But these men and women will not ask us if we have failed Gandhi as an idea, as imagination and as a possibility. When a Gandhi becomes a Luddite, as he does in our times, we lose the playful innovativeness of the man and his institutions. We forget that khadi was a theory of innovation. When truth becomes catechism, it losses its catholicity, its tentativeness, it loses the sets of relations through which one arrives at truth. When Gandhi becomes synonymous with swadeshi, he gets associated with the perishing village and the tribe, certain to be doomed in the global culture and economy. But we forget that swadeshi cannot be without its corollary that is swaraj. swadeshi was about dignity and self-reliance, about keeping the village and the tribe alive not only as ancestors but as a real and simultaneous possibility. Swaraj was a theory of freedom that was both outward and inward. Swaraj required that we redeem the other so that we could be free. When we aspire for a hard state armed with stringent laws, which is able to stare the terrorist in the eye, Gandhi becomes a burden. Let us not forget that those who killed Gandhi argued that he had made the state of India effete. When we mock the invocations of ‘inner voice’ we dismiss the possibility that we as human beings are capable of truth, of compassion and recognising the good in our opponents. When we become suspicious of faith itself and wish to purge our polity to make it truly sanitised and secular, we not only see we every faithful as a potential communalist, we also foreclose the possibility that religious conflict might have its best chance of resolution in the dialogues of the faithful.

... contd.