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Volume XVI (2005)
Gandhi and King: A Comparison
Michael J. Nojeim
Center for International and Area Studies, P.O. Box 686, Prairie View A&M University,
Prairie View, TX 77446-0508
As Activists Committed to
Nonviolence
Gandhi and King had a philosophical commitment to
nonviolence. Nonviolence here is efined as the exercise of
power based on “the principle which comes increasingly to
motivate a human being as he or she transforms the desire
to injure others into its positive counterpart.”1 Activists who
hold a philosophical commitment to nonviolence employ
this principle in all aspects of their life and at all times. It is
a creed that calls on adherents to not only avoid harming
others but to work positively to uplift others, including opponents.
The idea is not to avoid the exercise of power, but
to use power, such as economic or moral power but not military
power, to create change without injuring the opponent
or at least by inflicting as little harm on the opponent as
possible.2
Gandhi and King were both men of action who wished
to agitate for change without harming others. For them nonviolence
is not about passive resistance to evil, which is a
form of inaction that neither countenanced. Rather, nonviolence
is resistance that is active, creative and dynamic, but
also not violent in its implementation. Gandhi and King did
not seek conquests, they sought converts. They used power
not to defeat opponents but to win their hearts and minds
through a loving, albeit forceful, process of nonviolent conversion
based on purity of means. Nonviolent activists, therefore,
refuse to give in but neither do they strike back in vengeful
anger. This principled stance begins to raise questions in
the opponent’s mind that eventually (not always) leads the
opponent to change his or her ways. Gandhi called this process
satyagraha or truthforce and King called this soulforce
and referred to it as the marvelous new militancy.3 It is this
power, or force, that could peacefully transform a conflict,
leading to a truly just resolution.
Gandhi and King made use of similar nonviolent strategies
that initially relied on negotiations with the opponent
that had to be conducted openly and in a spirit of goodwill
and faith. If negotiations fail, gentle persuasion comes next,
usually in the form of public declarations based on moral
arguments. If that fails, the strategy calls for increasing the
pressure on the opponent by first using nonviolent noncooperation,
such as economic strikes and boycotts, and then
using nonviolent civil disobedience, which involves openly
breaking unjust laws and willingly accepting the punishment,
often a prison sentence, in order to draw attention to
the injustice.
But it is no small surprise that King’s philosophy and
strategy of nonviolence was similar to Gandhi’s. During his
academic pursuits, King was influenced by African Americans,
such as Howard University’s President Mordechai
Johnson, who had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s form
of resistance. Moreover, King visited India in February 1959,
shortly after the Montgomery Bus Boycott made him a
household name. King’s trip to India “consummated his
conversion to nonviolence.”4 He acknowledged Gandhi’s
influence on him when he said that the trip for him was akin
to encountering famous heroes of the American Revolution,
such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.5 While
he traveled to other countries as a tourist, King declared
that he came to India as a pilgrim.
On a personal level, King’s trip to India prompted him
to try to adopt some of Gandhi’s practices as his own, such
as fasting, meditation and material dispossession, but he was
not as successful at this as was Gandhi. King did not attempt
to copy Gandhi’s vegetarianism, confessing a weakness
for barbecue.
On a broader scale, King was impressed by the Indian
government’s considerable efforts to improve the plight of
India’s oppressed classes, such as its so-called Untouchables.
Upon his return to the United States, King made special
U.S. federal government aid to blacks one of his cardinal
goals. He also wished that U.S. presidents, such as Dwight
D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson, had the moral courage
to work on improving the condition of blacks in America
the way he observed India’s national leaders working to
uplift its Untouchables.6
As Political Leaders of Nonviolent
Resistance Movements
Leading Adherents and Followers
Neither King nor Gandhi sought the mantle of leadership.
If not for Gandhi’s rude exposure to white racism on a
train in South Africa, he may not have ever tried to organize
Indians there. Instead, he probably would have become
South Africa’s richest “colored” attorney. Moreover, upon
his return to India after a twenty-year absence, Gandhi was
not initially a prime mover in Indian politics. Nor did he
deliberately seek out injustices against which to launch nonviolent
resistance campaigns.7 The same can be said of King
who was a reluctant leader at first.8 Upon his return to the
South after years away at northern schools, King planned
on having two careers, first as a pastor at some respectable
middle class church in the South and second, as a university
professor. Leading and organizing a mass nonviolent resistance
campaign for 13 years was not among his plans.
Both Gandhi and King were newcomers to the movement
whose leadership reigns they assumed. Gandhi had
only been in South Africa a very short while before he began
organizing the Indians. Likewise, King had only been
in Montgomery a short while before he was nominated to
head up the bus boycott effort. He was not a long-time member
of Montgomery’s established black elite. King was chosen
as the boycott’s leader because he was well educated
and an articulate speaker, which appealed to Montgomery’s
black professionals, and also because he was a Baptist minister,
which appealed to Montgomery’s largely Baptist
churchgoing blacks.9
King’s leadership of his adherents and followers contrasts
sharply with Gandhi’s. King was not the administrator
Gandhi was. While Gandhi kept scrupulous books and
financial records, King did not possess this attention to detail.
But King’s closest aides, who shared his philosophical
commitment to nonviolence as a way of life, did not expect
King to be a great administrator: He was a dreamer, an orator
and a holy man of faith. According to one aide,
what else does he need to be? He’s a symbol that
there needs to be a moral voice in America talking
about the injustice and the inequity…. He doesn’t
need to know how to answer a telephone.10
King did not like to make personnel decisions, especially
those involving somebody’s dismissal. He was steadfastly
loyal to close friends and advisers, like Stanley
Levison and Jack O’Dell. Levison was King’s close friend
who, among other things, helped King write his books.
O’Dell, who helped run King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) office in New York and had an
affinity for numbers, had built a substantial donor list. When
the U.S. Justice Department admonished King to jettison
Levison and O’Dell because they were thought to be communists,
King balked, demanding to see proof. But when
the government failed to produce any shred of evidence,
King demurred, his sense of loyalty to Levison and O’Dell
trumping whatever political calculus the federal government
was trying to get him to make. Eventually, however, direct
pressure from President Kennedy and his brother Robert
compelled King to fire O’Dell, which was one of the most
agonizing decisions he ever had to make. Nevertheless, King
maintained close contact with Levison despite the Kennedy
brothers’ entreaties. And when King finally succumbed to
intense pressure to force the resignation of yet another controversial
aide, Bayard Rustin, he nevertheless maintained
close contact with Rustin, so much so that the “firing” was
official in name only.11 He even had to be convinced to fire
a SCLC staffer after it was clear the staffer was stealing
from the SCLC’s treasury.
Unlike King, Gandhi was not reluctant to abandon even
the oldest of relationships. When he discovered a childhood
friend, who was living with him in South Africa and to whom
he felt he owed a debt, in bed with a prostitute, Gandhi immediately
expelled him from his house and never welcomed
him back again. And Gandhi was less averse to wading into
the middle of difficult and controversial matters that arose
within his movement. Although his was an inclusive type
of leadership, Gandhi also had authoritarian, even dictatorial,
traits when it came to getting his way in the Congress
Party.12 Gandhi knew how popular he was and how essential
his participation in Congress was in order for Congress
to obtain mass support. However, if Congress began to veer
in a direction that Gandhi opposed, he would threaten to
resign. Gandhi was able to force Congress into choosing
one leader over another and to force Congress into adopting
his satyagraha methods as official party platforms, even
though many, if not most, of the Congress leaders did not
share anything near his philosophical commitment to nonviolence.
Despite their intense love for him, some leaders,
including Jawaharlal Nehru, thought Gandhi’s ideas about
nonviolence, village spinning programs and a simplistic life
of labor without heavy industry were not just quaint and
quirky, but downright dangerous to the security of an emerging
modern India.
Neither was Gandhi reluctant to involve himself in the
personal confrontations among his followers. A famous example
of this is the feud between two of Congress’s greatest
leaders, Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. Both men were
headstrong, stubborn and possessed great force of personality
and they disagreed on many policies and programs
within the Congress Party. Their feud grew so bad at times
that they could not even stand to talk to each other. After
independence, both leaders would write to Gandhi offering
to resign so that the other could assume unquestioned leadership
over the Congress Party and the country’s government
(which were virtually one and the same thing just after
independence). Yet Gandhi would have none of that, taking
an active role in urging them to work together to iron
out their differences. Nor was he reluctant to take sides in
these feuds, agreeing with one person (usually Nehru) and
opposing the other (usually Patel).
In King’s case, when differences among staff emerged,
he often remained silent, seemingly aloof. He appears to
have had no stomach for settling disputes between people
in the movement. He often procrastinated when he was called
on to make a difficult decision. He didn’t like to confront
antagonistic personalities among the black leadership. When
it came to debating, arguing or otherwise doing battle within
the movement, “he was at a loss,” said trusted confidante
Rustin.13 Since Montgomery, King presented “an almost galactic
remoteness” to those around him and, according to
David J. Garrow, “combat with people outside the movement
was one thing, but head-to-head unpleasantness was
something King avoided consistently,” adopting a passive
stance instead.14
This is ironic when considered against the backdrop of
King’s active nonviolence, which calls for increasingly confrontational
forms of intervention in government functions.
Some saw King’s passivity and gentleness amidst rowdy
office gatherings as a fault while others saw it as a valued
blessing. He would quietly sit through raucous sessions and
then, in Hegelian fashion, he would reach a synthesis among
all the different viewpoints, trying to appeal to everyone.15
Aides said he never got angry and demonstrated unusual
patience.16 Perhaps that is exactly the type of leader the Civil
Rights Movement needed, given its many discordant voices.
As moral spokespersons, both felt strongly about people
taking the initiative for their own self-improvement. Both
used their leadership roles to reform their own people from
within as much as they sought to confront oppression from
without. King argued that blacks “must assume the primary
responsibility” for making changes that would improve their
status.17 If blacks believe that others will be more concerned
about their rights than they are themselves, then they will
contribute to their own victimization and marginalization.
In criticizing blacks for becoming cynical and disillusioned
with American society, King said they,
have so conditioned themselves to the system of
segregation that they have lost that creative something
called initiative. So many [blacks] use their
oppression as an excuse for mediocrity.18
Gandhi was a tireless reformer of Indian society. His
three part social welfare program—weaving homespun cloth
(khadi), attaining Hindu-Muslim unity and ending Untouchability—
reveal his passionate desire to reform India. In constantly
preaching that people should make and wear khadi,
Gandhi sought economic reform to revive each village to
help make it self-sufficient. In preaching Hindu-Muslim
unity, Gandhi sought political reform to ensure the survival
of a united Mother India. And, in launching his controversial
attack on Untouchability, he sought spiritual reform in
an effort to save Hinduism from self-decay. These issues
were far more important to him than was political independence
from Britain, for what was the point of changing political
leadership in Delhi if village life remained so hopelessly
destitute, if India was brutally divided and if Hinduism
remained an oppressive system?
Neither Gandhi nor King hesitated to criticize those with
whom they had philosophical disagreements. Of Malcolm
X’s aggressive rhetoric about using any means necessary in
defense of black rights, King argued that such an approach
was neither morally nor strategically sound. Of the white
clergy who gave sympathetic lip service to black civil rights,
King chastised them for too often being a taillight rather
than a headlight. He said they were “more cautious than
courageous” and content to remain silent “behind the anesthetizing
security of stained glass.”19 Of the black activists
in the Civil Rights Movement, King complained that it was
populated with too many middle class people and not enough
activists from the grassroots in the rural south or the northern
ghettoes.20 Of the Federal Government, on which he relied
so much in his confrontation with local and state governments
in the South, King was critical of its snail-like
pace in introducing civil rights legislation. King was also a
vocal opponent of the Federal Government’s foreign policy
in Vietnam.
For his part, Gandhi issued a contemptuous indictment
of Western Civilization in his short book Hind Swaraj (Indian
Home Rule). In it, he condemned Western Civilization
as immoral and godless and predicted it would self-destruct.21
He also published articles criticizing the Congress leadership.
He accused it of being corrupt and venal. He charged
Congress with being more concerned with protecting its
privilege of power than with helping India’s destitute masses.
He wrote forceful articles railing against ancient Hindu traditions,
like child marriages and Untouchability, calling for
an end to both.
One of the most important issues to discuss in this regard
is the challenge both Gandhi and King faced in their
efforts to mold their constituents into a unified front. Neither
man was successful in this. The black community, as
with the Indian, suffered from internal divisions, not least
of which were those arising out of religious differences. Not
all blacks in America are Christians, just as not all Indians
are Hindus. Even though virtually all blacks and Indians
experienced the humiliation of white oppression and racism,
this shared experience proved to be an insufficient base
on which Gandhi and King could build a lasting united front.
Interestingly, both were subjected to withering critiques from
the Muslim leaders in their respective communities. To be
sure, it must be a coincidence of history that both men confronted
an increasingly hostile population that did not practice
their faith, but instead practiced Islam and from which
were issued challenges to their legitimacy.22
The so-called black Muslims in America, especially
Malcolm X, leveled scathing criticisms against King and
the nonviolent resisters. Most of Malcolm X’s vitriol was
reserved for whites, but Malcolm X was almost as unsparing
in his attack on King’s nonviolence. He condemned
nonviolence as a “cowardice-producing narcotic” and proclaimed
that King, with his nonviolent love-thy-oppressorphilosophy,
was speaking a language that the violent white
man could not understand.23 Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the
powerful and charismatic leader of the Muslim League in
India, had strong disagreements with Gandhi and blamed
Gandhi for some of the Hindu-Muslim problems. Jinnah
became such a powerful force in Indian politics that he was
able to thwart all of Gandhi’s efforts to keep India united.
Both Gandhi and King were beloved by the masses.
But this is no small wonder since both so heavily identified
themselves with the poor and disenfranchised. Despite coming
from privilege, Gandhi and King had an intimate understanding
of, and could implicitly relate to, the needs of the
common folk.24 On marches, both drew throngs of people
who just wanted to get a glimpse of them or to somehow
participate in a historic moment. Like Gandhi, King was
swarmed by onlookers trying to get closer to him, to touch
him. A white reporter covering a march in Mississippi marveled
at the impact King had on the rural, uneducated blacks,
even bringing five-year-old girls to tears.25
Both identified with the poor masses and worked tirelessly
on their behalf. They lived like the poor, Gandhi in primitive
rural huts, King in tenements in the Chicago ghetto.
They traveled like the poor, Gandhi by third class rail or by
bare feet, King by bus or mule. They dressed like the poor,
Gandhi in his simple white loincloth, King in his signature
farmers’ overalls. They worked like the poor, Gandhi toiling
in the hot fields or at his spinning wheel, King bending
down during the harvest with migrant farm laborers. And
both furnished their people with the potent weapon of love
attached to nonviolence, a weapon that empowered them
and gave them hope against their despair.26
Finally, both were master communicators, King seemingly
born to the bully pulpit while Gandhi had to learn to
overcome his shyness in front of large groups. Both became
effective public speakers, able to use rhetoric, metaphor and,
in King’s case, anaphora to great effect. While King was
the more accomplished speech-giver, both had a knack for
dramatizing, in stark and vivid imagery, the injustices that
their people suffered. Both had a flair for the theatrical drama
necessary to lead a mass nonviolent movement. Gandhi’s
Salt March, for instance, struck a chord deep in the psyche
of diverse sectors of the Indian population. King’s harnessing
of both Christian and constitutional principles resonated
not only with black Americans, but with white Americans
as well.
Confronting the Opponent
Interestingly, both Gandhi and King had their activism
forged in the burning humiliations they suffered on public
transportation. Gandhi was forcibly thrown off a train in
South Africa because he refused to give up his first class
seat. As a high school student, King had to give up his bus
seat on the way home from a debating competition. Seething
with anger as he remained standing during 90 mile bus
ride home, King at that time vowed to hate all white people.
And on a train ride back home to Georgia from graduate
school in Boston, King had to dine behind a curtain, so that
whites wouldn’t see him, as his train crossed the Mason-
Dixon Line.
Moreover, both confronted a white power structure that
was extremely resistant to change.27 Like many others, they
saw the essential hypocrisy of the whites. On the one hand,
whites proclaimed adherence to a noble philosophy based
on liberty and equality. On the other hand, whites denied
these same rights to people of color.
Of course, both used nonviolence to resist their opponents,
but for different ends. Gandhi sought to overthrow
his opponent’s governing system, arguing that to cooperate
with the British system of government in India was to cooperate
with evil. By contrast, King did not seek to overthrow
the system of government in the United States. Rather,
by exposing its shameful conduct, he sought to compel it to
live up to its declared creed that all men are created equal
and enjoy the same unalienable rights. King believed in
American society and the American system of government.
He believed the United States was truly an exceptional country
and wanted blacks to be able to freely and equally participate
in its many opportunities.
In confronting their opponents, Gandhi and King also
used nonviolent resistance to popularize jail-going. They
knew that provoking their white opponents into imprisoning
them would raise a groundswell of popular support. Jailing
nonviolent resisters, with the cameras rolling, would
demonstrate to the world how desperate and morally bankrupt
the governing authorities were. Indeed, at times the
British government refused to accept Gandhi’s invitation to
arrest him, knowing full well this would turn the people
against it. King had similar experiences, as when he was
mysteriously bailed out of jail in Albany, Georgia: he suspected
it was the very same sheriff (or his cronies) who had
arrested him in the first place.
Gandhi and King changed the nature and image of imprisonment.
King gave beautiful speeches about transforming
prisons from “dungeons of shame” into “havens of freedom
and human dignity.”28 Gandhi made jail-going “the
hallmark of integrity and national commitment rather than
an experience of degradation and public shame.”29 While
in jail, both would engage in extensive prayer and study.
Each would also take to writing, King’s “Letter from Birmingham
City Jail” being the most famous. Moreover, imprisonment
served yet another purpose, especially for
Gandhi. He had become so popular and beloved that he
welcomed jail as the only way to get respite from the throngs
of admirers who flocked around him wherever he went.
As Religious Devotees
Both Gandhi and King were driven the most by their
strong faiths. Their faiths informed their philosophical commitment
to nonviolence and also compelled them to social
activism. These were not politicians trying to be holy men;
these were holy men trying to be politicians. In both cases,
a spiritual man is entering politics because he feels his religious
beliefs compel him to do so. Despite their moments
of doubt, despite their bouts with depression and despite
the hatred, chaos and violence that enveloped them, neither
lost faith. As their careers progressed, through failures and
successes, it appears that they grew even stronger in their
respective faiths. According to C. Eric Lincoln,
the peculiar genius of Martin Luther King is that
he was able to translate religious fervor into social
action, thereby creating political leadership under
the rubric of his religious ministry.30
But these same words could just as easily be written about
Mohandas Gandhi.
During their nonviolent resistance campaigns, God and
religion were constantly invoked. For instance, in South
Africa, Gandhi told the satyagrahis that God was with
them.31 King made similar proclamations such as, in 1955
during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when he proclaimed
in his best preacher’s baritone voice, that “if we are wrong,
God Almighty is wrong!”32 Moreover, King cited a broad
range of authoritative theologians to bolster his arguments.
He did this to masterful effect in his “Letter from Birmingham
City Jail” when he cited both St. Augustine and St.
Thomas Aquinas to argue that unjust laws must be disobeyed.
Both leaders put themselves and their movements on the
side of a just and merciful God. Both invoked love as a pillar
of their faith-based struggle. King’s use of agape brought“Gandhi’s spirit of inclusiveness into an American context
more than any other aspect of King’s philosophy.”33 King
liked to say that Christ furnished the spirit of love, justice,
redemption and bearing the cross of suffering while Gandhi
furnished the method of nonviolent resistance.
Some of Gandhi’s critics point out that his near fanatical
devotion to God, expressed primarily through Hinduism,
actually helped fan the flames of religious intolerance
between Muslims and Hindus. Despite his own Herculean
efforts to attain Hindu-Muslim unity, Gandhi’s constant emphasis
on religion and religious piety may have contributed
to an increase in religious intolerance, which wasn’t so hard
to do in the first place since Hindus and Muslims had a
shaky relationship for decades. At first, Jinnah, the Muslim
League’s leader and future “father” of Pakistan, was a powerful
and influential member of Congress with stanch unionist
sentiments. However, Jinnah turned away from Congress
as he began to believe that the party was becoming increasingly
a Hindu nationalist party, as opposed to an Indian nationalist
party. Jinnah blamed this evolution in part on
Gandhi who was constantly emphasizing religion in his
speeches and actions. Jinnah and many other Muslims feared
that Gandhi’s emphasis on religion in politics would end up
replacing the British Raj with a Hindu Raj.
Gandhi and King’s religious devotion elicited very
strong responses, both from people who adored them and
from those who reviled them. To his followers, Gandhi was
Bapu (father) or Mahatma (great soul). But to his detractors,
especially the Hindu extremists who feared he was giving
away too much to the Muslims, Gandhi was not a Mahatma,
nor even did they refer to him by his given name,
Mohandas. Instead, they referred to him as Mohammed
Gandhi, an alliterative play on the term Mahatma and meant
as an insult to Gandhi, since Mohammed is a very popular
Muslim name. To his intractable British adversary, Winston
Churchill, Gandhi was nothing more than a
seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a
fakir . . . striding half-naked up the steps of the
Viceregal palace . . . to parlay on equal terms with
the representative of the King-Emperor.34
King’s followers referred to him as LLJ for Little Lord
Jesus, or just Little Jesus. Upon his arrival somewhere, his
admirers shouted, “King is King!” or “Hail to the King!”
His black opponents, however, referred to him derisively as“Da Lawd,” and white racists referred to him as Martin
Luther Coon, or Martin Loser King.35
In comparing Gandhi and King against the backdrop
of religion, it is also useful to point out a paradoxical combination
of values they both possessed. In the first instance,
each was a stanch nationalist, which gave their work an essentially
exclusivist flavor. Gandhi was fiercely proud of
India and its impressive civilization. He thought India, with
its rich ancient history, had much to offer the world. After
all, as the birthplace of two of the world’s most widely practiced
religions, India can be considered The Holy Land to
hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists. Gandhi was
proud of the faith into which he was born and which was
born of his beloved Mother India. He wanted India to be
run by Indians, not by an alien power.
Like Gandhi, King was a patriot, a quintessential American
who believed that America was ordained by God to be
special, even unique among all other countries. This is called
the Doctrine of American Exceptionalism and is shared by
many Americans. King saw the United States as a beacon
on a hill, providing a guiding light for the rest of the world
to follow. Even his opposition to the Johnson
administration’s Vietnam War policies was couched in patriotism:
King said he opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam because
of his love for America. Furthermore, he believed that
black Americans in particular could set a fine example for
the rest of the world to follow. Because of their unique role
in history, black Americans could teach the rest of the country
and the world about the transforming power of nonviolence.
By bearing the cross of others’ shame, by acting out
their resistance using nonviolence and self-suffering, black
Americans could redeem the soul of the entire nation, which
would then serve as a shining example for the rest of the
world to follow.36
So, as lovers of their own countries, both Gandhi and
King possessed a nationalist vision that was essentially
exclusivist in its patriotic fervor. Gandhi’s Indian nationalism
led him to demand independence from Britain and the
exclusion of whites from Indian rule because, unlike white
Americans, white Britons in India were foreigners. King’s
American nationalism led him to demand the inclusion of
blacks in the American Dream.
Yet, and in the second, paradoxical, instance, their
exclusivist nationalistic sentiments were offset by their universalistic
visions for humanity. Fueled by their deep religious
convictions, each envisioned a kind of global inclusiveness
that called for human oneness, regardless of nationality. For Gandhi, everyone is a child of God and must
be treated thusly. Each person is spiritually connected to
everyone else: to hurt one person is to hurt oneself. For King,
his philosophy of Personalism meant that every human being had worth under God, and therefore must be loved and
treated as part of a single, unified garment of human destiny.
King’s Personalist vision did not apply only to Americans.
Since he believed that “injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere,” the whole world must be redeemed,
not just the United States.37 He developed an all encompassing
global vision. The Poor Peoples’ Campaign that he
was organizing when he was murdered is a good example
of his inclusive vision for bringing justice to all who suffered,
not just blacks.
As religious devotees, both men insisted on living the
totality of their lives informed by a single, unifying creed,
nonviolence. Gandhi’s nonviolence was acquired through
his deeply held Hindu beliefs, reinforced through the influences
of Jainism and his Jain friend, Raychandbhai, and then
leavened by European and American influences, such as Leo
Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau. King’s was acquired
through his deeply held Christian beliefs, then reinforced
by the influences of Gandhi, Bayard Rustin and others. All
aspects of their lives were filtered through the demanding
prism of nonviolence. In Gandhi’s case, all his experiments
with diet, celibacy, non-possession and even his maddeningly
frequent about-faces on issues, were all conducted
under the unifying rubric of satyagraha, which had as its
most exigent endeavor the desire to see God through the
pursuit of Truth.
For King, his faith dictated not only his nonviolence in
the Civil Rights Movement, but also his views on other issues,
especially poverty and the Vietnam War. His opposition
to the war alienated the Johnson administration, cost
him considerable financial support among white liberals and
angered many black leaders who turned their backs on him.
But King, irrevocably bound by his faith, refused to yield
on these issues.
While both were men of intensely held religious convictions,
their faith was not confined to the cloister. They
were also men of action, believing that their faith demanded
their presence at the ramparts of an epic historical struggle.
Both were keen at taking the best moral and spiritual tenets
of their faiths and turning them into political action that was
high minded. Such action was thus so profoundly symbolic
that it struck the peoples’ deepest psychological chords and
transformed many of them into sympathetic adherents if not
active resisters. This is what Robert King calls “engaged
spirituality.” Gandhi, for instance, used the fast to demonstrate
to Hindus the extent he was willing to suffer for his
principles. King used not only the symbol of the cross, but
also Negro spirituals to fuse political action with a holy
message:
The spirituals did for the Civil Rights Movement
what Gandhi’s fasts did for his own reform movement:
they brought people together and gave them
the courage to resist oppression, while also affecting
the consciences of the people outside the movement.38
As Men
Both Gandhi and King had relatively privileged youths,
at least by comparison to other Indians and blacks of their
time. Although both were scarred by white racism, both were
fortunate to come from stable families that were relatively
economically secure and insulated from the worst that racists
had to offer. Both of their fathers were “strong and ample
providers who exercised considerable influence within their
respective communities.”39 Gandhi’s grandfather, then father,
then brother, all had good positions in the local government.
King’s father was a self-made business entrepreneur
and preacher. His family was solid middle class.
As young boys, however, Gandhi and King had strikingly
different personalities. Young King was athletic and
liked to play rough games. Although he did not like to fight,
he was willing to settle playground disputes with his fists
by suggesting to his opponent that they duke it out on the
grass. Few childhood rivals accepted King’s offer. King was
short and stocky and very physical: he could give a hit as
well as absorb one. By his own recollection Gandhi, who
was much more slender, even by Indian standards, did not
have much interest in athletics at all. There are few, if any,
accounts of Gandhi brawling as a youngster.
Moreover, both appear to have had mild suicidal tendencies
in their youth. In his frustration at having to do what
his elders told him, Gandhi and a childhood friend made a
suicide pact but they failed to muster the courage to go
through with it.40 King made a couple of half-hearted attempts
at suicide. The occasion both times involved the griefstricken
boy and his beloved grandmother. On the first, when
his grandmother was accidentally knocked unconscious,
King thought she was dead and leapt from a second-story
window. He did it again sometime later upon hearing the
(correct) news of his grandmother’s death.41
Although both had expensive high-powered educations,
Gandhi was not much of a student compared to King. His
schooling, from early childhood through law school in London,
was not marked by any significant or outstanding academic
achievements. Later in life, however, Gandhi proved
to be an adept intellectual, a voracious reader and prolific
writer. King, by contrast, was an exceptional pupil and a
well respected and promising young scholar (although not
the best of writers). Perhaps King’s academic rise was due
to the post-World War II need to fill the schools and colleges.
However, it is unlikely that this alone, especially in
the segregated Deep South of the 1940s and 1950s, would
have been enough to propel an African American all the
way through to his Ph.D. King was, indeed, an intellectual.
What is paradoxical about King’s obvious intellect is the
plagiarism he committed in writing his dissertation at Boston
University. If King was an intellectual lightweight, this
would have been easily discovered in the classroom or at
the many salons he and his housemates hosted in Boston.
Few doubt King’s intellect or academic acumen, which was
evident from early childhood, so why did he plagiarize parts
of his doctoral thesis? Did he cut corners in his haste to
finish? Was he becoming academically lazy? Was he insecure
about his writing skills? Or was it simply an outgrowth
of the common and widely accepted practice among black
preachers to borrow material from one another without giving
attribution?
Unlike King, Gandhi was painfully shy. As a young
barrister, Gandhi had difficulty mustering the courage to
speak up in a court case, even though it was his turn and
everyone was waiting for him to speak. By contrast, King
won a debating contest while he was in high school and was
already accomplished at the pulpit before he graduated from
college. Neither was King shy in his pursuit of women. He
was quite the ladies’ man, while Gandhi hardly even understood
the impact of his childhood marriage to Kasturba. King
was a galavanter while Gandhi sought to achieve celibacy
at an early age. Even as she agreed to marry him, Coretta
Scott’s friends warned her about young King’s reputation
as a womanizer.
What they both did share, however, was a strong moral
center. As a little boy, King seemed to know instinctively
that something was immoral about how his best friend’s
parents no longer allowed Martin to play with their son because
of Martin’s skin color. And King was outraged by
having to give up his seat to a white person on an overnight
train ride. For his part, young Gandhi refused to obey his
teacher’s instructions to copy off of another pupil’s exam
so that a visiting school official could see that the teacher’s
students had all achieved a 100 percent mark. Even in his
rebelliousness, Gandhi’s moral center eventually overrode
his youthful impulses. After stealing and lying, the young
Mahatma-to-be could not overcome the sense of guilt and
shame he felt and thus confessed his sin to his father. And
once Gandhi made a promise, as a young law student in
London or as an accomplished barrister in South Africa,
there was absolutely no going back on it.
That said, neither Gandhi nor King can be considered
excellent role models as family men, at least in the traditional
sense. Unlike the conventional father and husband,
Gandhi’s attachment to and love of family did not supercede
his love of others. Gandhi made no distinctions in how
he treated people, whether they were blood relations or not.
He virtually disowned his eldest son, Harilal, after he learned
of Harilal’s drinking, cavorting and public conversion to
Islam. Gandhi instructed other family members not to share
anything with Harilal. Is this the proper approach a votary
of love and nonviolence takes toward another person, a son
no less? Furthermore, in correspondence with family members,
Gandhi was harsh, refusing to send them money, proclaiming
that all his resources were devoted to his social
uplift programs and that relatives did not deserve his largesse
just because they were kin.
Gandhi was strict with Kasturba too, rarely giving in to
her wishes. He forbade her from keeping gifts. He also dictated
to doctors what medicines she could have in times of
illness. Even though he eventually eased up on trying to
control every aspect of his wife’s life, “he refused to give
any credence or respect to her opinions or intellect,”42 remaining
patrician toward her until she died. That is not to
say that Gandhi did not love “Ba” because he did. It’s just
that his love for her did not conform to conventional notions
of spousal fealty.
And King loved Coretta, but he was strict with her also.
Right at the end of their first date, King shocked Coretta by
expressing his desire to marry her. But this proposal was
conditioned on Coretta’s willingness to accept the traditional
role of the housewife who would keep the home and raise
the children. Despite her considerable prospects as a professional
singer, Coretta acceded to King’s insistence that
she remain home. Once they were married, he even forbade
her from partaking in nonviolent resistance campaigns.
Coretta once said, “I’ve never been on the scene when we’ve
marched. . . . I’m usually at home because my husband says,‘you have to take care of the children.’”43 Moreover, King
was, by today’s standards, an absentee father, not seeing his
children for weeks at a time. King was also unfaithful to his
wife.
When it came to gender relations and the treatment of
women overall, Gandhi was arguably far ahead of his time
while King was behind his. Although he started out as a
young male chauvinist in the first years of his marriage,
Gandhi ended up calling for an end to child marriages because
of the heavy burden it placed on young girls. Gandhi
wanted to liberate women from their social shackles. He
called for an end to purdah (screen or veil) and the seclusion
of women because women must exercise their right
and duty to serve outside the home as well as inside it.44 He
called for equal treatment of women and insisted that men
share in the housework at his ashrams. He even called on
women to join the men as equals in the nonviolent
satyagraha campaigns.45 He felt women had a special
strength of character and a great capacity for self-sacrifice
and nonviolence. He also believed that women were perfectly
situated to help him carry out his major reform programs,
including spinning, ending untouchability, improving
home hygiene and even building friendships across communal
boundaries.46
By contrast, King looked down on professional women
and did not think that women could be effective leaders.47
According to James Lawson, a high-ranking member of the
movement, “Martin had real problems with having women
in a high position.”48 But even if King insisted that Coretta’s
place was in the home, other women played key roles in the
movement. From Rosa Parks’s famous “no” on that Montgomery
bus, to Ella Baker’s leadership in saving the SCLC
from financial ruin,49 to Diane Nash’s remarkable ability to
keep the Freedom Rides, which were on the verge of collapsing,
intact and nonviolent, women played a prominent
role and were very much the “backbone” of the Civil Rights
Movement.50
Even as a national figure, King’s views about freedom
and equality did not extend to women. In the late 1950s, he
wrote a column for Ebony Magazine called Advice for Liv
ing. In it, he wrote that the “primary obligation of the woman
is motherhood.”51 In one column, a woman wrote in asking
for advice about her cheating husband. Rather than hold the
husband responsible for his despicable behavior, King suggested
that it was the wife’s fault. He asked her to consider
what the other woman had to offer her husband that she did
not: “Do you nag?” he asked.52 While King’s traditionalist
views of women may have been similar to some other men
of his time, they certainly clashed with the major theme of
his movement. Moreover, the women’s liberation movement
was in full swing during King’s last years, so he must have
been fully cognizant of women’s issues.
Gandhi and King share similarities and differences in
how they tried to cope with human passions, including their
materialist, culinary and carnal desires. Despite the objections
of their spouses, Gandhi and King both sought to overcome
what many consider a natural human desire, to acquire
material possessions. In Gandhi’s case, he gave up
virtually all worldly possessions, save a pair of spectacles,
a walking stick, a few articles of clothing, some writing
implements and some crude dining ware. At a very early
age and much to the consternation of his wife, Gandhi began
divesting himself of his and his family’s possessions,
putting them in trust for the poor. After his visit to India,
King also tried to shed his desire for material things, although
he was less successful at this than Gandhi. For the
longest time, he resisted Coretta’s pleas and delayed buying
a new car and a new home, despite the fact that the
family had clearly outgrown the old ones. He felt that he
did not deserve to keep the monetary award that came with
his Nobel Peace Prize while Coretta argued that he should.
He won that argument. Although King’s taste for fine suits
stayed with him, by his last days, he was increasingly turning
to the idea of complete denial of material possessions.
When it comes to the palate, Gandhi and King diverge
considerably. Judging that he must overcome all desires in
order to see God face to face, Gandhi engaged in a lifelong
experiment to conquer his palate. He was a strict vegetarian
by his law-school days. In later life, he conducted diet experiments
in order to determine how little and how simply
he could eat. Gandhi’s repeated fasts were also tied to his
desire to conquer his palate. For his part, King does not
appear to have had any interest in conquering his palate. A
little bit overweight, King was a meat eater who definitely
enjoyed a good meal. He was known to make sudden outbursts
at SCLC meetings proclaiming he could not continue
without first having something to eat.
Regarding their sexuality, Gandhi and King show differences
as well as similarities. On the one hand, both were
nearly consumed by their preoccupation with sex. Gandhi
and King both felt immense guilt about their sexuality. King
was haunted by his infidelities, while Gandhi never fully
recovered from the shame of running off to his wife’s bed
just as his father was about to die. On the other hand, they
came to terms with this preoccupation through sharply contradictory
practices, with Gandhi essentially denying his
sexuality through the austere practice of brahmacharya (celibacy),
while King repeatedly succumbed to his sexual appetite.
Despite his guilt and self-loathing, King’s urges, perhaps
coupled with his loneliness for being away from home
so much, led him to break his marital vows on numerous
occasions. According to Ralph Abernathy’s book And the
Walls Came Tumbling Down (1989), written long after King
died, King engaged in a sexual liaison even on the night
before he was assassinated. By contrast, Gandhi achieved
celibacy at the young age of 37. Yet, despite finally keeping
his vow of celibacy for more than four decades, Gandhi remained
preoccupied with his sexuality until his death. He
clearly enjoyed the company of young women, writing to one,“The sexual sense is hardest to overcome in my case.”53 Once
Gandhi had an involuntary discharge while sleeping and
awoke traumatized by the incident. So, to be absolutely sure
of his celibacy, Gandhi conducted a controversial experiment
by sleeping naked alongside nubile young women.
As Heroes
If a hero is someone who, knowing the danger, demonstrates
bravery and courage in the fearless service of others,
then surely Gandhi and King are heroes. King defined courage
as the power of the mind to overcome fear.54 To be sure,
both King and Gandhi demonstrated fearlessness in the face
of repeated death threats and several assassination attempts.
King was spat upon, jailed, beaten, hit with bricks, bombed
and stabbed, yet he retained the courage to continue struggling
for his beliefs.55 In seminary school, a white racist
pulled a gun on King and threatened to kill him. King calmed
him with his words. Later, the student admitted he was wrong
and publicly apologized to King.56 At a signing ceremony
for his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, a crazed woman
stabbed King in the chest. Once while King was giving a
speech, a white supremacist rushed the stage and punched
him in the face and then began to pummel him. When King
lowered his arms and looked calmly at his attacker, one
witness said that she never again doubted King’s complete
philosophical commitment to nonviolence.57 King’s house
was firebombed and he and his family were constantly receiving
death threats. Yet he remained eerily calm amidst
this maelstrom. After the firebombing, King confronted an
angry black mob outside his home that wanted revenge. King
calmed them, saying “we must love our white brothers, no
matter what they do to us… We must meet hate with love.”58 When hooded Ku Klux Klansmen rode through his neighborhood
to try to terrorize him, he went out on his front
door step and remained there until the horsemen left. In the
closing words of his last speech, King expressed this fearlessness
eloquently:
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve
got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter
with me now. . . . Like anybody, I would like to
live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m
not concerned about that now. . . . [because] I’ve
seen the promised land. I may not get there with
you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a
people, will get to the promised land. And I’m
happy, tonight! I’m not worried about anything!
I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord!59
For his part, Gandhi received many death threats and
in fact experienced several close calls. In South Africa,
Gandhi was almost beaten to death by an angry mob of
whites. After a burly Indian threatened to kill him, Gandhi
showed no fear in defying his compatriot. True to his threat,
the husky man clubbed Gandhi on the head, seriously
wounding him. During the communal riots in Calcutta,
Gandhi deliberately waded into the thicket of violence, residing
in the abandoned house of Muslims. An angry mob
of Hindus broke into the compound, demanding that he leave
at once. They trashed the place, swinging clubs and sticks.
Gandhi was nearly hit in the head with a brick. Gandhi’s
life was in danger yet he remained calm and eventually talked
the crowd into putting down its weapons and going home.
On another occasion, a bomb exploded near the dais where
he was conducting his prayer meeting. This was a failed
attempt on Gandhi’s life, conducted by members of the same
group who would in fact succeed the next day, this time
with three bullets to the chest. When the bomb exploded
Gandhi remained calm, soothing the crowd by resuming his
prayer session. And, true to his wish, when Gandhi was shot
by the Hindu extremists the next day, he said Hey Ram (Oh,
God) three times and then fell to the ground.
Gandhi and King are also heroes because of how they
lived their lives in the service of others. Although both could
have been rich and successful as private citizens, both chose
instead to sacrifice great career potential, and the comfort it
would bring them and their family, for a life of service to
others. Both men gave up promising and lucrative careers
for a life of voluntary poverty. Indeed, both were far more
concerned with caring for and serving others than they were
for themselves.
So what of their legacies? Do Gandhi and King’s nonviolent
visions dominate Indian or American society today?
Does today’s India reflect Gandhi’s vision? Has the United
States fulfilled King’s dream? In short, the answer is mostly
no. Overall, since India did not follow Gandhi’s lead on the
issues that mattered most to him, such as nonviolence,
satyagraha, Hindu-Muslim unity, khadi, reviving village life
and ending Untouchability, there is little to suggest that
Gandhi is the father of contemporary India.60 Contrary to
what Gandhi wished, India evolved into a modern country
with a strong central government, a sophisticated military
and heavy industrial and agricultural sectors. And King’s
eloquent dream of creating a beloved community in the
United States remains a dream. In the twenty-first century,
people still are too often judged by the color of their skin
and not the content of their character. America remains very
much segregated. Racial profiling of blacks on the streets,
on the highways, in the malls and in the restaurants still
exists and the problem of America is still the problem of
racism.61
Nevertheless, there is evidence all around of Gandhi
and King’s influence and enduring legacy in the twentyfirst
century. Both men are the subject of numerous continuing
studies and books. Both men have many Internet
websites dedicated to their memory and teaching. Both men
are the subject of numerous international conferences and
symposia. Both men have been the subject of multiple film
documentaries and cinematic movie productions. Both men
have monuments and museums dedicated to their life and
work. Both men have national holidays honoring their
memory. Both men have left behind a wealth of admirers
and followers who today carry on their work all over the
world. Both men have their words reproduced and replayed
countless times in countless venues. Most important, their
style of nonviolent resistance is still practiced throughout
the world.62 Indeed, both men are more than historical figures—
theirs is a legacy of timeless applicability and boundless
potential, one for all the ages.
Endnotes
1. Michael Nagler, “Nonviolence,” in World Encyclopedia
of Peace, vol. 2 , ed. Ervin Laszlo and
Jung Youl Yoo (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986),
p. 72.
2. Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The
Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 2nd ed.
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988),
p. 9.
3. Satyagraha also translates as the strength that
comes from adhering to the truth.
4. James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope:
The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: HarperCollins,
1986), p. 31.
5. William Robert Miller, “The Broadening Horizons,”
in Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile, rev.
ed., ed. C. Eric Lincoln (New York: Hill and Wang,
1984), p. 63.
6. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life
of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper and
Row, 1982), pp. 142–44.
7. Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 108.
8. Donald T. Phillips, Martin Luther King, Jr. on
Leadership: Inspiration and Wisdom for Challenging
Times (New York: Warner Books, 1999), p. 41.
9. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), p. 20.
10. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 286.
11. Rustin was a remarkably gifted organizer and instrumental
in influencing King’s turn to
philosophical nonviolence. He was also openly gay
and a former member of the Communist Party, both
factors that made him a serious liability to King.
12. Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent
Power in Action (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), p. 96.
13. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 343.
14. Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York:
Penguin Books, 2002), p. 46 and Garrow, Bearing
the Cross, p. 343, respectively.
15. German philosopher G.F.W. Hegel’s (1770–1831)
notion of synthesis, which was the product of the
clash between a thesis and its antithesis, appealed
to King’s intellectual sensibilities.
16. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 464–65.
17. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Rising Tide of Racial
Consciousness,” in A Testament of Hope, p.
148.
18. Ibid., p. 150.
19. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham
City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope, p. 299.
20. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 540.
21. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Indian Home Rule, second
improved edition (Madras, India: S. Ganesan,
1922), pp. 22, 53. More than 30 years after he first
wrote the book in 1910, Gandhi said he stood by
the remarks in it.
22. This is especially poignant in Gandhi’s case since
he went to great lengths to maintain good relations
and a productive dialogue with India’s Muslims.
See David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and
Ours: The Global Legacy of his Ideas (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 158–74.
23. James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm in America:
A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1993), p. 176.
24. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 290.
25. Ibid., p. 399.
26. Ibid., p. 290.
27. Interestingly, while Gandhi confronted whites as a
member of the majority group, King confronted
them as a member of a minority group.
28. “The Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Retrieved
13 July 2005 from MLK Papers Project
Sermons: “The American Dream website:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/650704_The_American_Dream.html, no
date.
29. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, p. 17.
30. C. Eric Lincoln, ed., Martin Luther King, Jr.: A
Profile, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984),
p. xiii.
31. D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas
Kormachand Gandhi, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Publications
Division, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Government of India, 1951), p. 88.
32. “MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,”
Retrieved 10 July 2005 from MLK Online website:
http://www.mlkonline.net/mia.html, no date.
33. Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in
Action, p. 183.
34. Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, p. 238.
35. Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 96.
36. Gandhi made prophetic reference to this in the
1930s when he said, “it may be through the [American]
Negroes that the unadulterated message of
nonviolence will be delivered to the world”
(Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in
Action, p. 182).
37. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham
City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope, p. 290.
38. Robert H. King, Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat
Hanh: Engaged Spirituality in an Age of Globalization (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 158.
39.. Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in
Action, p. 177.
40.. Gandhi, Mohandas K., An Autobiography or The
Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. by
Mahadev Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p.
26.
41. Lerone Bennett, What Manner of Man: A Biography
of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson
Publishing Co, 1968), pp. 18–19.
42. Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, p. 97.
43. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 308.
44. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, p. 210.
45, Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, p. 111.
46. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, p. 59.
47. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the
King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1988), p. 232.
48. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 141.
49. This, despite King’s vocal opposition to giving her
the position, and then acquiescing only if it was
agreed Baker’s position in the SCLC would be temporary.
50.. Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in
Action, p. 178.
51. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 99.
52. Ibid., p. 104.
53. Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and
Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 186.
54. Phillips, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 306.
55. Ibid., p. 287.
56. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 30.
57. Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 654.
58. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom:
The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and
Row, 1958), pp. 137–38.
59. “Memphis: We remember: I’ve been to the
Mountaintop,” Retrieved 18 September 2002 from
American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees website:
http://www.afscme.org/
about/kingspch.htm, no date.
60. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, p. 389.
61. To this can now be added racial profiling of Muslim
and Arab Americans.
62. See Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, pp.
198–293, for an excellent discussion of Gandhi’s
legacy not only in India but throughout the world. Volume XVI |
