Exploring Mahatma Gandhi’s relevance today, from ethics and non-violence to dissent, nationalism, and moral responsibility in a polarised modern India
Rabindra Kumar Nayak
On 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, an act that shocked a newly independent India and stunned the moral conscience of the world. More than seven decades later, the questions refuse to fade: Was Gandhi’s assassination justified? And perhaps more importantly, does Gandhi still matter today? These questions are not merely historical—they go to the heart of how a society understands dissent, disagreement, nationalism, and moral responsibility.
To ask whether Gandhi’s assassination was justified is to confront a foundational principle of civilisation itself: can political disagreement ever justify murder? Godse and his supporters argued that Gandhi weakened India by advocating non-violence, by showing empathy towards Muslims during Partition, and by pressing the Indian government to honour financial commitments to Pakistan. In their view, Gandhi’s moral stance amounted to political betrayal.
But this line of reasoning collapses under ethical scrutiny. Disagreement, even deep, passionate disagreement, does not grant the right to kill. Gandhi did not wield state power, command armies, or impose laws by force. He persuaded, fasted, appealed, and reasoned. To assassinate a moral voice because one finds it inconvenient or threatening is not an act of patriotism; it is an admission of intellectual and moral bankruptcy. No democratic or civilised society can legitimise violence against an individual for holding a different ethical vision of the nation.
Godse claimed he killed Gandhi to ‘save’ India. History has shown the opposite. Gandhi’s assassination did not strengthen the nation; it exposed its vulnerabilities, its unresolved communal anxieties, its intolerance for pluralism, and its impatience with moral restraint. The bullets fired at Gandhi were aimed not just at a man, but at the idea that politics must be bound by ethics.
This brings us to the second, more uncomfortable question: Is Gandhi relevant today? In an age of aggressive nationalism, social media outrage, economic competition, and geopolitical conflict, Gandhi often appears impractical, even naive. Non-violence seems slow in a world addicted to instant results. Moral self-restraint seems outdated in a culture of spectacle and power.
Yet relevance should not be confused with convenience. Gandhi’s relevance lies precisely in the fact that his ideas challenge our instincts. He insisted that means matter as much as ends, that injustice cannot be cured by injustice, and that hatred corrodes the hater before it harms the enemy. These ideas are deeply inconvenient, but profoundly necessary.
Let us consider today’s political climate. Polarisation has become the dominant mode of public life. Citizens are reduced to identities – religious, caste-based, ideological, rather than addressed as thinking individuals. Misinformation spreads faster than truth, and disagreement is often met with abuse, intimidation, or calls for silencing. In such a climate, Gandhi’s insistence on dialogue, empathy, and moral courage feels not obsolete, but urgently relevant.
Gandhi was not infallible. He was not without flaws; some of his views warrant serious criticism, and his ideas evolved over time. Portraying him as an infallible saint is as intellectually misleading as reducing him to a villain. But relevance does not require perfection. It requires the capacity to illuminate present dilemmas. Gandhi’s life forces us to ask difficult questions: How do we resist injustice without becoming unjust ourselves? How do we pursue national pride without dehumanising others? How do we combine political action with moral accountability?
Globally too, Gandhi’s ideas resonate. Movements for civil rights, environmental justice, and peace continue to draw inspiration from non-violent resistance. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela, Gandhi’s legacy has travelled far beyond India’s borders, often being appreciated abroad even as it is contested at home.
Ironically, Gandhi is most remembered today through statues, currency notes, and ceremonial invocations while his actual principles are frequently ignored. Cleanliness is reduced to slogans, non-violence to symbolism, and truth to rhetoric. The real challenge is not whether Gandhi is relevant, but whether we are willing to be challenged by him.
To justify Gandhi’s assassination is to validate the idea that violence is an acceptable response to moral disagreement. To dismiss Gandhi as irrelevant is to surrender to cynicism and brute power. A mature democracy must do neither. It must allow space for critique, debate, and reinterpretation without erasing ethical foundations.
Gandhi’s assassin belongs to history; Gandhi’s questions belong to the present. As long as societies struggle with hatred, inequality, and the temptation to silence dissent through force, Gandhi will remain relevant not as an idol, but as a moral mirror. Whether we like what we see in that mirror is a different matter altogether.
(The author is a former Reader in English. Views expressed are personal.)