A Relook at the Gandhi Enigma

26 January 2019 | 20 minute read

This year (2019) marks the 150th year of the birth of Gandhi, the most influential person of modern India. It is time for a re-examination of his contribution and legacy. It is clear that his early contemporaries like Annie Beasant and Sankaran Nair saw Gandhi critically and highlighted his blunders. 

Prophet of Ahimsa

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) is widely revered for his devotion to Ahimsa which means non-use of force but widely mistranslated as non-violence. The need for the use of force in some situations has been recognized since time immemorial. Those who cite the much quoted phrase Ahimsa paramo dharmah conveniently leave out the operative second part Dharma himsa tathaiva ca, meaning so too is force for the sake of justice.  As Bhishma, the wise old man of the Mahabharata advised King Yudhishtira, one must use both to be an effective ruler.

Selective Ahimsa

Even his commitment to ahimsa was selective and did not apply to Muslims, who of all people needed counsel on nonviolence which has no place in their scripture or history. Gandhi claimed to be a proud Hindu, yet he turned more and more anti-Hindu after 1920 as his public life progressed. He was obsessed in his conviction that Hindu-Muslim unity was absolutely necessary and indispensable and for this to happen, Hindus must concede every Muslim demand. However, the irrefutable fact is that again and again he demonstrated his combat readiness to sacrifice or sell out vital Hindu interests, honor and blood in deference to the feelings of minorities in general and Muslims in particular. To quote the appropriate words of Prafull Goradia in this context: ‘For Mahatma Gandhi, no price was too great for appeasing Muslims, so that they did not oppose Hindus. That he did not understand the Muslims was proved by the conduct of the Muslim League and by the vivisection of the country.’  His early contemporaries like Sankaran Nair and Annie Beasant viewed him before he had acquired his Mahatma halo, and saw him as an unrealistic fanatic obsessed with his dogma of Ahimsa.

After the Mutiny of 1857, the incidence of Hindu-Muslim riots in India had come down sharply. By lending support to the Khilafat Movement of the Ali Brothers in 1920, Mahatma Gandhi inaugurated a new era of a fresh wave of Hindu-Muslim riots. Mahatma Gandhi was a confused man. How could his Satyagraha, which needed to be effective for attaining our Swaraj, be equally effective for saving the Caliph on his Turkish throne. Gandhi did not understand that restoration of the Caliph would only result in making him again a shining symbol of Pan-Islamism or the Supra-nationalism of Islam as a world religion with its people forming the Ummah. This inherent impending danger was clearly foreseen by Sir Sankaran Nair, a Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1922.

In his book prophetically titled ‘Gandhi and Anarchy’ (1922), he wrote: ‘It is impossible to believe that Gandhi and his adherents are not aware that this claim of the Mohammedans to be judged only by the Law of the Koran, is a claim which is the fons et origo of all Khilafat claims of whatever kind. It is well to be clear about this, for not only does the acceptance of the claim mean the death knell of the British Empire or Indo-British Commonwealth, whatever name we may care to give to the great fraternity of nations to which we belong, but specifically as regards India it means a real denial of Swaraj. For it involves Mohammedan rule and Hindu subjection.”

Thus Sir Sankaran Nair clearly saw the danger signal when Mahatma Gandhi was leading the Muslims of India to convert the Hindus into permanent Serfs. Dr Manmohan Singh’s declaration (in 2006) on Muslim hegemony is only a logical culmination of the process initiated by Mahatma Gandhi and clearly foreseen by Sir Sankaran Nair in 1922. Singh as a Congress plant was a natural legacy of Gandhi and his thoughts. There is no escaping it.

During the Moplah rebellion in Kerala in 1921, thousands of Hindu men, women and children were killed by the Muslims. Hundreds of women were raped. And yet Gandhi supported the Moplahs, and not the Hindu victims of Moplah violence and oppression. In fact Gandhi had no sympathy for the Hindus. Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his ‘Young India’, ‘it is wrong to say that Islam has employed force. No religion in this world has spread through the use of force. No Musalman, to my knowledge, has ever approved of compulsion.’ Does this not show that Gandhi practiced political deception or worse, duplicity?

Deception and duplicity

According to Gandhi, the Moplah Muslims were guilty of no crime. But the politically spurious and culturally disastrous view of Mahatma Gandhi on the Moplah rebellion was not shared by Lord Reading, the then Viceroy of India and Sir Sankaran Nair, a member of his Council. Sir Sankaran Nair wrote: ‘For sheer brutality on women, I do not remember anything in history to match the Malabar rebellion. It broke out on 20 August, 1921. Even by the 6 September, the results were dreadful. There was complete breakdown of Civil Government resulting in widespread disorder, in political chaos, in anarchy and in ruin.’  Let us contrast this with Mahatma Gandhi’s conclusion: ‘The Moplahs are among the bravest in the land. They are god-fearing.’

Further, the same Gandhi opposed India’s defensive war against Pakistan, when its soldiers invaded Kashmir in 1947-8. Worse, he blackmailed the Indian Government into releasing Rs 55 crores to Pakistan during the war. Again after the Calcutta killings of 1946 that followed Jinnah’s Direct Action Day, when Hindus in Bihar and Bengal reacted in self-defense, Gandhi, through Nehru, threatened that they would be bombed if the reaction did not stop.

Gandhi sponsors the Moplah Rebellion

When Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915, circumstances allowed him to gain control of the Congress party, facilitated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s death in 1920. His return to India is something of a mystery: who sponsored it? A moderately successful lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi saw himself as a loyalist of British rule. He was brought back by Gopalakrishna Gokhale who was on cordial terms with the British. They stopped on their way back to India, in England, no doubt to meet some high British officials. Upon his return to India, Gandhi was granted a meeting with Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay, and later by the Viceroy himself, an extraordinary honour for a common Indian.

This has given rise to speculation that Gandhi was acting on behalf of the British to neutralize the Swaraj Movement led by Tilak and Sri Aurobindo who were called extremists, while Gokhale was considered a moderate. Justice Markandeya Khatju, formerly of the Supreme Court of India, has claimed Gandhi was a British agent.

This is hard to prove but Gandhi stood Tilak’s idea of Swaraj on its head by claiming Swaraj meant restoration of the Sultan of Turkey after his defeat and recognizing him as the Caliph. The Turks had no use for their Sultan, whom they drove out led by Kemal Ataturk. The Congress eventually came around to Swaraj as freedom, as late as 1930. Gandhi was never wholeheartedly for a free India outside the British rule. Even in 1947, Gandhi and Nehru asked Mounbatten to continue as Viceroy. Mountbatten was able to get Nehru to take the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. Hyderabad also would have gone to the UN for mediation, but for Sardar Patel’s firm and timely action.

Worse, Gandhi promised the Muslim leaders, Maulanas Shaukat and Mohammad Ali (the Ali brothers), with their support he would guarantee ‘Swaraj within a year’, but what he meant was restoration of the Sultan as Caliph. In addition, Gandhi diverted the Tilak Swaraj fund to the leaders of the Khilafat.  When Gandhi’s promise failed to materialize, the Khilafat, which Gandhi called Non-cooperation Movement, turned violent and became a Jihad by Moplahs (Malabar Muslims) against the Government, and non-Muslims in general, with unspeakable atrocities against Hindus in particular, which Gandhi tried to deny. This became known as the Moplah Rebellion but has rarely been mentioned in India’s history books.

How did Gandhi overlook the brutal fact that Moplah Muslims were men-slaughtering, children-strangling and women-raping? I am asking this question in the light of the speech of Lord Reading, viceroy of India, on 20th of August 1921: ‘A few Europeans and many Hindus have been murdered, communications have been obstructed. Hindu temples sacked, houses of Europeans and Hindus burnt. According to reports, Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam… The result has been the temporary collapse of the Civil Government and offices and courts have ceased to function and ordinary business has been brought to a standstill. European and Hindu refugees of all classes are concentrated at Calicut, and it is satisfactory to note that they are safe there. One trembles to think of the consequences if the forces of order had not prevailed for the protection of Calicut. Those who are responsible for causing this grave outbreak of violence and crime must be brought to justice and made to suffer the punishment of the guilty.’

Annie Beasant’s eyewitness account

Annie Besant wrote a series of articles in her journal ‘New India’ on 29 November and 6 December 1921 under the caption “Malabar’s Agony”. She challenged the stand taken by Mahatma Gandhi on the peaceful and humanitarian overtures of the Moplah Muslims towards non-Muslims in Malabar. The shock of the Moplah riots was so widespread that a Committee of Distinguished Citizens was appointed to tour the affected areas. In their fact-finding report they concluded: ‘Truth is infinitely of more paramount importance than Hindu Muslim unity or Swaraj and therefore we tell the Maulana Sahib and his co-religionists and India’s revered leader Mahatma Gandhi – if he too is unaware of the events here – that atrocities committed by the Moplahs on the Hindus are unfortunately too true and that there is nothing in the deeds of Moplah rebels which a true non-violent, non-co-operator can congratulate them for. Their wanton and unprovoked attack on the Hindus, the all but wholesale looting of their houses.. Brutal murder of inoffensive Hindus, men, women and children in cold blood without the slightest reason except that they are Kafirs… Their wholesale conversion through threat of death.’

Dr B R Ambedkar paid his tribute to the Muslim Appeasement Bible of Moulana Mahatma Gandhi in these brilliant words: ‘Gandhi has never called the Muslims to account even when they have been guilty of gross crimes against Hindus.’ Dr Ambedkar knew whereof he spoke about the anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim attitude of Mahatma Gandhi.

Petition to Lady Reading
‘We, the Hindu women of Malabar of varying ranks and stations in life who have recently been overwhelmed by the tremendous catastrophe known as the Moplah rebellion, take the liberty to supplicate your Ladyship for sympathy and succour.’

‘Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last 100 years, the present rebellion is unexampled in its magnitude as well as unprecedented in its ferocity. But it is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels – of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half dead bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babies protruding from the mangled corpses; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our helpless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage.

The atrocities committed by the Moplah rebels were widely reported in the English and vernacular newspapers of the day throughout India and the British Empire. Mahatma Gandhi was fully aware of every development in Malabar during this time. But his overweening egoism blinded his eyes to such an extent that he was unable to see the realities on the ground.

A Peoples’ Conference presided over by the Zamorin, Maharaja of Malabar, was held in 1921. The following resolution was passed at this Conference: ‘This Conference views with indignation and sorrow the attempts made in various quarters by interested parties to ignore or minimize the crimes committed by the Moplah rebels such as:

• Brutality dishonoring women
• Flaying people alive
• Wholesale slaughter of men, women and children
• Burning alive entire families
• Forcibly converting people in thousands and slaying those who refused to get converted
• Throwing half dead people into wells and leaving the victims for hours to struggle for escape till finally released from their suffering by death
• Burning a great many and looting practically all Hindu and Christian houses in the disturbed areas in which even Moplah women and children took part and robbing women of even the garments on their bodies, in short, reducing the whole non-Muslim population to abject destitution.

Annie Besant was a fearless and impartial woman quite unlike Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi was a double-talking, multiple-tongued Moulana – layer upon layer of orchestrated fraud, dissemblance and deceit. Annie Besant had been elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1913 – two years before the final return of Mahatma Gandhi to India from South Africa. She wrote on 29 November, 1921: ‘It would be well if Mr. M K Gandhi could be taken into Malabar to see with his own eyes the ghastly horrors which have been created by the preaching of himself and his ‘loved brothers’ Muhommad and Shaukat Ali. The Khilafat Raj is established there; on 1 August, 1921, sharp to the date first announced by Gandhi for the beginning of Swaraj and the vanishing of British Rule, a Police Inspector was surrounded by Moplahs, revolting against that Rule. From that date onwards, thousands of the forbidden war knives were secretly made and hidden away and on 20 August, the rebellion broke out. Khilafat flags were hoisted on Police Stations and Government Offices. …. Eyes full of appeal, and agonized despair, of hopeless entreaty of helpless anguish, thousands of them camp after camp which I visited. Mr. Gandhi says ‘Shameful Inhumanity’. Shameful inhumanity indeed, wrought by the Moplahs, and these are the victims saved from extermination by British and Indian Swords. For be it remembered the Moplahs began the whole horrible business.’ Ultimately it was the military that brought the Moplah under control, which showed the hollowness of his Ahimsa doctrine.

Mahatma Gandhi at that time gave a great finding to the effect that every Muslim is a bully and every Hindu a coward. On the one hand he called every Hindu a coward and on the other hand he exhorted all the Hindus to remain calm and non-violent even when they went all out to defend themselves against the attacking Moplah Muslims. This horror was repeated in Bengal following the Calcutta killings.

Gandhi displayed all his courage only to suppress the Hindus. In so far as the Muslims were concerned, he was a typical Hindu coward. He was mortally scared of them. So was Jawaharlal Nehru. Therefore Gandhi had no moral sanction to talk about the cowardice of the Hindus. And here is the callous, sadistic and barbarous message he gave to the Hindu victims of Moplah rebellion in Young India of 29 September, 1921: ‘The ending of the Moplah revolt is a matter not only of urgency, but of simple humanity. The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion in spite of such fanatical eruptions. … Be the Moplahs be ever so bad, they deserve to be treated as human beings.’ By saying all this, Mahatma Gandhi was telling the Moplah murderers must be treated as human beings, even when they themselves acted like monsters.

Supporting Muslim invaders (Ali brothers, Shaukat and Mohammad)

Gandhi defends the Ali brothers’ treason

In May 1921, there were again public rumors that the Ali Brothers would be arrested by the British government for conspiring with the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India. Mahatma Gandhi’s conscience was quickened by this public rumor and he poured out his compassionate Muslim-loving heart to the even more compassionate Hindu-loving Ali Brothers. At a public meeting in Allahabad on 10 May, 1921, with tears in his eyes, Mahatma Gandhi said: ‘I cannot understand why the Ali Brothers are going to be arrested as the rumor goes, and why I am to remain free. They had done nothing which I would not do. ‘  Writing in Young India in May 1921, Mahatma Gandhi declared with Jehadic piety: ‘I would, in a sense certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan if he waged a war against the British government.’

Mahatma Gandhi sowed the wind of Khilafat in 1921 and we reaped the whirlwind of Pakistan in 1947.  In 2006, the Manmohan Singh government was preparing to create a federation of neo-secular Pakistans within our country by consciously chosen divisive policies based on religion, caste, color, creed and community running counter to the known letter and spirit of our Constitution. India is still paying the price of this Gandhian double dealing and cowardice. Nehru tried to cover up his cowardice by creating his perverse brand of ‘secularism.’

Annie Besant’s last words
Her biting comments on the Islamic character of Moplah carnage are worth outing: ‘Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India. Gandhi himself who has stated that the Moplah rebels had acted as they believed that their religion taught them to act. I feel that this is true; but there is no place in a civilized land for people who drive away out of the country those like Hindus who refuse to apostatize for their time honoured and ancestral faiths.’

Gandhi’s legacy
Mahatma Gandhi’s blind surrender to the Ali brothers first resulted in the Moplah rebellion in Malabar district of Kerala in 1921. The same aggressive Khilafat spirit was shown by the Muslims of Kohat, a small town near Rawalpindi in the North West Frontier Province (NWFT) in 1924. In 1924, Kohat’s population was estimated at about 15,000. Its people were mostly Muslims. On 10 September, 1924, in one day, 800 Hindus were butchered by the Muslims in a rioting which began the previous day. Why did the Muslims in majority in Kohat attack the defenceless Hindus? This can be answered most effectively through the brilliant words of Dr K D Prithipal, Professor of Comparative Religion, University of Alberta in Canada: ‘Muslims will only live as an oppressive majority and a turbulent minority’.

Mahatma Gandhi went to Rawalpindi along with Maulana Shaukat Ali on the 4 February, 1925 to meet the Hindu refugees and the Mussalmans of Kohat. The Hindus had already given their written statements to which they had nothing more to add. The Muslim Working Committee of Kohat did not come. They sent a wire to Maulana Shaukat Ali saying: ‘A reconciliation has already been effected between Hindus and Muslims. In our opinion, this question should not be reopened. The Muslims should therefore be excused for not sending their representatives to Rawalpindi.’

The Muslim lawlessness in Kohat was again provoked by the release on bail of one Jeevan Das, Secretary of the Sanatan Dharam Sabha of Rawalpindi by the British District Magistrate on 8th March 1925. Jeevan Das’s only crime was that he had distributed a booklet or pamphlet containing a poem which happened to offend the sentiments of some Muslims. Any civilized man would ask the question as to how in such an overwhelmingly Muslim Town could any Hindu risk such an annoyance? The Hindus as a whole graciously offered a written apology which was not sufficient for placating the Muslim sentiment.

Amidst his continuous double-talking and amidst his wholehearted involvement in the Khilafat Movement, Mahatma Gandhi seemed to show some understanding at least on one occasion on 10th February, 1925. In a speech at the Satyagraha Ashram, Sabarmathi, Gandhi said: ‘The Hindus in Kohat have woken up and the Muslims could not tolerate the awakening; those Muslims looking for a chance to wreak vengeance found it in the form of Jeevan Das’s booklet.’

Several contemporary Hindu writers who knew the facts have commented that Jeevan Das’s pamphlet itself was the logical culmination of a known and established process of Muslim misbehavior towards the Hindu community in general, and Hindu women in particular. The local Muslims were very fond of abducting Hindu women, married as well as unmarried, and converting them to Islam through fear of sword. Jeevan Das’s booklet contained strong strictures against such a barbarous practice.

After showing pretended cosmetic understanding of the helpless plight of the Hindus in Kohat in 1924, Gandhi gave this callous advice in his ‘Young India’: ‘…Even if Musalmans refuse to make approaches and even if the Hindus of Kohat may have to lose their all, I should still say that they must not think of returning to Kohat till there is complete reconciliation between them and the Musalmans, and until they feel that they are able to live at peace with the latter without the protection of the British bayonet. This is a counsel of perfection. I can tender no other advice. For me, it is the only practical advice I can give. Hindus in Kohat were not nationalists. They want to return not as nationalists but for the purpose of regaining their possessions.’

What does this all mean? According to Gandhi, if a hundred Hindu women were to return to Kohat and were raped in a brutal manner by the Muslims, they should all be determined to avoid taking any assistance from what Mahatma Gandhi called ‘the British bayonet’, which only meant the British Government in India. Gandhi was of the view that Hindus should cheerfully submit themselves to the carnal acts of the marauders. Only then, he would consider them all as true nationalists! Mahatma Gandhi said that he was giving practical advice to the Hindus when in fact he was giving only heartless and cruel advice. When a householder finds his wife or children, other near ones and dear ones murdered, with his property set on fire, what an extraordinarily heartless piece of advice to offer!! Is it not downright madness to talk of Swaraj and nationalism to a common helpless citizen when he had faced the total destruction of everything dear to him? To return to one’s home for the purpose of regaining one’s lawful possessions was viewed by Mahatma Gandhi as a selfish act.

Mahatma Gandhi was perhaps a schizophrenic if not a totally deranged person.  Let us again turn to the Muslim-loving words of Mahatma Gandhi in 1924: ‘Sometimes Muslims kidnap a woman and make her embrace Islam. I do not understand how, in this manner, she can become a Muslim. She does not know the Koran. Alas! She knows very little even of her own religion. I cannot understand how she can become a Muslim. … Our true wealth is not money, land or gold. They can be pillaged. But our true wealth is religion. When we abandon that we can be said to have pillaged our homes. You Hindus are losing much through love of wealth and life.’

All this will show that to Mahatma Gandhi, the Muslims of Kohat were friends who could do no wrong, while the Hindus, who comprised a minuscule proportion of Kohat’s population, were at fault for being innocent victims.
Mahatma Gandhi’s vision seems to be as current today as it was in 1924. Dr. Manmohan and his UPA Government endeavoured to translate the cosmic dream of Mahatma Gandhi into a concrete reality through the ‘New 15 Point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities’. The Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh spoke the rabidly communal words of a mofussil politician fighting in municipal elections. I am referring to his inaugural speech at Dalit-Minority International Conference organized by Ram Vilas Paswan of Lok Janasakti party in New Delhi on 27 December, 2006.  To quote his essentially unfortunate and impolitic words: “Some minorities in India have done better than others. For example in India, minority communities like the Jains and the Sikhs have fared relatively well from the process of social and economic development. However, other minorities, especially the Muslim community in certain parts of our country, have not had an equal share of the fruits of development.”

To quote the most brilliant and appropriate words of Dr S Kalyanaraman, an International Civil Servant in this context: ‘According to the Constitution, persons professing Sikh, Jaina or Buddha Religions are Hindu, that is the majority in Bharatham, and Sikh, Jaina or Buddha adherents do NOT constitute a minority. This is the established law according to many Supreme Court Judgements. How can Prime Minister make a statement in violation of the Constitutional mandate? Dr Manmohan Singh adumbrates ‘Minorityism’ as a State policy which is against the spirit, letter and basic structure of the Constitution. How can a Government, whose executive head violates the Constitution in a written speech, after taking an oath to uphold the Constitution, introduce new definitions of minorities (unauthorized by the Constitution), be eligible to continue in power?’ Dr Manmohan Singh’s approach to minorityism cut at the root of national unity envisaged by the Constitution.

Dr Kalyanaraman is mathematically right. Explanation II given under Article 25 of the Constitution of India states: ‘In sub-clause (b) of clause (2) the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist Religion, and the reference to Hindu Religious Institutions shall be construed accordingly.’  In short, the definition of ‘Hindu’ is categorical and unambiguous in the Indian Constitution and includes within its fold those professing Sikh, Jain or Buddhist Religions.

In a judgement from the same period, Supreme Court had declared: ‘Differential treatments to linguistic minorities based on language within the State is understandable but if the same concept for minorities on the basis of religion is encouraged, the whole country, which is already under class and social conflicts due to various divisive forces, will further face divisions on the basis of religious diversities. Such claims to minority status based on religion would increase in the fond hope of various sections of people getting special protections, privileges and treatment as part of Constitutional guarantee. Encouragement to such fissiparous tendencies would be a serious jolt to the secular structure of Constitutional democracy. We should guard against making our country akin to a theocratic State based on multi-nationalism. The State will treat all religions and religious groups equally and with equal respect without in any manner interfering with their individual rights of religion, faith and worship’.

Sri Aurobindo on the need for Kshatriays as leaders

Physical and intellectual weapons are both necessary. As Sri Aurobindo wrote:
“The sword of the warrior is as necessary to the fulfillment of justice and righteousness as the holiness of the saint. Ramdas is not complete without Shivaji. To maintain justice and to prevent the strong from despoiling, and the weak from being oppressed is the function for which the Kshatriya was created. Therefore, says Krishna in the Mahabharata, God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the dagger.”

Resisting evil does not simply mean fighting invaders and other foreign enemies. There are internal evils also — lack of education, discrimination on the basis of caste, untouchability, rampant corruption — that should also be seen as enemies to freedom that must be destroyed. This is the case in India today. At the same time, in a time of national crisis, everyone has to become a kshatriya of one kind or another. Scientists have to work on new weapons to defeat the enemy. Similarly, businesses and workers must create whatever is necessary to defend the nation. Everyone must contribute to the defense of society, and not just depend solely on the ruling class and the professional soldier.

Gandhi and his protege Nehru were heartily opposed to the kshatriya virtues, and imposed cowardice in the guise of Ahimsa and Secularism, as their respective ideologies.  Dr Manmohan Singh’s legacy as the disastrous head of an irresponsible, even anti-national government is, among many things, that of pampering and pandering to minorityism, creating a state based on religions, while the Constitution of India enjoins that the State shall have no religion.

Additional reading

N.S. Rajaram, Gandhi, Khilafat and the National Movement

Sir C, Sanakar Nair, Gandhi and Anarchy, 1922 (see image)

Sri Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth