Gandhi was not destined to launch that crusade. He was assassinated in January 1948. The following year, when Nehru visited the US he related his conversation with Gandhi to Albert Einstein. With a twinkle in his eyes, Einstein wrote down a number of dates on one side, and events on the other, to show the parallel evolution of the nuclear bomb and Gandhi’s satyagraha respectively — almost from decade to decade since the beginning of the 20th century. It turned out that by a strange coincidence that while Einstein and his fellow scientists were engaged in work which made the fission of the atom possible, Gandhi was embarking on his experiments in peaceful, non-violent satyagraha in South Africa; indeed the Quit India struggle almost coincided with the American project for the manufacture of the atom bomb.

The choice between these two opposite and parallel strategies, which Einstein noted in 1949, has become once again a critical and difficult one today. Will the instinctive death-wish of our species (which Freud perceived) triumph over the soul force which Gandhi sought to evoke in the human breast? Gandhi himself had no doubt that peace “will not come out of a clash of arms, but out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds”.

The writer, founder-director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, is one of the foremost historians of the Indian national movement, and has written extensively on Gandhi