, he said a day after accepting Pakistan, ‘I am after all a servant of the Congress. If it chooses to act madly, must I respond madly? Must I decide to end my life [by going on what, in the circumstances, would be a Satanic fast] simply to prove that mine is the sole right position? I wish to assail the intelligence of you all, the Congress, the Muslims, and Jinnah Saheb, and take possession of their hearts.’

With the same sagacity that prompted him to accept Pakistan, while believing it in principle to be wrong, Gandhi quickly turned his efforts to neutralising its likely negative effects. Hoping to keep the people together even after the creation of Pakistan, he wanted to make sure that geographical division did not divide people’s hearts. Though – and in that lay the real complication and Gandhi’s desperation – he also realised that geographical division had become inevitable because people’s hearts were divided.

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Gandhi died a sad, disillusioned, lonely man, believing himself to have been a failure. But his faith remained unshaken in the verities he had discovered – discovered, because he believed them to have always been there. He continued to practice them till, literally, his last breath. Defying old age, indifferent health and desertion by his closest associates, he desperately sought to drag his people out of the hell of collective insanity.

Finally, Gandhi knew that the things he suggested were difficult. But he also believed that they were really simple. Employing the analogy of Euclidean geometry, he insisted that in life also a straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is the path of truth. That straight path appears difficult because we have got used to the vicious circle of prevarication, hypocrisy, blind self-interest, and the illusory expectation that we could obtain quick results by breaking the irrevocable causal chain that binds ends and means.

An impossible simplicity was Gandhi’s aim. For himself as well as for the world around.

He did not succeed then. He has not succeeded since. The great gambler never quit the table. He is still at it.

Gandhi, to cite V.N. Datta again, belongs to posterity. Will posterity ever be contemporaneous with Gandhi?