The second misreading arises when they seek to reduce Hind Swaraj to a Swadeshi manifesto. Hind Swaraj is a civilisational text. It argues that modernity seeks to make machines as measure of men. It is for this reason modernity is characterised as ‘black age’ or ‘Satanic civilisation.’ The purpose of civilisation for Gandhi is that it should allow each person to know oneself, and so doing we learn to rule ourselves. It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. To rule one self is to be moral, to be just and have a sense of equability towards all religions. Hind Swaraj provides one of the most articulate critiques of the modern tendency to use religious identity as a ground for political mobilisation and violence that it inevitably breeds. Hind Swaraj also provides a fundamental meditation on the question of means and ends. It argues against the modern belief that ends justify the means. For Gandhi means and ends share an inviolable relationship. And therefore both means and ends have to be good, pure and virtuous. Finally, Hind Swaraj is an immensely hopeful text. It seeks not the destruction of England but wishes to rescue Europe from its modernity. It sees this as India’s unique possibility and challenge.

If the BJP wishes to appropriate Hind Swaraj for itself, it will have to eschew use of religious identity as grounds for political mobilisation. It cannot seek the annihilation and destruction of its ideological and political opponents but aspire to rescue them. The BJP and the Congress remain committed to use of violence as a means of legitimate political action, albeit through a theory of ‘legitimate violence’ or ‘counter-violence.’ Hind Swaraj does not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence and it is for this reason that it remains an arresting text. If the BJP wishes to contend with Gandhi it would need to contend with its own unconscious, its own past. It has another option. It can, like Narendra Modi, seek to turn Mohandas into a Mohanlal, a petty shop-keeper who has no future in our cities of malls.

... contd.