In a few days, it will be two years since October 7, 2023. In the time since, the world has been witness to the Palestinian struggle and the countless atrocities endured by the people of Gaza. The bombardments, the blockades, the staggering civilian death toll – slowly but steadily, these have shifted global perception.

Many who initially stood firmly with Israel have begun to recoil at the scale and horror of its actions. And yet, for many observers, one thorn remains: October 7 itself. For them, every Israeli strike, no matter how brutal, is justified with the reminder that Hamas began the violence. For those who cannot look past that day, support for the Palestinians can never be absolute. Violence, even in the service of freedom, remains the unresolvable stumbling block for a number of observers around the world.

Why does this matter for India? And what does Mahatma Gandhi have to do with this? Not long ago, a video circulated online of young men garlanding a statue of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin. On social media, memes deriding Gandhi as “weak” or “naïve” are easy to find, often paired with paeans to “real” freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Subhash Chandra Bose, and Chandrashekhar Azad.

In much of today’s political discourse, Gandhi is cast as the saintly but useless idealist who held India back, while those who took up arms are celebrated as the true liberators. His idea of ‘non-violence’ is outrightly rejected and even sometimes depicted as feminine. But here lies a deep irony.

The very tactics through which many anti-colonial revolutionaries across the world resisted the empire –armed mutiny, bombings, targeted assassinations – are the same tactics that modern states now routinely condemn as “terrorism.” The British Raj itself used that language against Indian revolutionaries in Bengal, branding them “terrorists” in its official records.

Members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), including Bhagat Singh, were tried and executed under such charges. Indian National Army (INA) soldiers were prosecuted as traitors in the Red Fort trials. These figures are rightly revered today for their sacrifice, but their methods show us how slippery the vocabulary of violence can be.

That is the point: not to equate freedom fighters with terrorists, but to show how easily the language of “terrorism” can delegitimise even the noblest struggles, depending on who writes history. Gandhi understood this danger long before “terrorism” became the catch-all term it is today.

His rejection of violence was not only a moral choice but a political masterstroke. Non-violence denied the British, and the larger world, the excuse to label Indians as anarchists or criminals. It made India’s freedom struggle unimpeachably legitimate in the eyes of the globe. And in an age when every armed liberation movement risks being reduced to “terrorism,” Gandhi’s model is perhaps more relevant than ever.

This pattern has repeated elsewhere. Hamas is called a “terrorist” organisation. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were banned globally as terrorists. The Irish Republican Army was for decades condemned under that label, despite its demand for national self-determination. Even Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were branded terrorists until South Africa’s transition to democracy was complete.

What this reveals is that the line between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” is rarely clear in the moment. It is drawn retrospectively, by the victors. India’s revolutionaries are remembered as heroes because independence was eventually achieved. Had the British Raj survived, their memory might have looked very different.

Against this backdrop, Gandhi’s politics look less like naïve moralising. By insisting on non-violence, Gandhi deprived the British of the language of terrorism. India’s nationalist movement could not be dismissed as an armed conspiracy; it had to be confronted as a mass political and moral challenge.

Gandhi ensured that India’s demand for independence carried a legitimacy the world could not deny. Even critics of Gandhi acknowledged this. Rabindranath Tagore argued with him, Ambedkar distrusted his religiosity, Nehru grew impatient with his methods, but none could deny that Gandhi’s approach gave Indian nationalism a distinctive global resonance.

The Salt March, Quit India, the charkha – all became symbols of resistance that carried moral weight precisely because they were non-violent.

Gandhi’s critics often point to episodes like Chauri Chaura, where he called off the Non-Cooperation Movement after protesters burned down a police station, killing more than 20 policemen. To many, then and now, this looked like a colossal blunder: why derail a nationwide uprising because of one local act of violence? But Gandhi understood something others missed.

The moment the movement crossed into bloodshed, it would give the Raj exactly the excuse it needed to brand the entire nationalist struggle as criminal and terroristic. By halting the movement, Gandhi not only reaffirmed his principles but also preserved the legitimacy of India’s cause. What looked like weakness was, in fact, a shrewd act of political risk-management. He saw that the moral high ground was not an optional luxury but the foundation of the entire struggle.

Fast forward to the present. Every armed movement for freedom now struggles under the weight of being branded “terrorism.” States define themselves against “terror,” and once that label is applied, legitimacy is almost impossible to reclaim. In this world, Gandhi’s path is not an antiquated curiosity.

The only framework that allows resistance without forfeiting legitimacy

It is the only framework that allows resistance without forfeiting legitimacy. That is why Gandhi continues to inspire movements far from India, from Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States to anti-apartheid activists in South Africa.

And yet, in India, Gandhi is derided as irrelevant. His statues are defaced, his name is mocked, and his assassin is valourised. Without Gandhi however, India’s freedom struggle itself might have been remembered in the same vocabulary of “terror” that we so easily apply elsewhere today. None of this is to suggest that Gandhi was flawless or beyond criticism. I disagree with many of his political choices, and his treatment of those closest to him – including his own family – leaves much to be questioned. Yet it is precisely because Gandhi is such a contested figure that his singular contribution stands out.

Whatever his failings, he secured for India a moral legitimacy that armed struggle alone could not have achieved. That achievement cannot be tucked away. To call him irrelevant is to misunderstand what he accomplished. He not only mobilised millions, but he also ensured that their struggle could never be dismissed as terrorism. In doing so, he gave India a freedom that was not only political but also moral.

Nikhil Agrawal is a business consultant and an observer of Indian history and culture.

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