Teachers working as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) have been engaged in the exercise for more than a month. They were earlier expected to return to schools on August 8, but their deployment has now been extended until August 17. The draft electoral rolls are scheduled to be published on August 24.

The extended schedule means teachers appointed as BLOs, as well as those assisting them, will continue with house visits, voter verification, form-related work and other activities connected with the revision.

Unit tests and classroom teaching affected

Schools are preparing for unit tests scheduled for August while also working with new textbooks introduced for Standards III, IV and VI under the National Education Policy. Teachers and school heads said the continued absence of staff has made it difficult for schools to maintain regular teaching and complete the syllabus.

The periodic assessment test, which is mandatory for students and is intended to assess their learning and academic progress, is normally conducted in August. Educationists have said that continued teacher deployment could push the assessment towards the end of September or October.

The extension has also affected unit tests planned for the second week of August. In several government and civic schools, teachers have either been fully relieved from school duties or are spending a substantial part of their working hours on SIR-related work.

In some schools, more than 70% of the teaching staff has reportedly been deployed for SIR duties, leaving fewer teachers to handle regular classes and examinations. Several schools have also been functioning for only half a day because of the shortage of teaching staff.

Teacher Madhav Suryawanshi said the continued deployment was affecting classroom work. He said, “BLO and SIR duties are complicated and continuous processes that require teachers to stay away from classrooms for several weeks”, as reported by the Times of India.

He also pointed out that the new textbooks introduced this year for Standards III, IV and VI under the NEP required additional classroom attention. According to him, schools were already facing difficulties in completing the syllabus and preparing for the first unit tests.

Schools managing with reduced staff

The impact is not limited to teachers formally appointed as BLOs. School heads said other teaching and non-teaching employees have also been assigned to assist in the SIR exercise.

According to the Times of India, Headmaster Tanaji Mane said his school had 17 teachers, one clerk and four Class IV employees. Initially, three teachers had been appointed as BLOs, but from July, the teaching and non-teaching staff were also assigned as assistants for the SIR exercise and directed to be relieved from their regular school duties.

According to Mane, the school had to function with reduced staff before all employees were eventually relieved. He was later also assigned election duty.

He said schools were simultaneously receiving circulars relating to literacy surveys, out-of-school children, student records and departmental competitions, making it difficult to run the school with normal staffing.

Education Department accounts for large share of BLO appointments

Tanaji Kamble, president of the Progressive Teachers Association, cited figures from the Ghatkopar East Assembly constituency to highlight the extent of teacher deployment. According to Kamble, 283 employees were appointed for BLO duties in the constituency. Of these, 184, or around 65%, were from the Education Department, including 157 teachers. Kamble said the figures from one constituency reflected the wider situation in Mumbai. He also said the government had stated that around 40% of teachers had been assigned SIR duties, while the situation on the ground was different, as per a report in the Hindustan Times.

The deployment has also led to pressure on teachers who do not report for election-related work. Police stations have issued notices to some teachers who failed to report for duty.

The issue has led to concerns among teachers, headmasters and school managements. Some school administrators have also approached the court over the matter, although no hearing has taken place so far.

Teachers say prolonged duty is affecting learning

Faruk Kazi, another teacher involved in the SIR exercise, said teachers had already been under pressure because of the prolonged nature of the work. As reported by the Times of India, Kazi said, “We have been under immense pressure for the past month. The form-filling process was completed only recently, but now verification and subsequent stages will continue.”

He said the revised schedule could extend the work into October and added that the Education Department had not done enough to address the concerns arising from prolonged non-academic duties. Jalinder Sarode, working president of Shikshak Sena (Maharashtra), also said the extension was coming at a time when examinations were already being conducted, as reported

As reported, Sarode said, “Examinations are going on and the frequent absence of teachers is disturbing the teaching process.”

He suggested that the government consider using trained personnel from other departments or outsourcing election-related work instead of continuing to deploy teachers from schools.

Concern over prolonged absence from classrooms

Suhas Gurav, an educator, said the issue was not limited to the additional workload being placed on teachers. He said attention also needed to be given to the effect of prolonged BLO and SIR duties on classroom teaching. As reported, Gurav said, “The real question is whether parents and society recognise that prolonged BLO and SIR responsibilities prevent teachers from devoting sufficient time to their primary responsibility of teaching.”

The SIR extension means teachers and other school employees assigned to the exercise will continue their election-related responsibilities until August 17, while the draft electoral rolls are scheduled to be published on August 24. Schools will accordingly continue to manage regular teaching and academic activities alongside the extended election-related deployment.

Related:

The Deadly Deadline: “I Can’t Do This Anymore”—India’s electoral revision turns into a graveyard for BLOs/teachers

SIR exercise leaves trail of suicide across states as BLOs buckle under pressure and citizens panic over citizenship

Haunted by NRC fears, 57-year-old West Bengal man dies by suicide; Mamata blames BJP for turning democracy into a “theatre of fear”

Pregnant woman deported despite parents on 2002 SIR rolls, another homemaker commits suicide

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The reasons are not far to seek.

Over a decade ago, in 2015-2016, barely a year or two into the first term of this regime that has since been viewed nationally and internationally as autocratic and proto-fascist, it was the Ambedkar-Periyar circles in both Hyderabad Central University and Chennai that were the first targets of power and ideological assault. Ministers from the union government weighed in, first to withhold meritoriously earned scholarships/fellowships of Dalit (read Ambedkarite) and left oriented students like Rohith Vemula and others, thereafter to humiliate them by limiting access to libraries and even hostel accommodation. Muslim student scholars like Umar Khalid and Najeeb Ahmed were particular targets. Najeeb “disappeared” from his JNU room on October 15, 2016, after an alleged scuffle involving the RSS-linked Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) the day before. He had been injured in that encounter and doctors, according to a witness, had refused timely treatment. Shockingly, the case assiduously pursued by his mother was “closed” by the Rouse Avenue court in 2025.  Two films, Ammi (2019) and Where is Najeeb? (2022) have preserved a contemporary tragedy this regime would rather have us forget.

Rohith Vemula, talented and bright, part of a vibrant student community that was in the cross hairs of the administration for daring to screen Muzaffarnagar Baqi Hai at HCU was driven to suicide, an act the movement has called “institutional murder” on Sunday January 17, 2026. That very night JNU students protested Rohith’s death and the ripples of the movement surged across India. Mumbai that only sometimes steps out collectively against repression saw tens of thousands students and activists march in Mumbai from Byculla to CSMT (CST) to demand justice for Rohith.

Brute power and authority coupled with the supine behaviour of Vice-Chancellors like Appa Rao Podille (HCU) and M Jagadesh Kumar (JNU) actively enabled violent police entry and involvement in both campuses, behaviour that physically brutalised students and also criminalised dissent. [1] Cases were filed, Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar were jailed for a month and students (35 from the FTII) had to spend precious years battling the vindictiveness the powerful. Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) is a film that, in a multi-layered narrative depicts what young Indians have been put through.

2016 then is as significant as 2026 may yet prove to be.

Why then is our public memory so short and our response only episodic? Institutional culpability or even amnesia by our constitutional bodies including courts and a wilful subservience by legacy and traditional commercial media has enabled the irresponsible vilification of student leaders and protesters.

Clearly, the specific targets were young, autonomous students, free in thought and behaviour. Organisations and individuals from Left and Dalit lineages and communities were specific, targets the case(s) made against them more vindictive and pernicious.

Umar was labelled “anti-national” (“desh drohi”) by irresponsible (and unaccountable) “media houses”. Rohith’s unquestionable “merit” was questioned and his caste status “doubted”, his mother hounded as she struggled for justice for her son. Fatima Nafees, Najeeb’s mother proud that her son made it to a central university, regrets that he opted for staying in its hostel! This level of violence and institutional discrimination faced by Dalit and Muslim students has not stemmed before 2016 or since. The deaths of Arman Iqbal Khatri (April 2023) and Darshan Solanki (February 2023) in Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Payal Tadvi (May 2019) studying to become a doctor at BYL Nair Hospital were all victims of targeted violence. Corrective constitutional institutions like courts have been tardy in offering remedies

Today in 2026, while the “westernised youth” or “desh drohi” (anti-national) are labels still sought to be applied to Gen Z as well, for erudite and clear left-leaning scholars like Umar and Rohith it was relentlessly pinned.

The sustained protests in HCU and JNU —among two dozen other institutions of higher learning –a decade ago were the first effective challenges to a regime determined to control behaviour, thought and ideas. In the months and years that followed this protest spawned multiple campuses across India: Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi Mumbai University, Kashmir, Assam, Puducherry, all saw spirited and sustained protests. Patna University-Bihar, Jadavpur University-West Bengal, National Law School-Bangalore and the Allahabad Central University-Uttar Pradesh saw similar struggles against repression. Nine months after Rohith Vemula’s “institutional murder” on Sunday, January 17, 2026, eight law students from the Babasaheb Ambedkar University Lucknow protested after two of them were target of vindictive administrative action: two of them toppers, who ranked first and second in the PHD entrance examination had been suspended and thereafter expelled without due process because they protested the caste-ist behaviour of both the government and their professors who they claimed were being protected by the administration and the Ministry for Human Resources Development (MHRD).In an article on SabrangIndia, Prathama Banerjee (in 2016) reported that in Gwalior, a meeting organized by the Ambedkar Manch involving an Ambedkarite professor Vivek Kumar from JNU was attacked by ABVP members, who went on to not only fire guns at the gathering but even burn the Indian Constitution, perhaps to avenge Ambedkar’s burning of the Manusmriti half a century ago!

From the ideological slant on syllabi, to the rights of women to dress as they please and eat non-vegetarian (!), to dubious appointments like Gajendra Chauhan as director (FTII), students and youth mobilised first and immediately against the threat to their very existence and autonomy. By end 2016, the Modi 1.0 regime’s assault on public education and taken the form of simply cancelling (read withdrawing) a staggering 20,000 scholarships to central universities; this was soon followed by withdrawal of all minority scholarships instituted by the previous UPA II government.

So while today’s 2026 Gen Z protests come as another breath of fresh air to a battle weary people, our students and youth, backed by some in the academia have been at the forefront of this democratic challenge for a decade.

What if?

What if the political opposition, despite its poor numerical strength had backed and amplified these voices and demands in Parliament? Since and repeatedly since 2016?

Would India have already witnessed a pushback from the seat of power?

In any truly democratic society, it is the university that is the storehouse of young and budding intellectual opinion and often the bedrock of voices of sharp, critical dissent. Since 2014, India has been going through a determined effort towards homogenisation and imposed majoritarianism—whether through the blind acceptance of commercialization or privatization of education, or the imposition of a culturally-homogenous worldview where the Indian state and nation is equated with “one language, one culture,” in effect denying a plurality of existence and citizenship. These trends are not just dangerous but pose a challenge to the very foundation of India as a constitutional republic. Centres of higher learning within India that have become the battleground for the preservation of Indian democracy and all it stands for.

Before 2014, over the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, through a slow and often painful process within these central universities that came into being through key enactments—the University of Hyderabad Act of 1974, the Jawaharlal Nehru Act of 1966 and the North-Eastern Hill University Act of 1973—baby steps toward affirmative action within teachers’ unions and associations first ensured real diversity among students: students from rural, marginalised and discriminated-against backgrounds made it into institutions of higher learning. That is how, our Umars, Najeebs, Rohiths are household names even in bold challenge or sacrifice. Before that it was the moneyed with access that enjoyed entry within.

Under this regime in its third term however, the dual assault of aggressive neoliberal policies that have ensured a cut in scholarships in institutions of learning, accompanied by an ideological assault of a proto-fascist authoritarian character, have rendered campuses in India the focal points of a resurgent democratic movement. Student leaders and associations that do not fall in line with the majoritarian vision face criminal cases, the worst being the law of Sedition (Section 124-A)..[2] Only a few days ago, a former student of previously prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) was denied bail for attending an event in support of academic, now deceased, G.N, Saibaba.

As the monsoon session of Parliament reaches its conclusion, and the union home minister, responsible in the chain of command for the use of pellet guns and nail-tacked lathis on students who protested at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 20, refuses to answer charges of accountability or incompetence, there is every chance that the regime may not back off either surveillance or vindictive action.

The Gen Z generation that is rightly euphoric of its success in shaking up the union government, may yet have to give tests of its resilience to persistent punishment by process. If solidarity shown by older Indians and large sections of independent media, not present a decade ago, holds, victory may still be ours. We need to be prepared though.

In this moment of reckoning, this is my humble tribute. To the inspiring decades plus relentless pushback by India’s young.

[1] Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2016 was M. Jagadesh Kumar, who assumed office on January 28, 2016, a month before the assaults and arrests of tudents. He succeeded Sudhir Kumar Sopory and later served until February 2022; Appa Rao Podile former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad was awarded the Millennium Plaques of Honour for his achievements in Life Sciences by the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in 2017!

[2] Teesta Setalvad’s KG Kannabiran Memorial Lecture delivered at Madurai. December 11, 2016

Related:

The post August 11, 2026: A decade plus of students challenging a regime that seeks to control thought & ideas appeared first on SabrangIndia.

His life story is full of contradictions. He emerged from Delhi’s politically charged theatre culture and was associated with the Left, but later developed an intense hostility towards leftists. He has himself described his decision to play a part in the politically controversial Jahangir National University as being driven by resentment rather than conviction and subsequently apologised for it.[1]

There is a similar contradiction in the way he talks about relationships, women and responsibility. Mishra has publicly admitted to cheating on his wife and has spoken about being emotionally absent and irresponsible during the early years of his marriage. He has also spoken about making obscene calls to women while drunk and acknowledged behaviour that he himself considered deeply inappropriate.

The point isn’t that a person’s private mistakes automatically invalidate their political opinions. They don’t. People can change, grow and genuinely repent.

The problem begins when someone turns their own personal journey into a source of moral authority over society, while refusing to interrogate the power structures, prejudices and contradictions embedded in their worldview.

And yet, somewhere along the way, Piyush Mishra has become something of a sweetheart of the young, progressive podcast circuit. He is presented as the rebellious, uncompromising, revolutionary intellectual, the older, irreverent voice who supposedly says what others are afraid to say. In the process, his history of misogynistic behaviour and his increasingly right-leaning political positions often seem to disappear from the conversation. The rebel is celebrated; the contradictions are merely a side note. There is also something deeply uncomfortable about the cultural archetype he represents: the brilliant, troubled, self-confessional male artist whose excesses are romanticised as evidence of his genius, while women are expected to absorb the consequences of those excesses with patience, forgiveness and understanding.

Mishra’s artistic talent is real. His self-awareness about some of his failures may also be real. But self-confession isn’t the same thing as political introspection.

And then comes Jharkhand.

This contradiction becomes particularly visible when Piyush Mishra enters the Jharkhand student protest.

A student movement is, at its core, about young people demanding accountability, dignity, opportunity and a future that isn’t determined by the whims of those in power. It is about challenging structures, not surrendering to personalities.

So his presence in the Jharkhand protest raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly does he represent there? If the movement claims inter-sectionality, shouldn’t that lens apply to the men it celebrates too?

If the protest is about challenging patriarchy, hierarchy, privilege and the normalisation of power without accountability, then elevating a celebrity whose own public narrative is marked by admitted infidelity, misogynistic behaviour and ideological contradictions sits uneasily with the politics of the movement.

The issue isn’t whether Piyush Mishra is allowed to speak. Of course he is. The issue is what his presence symbolises.

There is an additional question worth asking here. Mishra did publicly support the Jantar Mantar student protest, condemning the violence and saying that the government should have opened a dialogue with the students earlier. But he was not physically present at Jantar Mantar, where the violence against students was severe enough to move an empathetic heart to action. In Jharkhand, by contrast, he travelled to Ranchi, joined the students in person and sang Aarambh Hai Prachand at the protest site. He has said that watching interviews with the students and seeing their pain moved him to join them.

So the question is I’d keep it as an open-ended question rather than implying an answer:

So the question is: what made his solidarity more visible in Jharkhand? Does the difference in the governments being confronted have anything to do with it?

And perhaps the sharper question is for the progressive men, at least those who celebrate his presence at the protest: can a movement that seeks to challenge hierarchy and privilege afford to simultaneously romanticise the very contradictions it claims to resist? And why are those same contradictions disqualifying when they belong to people they oppose, but fascinating, forgivable or even revolutionary when they belong to a man they admire?

Perhaps the real test of progressive politics is whether we are willing to apply the same scrutiny to ourselves and the people we admire as we do to those we oppose.

(The author, is a branding and design strategist with over 25 years of experience across leading advertising agencies. She has worked with the Congress Party for the past six years)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

[1] Piyush Mishra played the character of “Guru Ji” and sang the promotional track “Main Nahi Manta” for the controversial political drama film Jahangir National University (JNU), which was released on June 21, 2024. Following the film’s release, Mishra publicly offered an unconditional apology for taking on the role, admitting that signing the project without reading the complete script stemmed from his past opposition to communist ideologies

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Campuses in Revolt: How the UGC Equity Stay and Criminalised Dissent Have Ignited Student Protests Across India

The post Piyush Mishra, Jharkhand and the Blind Spot of Progressive Men appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this fifth and final installment of the series, the spotlight falls on the man Gandhi considered his own “fifth son”—Jamnalal Bajaj. Their relationship defied every conventional understanding of the bond between wealth and political leadership. Jamnalal was not content to remain a generous donor or a sympathetic admirer. He sought something far more demanding: to remake his life in accordance with Gandhi’s ideals, placing his body, his fortune, and his family at the service of a national and ethical mission.

For Gandhi, this was not a relationship founded on patronage but on transformation. Jamnalal did not merely finance constructive work or support political campaigns; he embraced the discipline of the ashram, the hardships of imprisonment, the burdens of public service, and the uncompromising ethic of trusteeship. In doing so, he dissolved the boundaries between industrialist and satyagrahi, between privilege and sacrifice, until his wealth became inseparable from his moral responsibility.

As this exclusive series reaches its conclusion, the story of Mahatma Gandhi and Jamnalal Bajaj offers its most profound insight into the Gandhian experiment. It reminds us that enduring social change is sustained not simply by ideas or institutions, but by individuals willing to transform themselves before seeking to transform the world.

Read on to discover the story of why Jamnalal Bajaj became not just Gandhi’s closest associate, but the Mahatma’s beloved “fifth son.”

When history recalls the industrial titans who fuelled the engines of twentieth-century political movements, it almost always paints them in the cold, strategic shades of pragmatism. We see men who stood safely in the shadows of power, writing massive cheques to secure their investments, purchasing political insurance while keeping their immaculate suits far away from the dust, the sweat, and the swinging batons of the police lines. History treats them as financiers, not fighters. But history breaks its own rules when it encounters Jamnalal Bajaj.

In the roaring current of the Indian freedom struggle, Jamnalal was neither a distant banker nor a cautious ally operating on the comfortable periphery of revolution. He was a man who allowed himself to be utterly dismantled and rebuilt by the moral genius of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Where other wealthy patrons gave their surplus wealth, Jamnalal gave his very flesh. He traded the soft luxury of a merchant prince for the rough, abrasive embrace of coarse khadi, the backbreaking chores of the ashram latrine, and the cold concrete of colonial prison cells.

When Gandhi looked across the vast landscape of his followers in 1942, his eyes softened as he wrote a profound truth in the pages of Harijan:

“There was no work of mine in which I did not receive his fullest co-operation in body, mind and wealth.”

This is the untold epic of the merchant who did not merely fund the Mahatma, but chose to become his son, collapsing the historic distance between capital and conscience to prove that a man can conquer his wealth before his wealth conquers him.

Conscience Finds Home

To understand the moral architecture of the man who would become Gandhi’s right hand, one must travel back to the late nineteenth century, to a modest Marwari household in the dusty village of Kashi-ka-bas in Rajasthan. Born on November 4, 1889, into humble circumstances, the young Jamnalal’s destiny took a dramatic, fairy-tale turn at the tender age of five. He was chosen and adopted into the colossal, glittering merchant empire of Seth Bachhraj in Wardha.

Overnight, the peasant boy was dropped into a world of unimaginable opulence. He was surrounded by ledger books that recorded fortunes, vaults overflowing with silver coins, and a family that equated human value with material display. Yet, the opulence never quite stuck to his skin. The boy possessed a strange, innate spiritual allergy to luxury.

The defining rupture of his youth arrived over a handful of heavy gold jewellery. His adoptive grandfather, eager to showcase the family’s immense wealth at a glittering social gathering, harshly reprimanded the young Jamnalal for refusing to deck himself out in expensive ornaments. To the grandfather, a naked neck was an insult to the family firm.

The boy’s response stunned the household. Rather than bow to the tyranny of pride, Jamnalal quietly stripped away what comforts he had and walked out of the mansion into the dark night, leaving behind a letter that burned with detachment. As historian B. R. Nanda notes, this was no petulant teenage tantrum. It was an early, visceral manifestation of a spirit that viewed material possessions not as a crown, but as a cage.

When Jamnalal eventually met Gandhi decades later, it was not a conversion from scratch. It was a spectacular moment of recognition. Gandhi did not invent Jamnalal’s conscience. He simply gave it a home.

Quest For A Master

By the time the First World War was fracturing the globe, Jamnalal Bajaj was a mature, fabulously wealthy merchant, yet his soul remained deeply restless. Like many sensitive spirits of his generation, he was profoundly disillusioned by the moral vacuum of colonial modernity. He travelled across India, seeking out the great religious figures and socio-political stars of the era, sitting at the feet of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and wandering among local sadhus, but he returned from each encounter empty-handed. They offered dogmas, rituals, and philosophical abstractions. Jamnalal hungered for an ethical life that could be lived out in the marketplace.

Then, in 1915, a quiet lawyer returned from the battlefields of South Africa, carrying nothing but a walking stick, a spinning wheel, and an unshakeable faith in the power of Truth.

When Jamnalal met Gandhi, the effect was instantaneous. Here was a man who did not just preach the scriptures. He lived them out in the dirt. Gandhi’s radical synthesis of absolute inner discipline and explosive, non-violent political action was the exact key Jamnalal had spent a lifetime searching for.

But Jamnalal did not want to be just another wealthy patron writing cheques from a safe distance. In a move that shattered all conventional social boundaries, he approached Gandhi with an astonishing, deeply emotional request: he asked to be formally adopted as the Mahatma’s “fifth son.”

For Gandhi, who already had four biological sons with whom he shared a famously turbulent, demanding relationship, this was a moment of immense symbolic gravity. He looked into the eyes of the Marwari tycoon, saw the absolute, terrifying sincerity written there and accepted.

From that moment on, their letters shifted from the formal language of political allies to the intensely intimate, demanding, and loving dialogue of a father and a son. Jamnalal had successfully abdicated his throne of gold to inherit a kingdom of sacrifice.

Body As A Political Weapon

The world soon realised that Jamnalal’s adoption was no mere sentimental performance. In 1921, as the Non-Cooperation Movement began to convulse the country, Jamnalal walked into the public square and formally returned his title of Rai Bahadur, a highly coveted mark of distinction bestowed upon him by the British Crown. To the colonial state, this was an act of shocking class treason. A premier merchant prince was openly declaring that the King Emperor had no clothes. But the real shockwave hit when Jamnalal stepped away from his corporate boards to throw his actual physical body into the fires of mass agitation.

During the historic Nagpur Flag Satyagraha of 1923, when the British administration banned the hoisting of the Indian national flag, it was Jamnalal who took command of the peaceful volunteers. He marched directly into the forbidden zones, courting arrest with a calm smile.

When the heavy iron gates of the colonial prison slammed shut behind him, a vital boundary in Indian political history was permanently breached. Other industrialists gave money to keep the Congress alive. Jamnalal gave his liberty.

He was arrested again during the salt raids of 1930, and repeatedly thrown back into prison throughout the turbulent decade. Inside those damp, disease-ridden cells, Jamnalal steadfastly refused any special privileges, soft mattresses, or dietary exemptions that his immense wealth could easily have bought him. He ate the same coarse prison gruel, slept on the same stone floors, and endured the same humiliating searches as the poorest, most forgotten freedom fighter beside him. His wealth was completely decoupled from privilege. It had been entirely re-engineered into an instrument of voluntary suffering.

Rigours of Ashram Life

The true test of Jamnalal’s transformation, however, took place far away from the public drama of political rallies, within the quiet, uncompromising confines of Gandhi’s ashrams. The ashram was Gandhi’s moral laboratory, a place designed to systematically strip away every trace of ego, caste vanity, and class prejudice from its inhabitants.

The equaliser in this laboratory was manual sanitation work, the daily, mandatory task of cleaning the community’s dry latrines.

For a man born into the strict, orthodoxy-bound Marwari community, where notions of ritual purity were deeply entrenched and enforced by an army of domestic servants, this was a mountain of cultural resistance. Yet, biographical records by B. R. Nanda and contemporary witnesses confirm that Jamnalal did not flinch. He picked up the broom and the shovel.

The hand that signed multi-million rupee business contracts was the very same hand that regularly scoured the ashram toilets. This was the pure essence of Gandhian pedagogy at work: an ethical transformation that was not debated in abstract seminars but hammered out through the repetitive, daily rhythm of physical labour. Jamnalal did not merely read about equality. He scraped it out of the dirt.

Constructing Sevagram

In the mid-1930s, Jamnalal engineered an intervention that would permanently alter the geographic centre of the Indian freedom struggle. Desiring to anchor Gandhi’s vision deeply within the suffering heart of rural India, Jamnalal gifted the Mahatma a vast tract of land in an isolated, malaria-ridden village called Segaon, nestled near Wardha in the Central Provinces. This forgotten hamlet, entirely cut off from modern infrastructure, would be christened Sevagram, the Village of Service.

The radical austerity of this project is preserved in a remarkable, sharp letter written by Gandhi to Jamnalal on March 19, 1936. As he prepared to move into the wilderness, Gandhi gave his “fifth son” a strict, unyielding architectural mandate.

Gandhi demanded that the construction of his personal living space must not cost a single rupee over Rs.100, utilising only local mud, bamboo, and thatch. Jamnalal supervised the project meticulously, ensuring that not a single anna of industrial luxury crept into the sanctuary of rural poverty.

As the great leaders of the nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad, and Rajendra Prasad, descended upon this remote village to consult the Mahatma, the logistical challenges became comical. The roads were non-existent, frequently turning into deep pools of thick mud during the monsoons.

To solve this, Jamnalal designed a brilliant, hilarious piece of folk engineering that became affectionately known as the “Oxford.” He took the chassis and body of an old, broken-down Ford motorcar, stripped away its engine, and hitched its front axle to a pair of strong, slow-moving village oxen.

Inside this bizarre hybrid vehicle, a perfect, rolling metaphor for the convergence of modern industrial design and ancient rural reality, the elegant, European-educated Nehru and the iron-willed Patel were bumped and rattled across the muddy terrain to see the Mahatma. As Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn) beautifully noted in her memoir The Spirit’s Pilgrimage, though Gandhi had officially retired from the Congress, “the Congress had not left him.” It was Jamnalal’s quiet logistical genius that transformed an isolated rural outpost into the de facto capital of the Indian nation.

Laxmi Narayan Radicalism

At the very heart of the Gandhian economic alternative lay the highly controversial concept of Trusteeship. Gandhi did not believe in the violent, bloody extermination of the wealthy class through class warfare. Instead, he made a radical moral appeal to their conscience. He argued that a rich man did not own his wealth. He merely held it in trust for the collective benefit of the starving millions.

While the intellectual elite of the era dismissed Trusteeship as a naïve, utopian fantasy designed to protect the rich, Gandhi had a devastating, living answer to his critics. He would simply point his finger at Jamnalal Bajaj. Gandhi openly remarked that whenever he sat down to write his theoretical framework on Trusteeship, he had Jamnalal “principally in mind.”

Mahatma Gandhi once remarked about Jamnalal Bajaj, “I can say with confidence that Jamnalalji did not earn a single pie through unethical means, and whatever he earned, he spent it all for the good of the people.” This observation captures the essence of Gandhi’s philosophy of Trusteeship, the belief that wealth is not a matter of absolute private ownership to be donated at one’s discretion, but a social trust held for the welfare of all. It went beyond charity or philanthropy, placing an ethical obligation upon individuals to use their resources in the service of society. Jamnalal did not merely endorse this principle; he lived it, dedicating his wealth, influence, and personal life to building a society founded on non-violence, social justice, and freedom from exploitation.

Jamnalal was deeply influenced by Gandhi and embraced his austere way of life. Jankidevi willingly walked beside her husband on this path of sacrifice. What followed was a remarkable series of personal transformations.

It began with the renunciation of gold ornaments. Gandhi’s general appeal was followed by a letter from Jamnalal to Jankidevi, who was then just twenty-four. They believed that gold was a symbol of Kali and that it bred jealousy, attachment, and the fear of loss. Jankidevi willingly gave up all her ornaments and never wore gold again for the rest of her life.

Next came purdah. At Jamnalal’s urging, Jankidevi abandoned this symbol of aristocratic respectability and encouraged other women to do the same as an act of courage and self-respect. In 1919, this single decision became a powerful statement of women’s freedom and dignity, inspiring thousands whose lives had long been confined within their homes.

Jamnalal soon extended this philosophy far beyond his personal life. He institutionalised Trusteeship on a remarkable scale, channelling his vast fortune into Gandhi’s constructive programme, funding the Gandhi Seva Sangh, serving as the tireless Treasurer of the All India Spinners’ Association, and strengthening the All India Village Industries Association.

Yet perhaps his greatest act of Trusteeship was not financial but social. On 17 July 1928, five years before Gandhi formally launched his nationwide anti-untouchability campaign, Jamnalal and Jankidevi opened the doors of their Lakshmi Narayan Temple in Wardha to everyone, irrespective of caste. For the first time in India, Dalits (then referred to as Harijans) were welcomed into a Hindu temple under the initiative of its own patrons.

In the late 1920s, this was an act of explosive social radicalism. Jamnalal was attacked by religious traditionalists, boycotted by wealthy merchants, and threatened with social excommunication. Yet he stood firm at the temple gates, insisting that if God could not welcome the poorest and most oppressed, then such a god was nothing more than stone. In doing so, he risked his business, social standing, and personal safety to ensure that his private property served the cause of human justice.

Death In The Family

The intense, burning pace of Jamnalal’s life, divided between the damp dampness of prison cells, the gruelling travels of rural mobilisation, and the immense stress of managing both a commercial empire and a national movement, eventually took its toll. On February 11, 1942, at the age of fifty-two, Jamnalal’s exhausted body finally gave way. He suffered a sudden, catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage and passed into the ages.

The news of his death struck Gandhi like a physical blow. The Mahatma, who had trained himself for decades to receive news of death with absolute, detached stoicism, was completely broken.

Mahadev Desai, writing in a raw, grief-stricken letter to C. Rajagopalachari, recorded the profound emotional devastation that filled the ashram:

“Bapu is in great need of consolation… his sorrow is as deep and profound as it was on Maganlal Gandhi’s death.”

The nation had lost its treasurer, but Gandhi had lost his son. Days after the funeral, Gandhi gathered the grieving family around him, his presence bridging the gap between public leader and family patriarch. He looked at Jamnalal’s two young sons, Kamalnayan and Ramkrishna, and distributed their inheritance not in terms of stocks and bank accounts, but in terms of moral duties. He advised the elder son, Kamalnayan, to take the reins of the family’s vast commercial enterprises, running them with strict ethical transparency. Then, turning to the younger son, Ramkrishna, he asked him to surrender his life entirely to finishing the incomplete rural service of his father.

Even in death, the Mahatma’s moral authority continued to shape the Bajaj lineage, ensuring that the legacy of the fifth son would not dissolve back into mere corporate capital.

A Historic Partnership

The epic partnership between Mahatma Gandhi and Jamnalal Bajaj challenges the cynical, simplistic assumptions that dominate our modern view of politics and money. It dismantles the rigid, old idea that leaders must always be ideological purists and that capitalists must always be exploiters.

Jamnalal’s life stands as an immortal proof that the human conscience is fully capable of staging a spectacular revolution against its own economic privileges. He redefined the very meaning of success, showing the world that true wealth is measured not by how much a man accumulates, but by how much of himself he can successfully give away.

In our current twenty-first-century landscape, an era driven by hyper-capitalism, corporate social responsibility that so often feels like corporate public relations, and a deep, toxic division between classes, the story of the Mahatma and his fifth son remains a brilliant, challenging blueprint.

Mahadev Desai’s magnificent funeral tribute in Harijan preserves the final ledger of this extraordinary life for eternity. He wrote that Jamnalal was not merely the treasurer of the nation’s wealth, but the “treasurer of the nation’s honour.”

Jamnalal Bajaj left behind a luminous, timeless lesson for the elite of every generation. The highest use of capital is its total surrender to conscience, and that the greatest title a billionaire can ever earn is to be called a servant of the poor.

To read more articles from this series, click here.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post Jamnalal Bajaj, The Fifth Son appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this exclusive series, writer and researcher Anu Jain revisits Mahatma Gandhi’s closest political and personal relationships, uncovering the conversations, collaborations, and ethical dilemmas that shaped both the man and the movement he came to lead.

Long before Gandhi’s celebrated associations with Jamnalal Bajaj or G.D. Birla, it was the Tata family that quietly intervened at a defining moment in his South African struggle. Their support arrived not as an attempt to shape his politics, but as an affirmation of the moral courage and disciplined non-violence that lay at the heart of satyagraha. Gandhi, in turn, transformed this extraordinary generosity into a lesson in public accountability, insisting that every contribution—whether from a wealthy industrialist or an ordinary worker—was a sacred trust to be used with absolute transparency.

This five-part series explores the remarkable individuals who stood alongside Gandhi in different ways, revealing how their relationships illuminate the ethical architecture of India’s freedom movement. Together, they demonstrate that Gandhi’s greatest achievement was not merely mobilising people, but creating a moral framework within which power, wealth, and public service could coexist without surrendering to one another.

Read on to discover the unique relationship that Mahatma Gandhi shared with Sir Ratan Tata and the House of Tata.

The story of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s relationship with wealth, power and big business did not begin in the grand palatial houses of Indian industrialists during the height of the freedom struggle. Its foundation was forged much earlier, in the dust and heat of South Africa. There, the practical, everyday demands of running a resistance movement forced a young lawyer to confront a difficult reality. He understood that money is dangerous, yet entirely necessary. Long before he formally introduced his famous philosophy of trusteeship, the idea that the wealthy should act as custodians holding riches in trust for the public good, Gandhi was already experimenting with a radical political economy built on voluntary poverty, absolute accountability, and a deep scepticism of large-scale charity.

Even in the pages of his early South African newspaper, Indian Opinion, Gandhi was fascinated by how people used power and wealth. In 1905, he published biographical sketches of global figures like Leo Tolstoy, Abraham Lincoln and Florence Nightingale, praising their moral courage. Alongside these global icons, he highlighted an Indian pioneer, the industrialist Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. Gandhi admiringly wrote that the elder Tata “never looked to self-interest… nor did he ever take distinctions of caste or race into consideration… the Parsis, the Muslims, the Hindus, all were equal to him” (Gandhi, 1905). This observation was a vital prelude. It revealed Gandhi’s early belief that capital, if guided by an ethical compass, could be a force for social uplift rather than an instrument of colonial or class domination.

Crucible of South Africa

By 1908, Gandhi’s experiments in truth were facing a brutal trial. The satyagraha movement in South Africa had entered its hardest phase. As Gandhi later detailed in his history, Satyagraha in South Africa, peaceful resistance required massive financial commitments (Gandhi, 1928). When the white minority government threw striking Indian labourers and merchants into prison, their families back home were left with nothing. The movement had to feed, clothe and house these dependants for months at a time. Concurrently, Indian Opinion, the print lifeline of the struggle,was running out of money, yet its printing presses had to keep moving to document the community’s resistance.

To house the families of prisoners, Gandhi had helped establish the Phoenix Settlement, a communal farm dedicated to simple, austere living. While the residents grew their own food, they were not entirely self-sufficient. Paper, ink, transport, and basic medicine still required hard cash. Gandhi’s ideal of simplicity did not completely eliminate material needs; it simply disciplined them.

As the months dragged on, donor fatigue set in. The local Indian merchant community, which had funded the initial phases of the protest, was financially exhausted by continuous government fines and business closures. By late 1909, the financial strain was critical. Sailing back from London in November after failing to win concessions from British officials, a deeply stressed Gandhi wrote a letter to his nephew, Maganlal Gandhi. He insisted that Indian Opinion must be saved at all costs: even if they were reduced to printing a single page on a hand-press, the paper could not die (Gandhi, 1909). To Gandhi, the death of the newspaper would signal a moral retreat.

Lifeline from Bombay

On November 30, 1909, Gandhi stepped off the ship at Cape Town, bracing for bad news. Instead, he received a telegram that changed everything. Sir Ratanji Tata, the younger son of Jamsetji Tata, had sent a massive donation of 25,000 rupees to support the South African satyagraha. In 1909, this was a staggering fortune, equivalent to millions today.

The timing was miraculous. Gandhi openly admitted that this single act saved Indian Opinion and breathed new life into the struggle. But Ratan Tata’s intervention was not a random act of impulsive charity. It was a deliberate, principled political statement. Tata was a close ally of the moderate Indian nationalist leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He preferred constitutional reforms and disciplined, peaceful public action. What drew Tata to Gandhi was the pure ethical character of the South African movement.

In a letter to Gokhale accompanying the money, Ratan Tata expressed his deep admiration for the “undaunted and determined stand” of the regular people in the Transvaal (Tata, 1909). He wrote of his profound respect for everyday labourers who chose prison over loss of dignity, and their disciplined refusal to resort to violence. For Tata, this was not standard philanthropy. It was a wealthy captain of industry endorsing the moral stamina of the working class.

Gokhale immediately understood the power of this gesture. Labelling it “timely help,” he publicised the donation across India. The effect was immediate and cascading. Inspired by Tata, other wealthy patrons stepped forward: J. B. Petit in Bombay, Dr. Pranjivan Mehta in Rangoon, and Indian diaspora communities from London to Zanzibar sent funds. Tata’s money had legitimised a distant, experimental struggle, making it a unified cause for the global Indian identity.

The Sacred Trust

The way Gandhi managed this sudden wealth is just as revealing as the donation itself. In his autobiography, Gandhi argued that public money must be treated as a “sacred trust,” demanding far stricter accounting than personal wealth (Gandhi, 1927). Every single rupee had to be tracked, recorded, and publicly justified.

“Public money ought to be treated with greater care than our own. A trustee has no right to waste a single farthing of the funds explicitly placed in his custody.” M. K. Gandhi

Even with a full bank account, Gandhi refused to let luxury creep into the Phoenix Settlement. When some residents suggested using the Tata funds to build more comfortable housing and buy better provisions, Gandhi firmly refused. He believed that the self-imposed discipline of hardship was essential to the spiritual strength of satyagraha. To make life easy would ruin the movement’s moral edge.

Gandhi personally monitored the printing room of Indian Opinion, ensuring that paper and ink were never wasted. Whether a donation came from a millionaire industrialist in Bombay or a single copper coin from a poor indentured labourer, it was meticulously recorded in the ledger books. Transparency was non-negotiable. Furthermore, Gandhi remained deeply wary of becoming dependant on a few wealthy patrons. Even with Tata’s backing, he continued to collect small, pennies-worth subscriptions from the community, ensuring the movement stayed rooted in the masses.

Respectful Distance

The relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Ratan Tata offers a starkly different model of engagement compared to Gandhi’s later, legendary friendships with other Indian tycoons.

Unlike Bajaj or Birla, Ratan Tata never became a personal disciple of Gandhi. There are no records of late-night heart-to-heart chats or long weekends at the ashram between them. Their interactions were handled through letters and intermediaries like Gokhale.

This distance was intentional and respectful. Tata did not try to control the movement or use his money to buy influence, and Gandhi never asked him to abandon his factories. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, this pattern of respectful boundary-keeping continued with Ratan’s successor, J.R.D. Tata.

A natural ideological friction always existed between them. Gandhi was sceptical of heavy, assembly-line industrialisation, famously advocating for decentralised, village-based economies centred around the spinning wheel (charkha). The Tatas, conversely, were building India’s modern industrial infrastructure with massive steel plants, hydroelectric projects, and aviation lines. Yet, this economic disagreement never turned into bitterness. Gandhi sought to morally transform capitalism from the outside; the Tatas sought to humanise it from within.

Dawn of Independence

This deep, quiet respect survived the decades, lasting all the way to Gandhi’s final moments. On January 30, 1948, when a fanatic’s bullets ended the Mahatma’s life in New Delhi, the shockwaves travelled across the globe. J.R.D. Tata, who was away in Europe at the time, felt the loss deeply. In a private, poignant letter written from Switzerland to his colleague Ardeshir Dalal on February 6, 1948, J.R.D. reflected on the tragedy.

“I was horrified, as you all must have been, at the news of Gandhiji’s assassination,” J.R.D. Tata wrote. “It is a World tragedy but who knows whether his paying the ultimate price may not in the end have done more for the cause of peace, tolerance and communal harmony for which he gave his life than he would have achieved by remaining alive… I hope however, that the grief and anger caused by Gandhi’s murder amongst the great mass of the people of India and the realisation of the righteousness and soundness of what he stood for, will keep… the extremists from further mischief” (Tata, 1948).

J.R.D.’s words did not echo standard Congress party slogans. True to the Tata tradition, his letter viewed Gandhi through the lens of national stability, civic sanity, and moral order. Even in death, the industrialist recognised the Mahatma not just as a political figure, but as an indispensable moral anchor for a fragile, newborn nation.

The Moral Compass

In the grand tapestry of Indian nationalism, the intersection of Mahatma Gandhi and the House of Tata stands out as a unique experiment in political morality. It proves that the relationship between wealth and social activism does not always have to be corrupt, transactional, or compromising.

If Jamnalal Bajaj represented total surrender to Gandhi’s austere lifestyle, and G.D. Birla represented a continuous political negotiation with it, the Tatas represented something completely different: an honest recognition of Gandhi’s moral authority without the need to enter his personal circle. The historic 1909 donation remains a powerful historical example of how capital, when guided by clear ethics, can defend and sustain a grassroots struggle without trying to dictate its terms. Ultimately, Gandhi and Tata showed the world a rare, beautiful equilibrium, proving that money and morality can work together to transform a society, provided both sides respect the clean, uncompromising lines of a sacred trust.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for the next part of the series as we bring attention to how unwavering loyalty, financial sacrifice, and a shared dedication to rural upliftment forged an extraordinary bond between Gandhi and Jamnalal Bajaj.

To read more articles from this series, click here.

Anu Jain is a Doctoral Scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research examines the intersection of Gandhian philosophy and Gender with a particular focus on the crucial role of Elected Women Representatives (EWRs).

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post The Merchant and the Mahatma appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this exclusive series, writer and researcher Anu Jain revisits the defining personal and political relationships that shaped Gandhi’s life, revealing how his interactions with a small circle of trusted contemporaries profoundly influenced both his public leadership and private convictions.

Few of these relationships were as paradoxical, or as consequential, as his lifelong engagement with G.D. Birla. One was India’s most influential industrialist; the other, a leader who deliberately embraced poverty as a political and ethical discipline. Their association was neither one of unquestioning patronage nor ideological agreement. Instead, it became an enduring conversation about responsibility, public service, and the moral obligations that accompany wealth.

This five-part series explores the individuals who stood closest to Gandhi, not as passive admirers but as collaborators, critics, and fellow travellers in the making of modern India. Together, these relationships illuminate how Gandhi’s greatest influence often lay not in commanding power, but in reshaping the values of those who possessed it.

Read on to discover the remarkable bond that Mahatma Gandhi shared with G.D. Birla.

History is fond of neat, tidy equations. The powerful rule, the wealthy purchase influence, and the saintly retreat into cloistered isolation. Yet, the extraordinary bond between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Ghanshyam Das Birla defiantly shatters these easy categorisations. Theirs was not a conventional saga of a rich patron bankrolling a political movement, nor was it a story of uncomplicated friendship or calculated alliance. Instead, it was an arena of permanent moral tension, a beautiful, complicated dance between radical renunciation and massive capital accumulation.

What makes this relationship a vital chapter in the story of modern India is not merely that the nation’s wealthiest tycoon supported its most ascetic revolutionary. The true significance lies in a profound inversion of power, the billionaire did not shape the Mahatma, rather, the Mahatma entirely re-architected the moral universe of the billionaire.

When Gandhi returned to the red soil of India from South Africa in 1915, he did not yet wear the undisputed crown of national leadership. He was a curious, enigmatic figure, experimenting with communal living, dietary restrictions, and radical simplicity. Yet, India’s emerging merchant class, particularly the ambitious Marwari community, watched him with intense curiosity.

Among them was a brilliant, fiercely driven young businessman named G.D. Birla. He discovered something unprecedented in Gandhi. A leader who wielded immense power without possessing a single rupee, who could mobilise millions without promising material rewards, and whose very presence stood as a living rebuke to the pampered social elites of the British Raj. Birla was instantly transfixed. Gandhi, however, did not open his arms unreservedly. He had already walked through a furnace of betrayal, and his caution had been forged in a bitter crisis that would cast a long shadow over the rest of his life.

The Ghost of Kochrab

Between 1915 and 1917, at the newly established Kochrab Ashram near Ahmedabad, Gandhi sought to build a living laboratory for his core ideals, truth (satyagraha), non-violence (ahimsa), and radical social equality. Here, principles were not meant to be debated in academic comfort, they were tested against the raw, jagged edges of Indian reality. It was here that Gandhi collided head-on with a defining moral crisis, learning a lesson he would carry to his grave. Money is never neutral, it arrives with invisible strings, unspoken expectations, and subtle mechanisms of control.

The explosion occurred when Gandhi made the deliberate choice to admit an “untouchable” family, Dudabhai, his wife Danibehn, and their infant daughter Lakshmi, into the ashram community. In an era where caste lines were policed with religious ferocity, this was an act of open social rebellion. Gandhi viewed untouchability not as a minor social blemish, but as a cancerous moral evil. For him, if the ashram could not practise absolute human equality within its own four walls, its ethical foundation was a sham.

The blowback from orthodox society was swift and merciless. Several wealthy merchant-donors who funded the daily upkeep of the ashram were horrified. They didn’t just voice their disapproval, they used the ultimate weapon of the wealthy, they slammed their checkbooks shut. Financial contributions dried up almost overnight, plunging the young ashram into terrifying financial precarity.

The cold, unmistakable message hung in the air. Our charity is conditional. Fall in line with our social prejudices, or we will starve you into submission.

Gandhi found himself standing at a dangerous crossroads. He was entirely broke, responsibilities were mounting, and his experimental community was on the brink of collapse. Yet, his response was magnificent in its unyielding defiance. He flatly refused to reverse his decision or compromise the dignity of his new guests to placate his wealthy backers. As recorded in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, he calmly informed his companions that if the money ran out completely and they were evicted, they would simply pack up their few belongings, move directly into the Bhangi (sweepers’) quarters, and survive entirely on manual labour.

This moment of supreme vulnerability transformed into an epiphany. Gandhi realised that financial dependence on elite patrons was not merely a logistical challenge, it was an acute ethical vulnerability. This realisation became a permanent, protective armour he wore whenever he dealt with the wealthy and powerful.

The May 1918 Manifesto

By the time G.D. Birla firmly entered his orbit, Gandhi was no longer an untested idealist, he was a battle-hardened strategist who had engineered a strict internal framework to govern his interactions with wealth. This icy clarity is beautifully preserved in his very first correspondence with the young industrialist, dated May 4, 1918.

Acknowledging Birla’s enthusiastic offers of financial backing, Gandhi dipped his pen in ink and drew a sharp, non-negotiable line in the sand. He thanked the young tycoon for his generosity but made it explicitly clear that while his money would be accepted for public work, it would never buy a single ounce of leverage over Gandhi’s decisions, his worldview, or his principles.

The tone of the letter was a masterpiece of polite iron. It was courteous, devoid of hostility, yet utterly unmoving. Gandhi did not reject the capitalist’s resources, he knew that journals like Young India and Harijan, along with massive rural development programmes, required vast rivers of capital. But he established an immutable law. Capital must remain entirely subordinate to moral autonomy. There would be no room for expectations, no backroom understanding, and absolutely no dilution of values. Gandhi was not stepping into a trap of dependency, he was drafting the strict terms of Birla’s surrender to a higher cause.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, this dynamic solidified into a fascinating public reality. Birla’s money poured into Gandhi’s vast network of social engineering, funding schools, digging village wells, and printing revolutionary literature. Yet, Gandhi enforced an almost military fiscal discipline. Every paisa was tracked, luxury was forbidden, and Birla’s immense financial power was systematically broken down into small, transparent currents of social repair. The direction of influence was resolutely one-way. Wealth was being continuously purified by the demands of the ascetic.

Transforming Stone into Justice

This ongoing moral negotiation found its most dramatic architectural expression in the late 1930s with the construction of the Laxmi Narayan Temple in Delhi, universally known today as the Birla Mandir.

To G.D. Birla, the spectacular, sprawling temple complex built between 1933 and 1939 was an expression of deep religious devotion, civic pride, and cultural renaissance. But Gandhi viewed such grand architectural projects with a degree of critical detachment. For him, true religion did not live in towering structures of stone and gold, it lived in the ethical treatment of the human being. He was deeply wary of magnificent temples that functioned as exclusive clubs for the privileged while shutting out the broken and the marginalised.

When Birla urgently requested the Mahatma to officially inaugurate the grand temple in 1939, Gandhi did not offer a polite, empty compliment. He issued an ultimatum. He agreed to bless the inauguration on one absolute, non-negotiable condition. The temple gates must swing wide open to every single human being, regardless of caste, including those deemed “untouchable” by orthodox tradition.

As Vivek Shukla meticulously documents in Gandhi’s Delhi, Gandhi stepped onto the premises only after securing this binding vow, declaring that a house of God that excluded human beings based on the accident of birth was not a temple at all, but a moral crime.

In 1939, this was a radical, explosive demand that sent shockwaves through orthodox Hindu society. By anchoring his participation to this condition, Gandhi pulled off a brilliant act of symbolic alchemy. He took a monument built by private corporate wealth and transformed it into a battleground for social liberation.

The thousands of ecstatic citizens who flooded the temple grounds on that festive opening day witnessed something far greater than the opening of a building, they saw an industrialist publicly surrender the sovereign terms of his own monument to the moral command of a saint. Tellingly, his point having been made, Gandhi never set foot in the Birla Mandir ever again.

Rejecting a Mansion

As India entered the turbulent mid-1940s, hurtling toward a chaotic, blood-soaked independence, the intimacy between the two men deepened, but Gandhi’s moral scrutiny only grew sharper.

Gandhi is often mythologised as a man who completely rejected spaces of privilege. In reality, his practise was far more nuanced and challenging. When political negotiations with the British or failing health demanded it, he would occasionally stay at Birla’s expansive, manicured estates in Delhi or Bombay. But he inhabited these elite spaces like a passing ghost, using them purely as functional transit stations without ever becoming anchored to their comfort.

This distinction exploded into sharp focus in 1946. Arriving in Delhi to navigate the agonising pre-Partition negotiations, Gandhi was warmly invited by Birla to stay at his luxurious mansion. Gandhi flatly declined. Instead, he marched straight to the edge of the city and pitched his camp in the Valmiki (Bhangi) colony on Mandir Marg, a squalid, neglected settlement of Dalit sweepers. For Gandhi, the impending birth of a free nation required not a celebration in a palace, but absolute physical identification with the lowest rungs of Indian society.

The material conditions in the sweepers’ colony were miserable, lacking basic sanitation, running water, or electricity. Deeply distressed by the thought of his frail master living in such harsh conditions, Birla acted with his characteristic corporate efficiency. He rushed technicians and labourers to the colony, installing electrical wiring and fresh water lines directly to the humble shack where Gandhi slept.

It was a generous, well-intentioned gesture of devotion. Yet, Gandhi turned upon it with the clinical precision of a surgeon. He sent a sharp, handwritten note to Birla through his secretary, Pyarelal. He wrote that he sincerely hoped these newly laid water lines and electrical grids were permanent fixtures for the community. He added a devastating warning. If the wires are pulled out the moment I leave this colony, this entire exercise will be exposed as a pathetic farce.

With those few words, Gandhi cut to the heart of the corporate-philanthropic delusion. He rejected the concept of temporary benevolence that treats human dignity as a theatrical prop for a VIP guest. By demanding that the infrastructure remain forever, Gandhi pulled the intervention out of the realm of soft charity and thrust it into the realm of permanent justice. The electricity was no longer a gift to a saint, it was a basic human right owned by the sweepers of Delhi.

The Final Sanctuary

In the twilight months of his life, circumstance, not desire, finally bound Gandhi to Birla’s doorstep. Returning to a fractured Delhi on September 9, 1947, from the riot-torn fields of Bengal, Gandhi found the capital consumed by the fires of Partition. The streets were swimming in blood, and anger was boiling over.

Sensing the extreme danger, his closest companions, Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, intercepted him at the station and begged him to stay at Birla House on Albuquerque Road. They argued that the sweepers’ colony was no longer safe from the volatile mobs. Gandhi quietly acquiesced. It was an adjustment to an unfolding tragedy, not a compromise of his core principles.

Birla House was a majestic, opulent palace located in the aristocratic heart of New Delhi, surrounded by expansive, manicured lawns. Birla immediately transformed his estate into a fortress of support for the Mahatma. He built a wooden platform on the grass for Gandhi’s daily multi-faith prayer meetings, installed advanced microphones and loudspeakers so that his fading voice could reach the masses, and placed a private car at his disposal. The industrialist’s palace quickly became the nerve centre of the fracturing nation, where prime ministers, refugees, and generals converged.

Yet, the atmosphere was thick with dread. Furious Hindu refugees, inflamed by Gandhi’s uncompromising defence of Muslim rights, frequently gathered outside the iron gates, shouting bitter, hostile slogans. Gandhi was fully aware that death was closing in, a bomb had already detonated on the garden wall just days prior. Yet, he adamantly refused to allow barbed wire, police cordons, or weapons to insulate him from the public.

On the evening of January 30, 1948, leaning on his grand-nieces Manu and Abha, Gandhi walked out onto the green grass of Birla House for his customary prayer meeting. It was there, against the backdrop of corporate wealth and imperial architecture, that Nathuram Godse stepped forward and fired three bullets into his chest.

The geography of his death is profoundly symbolic. Gandhi did not draw his last breath in an ashram of his own making, nor in the guarded chambers of state power. He died in the home of India’s grandest capitalist, a man who had spent three decades offering him shelter, yet a man whose immense fortune could never buy, insulate, or protect the fierce, independent spirit of the man who walked his gardens.

The 1971 Negotiations

The story of Gandhi and Birla does not conclude with the echo of those three gunshots. It contains a final, fascinating epilogue that took place decades later, revealing the stark, unvarnished boundaries of their lifelong association.

In 1971, after years of intense public pressure and debate, the Government of India moved to acquire Birla House from the family to preserve it as a sacred national monument. What followed was not a sentimental, tearful surrender of property, but a cold, hard-nosed commercial negotiation.

The transaction was conducted with meticulous attention to market valuation. The industrialist K.K. Birla led the negotiations, and the state ultimately paid the Birla family a massive cash sum of ₹54 lakhs, alongside an exchange of approximately seven acres of premium urban real estate elsewhere in New Delhi.

To this day, contemporary accounts note with astonishment that even the individual fruit-bearing trees scattered across the lawns were counted, valued, and factored into the final price tag. The negotiations were protracted, legally calculated, and firmly anchored to the clinical laws of property ownership.

To an outside observer, this hyper-commercial transaction seemed to clash awkwardly with the historic narrative of the Birlas as selfless devotees of the Mahatma. The idea that the ground soaked with Gandhi’s blood was sold to the nation through an exacting financial audit felt, to some, like a betrayal of an ideal.

Yet, this apparent contradiction contains the deepest truth of the entire storey. It proves that Birla’s devotion to Gandhi was an entirely personal, voluntary act of the heart, an engagement with a moral titan that existed completely outside the mechanical structures of modern economic life. When dealing with Gandhi, Birla operated in the realm of the soul, when dealing with the post-colonial Indian state, he operated in the realm of the market. The two worlds were distinct, and neither collapsed into the other.

The Sovereign Blueprint

Following its commercial acquisition, the estate was renamed Gandhi Smriti and opened to the public on August 15, 1973, on what is now Tees January Marg. Today, the footprints of the Mahatma are cast in stone across the grass where he fell, a permanent place of pilgrimage for the world.

In the final analysis, the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and G.D. Birla remains a magnificent, unresolved paradox. It was neither a story of corporate capture nor one of pious exploitation. It offers a masterclass in how an ethical movement can courageously engage with massive wealth without ever being swallowed by it, and how an organisation can utilise immense resources without ever allowing them to dictate the terms of its soul.

Gandhi never retreated into the easy safety of moral purism, he walked directly into the palaces of capital, looked the richest men in the world in the eye, and subjected their fortune to the fierce, burning light of ethical accountability. Birla, in turn, never abandoned his identity as a hard-headed industrialist, yet he chose to remain in a lifelong conversation with a philosophy that challenged the very foundations of his empire.

In an era like our own, where global democracies are deeply compromised by hidden campaign funding, corporate capture, and the corrupting leverage of billionaire philanthropists, the clean, uncompromised boundary between Gandhi and Birla stands as an urgent blueprint. It reminds us across the decades of an immortal lesson. That true power does not belong to those who hold the gold, but to those who hold the truth.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for the next part of the series as we bring attention to how patriotic generosity, principled resistance, and a shared dream of self-reliance forged an unlikely bond between Gandhi and Sir Ratanji Tata.

Read the previous article in the series here.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post Money, Morality and Discipline of Power appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Writer and researcher Anu Jain revisits Mahatma Gandhi’s closest political and personal bonds in this series, offering a timely reminder that transformative movements are built not merely on charismatic leadership, but on the unyielding sentinels of conscience who surround it.

For Gandhi, leadership was never a solitary endeavour. It was a collaborative, often demanding dialogue with a close circle of confidants who possessed the moral courage to hold up a mirror to him.

This exclusive five-part series explores Gandhi’s deeply complex relationships with five of his remarkable contemporaries. Together, these five bonds did more than just steer the course of the independence movement; they directly shaped the deeply personal, moral, and political choices of the Mahatma himself.

Read on the unique bond that Gandhi shared with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari here.

In mid-June 1920, a letter arrived at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad that would make the most powerful moral leader in India stop and think.

The sender was neither a British Viceroy threatening imprisonment, nor a political rival launching a public attack. It was Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, affectionately known as Rajaji, a brilliant lawyer from Madras with a razor-sharp intellect and a quiet, unassuming demeanour. At a time when millions across the subcontinent were beginning to view Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as an infallible saint whose every word was law, Rajaji dared to do the unthinkable. He held up a mirror to his Master’s soul and told him he was on the brink of ruin.

Gandhi was entangled in a deeply intense, emotionally charged relationship with Saraladevi Chaudhurani, a brilliant and charismatic nationalist writer. He had begun to call her his “spiritual wife” and was privately contemplating a public declaration of their unique bond. To the outer world, Gandhi seemed unstoppable, reshaping the Indian National Congress into a thunderous mass movement. But in the quiet corners of his private life, he was navigating a profound emotional labyrinth.

Question of Accountability

Rajaji refused to remain silent while other members of Gandhi’s inner circle, such as his loyal secretary Mahadev Desai, watched in nervous silence and submitted to the Mahatma’s whims. He realised that Gandhi’s unwavering moral purity, rather than political strategy, was his greatest weapon against the British Empire. To jeopardise that purity would be to capsize the ship that held the hopes of a whole country.

This is the story of an extraordinary bond, what Mahadev Desai called an “intellectual wedding.” It is the chronicle of a friendship that proved the Gandhian movement was never a cult of blind obedience, but a crucible of fierce moral accountability.

Born into a traditional Iyengar Brahmin family in the Madras Presidency, Rajaji was a man built on classical learning, strict ethical reasoning, and the analytical precision of a seasoned legal mind. When he answered Gandhi’s call to join the nationalist struggle, he left behind a highly lucrative law practise. But he did not leave behind his critical faculties. To Rajaji, loyalty did not mean the suspension of judgement. He loved Gandhi, but he loved the moral clarity of the cause more.

When Gandhi wrote to his Tamil protégé hinting at a deeper, public acknowledgement of his relationship with Saraladevi, Rajaji’s response was immediate, urgent, and fiercely protective. Though Gandhi’s original letter to Rajaji has been lost to time, fragments of Rajaji’s reply from June 16, 1920, survive as a testament to ultimate moral courage.

Rajaji did not mince words. He warned Gandhi that any public step toward validating this “spiritual marriage” would bring “unutterable shame and ruin,” effectively destroying “all saintliness, all purity, all asceticism, all India’s hope.” To drive his point home, Rajaji invoked a magnificent and terrifying metaphor:

“How could you venture out… when in your boat was the faith and fate of millions of simple souls who, if the boat had capsized, would have seen neither beauty nor love nor grandeur, but unspeakable shame and death.”

Rajaji had briefly met Saraladevi, and his legal mind was entirely unimpressed by her charms. In an unusually harsh and candid assessment, he wrote to Gandhi:

“I fail to see any ‘greatness’ in the lady. She is like a hundred other women, whom a little education makes very attractive. I have seen scores of bigger-minded and better-souled women.”

Then, turning his gaze toward Gandhi’s steadfast wife, Kasturba, he drew a stinging contrast. To compare Saraladevi to Kasturba, Rajaji noted, was like “comparing a kerosene oil lamp to the morning sun.”

Rajaji did not spare Saraladevi further, criticising her “reckless indifference to consequences.” His final directive to his Master was absolute: “Pray disengage yourself at once completely. No delay is allowable when you hold such great trusts.”

This letter was a magnificent act of bravery. In 1920, Gandhi was fast becoming a deity in the Indian imagination. To challenge him on his private affections was highly dangerous. But Rajaji understood a fundamental truth about Indian society. Gandhi’s public authority rested squarely on his ascetic image. While old Hindu traditions technically permitted polygamy, the heartbeat of Indian social practise fiercely favoured monogamy. Had Gandhi publicly embraced another partner, even under the lofty banner of a “spiritual union“, he would have fractured his credibility among ordinary citizens, crippling the moral foundation of the freedom struggle.

Gandhi was visibly shaken by the raw frankness of Rajaji’s intervention. Though the emotional disentanglement was slow, agonising, and complex, the warning worked. The grand idaea of a public declaration was dropped. By December 1920, Gandhi took the definitive step to close that chapter of his life.

Writing back to Rajaji, Gandhi quietly confirmed the victory of his friend’s counsel:

“Yes, your guess is correct. The fair friend is Saraladevi. She wants to bombard me with more stuff but I have refused to give further accommodation.”

The Mahatma had been saved from his own vulnerability by his conscience keeper.

Public Triumph

While this private storm was being weathered, the year 1920 saw Gandhi achieve unprecedented heights on the public stage. The contrast between his private crisis and his public triumph was breathtaking.

Gandhi threw himself into a massive tour of the Madras Presidency, travelling alongside the flamboyant Muslim leader Shaukat Ali. They were an unlikely pair, Shaukat Ali, loud, booming, and dressed in striking, theatrical outfits. Gandhi, soft-spoken, slender, and wrapped in simple homespun cloth. Yet, Gandhi deeply admired Ali, describing him to the English missionary C.F. Andrews was “one of the most sincere of men I have met… generous, frank, brave and gentle.”

As they moved through towns like Kumbakonam, Madurai, Trichy, Calicut, Kasargod, and Mangalore, giant crowds gathered. Crucially, women poured out to join these meetings, signalling a massive shift in the social fabric of Indian politics. Standing right beside Gandhi throughout this gruelling tour was Rajaji, acting as his voice, translating his complex ethical ideas into fluent, evocative Tamil, and seamlessly connecting the Mahatma to the masses.

That same year, at the historic Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi completely revolutionised the party’s architecture. He dissolved the old British administrative divisions and reorganised the Congress along linguistic lines, ensuring people could participate in their own mother tongues. He established a beautifully organised hierarchy of elected committees stretching from remote rural taluks and districts all the way up to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and the executive Congress Working Committee (CWC).

Most importantly, he opened the doors to the poor. For a tiny, nominal fee of just four annas, any adult could join. Within a single year, the Congress transformed from an elitist, English-speaking debating club into a roaring mass movement of nearly two million members. Gandhi was building a nation, even as he was correcting a personal misjudgement.

By 1921, the political landscape grew heavy with tension. The movement was fracturing under the weight of the violent Moplah rebellion and a general sluggishness in the adoption of Khadi. During this dark period, Gandhi’s appreciation for Rajaji deepened immensely. He saw in the Tamil leader a rare combination of “wisdom, integrity and ability,” noting with relief that Rajaji was one of the very few who “fully understood the meaning of our struggle.”

It was during this southern tour, in the historic city of Madurai, that Gandhi made a decision that would forever define his visual legacy. For years, since his days in Barisal, Bengal, he had contemplated shedding his traditional clothes to fully identify with the poorest of the poor. Everywhere he went, poor labourers told him they simply could not afford khadi. It was too expensive compared to cheap, imported British mill cloth.

In a moment of profound empathy, Gandhi decided to discard his shirt and cap, adopting the simple, humble loincloth for the rest of his life. It was a radical, embodied identification with India’s destitute.

When he broke the news to his inner circle, a fierce debate erupted. Maulana Azad understood the brilliant moral logic immediately. But Rajaji, ever the cautious pragmatist, was deeply unsettled. He worried that such a drastic, sudden transformation would alienate the public, making Gandhi look eccentric, erratic, or as Gandhi himself later recalled, a “lunatic.” Rajaji’s criticism was grounded in political prudence. He looked at symbolic acts through the cold lens of social intelligibility and political fallout.

Conversely, C.F. Andrews embraced the move with deep sympathy, seeing it as an authentic, beautiful act of solidarity. This friction perfectly highlighted the unique ecosystem around Gandhi. Rajaji’s practical scepticism and Andrews’ moral idealism acted as vital guardrails, shaping the conversational, evolving nature of Gandhian leadership.

Yerwada Jail

The ultimate test of this intellectual intimacy came in March 1922, when the British colonial state finally arrested Gandhi. The great Non-Cooperation experiment was paused, and Gandhi was escorted under heavy guard from Ahmedabad to Poona, passing through the iron gates of Yerwada Jail on the evening of March 21.

The prison bureaucracy attempted to strip the Mahatma of his historical magnitude, entering him into the ledger as routine text: Inmate No. 827, charged under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code for exciting disaffection towards the government.

But walls could not contain the movement. On April 1, 1922, during his very first permitted visitor window, Rajaji arrived at the prison gates alongside Gandhi’s son, Devadas, and the social reformer A.V. Thakkar.

Rajaji carefully observed his Master’s life behind bars and penned a vivid, moving account for Young India. He described a leader living under relentless surveillance, locked away in solitary conditions, yet maintaining an iron-clad, joyful routine of prayer, reading, and spinning. These written dispatches were crucial. They kept the flame of Gandhi’s moral authority burning bright in the hearts of the public, proving that the Mahatma remained unbroken even in captivity.

Their conversations in jail were a continuation of a profound intellectual dialogue that had begun years earlier in 1919. Back then, Gandhi had shared his deep anxieties with Rajaji regarding rising Hindu-Muslim tensions and the terrifying prospect of a militarised India, warning that normalising armed forces would turn the liberated nation into nothing more than “an armed camp.”

Medical Crisis

In January 1924, this bond of trust faced a sudden physical crisis. Still a prisoner, Gandhi developed acute appendicitis. In the dead of night, during a raging thunderstorm, he underwent emergency surgery at Sassoon Hospital in Poona. Facing extreme physical vulnerability, Gandhi’s immediate instinct was to surround himself with his trusted circle, summoning V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and Dr. V.D. Phatak to his bedside before the scalpel touched his skin.

Throughout these dark intervals of imprisonment and near-fatal illness, Rajaji remained the unshakable interpretive bridge between the secluded leader and a waiting nation. Following his subsequent release, Gandhi moved to a beachfront bungalow in Juhu to recover.

Once he was out of jail, Gandhi’s daily schedule was modified. He still woke up at 4:30 a.m. and said his prayers. At six he had a light breakfast, then took a short walk within the compound of the cottage. From then until midday he attended to his correspondence in English and in Gujarati, dictating letters and articles to a shorthand typist. He rested in the afternoon, saw visitors, and then took a forty-minute walk on the seashore. On his doctor’s advice, he had not yet resumed spinning.

Juhu, the suburb where Gandhi was recovering, was easily accessible from the city by rail and road. A stream of visitors, mostly uninvited and unannounced, descended daily from Bombay. Gandhi was finally forced to issue a public appeal, asking people to come see him between five and six in the evening only.

“The capital of energy at my disposal is very small, and I want to utilise it only in service. I wish to resume editorship of Navajivan and Young India from next week. And I need absolute quiet for that work. If all my time and energy are taken up in seeing and entertaining you, it will not be possible for me to edit the weeklies in the way I desire.”

Among those keen to see Gandhi was M.A. Jinnah’s young wife, Ruttie. She sent a basket of strawberries, with a note saying she wanted to come too, but was nervous lest it interfere with his health.

“I should hate to think that what to me is a source of pleasure must inevitably prolong the struggle for recovery. But you must know, that like the rest of the world, I too am dying to see you, so when I can legitimately do so, I shall expect a line or a word of permission.”

It is not clear whether Mrs. Jinnah in fact visited Gandhi. But plenty of other admirers descended on the cottage in Juhu. Almost immediately, Juhu became what Rajaji described with characteristic irony as a “general ward” of visitors. Writing to Mahadev Desai, Rajaji sarcastically complained:

“I understand that Juhu has become another general hospital. At Poona it was a special ward. but it is now a general ward of all consumptives and melancholics, and a ward without divisions for sexes.”

Rajaji’s remark was not merely administrative irritation. It reflected his consistent, protective concern that Gandhi’s physical body was being overexposed to the relentless demands of political devotion, treating his critical convalescence as public access.

Logistical Custodianship

This tension between intimacy and overload reappeared repeatedly over the following decade. In 1927, when Gandhi fell seriously ill again while touring Nandidurg, it was Rajaji who ensured not only medical care but also continuity of comfort and routine. He went so far as to meticulously arrange for fresh goat’s milk to be sent daily from Madras via train to Bangalore, collected at Tumkur, and carried up to the hill station so it was available for Gandhi during his health recovery stay. The detail is small, but revealing: Rajaji was not only a political interpreter of Gandhi, but also a literal logistical custodian of his fragile body.

The intimacy of this care sat alongside Rajaji’s growing unease with Gandhi’s relentless pace. In private correspondence, he increasingly expressed anxiety about overwork, overexposure, and the structural exhaustion of the movement itself. Yet this concern never became withdrawal. Instead, it deepened his function as Gandhi’s stabilising interlocutor, someone who absorbed strain so that Gandhi could continue outward expansion.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, this relationship had become completely central to the functioning of the Congress movement itself. During Gandhi’s Tamil Nadu tour in 1927, it was Rajaji who designed the entire itinerary, coordinated meetings, and shaped the organisational logistics of mass mobilisation. The spinning campaigns that followed, where donation boxes moved through crowds after each meeting, depended heavily on Rajaji’s unique ability to translate high Gandhian ethics into airtight administrative practise.

Following the Poona Pact of September 1932, Mahatma Gandhi renamed his weekly Harijan, reflecting his conviction that the abolition of untouchability was as vital to India’s future as political independence. The term soon gained widespread acceptance among the Hindu middle classes and the nationalist press, although Dr. B.R. Ambedkar firmly rejected it and never used it for the community he represented.

The Anti-Untouchability League, established after Gandhi’s fast, was also renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh (Servants of the Harijans). The change was intended both to popularise Gandhi’s preferred term “Harijan” and to distinguish the organisation from the Anti-Untouchability League already run by social reformer V.R. Shinde.

Rajaji, however, strongly objected to the new name. He argued that calling the organisation the Harijan Sevak Sangh implicitly accepted the continued existence of “untouchables” as a separate group. Instead, he proposed the name Untouchability Abolition League, emphasising that the real objective was not merely to serve a community but to eradicate the social evil itself. As Rajaji explained, they were striving for “the abolition of a slave status,” and the word “abolition” conveyed the purpose far more clearly than “service.”

Gandhi did not consider the issue decisive, remarking, “the Sangh will not succeed or fail because of the name. It will be judged by its work.” Nevertheless, because the suggestion came from Rajaji, whom he deeply respected, Gandhi asked G.D. Birla and A.V. Thakkar to examine the proposal.

Although Thakkar acknowledged that Rajaji’s reasoning had “much logic,” the proposal was rejected on practical grounds. The organisation’s name had only recently been changed from the Anti-Untouchability League to the Harijan Sevak Sangh, the Board had approved it, the press had announced it, and official stationery had already been printed. Thakkar argued that proposing another change so soon would invite ridicule from both the Board and the public. Consequently, despite admitting that Rajaji’s suggestion was reasonable, the Board considered it inexpedient.

The episode illustrates the tension between principle and administrative convenience. While Rajaji’s proposed name more directly expressed the mission of eliminating untouchability and avoided the paternalistic overtones of “Harijan Sevak Sangh,” bureaucratic inertia and concern over public perception ensured that the existing name remained unchanged.

Social Challenge

Gandhi’s son Devadas, still unmarried and a brahmachari, was deeply loved by his mother and also by his father. Indeed, it was only with his youngest son that Gandhi shared something like a normal relationship. However, Devadas had fallen in love with Lakshmi, the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). While Gandhi and Kasturba were in Ceylon, they received a letter from a family friend describing how Devadas was wishing for Lakshmi and was determined to marry her. Gandhi replied that Devadas’ condition was pitiable and Rajaji was unlikely to permit the marriage and Lakshmi would not act without her father’s consent. While she remained cheerful, Devadas, Gandhi wrote, had “gone mad” in love, suffering deeply. He added that if such devotion were directed towards God, he might have become a saint. Yet Gandhi also acknowledged that Devadas was torn between obedience and inner rebellion, even resenting his father as an obstacle. Unsure of how to resolve this, Gandhi urged that he be guided towards peace and dharma, admitting he himself might be misunderstanding him.

The situation was further complicated by social realities. Rajaji was a Tamil Brahmin, Gandhi a Gujarati Bania, making this an inter-caste and inter-regional union. Gandhi worried that orthodoxy might seize upon such a marriage to portray him as a dangerous radical, undermining his campaign against untouchability. However, he was mistaken in one respect, Lakshmi’s love was fully reciprocated. The two had first met in June 1924 in Bangalore, where Devadas reportedly declared his love. He later formally approached Rajaji for permission. Rajaji, though fond of Devadas and familiar with him since 1918, remained hesitant.

After consulting Gandhi, the two fathers placed the couple on probation, no meetings or correspondence, to test the durability of their love. If, after some years, their feelings endured, the marriage would be allowed. This arrangement, later recalled by Rajmohan Gandhi, required the couple to wait five years without contact, after which they married with parental approval.

On 16 June 1933, Devadas married Lakshmi in Poona. At the ceremony, Gandhi remarked that Devadas had “robbed Rajagopalachari of a cherished gem” and must prove worthy of it, while praising Lakshmi as true to her name. He expressed hope that the marriage would deepen his bond with Rajaji. Significantly, Gandhi prefaced his remarks by stating that nothing had been done against dharma, an implicit acknowledgement of the inter-caste nature of the union, one typically disapproved by orthodox authorities. Gandhi had by this time come to argue more explicitly that inter-caste marriages were not only permissible but socially desirable, as they could help break down caste barriers and advance the moral regeneration of Hindu society.

This marriage also concretely bound the two families. Lakshmi, Rajaji’s daughter, became Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, further deepening the personal and political relationship between the two leaders.

The Ultimate Testimony

The profound depth of this lifelong bond reached its historical crescendo in the bloody twilight of British rule. When India gained independence amid the horrors of partition in 1947, Gandhi was fasting in Calcutta and Noakhali to stem the tide of communal madness.

The newly appointed Governor of West Bengal, C. Rajagopalachari, looked at his old friend’s fragile body and tried hard to persuade Gandhi not to go on a fast. If he died, warned Rajaji, “the conflagration would be worse.”

Gandhi calmly and beautifully answered: “At least I won’t be there to witness it. I shall have done my bit. More is not given to a man to do.”

Realising the Mahatma’s unyielding resolve, Rajaji then turned around and made a passionate, public appeal to the people of Calcutta. He urged that they must, as soon as possible, restore communal peace and goodwill in the city, as “Mahatma Gandhi had hard work before him in the Punjab, for which he must be spared.”

The city listened, and the miracle of Calcutta was achieved. Reflecting on this monumental triumph, Rajaji told the city’s Rotary Club:

“Mahatma Gandhi has achieved many things in his lifetime, but I do not think he has achieved anything so great, so grand, as he has achieved in Calcutta.”

Architecture of Freedom

The extraordinary relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, perfected across the turbulent decades following the early 1920s, reveals a foundational truth about the internal engine of the Indian national movement. Gandhi was a visionary, but he was also human, prone to errors of the heart and miscalculations of the mind. His greatness lay not in a lack of flaws, but in his deliberate choice to surround himself with individuals who possessed the supreme moral courage to stand up and correct him.

Rajaji was never a passive disciple basking in the reflected glory of a saint. He was an independent, brilliant intellectual force who stabilised Gandhi’s image during moments of profound personal and political vulnerability. He translated the Mahatma’s speeches for the masses, but more importantly, he translated Gandhi’s ethical responsibilities back to Gandhi himself.

In the grand design of ‘Lesser Known Gandhi,’ this chapter reminds us that true leadership does not survive on blind adulation or the silent acquiescence of yes-men. The unyielding strength of the Gandhian struggle did not rely on the exercise of absolute, uncritical authority. It thrived because of independent sentinels of conscience like Rajaji, men who stood firmly at the threshold of power and ensured that absolute moral accountability was never sacrificed on the altar of political destiny.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for next part of the series as we explore how financial support, morality, and industrial resources forged an unlikely bond between Gandhi and G. D. Birla.

Read the previous article in the series here.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post Gandhi’s Conscience Keeper appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Today, a day after reports of the death of Justice MS Liberhan at the age of 87, Sabrangindia is reproducing this article for the benefits of two or three generations of younger readers who did not have the benefit of these insights available herein. Besides Communalism Combat, where the article may be still read, it has also been re-published on Sabrangindia and may be read here.

We are also re-publishing this here again today, August 4, 2026.

Rath Yatra Retraced

First published in Communalism Combat in April 2001

Unless he, too, prefers to suffer from ‘memory failure’ before the Liberhan 
Commission as Uma Bharati did, Union home minister LK Advani would benefit from a quick survey of news reports that recorded his words and deed for posterity – during the bloody rath yatra in 1990, till the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992 and subsequently

After eight years of procrastination, the proceedings of the Justice MS Liberhan Commission investigating the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 have reached the conclusive stage. Evidence of the key accused in the entire episode, however, still requires to be led, before arguments from either side can begin. This includes the evidence of former BJP president, best remembered for his bloody rathyatra to Ayodhya in 1990, Lal Krishna Advani. Today he is India’s home minister. Others to depose are another former BJP president and presently Union HRD minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh.

Through rather dubious claims in a writ petition filed before the Delhi High Court, Singh has sought to avoid appearing before Justice Liberhan altogether. It is to be hoped that the Delhi HC judge in question will call Singh’s bluff and compel him to appear in this significant investigation.

Advani, too, has been avoiding appearance before the Commission, pleading “other pressing commitments” as an excuse for some time now. He is scheduled to appear before Justice Liberhan on April 10 and 11. Further cross-examination of former Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao and some other witnesses are also due.

Only after these depositions and cross-examination will the arguments begin and the key issues under investigation be raised. The issue being probed relates to the crucial question of rule of law under the Indian Constitution. A place of worship and a historical site was destroyed in broad daylight with no resistance from the police and the paramilitary deployed. Equally important is the instigation to violence that resulted in systematic and violent attacks on the lives and properties of Muslims, before and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

For the first time in the half-a-century old history of the Indian republic, a mass movement was orchestrated and thereafter blatantly used to subvert the law and defy basic norms of equal and fair protection of all sections of the population by the law and order machinery. The purpose of the investigation, however delayed (as unfortunately all such public investigations have been in the past) and subverted, too, by key witnesses accused of criminal conspiracy yet holding positions of power today is to nail and punish those guilty.

As Advani’s date with the Liberhan Commission draws close, CC proposes to recall — through documents and press clippings — the events that led to the demolition. This will remind our readers of the issues raised by the movement that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the widespread violence it brought in it’s wake. A reminder of the past words and deeds of the key leaders of the sangh parivar, something they would like us all to forget today.

In this issue, CC looks back for answers to the questions:

Ø What was Advani’s role in leading the rath yatra in 1990 and again in 1992? Through public speeches and silent mobilisation, in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992? In inciting crowds and thus triggering rounds of communal riots countrywide through his rath yatra?

Ø  What did large sections of the mass media report and record about the trail of blood that the rath yatra left behind in its wake?

Ø  How did Advani and the BJP react to the demolition soon after it took place?

Ø  What has Advani said on the issue, from the time the BJP adopted the Ramjanmabhoomi programme initiated by the VHP in 1986, until the demolition, and since, even as Union home minister?

Ø  Which is Advani’s realspeak and which his doublespeak?

1993

A month after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, on January 25, 1993, Advani expressed “no regrets over the demolition” adding, “it was the hand of providence that willed the fall of the Babri Masjid”.

The Indian Express dated January 26, 1993 reported on his public meeting in Ahmedabad under the headline: ‘No regrets over demolition, says Advani’. The text of the report read — “Ahmedabad: Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani told a largely attended public meeting at Narangpura in Ahmedabad at the end of his three-day visit to the state on Sunday that what happened at Ayodhya on December 6 would change the course of Indian history. Mr. Advani said he did not regret the demolition of the mosque though he was sad that day because his fervent pleas to kar sevaks not to damage the monument had been ignored. Reciting a couplet from Tulsi Ramayan, ‘Hoi So Soyi Jo Ram Lekhi Rakha’, he said the disputed structure was destined to fall because Providence had ordained it so.”

Another report of the same event in The Economic Times dated January 26, 1993 had the headline ‘Providence willed fall of Masjid, Advani’.

Soon after the demolition, despite occasional outbursts of remorse at the event, LK Advani was unequivocal in his assessment that the political gain to the BJP from the demolition far outweighed outpourings of secular remorse. December 6, 1992 meant increased voter support for the BJP, or so Advani felt. At no place is this more clearly evident than in the foreword to the BJP’s white-paper on Ayodhya, authored by Advani and triumphantly released by him at the party office in New Delhi in April 1993.

The Frontline dated May 21, 1993 carries a report on the event titled, ‘Black, and White’. “The feeling in the rank and file that after December 6, 1992, the BJP has come into its own was corroborated by its leader, LK Advani at a press conference in New Delhi on April 18 to release the document, when he claimed: “It was because of Ayodhya and the people’s perception of it that the BJP increased its voter support.”

In the foreword to the paper, Advani amplifies his claim.  “…But the kar sevaks did more. They did not just erase a symbol of our subjugation. They did not just begin building a symbol of resurgence. They showed us as if in a flash, how far we have to travel. For the country reacted in two diametrically opposite ways, as virtually two different peoples. For a handful — those in government, in political parties, and in large sections of the English press, for instance — what happened were a ‘national shame’, it was ‘madness’, and it was ‘barbaric’. For the rest of the county it was a liberation — a sweeping away of cobwebs. The depth of anger at the recent policies, surprised me, as I said; the depth of the chasm between these two nations — the microscopic minority and the people — did not.”

The Blitz of May 1, 1993 in an article under the heading, ‘I Accuse…’, quotes Advani in the foreword: “Sri Rama is the unique symbol, the unequalled symbol of our oneness, of our integration, as well as of our aspiration to live the higher values. As Maryada Purushottam, Sri Rama has represented for thousands of years the ideal of conduct, just as Ram Rajya has always represented the ideal of governance. And one saint of our land after another, one saintly tradition after another has immersed itself in devotion to Him: the sacred Sri Guru Sahib celebrates and invokes Sri Rama about two thousand four hundred times, Gandhiji died with His name on his lips.

“It is natural, therefore, that the place of His birth has been an object of the deepest devotion for Hindus through the millennia — the inscription which has been found at the site and which speaks of a magnificent temple with a pinnacle of gold, dedicated to Lord Vishnu Hari who had humbled King Bali and defeated the wicked Dashanana, that is, Ravana; the record of the unremitting struggle of the Hindus to regain the site; the pathetic history of their worshipping the spot from a distance when they were denied access to it, of their circumbulating it — all these bear testimony to their deep and abiding, and indeed stirring, devotion to Sri Rama.

“On the other hand, the structure which Mir Baqi put up on the orders of Babur never had any special significance from a religious point of view. It was purely and simply a symbol not of devotion and of religion but of conquest. Correspondingly, quite apart from its being an obstacle, preventing Hindus from worshipping the birthplace of their idol, Sri Rama, it was for the country the symbol of its subjugation. This is how in 1989 the Bharatiya Janata Party formally decided to lend its shoulder to the cause — the party was responding to the deepest urges of our people.”

1990

To go back three years, when Advani led his rath yatra from Somnath through Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, and Purulia in West Bengal until it’s culmination, news reports portray the then BJP president in a defiant and angry mode, as he challenges the law and order machinery to dare act against him or his rath initiative. Incidentally, news reports of the period warn of the fast-deteriorating ground reality around the trail of the rath yatra that caused deep polarisation and brutal and violent communal outbursts.

The Telegraph dated October 16, 1990 records the defiant mood of Advani as he dares the government to arrest him. A report titled, ‘Advani defies govt to stop rathyatra, arrest him’, reads:

“New Delhi, Oct. 15: The BJP president, Mr LK Advani, today warned the government not to “stand in the way” of building the Ram Janmabhoomi temple and said any obstruction on its part would prove costly… Speaking from atop his rath, Mr Advani challenged the government to arrest him and his associates and impound the rath.
He warned: ‘If the government stops us, it should be ready to face the consequences.’”

The Sunday Times of October 14, 1990 similarly records Advani in a defiant mood. ‘No one will stop this rath yatra’, is the headline of the interview he gave to Swapan Dasgupta.

“Q. Now that the rath yatra has taken off, there is a demand that it be banned on the grounds that it is inflaming communal passions. You have said it will provide a healing touch. Is there some failure in communicating this view to those who demand a ban?

Advani: No, I do not attribute it to any such failure to understand the message of the rath yatra. I am sure that everyone knows that it has provided a healing touch; it has not caused any tensions or has not inflamed passions. These demands are being made by people who felt that they could ride roughshod over the sentiments of the Hindus. But now the sentiments of the Hindus have been manifested and articulated in such a powerful fashion without arousing any communal passion that their case has become indefensible. It is the indefensibility of their own case which makes them react with such vehemence.

“I am pained by the casual comments being made here and there about the rath yatra leaving behind trails of blood and communal passions. Actually, these have nothing to do with ground reality; I can admit that I was very apprehensive when it started. As everyone knows, Gujarat and particularly certain places such as Baroda, Ahmedabad, Surat and Bharuch have become very susceptible to riots over the slightest provocation.
Therefore, I was particularly keen to ensure that nothing happened. You may have noticed that as the first reaction of the rath yatra, there was the blood tilak, vessels of blood and the collection of shastras. All this is symbolic, they don’t mean anything. Even then they saw that I didn’t approve of the slogans that are being raised. Babri Masjid todo, jo hum say takrayega sidha upar jayega’ and I think this disapproval had a very salutary effect on them”.

A spate of news reports, analyses and editorials around this period warn of the grave consequences to harmony and unity caused by the divisive politics of Advani’s rath. This editorial in The Times of India, dated October 5, 1990 called ‘Playing With Fire’ really sums it up:

“If the BJP president is congratulating himself on the success of his Rath Yatra – and going by his recent utterances in Maharashtra he seems to be doing just that — the rest of the country has reason to be greatly worried. For, with the conclusion of the Gujarat chapter of the programme, it should be plain that Mr Advani’s campaign is leaving a trail of destruction in it’s wake. Communal riots have already broken out in Baroda and Banaskantha. It is difficult not to see the connection between the Rath Yatra and the Ram Jyoti campaigns on the one hand and the heightening of communal tensions in different parts of the country on the other… Indeed the collection of lethal weapons, particularly of trishuls, gory ceremonies and performance of other rituals designed to create a spirit of militancy… it would be something of a surprise if violence did not follow it.

“By taking the lead in the campaign whose divisive and destructive potential is just going to unfold …he has considerably lowered his political stature. His inflammatory speeches, his indulgent wielding of glittering Sudarshan Chakras in public and his endorsement of the most bigoted among the militants threaten to identify him with the likes of Acharya Giriraj Kishore of the VHP… If Mr Advani is concerned about the unity and integrity of the country and stands for the defence of law and order, he should reconsider his course.”

Advani paid no heed as a succession of news reports from different newspapers show. ‘Stop Rath Yatra, government told, read a headline in The Hindustan Times, October 7, 1990. An article in The Sunday Observer, dated October 14, 1990 titled, ‘The Communal Flare-up’ was authored by none less than Sudheendra Kulkarni, then assistant editor with the paper and today officer on special duty to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The article read:

“Tumkur, Mandya, Kodagu or Coorg, Chitradurga, Mysore, Mangalore, Shimoga, parts of Bangalore city itself and even Dharwar in North Karnataka, have all reported instances of mounting tensions and even minor clashes. What is new to this present round of communal violence in this state, is the extent to which it has succeeded in penetrating the villages. The burning down of an entire hamlet of Muslim farmers near Chennapatna is only the most shocking among the cases reported so far. In Kolar district, too, Muslim houses in several villages have been reported to have been attacked by unknown outsiders.

“Even as the state was reeling under the sudden spurt of religious strife, yet another piece of inhumanity was committed in Bah Malkheda, a village in the north-eastern district of Bidar (which borders Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh). Seven persons, including a woman and a child, were roasted alive, in a clash that was set off by nothing more than a minor altercation between two drunken youths… There is no doubt whatsoever, that the Muslim community (which constitutes about 35 per cent of the town’s population) bore the brunt of the rioting, both in terms of lives lost and property damaged — of the 17 dead, 13 were Muslims. Muslim hoodlums, in turn, attacked a colony of Tamil speaking Adi Dravidas (adivasis) and set ablaze 15 houses. ‘They asked us angrily why we received the Ram Jyoti at our colony on Dussera,’ recounted Venkatayya, who was one of few old men present when the attack occurred.

“But what Hindu lumpens wreaked on the Muslims was on a far larger scale. Yaarab Nagar, a colony of poor Muslims, engaged in beedi-rolling, toy-making and other low-paying forms of self-employment, was attacked by a mob 500 men wearing ‘khaki shorts’ (as Saab Jaan Saab, a local resident described them). A Muslim watchman of a nearby plastic factory was roasted alive when it was set ablaze. Sikandar Pasha, a lottery ticket seller, was burnt alive in front of his house. Amir Jaan, a beedi roller, was axed to death while Khairun Bi, an elderly deaf woman, was knifed and killed inside her little hut”.

Other news reports of the period published by the national press record with chilling similarity the trail of violence that Advani’s rath yatra inspired. ‘Fears of another round of communal frenzy dog Gonda’, read a headline in the Blitz dated October 14, 1990.

In a long report, The Telegraph (Insight) dated October 14, 1990, was scathing in its comment. The newspaper has likened Advani’s rath with ‘Chariots of Fire.’

“…The extent to which communal passions have been heightened is evident simply by taking a look at what is happening in UP today: even before Mr Advani’s rath has entered the state, the death toll in communal clashes has gone up to 44. And with the BJP chief about to enter UP, there is apprehension that this figure might shoot up…When the rath moved into Maharashtra from Surat, the armed Bajrang Dal activists were less prominent — but the speeches of the BJP leaders were as full of venom…

“It was not just coincidence that communal riots should break out in Karnataka, within days of Mr Advani and his Ram rath passing through Solapur, near Maharashtra’s border with Karnataka. On October 3, communal clashes claimed nearly 20 lives in Kolar, Chennapatna and Ramanagaram towns and another 12 a few days later in Davangere. At least in Davangere, the instigation once again was VHP volunteers, who insisted on taking the Ram Jyoti procession through the heavily Muslim populated areas of Davangere town.

“In neighbouring Mandya and Hasan districts miscreants desecrated places of worship, set fire to houses and vehicles and assaulted women. But what needs to be pointed is the failure of the Veerendra Patil government.

“In Madhya Pradesh, where Mr. LK Advani’s rath wound its way through 13 of the state’s 45 districts, the BJP message was clear: the Muslims in India had to choose between Maryada Purshottam Lord Ram and lootera Babar. This was repeatedly stressed by BJP leaders in the course of Mr Advani’s whistle stop tour from October 6 to 10. In fact, at Mandsaur, from where chief minister Sunderlal Patwa hails, Mr Pramod Mahajan, the BJP leader in the course of a fiery speech asked the Muslims to either have faith in Lord Ram or else leave the country. Mr Advani all the while nodded in acquiescence and the hundreds of youths who surrounded the podium brandished their swords and trishuls and hailed the speech. The result, of course, was inevitable: communal clashes broke out in Raipur.”

‘When the Pink City ran red with blood’, The Sunday Observer, by Nirupama Subramanian, dated October 28, 1990, reads: “Death arrived at Mohalla Koliyan and Rishi Ghalib Nagar in the congested Ramganj area this week with a savageness that has few parallels in this part of the country. The Pink City acquired several shades to turn a crimson red, the colour of blood and mindless violence.”

Similarly, The Telegraph report on October 28, 1990 in ‘Purulia violence after Yatra’ by  Barun Ghosh says: “The communal flare-up that rocked Jhalda in Purulia district on Thursday claiming 9 lives, is a direct fall-out of the rathyatra of Mr. LK Advani which passed through the town on October 20.”

The Independent, dated November 2, 1990 in a story titled, ‘Communal riots take a new turn in Indore’, depicts the grisly violence in that town. “Communal Frenzy and out-bursts are nothing new to Indore. These are like festering sores and this sprawling industrial town, over the years, has learnt to live with them. What is remarkably different in the on-going clashes is that rampaging mobs armed to the teeth have clashed with the police attacking them with firearms and, of all things, tear gas grenades. Curfew orders have been violated with impunity and families of policemen have been attacked and their houses damaged. That the riots were pre-planned is evident from the large haul of stored arms and weapons from several houses — petrol bombs, country made pistols, guns, Molotov cocktails, swords, spears, knives, tear gas grenades, glass shards and soda water bottles.

The events in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 and countrywide in the dark month that followed are testimony that the assessments of scribes were proved woefully correct.

1992

After the demolition, here are some of the newspaper headlines. ‘Over 200 killed in nationwide frenzy’, reads The Indian Express, December 8, 1992; ‘Anarchic situation in Ayodhya,’ is the headline of The Hindu, December 8, 1992; ‘SC hints at trial of BJP leaders,’ said The Pioneer of December 8, 1992; ‘Violence toll crosses 500,” was the headline in The Indian Express, December 9, 1992; “Violence Unabated, toll mounts to 700”, The Economic Times, December 10, 1992; and, “Shoot at sight in Calcutta: Toll mounts to 950, TheEconomic Times, December 11, 1992.

The Frontline on January 1, 1993 in it’s story headlined ‘Wounds all over — The violent aftermath’ said: “It may well go down in history as the worst round of widespread violence the country has seen since Partition: over a thousand people were killed in the week following the Black Sunday. The states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were burning and bleeding with more than 200 of their people consumed by the communal fury in less than a week. Anarchy reigned in Bombay and Surat where the tolls were as high as 191 and 155 respectively five days after the vandalism in Ayodhya. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Assam and Karnataka were also reeling under the impact of riots. Surprisingly, while West Bengal remained by and large peaceful initially, a belated bout of violence broke out in Calcutta and adjoining districts.”

1994

Two years later, this report in The Independent dated July 25, 1994 is a sombre reminder of just what the Ayodhya movement was really all about. “Fears of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Ayodhya; ‘Shuddhikaran’ programme includes fight against ‘Islamikaran’ of holy city by Janardan Thakur. “Behind the surface calm of this besieged town, a sinister plot is being executed. Its goal: to scare away the Muslim population, take over their land and property — and their holy places. Leaders of the community wake up to threatening calls by unidentified callers demanding that they ‘quit Ayodhya or die’. Muslim shops are ransacked and burgled at night and the police refuse to register their cases lest the shopkeepers claim compensation from insurance companies to keep their establishments going.”

Clearly, Advani, the man who played a pivotal role in the movement that led to the demolition of the Babri masjid, with callous disregard to its implications for the rule of law, or its human consequences, will have a lot to answer before the Liberhan Commission.

Related:

Ram Rajya Rath Yatra: The road to Power

How it Took CBI 24 Years & Still Conspiracy Charges were Not Pressed: Advani & Others

The making of “Ram Ke Naam”: a Hinduism that is the mirror opposite of Hindutva

The post Rath Yatra retraced: Evidence presented to the Liberhan Commission appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Writer and researcher Anu Jain revisits Mahatma Gandhi’s closest political and personal bonds in this series which offers a timely reminder that transformative movements are built not only on charismatic leadership, but on the communities of conviction that grow around it.

For Gandhi, leadership was never a solitary endeavour. It was a collaborative, often demanding dialogue with a close circle of confidants who held up a mirror to him. 

This exclusive five-part series explores Gandhi’s deeply complex relationships with five remarkable contemporaries. Three visionary captains of industry who funded and anchored his radical socio-economic experiments, and two towering intellectual peers who served as his ultimate conscience keepers , who were willing to challenge his decisions when no one else dared. 

Together, these five bonds did more than just steer the course of the independence movement; they directly shaped the deeply personal, moral, and political choices of the Mahatma himself.

Read on the unique bond that Gandhi shared with Rabindranath Tagore here.

When the French philosopher Romain Rolland looked across the global landscape of the early twentieth century, he observed a magnificent, unprecedented spectacle unfolding on the Indian subcontinent. He described it as the simultaneous gathering of “two great rivers”, towering, majestic currents of human thought flowing from vastly different geographical and spiritual sources. Yet, rushing forward to nourish the very same civilisational soil. One river was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the other was Rabindranath Tagore.

Theirs was a relationship that defied the ordinary grammar of political alliances or personal friendships. It stands as one of the most remarkable intellectual and moral engagements in human history, a thirty-year “noble debate” that fundamentally expanded the moral vocabulary of freedom.

They did not always walk in lockstep, in fact, they disagreed on almost everything from the economy of the spinning wheel to the very meaning of a nation. Yet, their relationship was defined by a rare, luminous intellectual companionship where dissent itself became an act of profound love. They did not argue to defeat one another, but to refine one another.

In an era where differences so often degenerate into hatred, the story of Gandhi and Tagore reminds us that a nation’s soul is not built on a fragile, forced consensus, but on the capacity of its greatest minds to disagree with absolute dignity.

“Mahatma” and “Gurudev”

The very names by which history remembers these two titans are beautiful, poetic gifts they bestowed upon each other. To the world, Gandhi became the Mahatma (The Great Soul), and Tagore became Gurudev (The Divine Teacher). Yet, the historical roots of these titles reveal a far more fascinating, layered evolution than popular memory suggests.

The sacred title of “Mahatma” was not suddenly invented by Tagore in a vacuum. Long before it became a household word, Gandhi’s closest confidant and financial supporter, Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, had quietly used the term in private correspondence, most notably in a deeply perceptive letter to the moderate leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale, recognising the saintly quality of the lawyer returning from South Africa.

But it was Tagore who took this private whisper and transformed it into a thunderous national reality. Using the immense weight of his global literary authority, Tagore publicly crowned Gandhi with the title, giving the illiterate millions of India a vocabulary of reverence for the man in the loincloth.

Gandhi, in turn, bowed before the poet’s towering cultural and philosophical mastery, christening him Gurudev. This exchange of titles was a beautiful, public contract of mutual recognition: an acknowledgement that while one was the undisputed master of political action, the other was the sovereign ruler of the human mind.

Capital and Culture

Nowhere did this hidden current of solidarity manifest more beautifully than in the physical sanctuary of Santiniketan, Tagore’s legendary open-air educational experiment in Bengal. Founded on the romantic ideals of intellectual freedom, artistic expression, and global humanism, Santiniketan was a paradise of the soul but a recurring nightmare for the checkbook. The ashram-school was chronically broke, permanently burdened by debt, and dependant entirely on personal donations and the fading physical energy of its ageing founder.

By the mid-1930s, the crisis had reached a breaking point. Tagore, already in his frail seventies, felt compelled to pack his bags and travel across the country with a student performance troupe, staging plays in cities like Delhi just to collect a few scattered rupees to keep his school alive. Hearing of this, Gandhi was deeply shaken.

Though Gandhi had spent decades publicly criticising elite, literary, and urban-centred education, advocating instead for basic manual training (Nai Talim), he refused to let his ideological disagreements blind him to Santiniketan’s civilisational value. He recognised that if Tagore’s school died, a vital lung of the Indian spirit would stop breathing.

Gandhi immediately dipped his pen in ink and sent a deeply emotional letter to the poet, telling him that it broke his heart to see the great Seer of India begging for funds on the public stage. Gandhi vowed to strain “every nerve” to lift this financial anvil from the poet’s shoulders.

True to his word, Gandhi deployed his silent network of wealthy industrialists. Within a matter of months, he slipped a Rs. 60,000 bank draft, an astronomical fortune at the time, into an envelope and sent it to Bengal with a triumphant message:

“God has blessed my poor effort. And here is the money. Now you will relieve the public mind by announcing the cancellation of the rest of the programme.”

With characteristic moral delicacy, Gandhi never told Tagore where the money came from. He purposefully concealed the fact that the entire sum had been cut from the checkbook of his close supporter, the industrialist Ghanshyam Das Birla.

This single episode completely dismantles any simplistic caricature of Gandhi and Tagore as bitter ideological enemies. Here was Gandhi acting as the silent, invisible bridge between industrial capital and artistic culture, using the wealth of a billionaire to protect the independence of a poet who regularly criticised his political movements. Santiniketan was no longer just Tagore’s dream, it had become a shared moral investment for the entire nation.

Fault Lines of Two Minds

The grand public debates between Gandhi and Tagore were carried out in the pages of journals like Young India and The Modern Review. They were watched with bated breath by millions of citizens, offering a masterclass in intellectual integrity. Their arguments were not petty squabbles, they were foundational clashes between two completely different visions of human liberation.

For Gandhi, Satyagraha was the ultimate weapon of human liberation, a “soul-force” or “love-force” rooted in absolute truth and self-suffering. Gandhi believed that by fasting and absorbing suffering without retaliation, an individual could melt the heart of the most brutal oppressor.

Tagore, however, watched this with deep intellectual scepticism. While he marvelled at Gandhi’s personal purity, he terrified himself with the thought of what happens when Satyagraha is mass-produced for millions of uneducated followers. He feared that for the masses, Satyagraha would cease to be an active moral choice and would instead become a form of blind, hypnotic obedience, a mechanical ritual that substituted one form of conformity for another. Tagore argued that India’s deep disease was a “slave mentality,” and the cure was a sharp, intellectual awakening of the individual mind, not the emotional intoxication of mass rallies.

Gandhi defined Swaraj (Self-rule) as something far deeper than merely replacing a British governor with an Indian prime minister. He defined it as not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity of all to resist authority when it is abused.

For Gandhi, Swaraj was an exercise in rigorous self-restraint, localised governance, and decentralised village power. Tagore, conversely, was deeply suspicious of the very machinery of the modern political state. In his seminal essay The Call of Truth, he warned that an indigenous government could be just as cold, cruel, and oppressive as a foreign one if the minds of the people remained chained to dogma and superstition. To Tagore, true Swaraj was not a political flag flying over a parliament building, it was the total liberation of the human spirit, a mind that was completely fearless, creative, and open to the cosmos.

The Charkha

Perhaps no object symbolised their deep divide more dramatically than the Charkha, the wooden spinning wheel. Gandhi elevated the Charkha into a holy sacrament. He demanded that every Indian, whether doctor, lawyer, or peasant, spend at least half an hour every single day spinning cotton. For Gandhi, the Charkha was a brilliant economic weapon against British textiles, a direct link to the suffering of the starving millions, and a beautiful lesson in physical labour.

Tagore openly revolted against this directive in his provocative 1925 essay, The Cult of the Charkha. He argued that forcing a brilliant scientist, an artist, or an intellectual to spin a wheel for thirty minutes a day was an insult to human intelligence. He called it a monotonous, mind-numbing exercise that deadened creativity, pointing out that India’s crippling poverty could only be solved through modern science, agricultural machinery, and creative engineering, not by turning the entire population into uniform, spinning automatons.

Gandhi hit back with fierce, poetic passion, writing that to a starving man, God can only appear in the form of bread, and that spinning was a beautiful form of collective prayer for a broken country.

Clash of Reason

The most explosive and revealing confrontation between the two men occurred in the early months of 1934, following a monstrous, cataclysmic earthquake that ripped through the province of Bihar, flattening cities and killing thousands.

Gandhi, travelling through South India at the time, made a public announcement that stunned the intellectual elite. He declared that the devastating earthquake was not a random geological accident, but a direct, divine punishment sent by God to avenge the ancient sin of untouchability. He argued that the earth had literally fractured because high-caste Hindus had spent centuries fracturing the dignity of their Dalit brothers and sisters.

Tagore was profoundly appalled by this statement. He immediately published a blistering, public rebuke, accusing Gandhi of spreading dangerous, unscientific irrationalism. Tagore argued that physical laws operate blindly across the universe, entirely independent of human ethics. To tell uneducated villagers that a physical earthquake was caused by moral sins, Tagore warned, was to reinforce the very forces of blind superstition and fatalism that kept India backward.

Yet, even in this moment of raw, public collision, the exquisite tone of their engagement remained intact. Gandhi did not attack Tagore’s character, nor did his followers burn the poet’s books. Gandhi published his defence in Harijan, calmly stating that while he bowed to the poet’s superior scientific knowledge, he possessed an unshakeable faith in the mysterious connection between cosmic events and human morality.

Their public letters became a legendary historical archive: an unforgettable proof that two human beings could fiercely debate the laws of physics and God without losing a single ounce of mutual love.

Conversions at the Horizon

For all their spectacular public battles, if one travels down these two great rivers to their ultimate destination, they converge on the exact same moral horizon. Beneath the surface noise of their debates lay an absolute, unbreakable unity of purpose: a shared, uncompromising devotion to human dignity.

Tagore spent his entire life warning the world against the horrific, mechanical monster of aggressive nationalism, describing it as a soul-crushing apparatus that destroys human freedom. Gandhi, though the commander-in-chief of a massive nationalist movement, arrived at the exact same conclusion. He repeatedly stated that his vision of nationalism was completely inclusive, and that he supported independence only so that a free India could voluntarily surrender its sovereignty to a democratic world federation grounded in non-violence.

This deep spiritual convergence was recognised by Tagore himself during a quiet visit to the Sabarmati Ashram. Standing before the community, the poet remarked that the true meaning of the “Mahatma” was a man who had successfully realised his own inner self within the heartbeat of all humanity, completely melting away the artificial walls of nation, caste, and identity.

The Modern Verdict

The long, brilliant dialogue between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore was never resolved. When Tagore drew his last breath in 1941, followed a few years later by Gandhi’s martyrdom in 1948, they left behind two completely distinct, unmerged blueprints for the liberation of the human race. Tagore passed away still sceptical of mass politics, Gandhi died still committed to it. Tagore remained the champion of intellectual cosmopolitanism, Gandhi remained the high priest of localised ethical discipline.

Yet, the ultimate significance of their relationship lies precisely within that unresolved tension. They proved to the world that harmony does not mean uniformity. In our modern twenty-first-century landscape, a fractured world deeply polluted by tribalism, echo chambers, cancel culture, and instant polarisation, their “noble debate” shines across the decades like a burning beacon of hope.

They leave behind an immortal, luminous standard for the intellectual life of global democracy. A lesson that true respect does not mean silent acquiescence, and that critique is the highest form of solidarity. Gandhi and Tagore remind us until the end of time that we can hold completely different versions of the truth, we can fight fiercely over the pathways of freedom, and yet we can still march hand-in-hand toward the liberation of the human soul.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

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Scheduled for August 2 at the institute’s Mumbai campus, the convocation was called off barely two days before the ceremony. Students received an email from the Registrar shortly after midnight on July 31 stating that the event had been postponed due to “unforeseen circumstances.” No explanation accompanied the announcement.

According to The Indian Express, the decision was formally communicated to students through a late-night email from the Registrar, while the institute later issued a public statement saying only that the ceremony could not be conducted in a “conducive environment.” The administration has since maintained that the convocation will be rescheduled at the earliest.

The last-minute decision came after hundreds of graduating students and their families had already booked flights, train tickets, accommodation and made travel arrangements from across the country and abroad. For many, the postponement represented not merely an inconvenience but a significant financial burden and the loss of a once-in-a-lifetime academic milestone. 

Security concerns reportedly linked to CJI’s visit

Although TISS never officially announced the identity of its chief guest, The Indian Express reported that Chief Justice of India Surya Kant was scheduled to preside over the ceremony. The newspaper, citing institute officials and students, reported that discussions had been ongoing within the administration regarding security arrangements because of concerns that demonstrations linked to the continuing Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) movement could occur during the convocation.

One institute official, quoted by The Indian Express, stated that while the CJI’s visit had never been formally publicised, it was “common knowledge” on campus and there were concerns about possible protests targeting the chief guest.

Similarly, The Quint, citing graduating students and student representatives, reported that the administration had deliberately refrained from officially announcing the Chief Guest because it anticipated protests. One graduating student anonymously told the publication that “everyone knew” the CJI was expected to attend even though no formal announcement had been made.

Students also told The Indian Express that police personnel had visited the campus in the days preceding the ceremony as part of security preparations. The Quint further reported that a security meeting involving senior police officers was held on July 30, a day before the postponement was announced.

Administration offers little explanation

Following widespread criticism, TISS later issued a public statement asserting that the Institute had assessed that the ceremony could not be held “in a conducive environment.” 

The official notification can be viewed here.

The statement said proceeding with the convocation could have affected the wellbeing of students, faculty, staff, dignitaries, guests and campus life. However, it stopped short of explaining what precisely had rendered the environment unconducive. This carefully worded explanation leaves more questions than answers.

If the decision was based upon a concrete security assessment, the institute has not disclosed its nature. If there existed credible intelligence regarding potential violence, that too has not been shared. Instead, the administration has relied upon vague terminology while expecting students to accept the cancellation of one of the most significant events of their academic lives without meaningful justification.

The institute announced that it would examine requests for financial assistance arising from the postponement on a case-by-case basis and assured students that provisional degree certificates and other academic documents would be made available through the prescribed procedure. It also stated that the convocation would be rescheduled. 

While these measures may mitigate some practical consequences, they cannot compensate for the disruption caused by a decision communicated only days before the ceremony.

Allegations of intimidation on campus

The postponement also unfolded against a backdrop of increasing political tension on campus. According to The Indian Express, students said discussions had been taking place for several days regarding possible demonstrations during the convocation because the CJP movement continued to resonate with many students.

Meanwhile, The Quint reported allegations that WhatsApp groups associated with right-wing organisations circulated messages warning students that anyone attempting to protest during the convocation could face FIRs, arrest and disciplinary consequences. Screenshots of such messages were published by the publication.

One graduating student told The Quint that the atmosphere on campus had become increasingly hostile in the days leading up to the convocation, with students allegedly being warned that any form of protest could damage their careers and placement prospects.

Members of the Progressive Students’ Forum (PSF), quoted by The Quint, further claimed that when students questioned the Dean of Student Affairs regarding the postponement, they were informed that it was due to “security reasons.”

Student organisations demand accountability

The Progressive Students’ Forum criticised the decision, arguing that it reflected a broader pattern of administrative failures affecting graduating students. In a statement, the organisation noted that delays in declaration of final results and issuance of degree certificates had already adversely impacted students applying for employment and higher education opportunities. The postponement of the convocation, it argued, compounded these existing difficulties while damaging the institution’s credibility. Student representatives also questioned why degree distribution itself could not proceed even if the formal convocation ceremony was postponed.

As reported by The Quint, elected representatives met the Registrar seeking clarification after the announcement. Students present at the meeting alleged that the Registrar repeatedly referred only to “unforeseen circumstances” while declining to provide any substantive explanation.

The publication also reported that the administration later declared August 3 a non-instructional day without addressing students’ demands for greater transparency regarding the postponement. For many students, this reinforced concerns that the administration’s priority had shifted from engaging with students to preventing gatherings on campus.

Universities cannot function on speculation

Universities have historically served as spaces where disagreement, political engagement and democratic participation coexist alongside academic life. The possibility that some students may express dissent during a public function cannot, by itself, justify cancelling that function altogether.

Peaceful protest is protected under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) of the Constitution, subject only to reasonable restrictions. Administrative inconvenience or apprehension of embarrassment cannot become substitutes for concrete threats to public order. Where genuine security concerns exist, universities possess numerous less restrictive alternatives: enhanced security arrangements, controlled access, designated protest zones and coordination with law enforcement. Resorting immediately to cancellation represents the most restrictive response available and inevitably burdens the very students whose achievements the institution is meant to celebrate.

Equally concerning is the opacity surrounding the decision-making process. When an institution invokes vague “unforeseen circumstances” and point towards anticipated protests surrounding a constitutional functionary, the absence of transparency inevitably fuels speculation.

Students pay the highest price

Lost amid discussions about security and protocol are the students themselves. Convocation is more than a ceremonial event. For many first-generation learners and families from distant parts of the country, it represents years of sacrifice, financial struggle and academic perseverance. By postponing the ceremony at the eleventh hour without a clear explanation, the administration transferred the consequences of its decision almost entirely onto graduating students.

Whether the postponement ultimately stemmed from genuine security assessments or merely apprehensions about possible dissent, the episode reflects an increasingly familiar pattern within Indian universities. Across campuses, administrative responses to anticipated protests have increasingly prioritised pre-emptive restrictions over engagement. Events are curtailed, permissions withdrawn and public functions altered not because disorder has occurred, but because authorities fear that dissent might emerge. Such decisions risk transforming universities from spaces of intellectual exchange into institutions governed by precautionary control. Until the institute provides a fuller account of why the ceremony could not proceed, questions surrounding transparency, institutional accountability and the balance between security and democratic freedoms are likely to remain unanswered. The institution’s silence has not merely postponed a convocation—it has deepened anxieties about whether India’s universities are increasingly willing to curtail normal academic life in response to the mere possibility of protest, rather than uphold both security and the democratic values they are meant to foster.

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