For years Rukhmabai had vacillated between fear and determination, despair and hope, uncertainty and clarity. She could have chosen either way. A different choice, and the world would not have heard her name.

For the proponents of Hindu rashtra, Gandhi is the most formidable obstacle. Their latest tampering with the NCERT school textbooks is part of many manoeuvres being simultaneously carried out to finish him off forever.

It is comforting to attribute Stan Swamy’s death to the authoritarian Hindutva regime and a compliant judiciary. It diverts attention from the troubling societal transformation underway and helps us avoid confrontation with the full horror of our predicament.

In the call for an ‘atmanirbhar’ Bharat to overcome the COVID-19 crisis is a visceral appeal to Gandhi’s swadeshi. However, in spirit and intent, it’s a violation not just of Gandhi’s swadeshi but of everything he stands for.

What explains the fearlessness of the British Indian subject and the servility of the free Indian now when, as then, good government is dismissed as being irrelevant for holding power? 

Of the multiple identities – Hindu, Indian, human being – that constitute my being, there is not one that is not diminished and violated by what passes for Hindutva.

It is difficult not to imagine Gandhi in the time of COVID-19. For him, there was no consideration that could permit any compromise with truth and concern for the poor.

One is seized with shame to have to save Gandhi from being vandalised by his own people who seek to endorse the Modi government’s claim that the CAA is in fulfilment of the Mahatma’s ideas. These people would tell Gandhi himself what he thought, did and said. 

Historian Sudhir Chandra writes that creating a space for Gandhi’s ideas is possible only if we change our narrow modes of thinking – modes incapable of freeing our conceptions of what ‘is’ possible and practicable from the constricting hold of what ‘seems’ possible and practicable here and now. 

The reconstruction of the Somnath temple was unexceptionable. But rather than justifying the demand for a Ram temple, it makes it obligatory that we rebuild the Babri Masjid.

Putting oneself in harm’s way by way of a fast unto death might now be futile, given the social conscience is so dulled that the rightness of a cause is no guarantee for success any more.

Tridip Suhrud’s authoritative Critical Edition of Gandhi’s ‘Autobiography’ shows something significant – the most illuminating reading of Gandhi happens when the works he wrote in his native Gujarati are read closely along with their English translations.

Gandhi speaks to our times with renewed urgency in a translation of an acclaimed work.