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Gandhi was the saintly father of modern India

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was one of the great men of the 20th century. His frail, bent figure, in dhoti and shawl, walking barefoot with a stick is the icon of Indian independence, the century’s grandest struggle for freedom and self-determination from colonial domination and exploitation. In India he is revered as the father of the nation. His face stares out from India’s banknotes; statues of him adorn India’s cities; innumerable thoroughfares bear his name.

So Gandhi is rightly and widely revered but was also in his lifetime, and remains, a controversial figure. Was he primarily a man of God, an ascetic who espoused the simple life and devoted himself to the plight of India’s poor and downtrodden? Or was he a consummate politician, bent on achieving India’s independence, whose apparently unworldly exterior concealed a Machiavellian political instinct?