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Mahatma Gandhi was never the Father of India

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 transformed the spinning wheel into a national icon and utilized fasting as a political tool 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 the course of 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 lethal and straightforward: threaten secession, hint at violence, and the state will kneel.

There were early warnings of how this bargain would come to fruition. 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 a spontaneous irruption; it was an 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 debates over the exact numbers, but no disagreement about the reality of the situation: a civilization was torn apart, and much of the disrupted fabric 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 a 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 the 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 provide 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, sultanates, and templar pyres, and jizya ledgers, some men 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 the 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, taxes 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 empire’s monopoly by inventing speed and surprise warfare from ravines and clouds. He demonstrated that a civilization could relearn the use of 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 led to 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 discover 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 the Kurukshetra War. 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 a testament to 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 a 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. 
Please don’t 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 to happen. 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.

Ultimately, 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 country 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, 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.