Every Gandhi Jayanti we repeat two words, truth and ahimsa, and fold them away by evening. One side garlands Gandhi as a gentle saint; the other throws stones, saying his ahimsa made Indians cowards. Ahimsa is far older than Gandhi, and it begins with the violence we first do to ourselves. What carried him was insistence, turned first against his own failings and then outward. Garland or stone, both spare us the trouble of reading him. Will we read him, and ourselves, once?
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Originally published in Times Now on 2 October '26
Every Gandhi Jayanti, two words are spoken everywhere: truth and ahimsa. Schoolchildren recite them, ministers lay wreaths beneath them, and by evening both words are folded away for another year. This 2 October marks Gandhiji’s 157th birth anniversary, which the United Nations observes as the International Day of Non-Violence. His image is on currency notes and classroom walls. And yet the country is not so much forgetting him as never having quite understood him, and the misunderstanding begins with those very two words.
Truth does not mean that if someone asks how much money I have in my pocket, and I have 500 rupees, I tell him 500. Ahimsa does not mean that someone slaps me and I say, never mind, I will not hit back, please sit, have some jaggery, drink some water. Neither word is a rule of behaviour, and neither began with Gandhi. At one end of every duality sits the ego, the one who says “I”. When that ego turns and looks at itself, the duality it was holding up is seen to have no ground. That seeing is truth; it is immediate, and it has to happen afresh each time.
