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Gandhi – the Success of his Failure
Sandipto Dasgupta
[The rebel] is not simply a slave opposing his master but a man opposing
the world of slave and masters.
Albert Camus,
The Rebel
For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?
Saint Augustine,
City of God
Introduction
There is an important difference between most of the assessments of Mohandas
K Gandhi’s political career and his political thought. While the former is often a
narrative of triumph, of leading one of the biggest popular movements in history,
the latter is tinged with a sense of tragedy. Though Gandhi’s principles (non-
violence being the most well known of them) have inspired several political
movements world wide, his political vision was never realized in the country
whose struggle for nationhood he so successfully lead. As opposed to the village
centric, non-industrial, pacifist, moral community that he wanted India to be, in
the last year of his life he saw the birth of a sovereign Indian state with the same
modern institutions like army, police, bureaucracy and parliament against which
he had so forcefully argued in his writings. The person who liked to describe his
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Convention