The man we honour, the Mahatma we forget
Every October 2, India performs a familiar ritual: wreaths at Rajghat, a dry day and a holiday. The harder question is whether the country still remembers the man behind it. The world he left is more fractured than the one he confronted. His message of non-violence is lost in the din. Global military spending was at a record $2.887 trillion in 2025, and the message of love no longer resonates with world leaders who are hell-bent on waging wars.
Societies are split along faith, class, region and now algorithms, with every feed rewarding outrage over understanding. That is precisely why Gandhi matters more than ever. His genius was method, not sentiment. The 1930 Salt March, with 78 volunteers walking about 390 km to Dandi over 24 days, shook the moral authority of an empire. He insisted that means and ends are inseparable, that an opponent must be persuaded rather than humiliated, and that a leader’s credibility rests on living what he preaches.
In a season of shouting, these are working tools of politics. Have we forgotten him? Not his face. It sits on our currency, in every government office and on statues in nearly every city. What we have forgotten is his discipline. On India’s first Independence Day, he was not in Delhi. He was in Calcutta, fasting and praying, trying to hold a riot-torn city together.
Set that against an India where hate speech is routine, mob lynching has stained too many headlines, and public life is conducted as a contest of insults. Swachh Bharat, launched on his birthday in 2014, borrowed his broom but missed his point: for Gandhi, cleanliness was a question of dignity and caste, not a photo opportunity.
The replacement of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act with the VB-G RAM G Act in December 2025 sharpened the question. The government presented it as an expansion, with 125 days of guaranteed work instead of 100. The Opposition called it erasure and pointed to the 40 per cent burden placed on states. Both arguments deserve scrutiny.
What is beyond dispute is that his name left a law that had carried it since 2009. Reviving Gandhi does not mean spinning wheels or wearing khadi. It means three things. First, civility as a political obligation, with parties competing on ideas, not contempt.
Second, his talisman taken seriously: recall the face of the poorest person you have seen and ask whether your policy serves them. Growth that leaves the last person behind fails his test. Third, communal harmony treated as national security, not a line in festival greetings. Gandhi called his life an experiment with truth and never claimed it was finished. The experiment now belongs to us. On Friday, let us leave the garlands and keep the discipline.
