In this adapted text of the 28th Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture—organized in New Delhi by the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism—Prof. Ramachandra Guha examines Mahatma Gandhi’s inclusive theology, the Nehruvian commitment to constitutional secularism, and the urgent imperatives for Indian democracy today.
Memorial Lecture | Ramachandra Guha
It is a great privilege to speak in honour of Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, a thinker and scholar whose work and courageous public interventions I followed closely while growing up intellectually and politically. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the aftermath of the Emergency, I began reading Dr. Engineer’s piercing writings on communal harmony and his principled, steadfast battles with religious authority and orthodoxy within his own tradition. When the invitation came to deliver this memorial lecture, it seemed only fitting to speak about another religious radical: a figure who did not abandon his inherited faith, but sought relentlessly to refine, reform, rehabilitate, and elevate it into something empathetic, humane, and just. That subject is Mahatma Gandhi—specifically, his faith, and what it demands of ours today.
Faith in Public Life: Two Divergent Currents
When we consider faith—a belief in a transcendent power or moral order beyond the immediate human ego—we observe that for many major modern political figures, it was inconsequential. Whether Winston Churchill was an active Christian is irrelevant to our assessment of his politics; the same can be said of Charles de Gaulle in France or Mao Zedong in China. For others, however, faith is foundational, though it manifests in vastly divergent ways. When President George W. Bush was asked to name his favourite philosopher, he famously named Jesus Christ—an interpretation of Christian ethics that many of his compatriots vigorously contested during the invasion of Iraq. A generation earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., if asked the same question, would have given the exact same answer, yet his Christ was an apostle of universal civil rights, non-violence, and radical empathy.
For Mahatma Gandhi, faith was not a casual adornment or a cynical instrument; it was the bedrock of his entire moral and political being. To understand the distinctiveness of Gandhi’s religious outlook, we must first locate him within his historical epoch. Gandhi was born in 1869. In Europe, this was an era marked by rising rationalism, scientific secularism, and skepticism toward religious dogma—coming just a decade after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which shattered literalist creationism. Intellectuals in the West were turning toward rational humanism; Thomas Hardy would soon compose his elegiac poem, God’s Funeral. Conversely, in Asia and Africa, the late nineteenth century witnessed aggressive religious fundamentalism and competitive proselytization. Expanding European empires brought Christian missionary movements intent on converting the "heathen"; missionary Islam spread across parts of Africa; and in India, revivalist movements like the Arya Samaj emerged to reclaim believers for Hinduism. Gandhi’s singular historical position was that he steered clear of both extremes: he was neither an unyielding atheist nor an exclusionary religious dogmatist.
The Intellectual and Moral Mentors
Gandhi’s religious thought did not emerge in a vacuum; it was carefully cultivated through dialogues with mentors across geographic, cultural, and spiritual boundaries. It is notable that his intellectual horizons expanded in widening concentric circles: first from a fellow Gujarati, then to an Indian from outside Gujarat, and finally to an international thinker.
The first formative influence was Shrimad Rajchandra, popularly known as Raychandbhai, a Jain philosopher and mystic whom Gandhi met in 1891 upon returning from London after his legal studies. Gandhi had just learned of his beloved mother’s passing, and Raychandbhai provided vital spiritual comfort. More importantly, he introduced Gandhi to the profound ethical discipline of ahimsa, or non-violence, and the necessity of engaging other religious traditions with deep intellectual humility. Raychandbhai offered Gandhi an evocative railway metaphor: imagine different religious traditions as distinct compartments on the same train. A passenger riding in Coach A, representing Hinduism, can walk down the corridor into Coach B for Jainism, Coach C for Christianity, or Coach D for Islam. Though the compartments appear distinct, they are all part of the same moving carriage, traveling along the same tracks.
The second influence was his political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Gokhale was an extraordinary statesman who understood that building lasting harmony between India's two largest religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, required patience, tact, and unyielding public commitment. Unlike his contemporary Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose political mobilization was steeped in orthodox Hindu imagery, Gokhale championed a civic, inclusive nationalism and alerted Gandhi early on to the grave moral stain of untouchability. The third great influence was the Russian writer and moralist, Count Leo Tolstoy. Gandhi never met Tolstoy in person, and there is no concrete evidence that he read Tolstoy’s towering novels, War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Rather, Gandhi absorbed Tolstoy’s radical non-fiction, particularly The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Tolstoy argued that the divine resides within the individual soul, rendering institutional hierarchies, state churches, and clerical authorities entirely redundant. From Tolstoy, Gandhi derived the conviction that an individual needs no intermediary—neither Shankaracharya nor Bishop, Imam nor Pope—to cultivate a genuine relationship with truth and God.
The Crucible of Practical Experience: London and South Africa
Beyond books and mentors, Gandhi’s faith was forged through lived personal relationships that broke sharply with the social orthodoxy of his time. Gandhi was transformed by living abroad, an opportunity made possible only because his father’s passing lifted the traditional patriarchal objections to overseas travel. In London during the late 1880s, he encountered independent women in public life and struck up close friendships with English Christians. He shared lodgings with a fellow vegetarian, Dr. Josiah Oldfield, an intimate inter-religious domestic arrangement that would have been virtually impossible in the conservative social climate of late-nineteenth-century Kathiawar. After returning to India and struggling to establish a practice as a briefless barrister at the Bombay High Court, Gandhi received an offer to mediate a commercial dispute between two Gujarati Muslim trading cousins in South Africa. When he arrived in Durban in 1893, he was received and housed by his client, Dada Abdullah. The sheer domestic reality of a strict, vegetarian Bania from Kathiawar living comfortably under the roof of a Gujarati Muslim merchant was unprecedented in the Indian context of that era.
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Later, in Johannesburg, Gandhi formed one of his most consequential friendships with a British Jew, Henry Polak, whom he met in a vegetarian restaurant. When Polak’s orthodox parents opposed his marriage to a Christian woman, Millie Graham, Gandhi intervened, wrote to the family, and eventually served as the sole legal witness at their civil wedding in the Johannesburg magistrate’s court. Following the marriage, Gandhi and Kasturba shared a home with Henry and Millie Polak—creating a single household in deeply segregated Johannesburg where Hindu, Jewish, and Christian traditions coexisted in daily harmony. These personal bonds naturally extended into Gandhi's political campaigns in South Africa. Parsi Rustomjee, a prominent Parsi philanthropist, served as the primary financial benefactor of the Natal Indian Congress and the early satyagrahas. When many caste Hindus grew weary of repeated imprisonment, it was Ahmed Muhammad Kachalia, an extraordinarily brave Gujarati Muslim merchant, who stepped forward to lead the passive resistance campaign. Kachalia's sons would later become close comrades of Nelson Mandela in the anti-apartheid movement.
Gandhi was an activist and a moral philosopher rather than a systematic academic theologian. His religious thought must be distilled from his voluminous writings, public addresses, and everyday practice, resting upon five core principles.
The Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg became the historic meeting ground where Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians gathered to coordinate satyagraha, and outside of which the burning of discriminatory identity passes took place in 1908. Furthermore, the Reverend Charles Freer Andrews, an Anglican priest sent to South Africa by Gokhale in 1914, became Gandhi’s closest lifelong confidant. While associates called Gandhi Bapu and admirers addressed him as Gandhiji, C.F. Andrews was one of the few people in his adult life who called him simply "Mohan," while Gandhi affectionately addressed him as "Charlie."Gandhi was equally open to challenges from non-believers. G. Ramachandra Rao, widely known as Gora, an ardent social reformer and radical atheist from Andhra Pradesh, engaged Gandhi in profound debates. Gora argued that believing in an abstract divine being was unnecessary for living an ethical life dedicated to human service. Gandhi took Gora’s challenge so seriously that he f amously revised his core philosophical formulation from "God is Truth" to "Truth is God," thereby widening his moral universe to embrace ethical non-believers.
The Five Tenets of Gandhian Theology
Gandhi was an activist and a moral philosopher rather than a systematic academic theologian. His religious thought must be distilled from his voluminous writings, public addresses, and everyday practice, resting upon five core principles. First, Gandhi unequivocally rejected exclusivism. He denied that any single community, scripture, or priestly class held a monopoly on divine revelation, insisting that no religion was the sole custodian of truth. Second, he recognized the coexistence of divine truth and human imperfection within all traditions. He maintained that all religions were inspired by God but filtered through fallible human instruments. Visiting a Trappist monastery in South Africa in 1895 and contrasting the monks' simplicity with the racism of the white Christian administration, Gandhi observed that a religion may be devilish or divine depending on what its practitioners make it to be.
Third, Gandhi strongly opposed organized religious conversions and missionary campaigns, arguing that competitive proselytization treated human souls as demographic territory and inevitably bred communal friction. Fourth, he held that a believer's first duty is to remain within their inherited faith and purge it of its moral rot. In his own tradition, Gandhi recognized untouchability as an unforgivable evil. As early as 1919, he declared untouchability to be an absolute sin against God and humanity, later writing that those who practiced it were the General Dyers of Hinduism. Simultaneously, he worked to dismantle patriarchal restrictions, bringing thousands of women into the vanguard of the national movement—a transformation exemplified in 1925 when Sarojini Naidu was elected President of the Indian National Congress at a time when women rarely held civic office in Western democracies.Fifth, Gandhi saw other religions not as rivals, but as mirrors that could help clarify and deepen one's own faith. As he famously remarked, he broadened his Hinduism by loving other religions as his own. This pluralism was brought to life in his ashrams through daily interfaith prayer meetings held under the open sky, incorporating readings from the Gita, the Quran, the Bible, the Zend Avesta, and the Guru Granth Sahib.
As his friend Henry Polak wrote in an unpublished memoir preserved in Oxford, religion for Gandhi implied a mighty and all-embracing tolerance. Hindu by birth, he regarded all men and women—Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, and Confucians—as spiritual brothers and sisters. Recognizing that all faiths lead to salvation and that all are ways of viewing God, Gandhi saw people as fellow human beings first, and followers of creeds afterwards.
The Political Crucible: A Crossfire of Three Oppositions
When Gandhi assumed the leadership of a massive anti-colonial movement involving hundreds of millions of people, his personal faith inevitably became a subject of intense national contention. His religious pluralism came under sustained attack from three distinct ideological camps.The secular left condemned his spiritual idiom as reactionary superstition. The Marxist theorist M.N. Roy wrote scathingly that while Bolshevism forged ahead, Gandhism groped in the dark, spinning out ethical and religious dogmas that prevented the masses from developing the revolutionary will to fight for freedom. Conversely, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League argued that Gandhi's interfaith language was merely a subtle disguise designed to establish upper-caste Hindu hegemony over the subcontinent, an ideological posture that culminated in the partition of India.
On the other extreme, Hindu nationalists in the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha saw Gandhi's insistence on minority protection and interfaith solidarity as an intolerable betrayal of the Hindu nation. Nathuram Godse argued that eliminating Gandhi was necessary so that a muscular, retaliatory Hindu politics could emerge, unencumbered by Gandhian non-violence. Here lay the great historical paradox: the Muslim League accused Gandhi of being far too much of a Hindu, while Hindu nationalists assassinated him for not being Hindu enough. Gandhi met the tragedy of Partition not with political retreat, but with his finest moral hours. He walked through the riot-torn villages of Noakhali and undertook fasts unto death in Calcutta and Delhi to halt communal massacres. A declassified dispatch sent to London in January 1948 by the British High Commissioner—whose offices stood directly opposite Birla House where Gandhi was fasting—recorded that day in and day out, Delhi Muslims of all classes, many of whom had suffered personal bereavements, came to invoke Gandhi’s help. They came to him because they believed he had their interests at heart, and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of saving them from destruction.
Hindu nationalists in the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha saw Gandhi's insistence on minority protection and interfaith solidarity as an intolerable betrayal of the Hindu nation. Nathuram Godse argued that eliminating Gandhi was necessary so that a muscular, retaliatory Hindu politics could emerge, unencumbered by Gandhian non-violence.
The Nehruvian Continuity and the State
Following Gandhi's assassination, the duty of defending an inclusive, secular democracy fell to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. While Nehru differed with Gandhi on industrialization and economic policy, he was entirely unified with him on minority rights and state impartiality. On October 15, 1947, amidst the horrors of Partition, Nehru addressed a firm directive to all provincial Chief Ministers, stating that India had a Muslim minority so large in numbers that they could not go anywhere else even if they wished to. He insisted that whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever horrors were inflicted on non-Muslims there, India had to deal with its minorities in a civilized manner, guaranteeing them total security and full citizenship rights in a democratic state.
During the 1951 general election campaign, Nehru declared in Delhi that Gandhi’s primary message was the unity of India across all castes and creeds. He announced unequivocally that he was prepared to come to an agreement with anyone, except any individual who raised a hand against another Indian in the name of religion, promising to fight such communal forces to the very end. In 1953, Nehru again reminded his Chief Ministers that it remained the sacred duty and obligation of the majority to win the goodwill of the minorities through fair and generous treatment. Because of Nehru’s moral clarity and the administrative resolve of his government, India witnessed virtually no major communal riots between 1947 and 1963.
The Roots of Majoritarian Hegemony
The subsequent rise to ideological hegemony of majoritarian nationalism in India can be attributed to several intertwined historical developments. As W.B. Yeats famously wrote in The Second Coming, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The majoritarian right maintained exceptional organizational discipline, cadre commitment, and ideological persistence over decades.
At the same time, the post-Nehru Congress compromised constitutional secularism for short-term electoral calculations under Rajiv Gandhi, notably by reversing the progressive Shah Bano Supreme Court judgment to placate conservative clerics, and subsequently unlocking the gates of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to appease conservative Hindu sentiment. Simultaneously, post-Gandhi Gandhian institutions retreated from hard political battlegrounds. Figures like Vinoba Bhave largely avoided direct confrontations with communalism and caste violence through the 1950s and 1960s, allowing the grassroots defense of pluralism to atrophy. Furthermore, India’s regional neighborhood increasingly normalized religious majoritarianism—with Islamic states in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and Buddhist majoritarian regimes in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—creating a hostile regional climate where competitive fundamentalisms fed upon one another.
The Dual Path Forward: Gandhi in Society, Nehru in the State
In confronting the contemporary erosion of constitutional values, we must discard the false dichotomy constructed by certain intellectuals in the late 1980s, which claimed India had to choose between a supposedly alienated Nehruvian secularism and an indigenous Gandhian religiosity. We do not have the luxury of choosing one over the other; we urgently require both Gandhi and Nehru, operating in their appropriate spheres. At the level of civil society, we need the spirit of Gandhi to rebuild the fabric of interfaith empathy, shared cultural life, and mutual understanding. This work cannot be performed by courts or bureaucracies alone; it requires citizens who cross boundaries of faith, caste, and language in everyday life. We have seen this spirit in initiatives like the Sarva Seva Sangh, the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan founded in the 1990s by figures like Purushottam Agrawal and Dilip Simeon, and contemporary civil society mobilizations like the Karwan-e-Mohabbat led by Harsh Mander.
At the level of state institutions, we need the unwavering firmness of Jawaharlal Nehru. A riot is never merely a spontaneous eruption of popular passion; it occurs and continues only when the state machinery, the police, and the political executive permit it. From Nehru, we must recover the principle that the state must be resolutely neutral, professional, and uncompromising in upholding the rule of law. History provides inspiring examples of such state resolve. In 1965, during the war with Pakistan, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri addressed a massive rally at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. Pointing to Mir Mushtaq Ahmad on his left and Frank Anthony on his right, Shastri declared to the nation that this shared platform of diverse faiths was precisely what distinguished democratic India from Pakistan.
Similarly, in November 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when anti-Sikh violence was actively abetted or ignored in the national capital, West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu rushed back to Kolkata and issued strict orders that not a single Sikh citizen should be harmed, ensuring that the city remained entirely peaceful. More recently, in 2025, when the acclaimed Kannada Muslim author Banu Mushtaq won the International Booker Prize and was invited to inaugurate the historic Mysuru Dasara festival, majoritarian groups staged intense protests. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah refused to capitulate, standing firm on the principle that she was an illustrious writer representing the shared cultural heritage of the state, just as the poet K.S. Nissar Ahmed had inaugurated the festival decades earlier.
Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated that deep personal faith need not lead to sectarian hatred; rather, when pursued with honesty, it can become the greatest source of empathy, universal brotherhood, and moral courage. Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer lived and wrote in that exact same tradition, refusing to surrender his faith to the dogmatists while never ceasing to critique its internal injustices. To defend the soul of the Indian republic today, we must nurture Gandhian compassion and interfaith solidarity within civil society, while demanding uncompromising Nehruvian fairness, constitutional secularism, and administrative justice from the state. Only through this synthesis can we ensure that India remains a home where every citizen, regardless of caste, creed, or background, belongs with equal dignity and equal rights.