In a conversation with Newslaundry’s Manisha Pande, historian Ramachandra Guha says his new book, Arguments With Gandhi, gives MK Gandhi’s critics “more than their fair say”. Marxists, Hindu nationalists, Muslim leaders, feminists and Ambedkarites all appear in it.  

Guha argues that Gandhi was a “theological pluralist” shaped by his years in South Africa and London. On Partition, he says structural forces, not Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru or Patel, made it likely. He also rejects the charge that the principle of non-violence (ahimsa) made Indians weak. “Who is braver: the non-violent Satyagrahi who keeps death as his bosom companion in the struggle for justice, or he who inflicts death on others?”

Guha also notes that the attacks on Gandhi come from both ends of the ideological spectrum. He reads out a 1960s Naxalite leader’s tirade against Gandhi’s non-violence and points to the “rhetorical parallels between the left of that time and the right of today”. 

On caste, Guha sees Gandhi and Ambedkar as complementary. He observes that Gandhi told the upper-caste community to shed their “superiority complex”, and Ambedkar urged the Dalit community to shed their “inferiority complex.” Their disagreements, he says, were “real enough in their time”, but in the context of 2026, it is what the famous Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud would call “the narcissism of minor differences”. 

“They were both visionary reformers charting in different ways the path to a more egalitarian, just society, and in the face of all the horrors in front of us, we can’t waste our time on petty disputes between Gandhi and Ambedkar. We have to bring them together.” 

His sharpest criticism lands on Gandhi’s “peculiar views” on celibacy and contraception, which he calls “indefensible”. 

Guha is less pessimistic about Gandhi’s future in India than when his book went to press earlier this year, citing recent student protests. His closing verdict is that Indians first over-venerated him, then overdemonised him, and that it is now time to take a more middle position. 

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