Article2

“Saint, Not Father: Why Gandhi Cannot Be
the Father of the Indian Nation”

Mahatma Gandhi was a great man. Perhaps one of the greatest Indians who ever
lived. His austere life and iron self-discipline, his experiments with truth, his
bridling of anger and ambition, his willingness to suffer for what he
believed—these made him a moral giant in a century drunk on violence. He turned
the spinning wheel into a national icon and made fasting a political instrument that
shamed viceroys and confounded governors. In a world of cynics, he was an
inconvenient saint. As a personal example, he still towers: humility instead of
vanity, restraint instead of rage, service instead of greed. Every Indian can profit by
emulating that private Gandhi—the patient neighbor, the honest clerk, the frugal
householder who refuses to hate. But a nation is not a monastery, and sainthood is
not statecraft. The virtues of the cloister are not the principles of public safety. A
father protects. A ruler preserves. A civilization survives because someone,
somewhere, accepts the ugly burden of defense. Gandhi could be a saint for the
soul; he could not be the father of a nation.
The catastrophe of confusing private goodness with public policy did not arrive in
a single blow; it gathered like monsoon clouds over decades. From the moment
Gandhi grafted the Khilafat agitation onto the Indian struggle, he taught a
destructive lesson: that Hindu aspirations would be yoked to Muslim theological
grievances from faraway Ottoman lands, and that national purpose must forever be
hostage to the appeasement of sectarian demands. What did the restoration of an
alien Caliph in Turkey have to do with the self-rule of peasants in Gujarat or
weavers in Bengal? Everything, if one accepted Gandhi’s bargain. The Hindus
would support pan-Islamic sentiment to “win Muslim hearts,” and in exchange
Indian Muslims would support swaraj. But appeasement does not buy loyalty; it
rents contempt. The Khilafat experiment energized clerical politics, sanctified
mobilization on religious lines, and conditioned an entire generation to expect that
the Hindu majority would retreat before the threat of communal fury. When the
Ottoman caliphate crumbled anyway, the resentments remained. The lesson learned
was simple and lethal: threaten secession, hint at violence, and the state will kneel.
There were early warnings of how this bargain would ripen. In Malabar, the
Moplah violence of 1921, with its killings, forced conversions, and desecrations,

was not a stray crime wave; it was a sign that the romance of Hindu–Muslim unity,
forged on theological appeasement, could curdle into Hindu blood on temple
floors. The response from the commanders of conscience was to lament, to
sermonize, and to counsel patience—always patience. But patience is not policy; it
is anesthesia. Each advance of clerical politics was paid for by Hindu retreat, and
the bill came due in 1946.
When Jinnah declared Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946, Calcutta became a
laboratory of partition: three days of howling mobs, loot and flame, knives and
clubs, women dragged from homes, shops smashed, entire localities baptized in
terror. Thousands of Hindus were cut down, their bodies sprawled on streets with
names that once murmured of cosmopolitan commerce and poetry. This was not
spontaneous irruption; it was orchestration. It was the proof that the new state
being demanded would be chiseled out of India by the blade. What did the apostle
of non-violence demand in reply? Not punishment, not a mobilization of self-
defense, not the stern announcement that the blackmail of blood would end in
handcuffs and hangings. He asked the butchered not to retaliate. He asked patience
of people watching their daughters disappear. He asked the sacrificial virtue that a
saint may honestly demand only of himself. Non-violence chosen by the individual
is sublime. Non-violence imposed on victims while knives are still wet is not
sublime; it is surrender masquerading as sanctity.
Calcutta was answered by Noakhali in October–November: village after village in
East Bengal terrorized, Hindu homes raided, men cut down, women abducted and
forced into conversion, temples shattered, the night thick with screams and smoke.
In Rawalpindi district in March 1947, Sikh and Hindu villages were surrounded,
set ablaze, their inhabitants hunted through fields, family lines snapped in an
afternoon. In Punjab through the summer, the rails became funeral conveyors;
trains pulled into stations with every throat cut, with silent toddlers sitting among
corpses that had been parents at the last stop. Partition was not a line on a map—it
was a moving storm front of mutilation. Two million dead, perhaps more; ten
million uprooted, perhaps more. There are arguments over the exact numbers but
no argument about the nature of the thing: a civilization was torn and much of the
rent cloth was Hindu and Sikh flesh.
And in the middle of this Dantean landscape the politics of the saint never
changed. Sermon, fast, plead. The aggressor and the victim were placed on the
scales as if equally culpable. The League’s separatism was treated as grievance;
Hindu anger as communalism. “Do not strike back,” he told people whose
daughters had not returned. “Do not retaliate,” he told men staring at the burnt

frames of their houses. “Appease,” he implied, because any resistance would make
the saint’s project of moral spectacle harder. The point was not that Gandhi loved
Muslims and despised Hindus; it was subtler and more ruinous. He loved his
principles more than he loved a people in need of protection. He was ready to be
crucified himself; he should never have volunteered his country.
When Pakistan sent its proxy warriors and raiders into Kashmir in late
1947—pillaging, murdering, violating along the road to Srinagar—the posture of
the saint became, if possible, even stranger. He fasted—not against the invader
who marched under the green banner, but against the Indian government, to force
the release of fifty-five crores of rupees owed to Pakistan under partition
arrangements. The treasury was being withheld because Pakistan had opened a war
front; Gandhi made his body the lever to pry it loose. Under the pressure of his
fast, the money moved. To call such an act saintly is to make a mockery of words.
It was not kindness; it was a morality so indifferent to consequences that it might
as well have been malice. While refugees huddled in camps, while Punjab
scrubbed blood from its platforms, while Kashmir struggled not to fall, the new
enemy state was given more fuel—because a principle was hungry. A saint may
give his last coin to the man who beats him; a statesman may not give his people’s
coin to the army that is beating them.
What makes a father? It is not the ability to scold oppressors in the abstract while
forbidding one’s children to resist; that is the choreography of admirable suicide. A
father builds the will and means of survival. In India’s long descent through
invasions and sultanates and templar pyres and jizya ledgers, there were men who
acted as fathers even when no crown recognized them. Shivaji Maharaj stands in
that hall like an iron pillar. When the Mughal machine under Aurangzeb groaned
across the Deccan, temples bled stone, and celebrants of Hindu rites were taxed
and humiliated, a young Maratha chieftain forged a counter-reality from forts and
nerve. Pratapgad and the slaying of Afzal Khan were not feats of banditry; they
were announcements that guile could puncture empire. The sacks of Surat were not
mere loot; they were the empire’s own habits returned to it as fear. The escape
from Aurangzeb’s gilded prison at Agra was not a trick; it was a parable: the lion
can smile and bow and then walk through a kingdom’s blinds like smoke. Raigad,
Rajgad, Pratapgad, Sinhagad—a rosary of stone that taught peasants their hills
remembered them. Shivaji did not tell a plundered villager to fast so that the
emperor might discover a conscience; he sent a havaldar who would make the
plunderer reconsider his profession. He did not demand that the people embrace
non-violence while their brides were being led away; he summoned Mavalas who

would escort those brides home and make the escorters wish they had been born
with a different faith in their bones.
His statecraft was not modern in the sense that the young learn in baffled
classrooms; it was better. He knew administration must be predictable, tax fair,
protection visible; the granary had to seduce harvests. He patronized Sanskritic
culture but did not make purity a gallows; he was a Hindu ruler who did not need
to humiliate non-Hindus. He broke the monopoly of empire by inventing speed and
surprise warfare from ravines and clouds. He showed that a civilization could re-
learn claws. His son would be tortured to death by the Mughals; the father survived
in what every hill taught a child: that dharma without the will to defend it is a
commentary on someone else’s scripture.
Another father came in steel and hymn. Guru Gobind Singh watched his father,
Guru Tegh Bahadur, be executed in Delhi for refusing to accept Islam. He watched
his two youngest sons bricked alive at Sirhind for refusing conversion. He watched
his two elder sons die in battle. And then, in a feat of spiritual metallurgy, he
forged the Khalsa: men and women who would carry God with the same hands that
gripped a sword, who would baptize themselves not in submission but in courage,
who would keep their hair unshorn as a covenant with fearlessness, who would
encircle their bodies with steel as a promise to the weak. He gave them five visible
articles, so that no one could ever pretend not to be obliged to intervene when
injustice walked by. He wrote the Zafarnama to Aurangzeb—no pleading there,
only indictment—the letter of a man who had seen how oaths are kept under a
foreign theology and how religion is used as a whip. When Anandpur fell and
Chamkaur bled and the long, terrible exodus through the ravines unspooled, he did
not write essays on non-violence; he forged men who would make non-violence
possible again by clearing a perimeter around the innocent.
At Delhi in 1675, in the same theatre where conquerors had once paraded loot and
chained kings, Bhai Mati Das was tied between posts and sawed alive for refusing
to renounce his faith; Bhai Dayal Das was boiled; Bhai Sati Das was burned.
Banda Singh Bahadur took up the Guru’s charge and smashed the Mughal terror in
Samana and Sirhind before being captured and executed with the cruelty of a
system that despised the courage of the conquered. The Maratha tradition and the
Khalsa’s steel were two limbs of one instinct—the refusal to let India dissolve into
sermons while its daughters were being given new names. These are the fathers of
India: men who turned grief into institutions, sacrifice into schools of courage,
martyrdom into a curriculum of national spine.

The defenders of saintly politics insist that Gandhi’s path alone won independence,
that without his fasts and marches the union flag would still flutter over Delhi. This
is a flattering myth for the conscience and a terrible guide for statecraft. Empires
end for many reasons: wars they cannot afford, treasuries they have drained,
industrial electorates at home that will no longer pay for someone else’s afternoon
of superiority, and yes, movements that turn colonial management into moral
embarrassment. Gandhi made British rule expensive in London’s mirror, and for
that he deserves historical thanks. But the measure of a father is taken after the
visiting army leaves. What did you hand your children? Is the house intact? Are the
doors on their hinges? Are your daughters safe? If your answer is a half-burnt map
and a wagon of corpses, you do not get to call yourself a father.
It is not cruelty to say this; it is clarity. There is a difference between personal
virtue and public virtue. The private ethic says: “Do not strike back when
insulted.” The public ethic says: “Make sure your neighbor is not stabbed on his
way home.” The private ethic can absorb experimentation and self-denial; it is a
lab where souls distill themselves. The public ethic must be predictable, firm, and
occasionally fearsome; it is the fence that keeps the lab from being overrun. When
the private ethic is smuggled into public life as doctrine, it becomes—despite its
beautiful motives—a permission slip for predators. A decent man may choose
martyrdom; a decent government may never choose martyrdom on behalf of its
citizens.
Gandhi repeatedly demanded that Hindus be saints while their enemies were being
marauders. He made Hindu anger the real villain of the piece and treated the
blackmail of separatists as some sort of wounded dignity to be stroked with money
and offices. When partition became inevitable, he chose to dignify it by pretending
that moral example can heal a machete wound. When Delhi convulsed with
reprisals after months of horror, he fasted to halt Hindu violence—an
understandable gesture—yet it came braided with an insistence that India release
funds to a Pakistan already complicit in invading Kashmir. The sequence is not
ambiguous; its message was heard in every tea stall: if you are Hindu and enraged,
you will be shamed and starved; if you are Muslim and armed, you will be paid. A
father who educates his children in such arithmetic guarantees their future as
accountants of defeat.
Those who argue that Gandhi prevented even worse bloodshed indulge an
unprovable counterfactual and ignore a simple possibility: that a clear red line,
drawn early and enforced without apology, would have cost lives in the short run
and saved a civilization’s confidence for generations. When a community learns

that there is finally something to fear from the state if they slit their neighbor’s
throat, they do it less often. When they learn that each episode of mayhem will be
washed with grants and prizes in the name of harmony, why should they reform?
To say this is not to invite cruelty; it is to acknowledge the logic by which ordinary
sinners are deterred and zealots are at least inconvenienced.
This is why the Gita does not enlist Arjuna in a hunger strike on the eve of
Kurukshetra. He is told to fight—not from hatred, not in rage, but from duty, the
calm and surgical obedience to the demands of public virtue. Dharma yuddha is not
a license for sadism; it is the refusal to outsource your family’s safety to your
enemy’s potential change of heart. The point of the sword is not to make saints out
of tyrants; it is to make it harder for tyrants to practice their religion of cruelty in
your neighborhood.
All this becomes sharper when one contemplates what “Father of the Nation”
means. It does not mean the most admired, the most quoted, or the most inspiring
to foreigners. It means the man whose imagination became the architecture of
survival. Shivaji’s forts, systems of revenue, doctrines of speed, and instructions to
commanders constitute an imagination of endurance. Guru Gobind Singh’s baptism
of steel, the raising of a brotherhood that pledged not only to worship but to
intervene, the visible articles that forbade anonymity when the weak cried—this is
imagination as national skeleton. Banda Bahadur’s stern justice, the Maratha
Peshwas’ extension of a crescent of Hindu power across an exhausted
subcontinent, the Rajput traditions of resistance—all these are strands of paternity.
They may not have written many essays; they left scars in stone and habit. These
are fathers.
Gandhi left habits too, and they have proved deadly. The first is moral
exhibitionism: the belief that the job of a nation is to perform goodness so
elaborately that its enemies grow embarrassed and retire. The second is the habit of
treating appeasement as magnanimity: release funds to the regime whose irregulars
have just violated your frontier, proclaim it as high principle, and call yourself
brave. The third is the habit of criminalizing your own majority’s grief: label it
communalism, drown it in shaming sermons, and send it home with empty hands.
None of this builds a house. All of it teaches your children that dignity is a
rhetorical trick other people play on you.
To say that Gandhi cannot be Father of the Nation is not to say he should be
toppled from every pedestal. It is to restore the distinctions that keep civilizations
sane. Honor him as a private saint, a moral teacher, an exemplar of simplicity, a

man who could break a tyrant’s schedule with a thread and a silence. Quote him
when you are tempted to cruelty in your own life. Listen to him when you desire
revenge for private injury. But do not hire him to guard your daughter. Do not
consult him about the frontier. Do not outsource police work to his charisma. The
state’s first duty is to make sure you can sleep without counting doors. A saint does
not count doors; he opens them and waits for a miracle. A father locks them and
stations a guard.
We live in the long shadow of the choice that was made. The subcontinent is an
archipelago of wounds. Pakistan exists because enough men learned that
threatening to burn the house earns you a wing to yourself; Bangladesh exists
because the logic of religious nationalism eats its own; India exists because,
despite everything, Hindus and Sikhs and Jains and Buddhists refused to forget
how to work, how to harvest, how to mutter prayers over the first chapati of the
day. But what might have existed had a different imagination of fatherhood
prevailed? A larger India with fewer graves, a security doctrine that taught both
mercy and deterrence, a political culture where clerics could preach as loudly as
they liked because they no longer frightened anyone.
The test is not merely historical. It is perennial. Every generation must decide
whether it will put a garland on a sermon or a lock on a door. The correct answer is
not cynicism. The correct answer is balance. A decent nation preaches restraint to
its citizens and terror to those who would terrorize its citizens. It builds schools and
prisons, prayer halls and shooting ranges. It sings hymns and pays armorers. It
encourages saints to write books and appoints fighters to keep the bookstores
unmolested. The man who can imagine this equilibrium—who can be harsh for the
sake of tenderness, fierce for the sake of playtime, punitive for the sake of festival
days—that man can be called father. Gandhi could not. Shivaji could. Guru Gobind
Singh could. Banda Bahadur could. The nameless Maratha captain who took his
company up a cliff at night with torches in his teeth could. The Sikh who stood
outside a village, heard a girl cry, and walked in with one hand on his kirpan and
the other steadying his voice—he could. Fatherhood is not the refusal to fight; it is
the refusal to let your children grow up learning that other people get to decide
whether they live.
In the end the argument is this blunt: Gandhi’s saintliness is a private treasure, not
a public constitution. Applied to the state, it produced partition, trains with the
wrong kind of silence, and a new neighbor dedicated to the proposition that India is
an error to be corrected in installments. Applied to the home, it will make you a
fine grandfather. Applied to the frontier, it will make you a fine obituary. A nation

that insists on treating saintliness as a strategic doctrine invites a thousand-year
déjà vu. A nation that honors saints in temples and fathers at the barracks will
survive to host pilgrimages.
Let Gandhi remain on the calendar of private ethics. Light a lamp for him when
you are tempted to envy, when you are boiling at an insult, when the urge to lash
out would make a fool of you. But when the census of fathers is taken, the roll-call
must begin elsewhere. With Shivaji Maharaj, whose forts are still lessons in the
geometry of defiance. With Guru Gobind Singh, whose hymns still put iron in the
blood and whose Zafarnama still reads like a summons to straighten your spine.
With Bhai Mati Das and Bhai Sati Das and Bhai Dayal Das, whose deaths made
Delhi remember that faith has a price higher than breath. With Banda Bahadur,
who proved that peasant rage can be harnessed into jurisprudence. With the
Maratha Peshwas and the Rajput houses and the nameless women who hid blades
under their shawls. These are the fathers of India—the men and women who made
it impossible for tyranny to feel at home, who taught dharma to bare its teeth, who
turned prayer back into something the wicked had to calculate around before
breakfast.
Call Gandhi a saint. Call him a teacher. Call him a conscience. But do not call him
Father of the Nation. That title belongs to those who did the unhappy arithmetic of
safety so that children could learn multiplication tables in peace, who built the
habits of deterrence, who punished the wicked not because they liked punishment
but because they liked festivals without widows. The fathers of India are those who
resisted, who organized, who turned grief into steel and steel into law. If India is to
heal, it must make peace with saints in the private square and with fathers at the
gates. Honor the saint. Build with the father. And never again confuse the two.