On Gandhi Jayanti, an old question returns: can we disagree profoundly without ceasing to see one another as fellow citizens?
Every year, on 2 October, we remember Mahatma Gandhi. We remember the walking stick, the spinning wheel, the spectacles and the familiar photograph of a frail man who challenged an empire with little more than his moral authority and a determination not to surrender his humanity. We remember Satyagraha, Ahimsa and the Salt March. We remember him by the familiar appellation “Father of the Nation”. And then, almost inevitably, the day passes.
Perhaps this year we should pause a little longer—not to turn Gandhi into a saint beyond criticism, and certainly not to pretend that he had all the answers. His ideas, his methods and some of his positions deserve continuing scrutiny. The more interesting question is: what does Gandhi have to say to India today?
Not to the India of statues, school textbooks and commemorative speeches, but to the India we actually inhabit: an India of extraordinary diversity and extraordinary argument, where religion, caste, language, region, class and political identity often intersect; an India confident about its place in the world, but also wrestling with questions about what kind of society it wants to be; an India in which political disagreement can quickly become a question of identity. Perhaps the best place to begin is not with one of Gandhi’s speeches, but with a song.
Vaishnava Jana To
Vaishnava Jana To is the famous 15th-century Gujarati bhajan attributed to Narsinh Mehta. It became closely associated with Gandhi and was frequently sung at his prayer meetings. Its opening line is deceptively simple:
Vaishnava jana to tene kahiye, je peed paraayi jaane re.
A true Vaishnava is one who understands the pain of another.
Read today, that line feels almost startlingly contemporary. Not the pain of one’s own community. Not the pain of those who vote as we do. Not the pain of those who speak our language or share our religion. Not even the pain of those whose political cause we support. The pain of another.
The other Indian. The citizen who sees the country differently. The neighbour whose faith is different. The fellow citizen whose language, caste, region or political convictions are different from our own. That is where the bhajan becomes unexpectedly relevant to India today.
Our diversity is not the problem
Gandhi’s political life unfolded in a society fractured by colonial rule, caste hierarchies, religious divisions, poverty and enormous social inequality. He was trying to build a political movement out of people who did not naturally form a single community.
The freedom movement was therefore not simply a struggle against the British. It was also a struggle over what kind of India would emerge when the British left. Who would belong? How would religious communities live together? What would freedom mean to the poor? What place would caste have in a free India? How could people with different languages, customs and histories imagine themselves as part of one political community?
Those questions did not disappear in 1947. They became the questions of independent India. And they remain with us. It is tempting, particularly in moments of political tension, to think that India’s diversity itself is the source of our problems. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. India’s diversity is a fact; the democratic challenge is learning how to live with difference without turning difference into hierarchy or hostility.
A Tamil and a Punjabi. A Hindu and a Muslim. A believer and an atheist. A person from a village and a person from a metropolis. Someone who sees India’s future through the lens of economic growth and someone who sees it through the lens of social justice. Someone who strongly supports the government of the day and someone who strongly opposes it. They can disagree profoundly and still share something more important:
They are citizens of the same Republic.
That sounds obvious. But democracies are sustained by precisely these seemingly obvious ideas, and they become fragile when citizens begin to regard political disagreement as evidence that the other person does not properly belong.
Gandhi did not ask Indians to stop disagreeing
There is sometimes a tendency to turn Gandhi into a prophet of harmony—as though his message was simply that everyone should get along. That is not the Gandhi I find interesting. Gandhi disagreed, often profoundly. He challenged the British government, argued with political colleagues and had serious differences with B. R. Ambedkar, particularly over the question of caste, political representation and the means by which social equality could be achieved. Their differences over separate electorates culminated in the negotiations surrounding the Poona Pact of September 1932. Yet both men, in their very different ways, confronted the same fundamental challenge: how could political freedom become meaningful freedom for India’s most disadvantaged?
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Their disagreements were real and consequential, and they should not be smoothed over in the interest of creating an easy national consensus. But the fact that two towering figures could disagree so sharply while grappling with the same underlying questions is itself instructive. It reminds us that a democratic society does not require a single moral or political vocabulary.
Gandhi’s life was therefore not an advertisement for avoiding conflict. It was an exploration of how conflict could be conducted without destroying the humanity of the person on the other side. That distinction matters enormously in India today. We do not need to agree about the government, economic policy, religion and politics, nationalism, history or the kind of India we want to see in the future. But disagreement cannot become a licence to deny the dignity of the person who disagrees with us.
Democracy requires opponents. It does not require enemies.
We have entered the age of permanent outrage
Gandhi lived in an age of newspapers, public meetings, pamphlets and speeches. We live in an age of television studios, WhatsApp groups, Instagram reels, YouTube channels and X feeds. The technology has changed dramatically. Human nature has not.
The modern information environment can turn a local disagreement into a national controversy almost instantly. A misleading message can travel across millions of phones before anyone has checked whether it is true. An angry political statement can be clipped, circulated and interpreted without context. And because so much of our digital conversation is organised around attention, outrage can become a business model.
This creates a particular danger for a country as diverse as India. A population of more than a billion people cannot function as a collection of mutually hostile camps. We need disagreement, but we also need shared facts, constitutional habits and some minimum capacity to trust one another as fellow citizens. Without these, diversity can become fragmentation.
The hardest part of Gandhi’s message
For me, the most difficult aspect of the Gandhian tradition is not non-violence. It is self-examination. It is easy to believe that the problem lies with the other side. It is much harder to ask: What if I am partly wrong? What if the person I disagree with has a legitimate concern? What if my own side is capable of injustice? What if my certainty is greater than the evidence available to me?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all is: Have I become the kind of person I criticise? This question is particularly important in India’s political conversation. Every side can find examples of intolerance among its opponents. Every side can produce evidence of hypocrisy. Every side can tell stories of historical injustice. The temptation is to use the other side’s failures as permission for our own. Gandhi’s challenge is different. The moral test is not what the other side does. It is what we choose to do.
Understand the pain of another
This brings us back to Vaishnava Jana To. The song does not ask us to understand only those who resemble us. It asks us to understand the pain of another. Can a majority understand the insecurity of a minority without feeling that it has surrendered something? Can a minority participate fully in the national story without feeling that its identity must be negotiated away? Can privileged Indians understand the anxieties of those who experience poverty and exclusion? Can the urban middle class understand the aspirations of rural India without romanticising or patronising it? Can different regions of India understand one another’s historical experiences? Can we acknowledge the pain of people whose political conclusions we reject?
These are not merely questions of political correctness. They are questions of citizenship and empathy does not mean agreement. Understanding is not endorsement. Listening is not capitulation. Recognising another person’s suffering does not require abandoning one’s own convictions. It requires accepting that another human being’s experience is real even when it does not fit comfortably within our worldview.
Gandhi and the politics of means
Another Gandhian idea has particular resonance today: the relationship between ends and means. Political movements of every description can be tempted by the same argument: Our objective is important, therefore our methods can be excused. Gandhi resisted that logic. For him, the manner in which we pursued an objective was part of the moral meaning of the objective itself.
That principle matters far beyond electoral politics. It matters in television debates, journalism, activism, social media, Parliament, university campuses, WhatsApp groups and even at the family dinner table. If we defend our idea of India by treating fellow Indians with contempt, what kind of India are we defending? If we seek justice by denying the humanity of those who disagree with us, what kind of justice are we pursuing? If we defend democracy while becoming incapable of tolerating dissent, what exactly are we defending? These are not abstract philosophical questions. They are questions about the kind of public culture we are creating every day.
Gandhi was not infallible—and that matters
There is another reason to resist turning Gandhi into a marble statue. He was not infallible. His views evolved. Some remain deeply contested. His disagreements with Ambedkar cannot be reduced to a footnote. His views on caste, modernity, industrialisation, gender and other questions deserve serious examination.
We should be able to acknowledge Gandhi’s extraordinary contribution while also subjecting Gandhi to criticism. Indeed, perhaps that is a more meaningful way of honouring him. Because if truth matters, then no historical figure should be exempt from scrutiny—not even Gandhi.
The purpose of remembering him is not to use his name to settle contemporary political arguments. It is to recover some of the questions he forced India to confront: How do we resist injustice without becoming unjust? How do we disagree without becoming cruel? How do we hold convictions without becoming prisoners of certainty? How do we build a nation without demanding uniformity? How do we remain united without pretending that our differences do not exist?
We don’t need another Gandhi
There is an understandable tendency on Gandhi Jayanti to ask who today’s Gandhi might be. I am not sure that is the right question. India does not need another Gandhi. It needs citizens willing to practise some of the qualities that made Gandhi consequential: courage without hatred, conviction without contempt, disagreement without dehumanisation and action without the constant need for applause.
A citizen who refuses to forward a communal rumour simply because it confirms what he already believes. A political activist who can criticise an opponent without dehumanising her. A journalist who distinguishes evidence from assertion. A religious believer who can defend her faith without denying the dignity of another faith. A citizen who can criticise her own political camp. A public intellectual who can change his mind without treating intellectual revision as humiliation. A voter who can say, “I disagree with you. But you are still my fellow citizen.” These may seem like small acts. They are not.
A republic is sustained not only by its institutions but by the habits of its citizens.
Perhaps this is the real meaning of Gandhi Jayanti
Gandhi Jayanti can easily become ceremonial. We garland statues, repeat familiar quotations, invoke his name in speeches and celebrate the anniversary before moving on. But perhaps Gandhi should make us slightly uncomfortable. Because his life does not merely ask us what we believe about India. It asks us what kind of Indian we are becoming.
Are we confident enough to tolerate disagreement? Strong enough to accommodate difference? Secure enough not to treat every dissenting voice as a threat? Can we see India’s religious, linguistic and cultural diversity not merely as something to be managed, but as part of the country’s inheritance?
These questions matter because India is too large, too diverse and too consequential to be held together by uniformity. We will remain different. The question is whether we can remain different without becoming hostile. And that brings us back to Narsinh Mehta’s old song:
Je peed paraayi jaane re.
One who understands the pain of another.
Not merely the pain of my people. Not merely the pain of my community. Not merely the pain of my political side.
The pain of another Indian.
Perhaps that is Gandhi’s most uncomfortable message to India today.
The future of our Republic will not depend on whether more than a billion people learn to agree with one another. They won’t. It will depend, in part, on whether we can learn to disagree without ceasing to see one another as fellow citizens.
