The Unwalked Path: Gandhi, A Prisoner of Hope, and the Echo of Golgotha

Today, as the world pauses to mark the birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, many will speak of non-violence, truth, and satyagraha. They will rightfully laud his towering achievements in liberating a subcontinent. But before I proceed, a clarification is essential, for my relationship with Gandhi's legacy is one of profound conflict. Those who follow my writings can always find an unapologetic stance against many of his core convictions. I speak of his deeply flawed understanding of the caste system—a belief in the purification of the varna hierarchy, which stood in stark, unforgivable contrast to the clarion call of the one man who truly understood its evil: Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who demanded its complete annihilation. I speak also of Gandhi's revivalist optimism for a reformed Hinduism, a vision I find untenable.

In that regard, my absolute and final resort is always, as Arundhati Roy so aptly put it, the Doctor. For me, the radical, structural wisdom of the Doctor always eclipses the spiritual aura of the Saint. And yet—and here lies the complex truth—I am humbled to accept that it was Gandhi's moral conscience that kept the very soul of India alive, even at the heart of its greatest, most agonizing historical turmoil. He possessed an intoxicating madness of charismatic authority, a moral gravity born not of office but of his own spiritual attributes. It was a force so vast it was capable of pulling even pragmatic giants like Nehru and Patel into its trench. Thus, I am not an exception. This article, therefore, is never a revocation of my staunch criticism, but an acknowledgement of a different, profound, and deeply tragic truth.

My thoughts today are drawn not just to what was, but to one of the most poignant "what ifs" in the vast tapestry of Indian history – a story that carries the raw, profound beauty of a sacrifice glimpsed but ultimately denied.

Imagine the dusty roads of Jerusalem, two millennia past. A man, condemned, shoulders a heavy wooden cross, each step a testament to a divine, yet utterly human, resolve. He walks towards Golgotha, not for political gain, but for the redemption of humanity, a final sermon etched in agony and unwavering love. This, for me, is the absolute mirror, a triplet of Jesus walking with the cross on his shoulder in the 20th century.

Today, my profound beauty lies in envisioning this very scene replayed, not in ancient Judea, but in the torn heart of the Indian subcontinent. It is the image of an old man, frail yet indomitable, known as the Mahatma, setting his feet on a path through the very hell that was partitioned Punjab, towards the nascent land of Pakistan.

This was not a fantasy; it was Gandhi's declared intention. Having quelled the inferno in Calcutta – a feat that earned him Mountbatten's awe as a "one-man boundary force" – and brought a desperate peace to Delhi through his fast unto death, his next pilgrimage was to be through the land drenched in the blood of Partition. He would carry no weapons, no army, no political entourage. His "cross" would have been the crushing weight of a million dead, the agony of millions displaced, and the profound, personal wound of a dream shattered: a united, harmonious India.

Judith Brown, in her seminal work, brilliantly titles her biography Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. She argues that his unshakeable optimism, while the fount of his power, also trapped him, making him struggle with political realities that contradicted his vision. Yet, it is precisely this "imprisonment" in hope that gives rise to the most compelling counter-narrative. A pragmatic politician, a realist, would have retreated from the catastrophe of Partition. But the prisoner of hope, bound by his divine conviction in the goodness of humanity and the ultimate triumph of love over hate, could not. He was compelled, by the very essence of his being, to walk into the fire.

This is where the profound beauty of that unwalked path truly resides. His journey would not have been about brokering political deals across the new border; it would have been a living, breathing act of Satyagraha on the grandest scale imaginable. His every step, every moment of vulnerability, would have been a silent, searing indictment of hatred and a resounding reaffirmation of shared humanity. He would have been the ultimate healer, not through pronouncements, but through presence.

Perhaps, this is precisely why "they"—the architects and peddlers of hatred—could not allow it to happen. Nathuram Godse, and the ideology he embodied, understood Gandhi in a way perhaps even his closest disciples did not. Nehru saw a guide, a moral compass. But Godse saw an existential threat. He knew, with terrifying clarity, that Gandhi's very existence, his ability to conjure peace from chaos, was the greatest obstacle to their vision of a fractured, exclusivist nation.

They feared another miracle. They knew that if this old man, this prisoner of hope, could walk through Punjab and awaken even a flicker of conscience, if he could ignite a "Miracle of Punjab" mirroring the "Miracle of Calcutta," their entire agenda of division would crumble. For an ideology built on hatred cannot survive in the embrace of reconciliation. Godse's bullet did not just kill a man; it brutally murdered a possibility. It silenced the greatest voice for unity just as he was about to make his most profound, most Christ-like walk towards redemption.

But the tragedy of that assassin’s bullet does not end with the murder of a man or even the murder of a possibility. It metastasizes over the decades into a grotesque, political theatre—a theatre so absurd it demands not tears, but the sharpest edge of sarcasm.

Consider, for a moment, the convention of post-colonial nations. Think of Atatürk in Turkey, Sukarno in Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. The path was a familiar one: lead the freedom struggle, be anointed the 'Father of the Nation,' and then seamlessly transition into the role of President or Prime Minister. Now, bring your thoughts back to India. Our Father of the Nation held no office. His authority was purely moral, a fact that the new state both revered in theory and was, perhaps, quietly relieved by in practice. So what was our gift to the man who held no office but liberated a subcontinent? That is where my sarcasm will haunt you forever. It was not a presidency, nor a premiership, but the cold finality of a Beretta M1934 semi-automatic pistol and its three bullets.

That was the immediate, violent answer to his legacy. The answer that echoes today, however, is quieter, and perhaps even more perverse. Fast forward to the present day, where the biggest irony unfolds—a futuristic sarcasm so potent, even a master like Charlie Chaplin would have been utterly failed to capture its grotesque theatre. Watch the meticulously orchestrated solemnity at Rajghat. See the whirring cameras, the carefully arranged wreaths on the pristine white marble, the performance of reverence.

Now, contrast this sanitized performance with the chilling clarity of Godse's own words from the dock—a man who killed not in a fit of passion, but as a cold, calculated expression of a political ideology. He killed Gandhi to silence the idea of a pluralist India. And today, the one who leads the commemoration, the one who bows his head for the cameras, is the absolute political disciple of the one who pressed the trigger. The ideology that pulled the trigger now lays the flowers.

This is the masterstroke of modern power: not to erase your enemy, but to appropriate his corpse. You bow before the memorial to neutralize the man's message. You lay flowers on the grave of the one idea you cannot tolerate, hoping the scent will mask the stench of your own ideological origins. You claim his legacy as a shield to hide the very dagger you still hold in your other hand.

Perhaps, my readers, I hope my untimely sarcasm now makes sense. It is the only language left when the chief mourners at a prophet's tomb are the very men who champion the philosophy that killed him. We are not just witnessing a historical anniversary; we are living inside its most profound and painful irony.

Therefore, the ultimate tribute on this day is not to be found in the sanitized rituals at Rajghat. The true act of remembrance lies in the courage to reject this theatre. It is found in the intellectual honesty to remember not just the frail man who fell, but the formidable ideology that felled him—an ideology that still walks among us, now cloaked in the very khadi it once despised. On his birthday, our most urgent task is to see past the flowers and gaze intently upon that unwalked, blood-soaked path. It is to understand, in our very bones, what was lost. And it is to recognize that the journey of that stubborn, beautiful, and tragic "Prisoner of Hope" remains, to this day, the true and unfinished business of this republic.

You might wonder, after all my criticism, about my romanticism of this man, of this unwalked path. But this is precisely what Albert Einstein foresaw when he famously remarked that generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this, ever in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth. Einstein was speaking of the man who had lived; the greater, almost unbearable tragedy is that his sentiment applies even more forcefully to the final act that was stolen from us. That walk into the heart of hatred, an act of love so profound it borders on the mythical, was to be the final, unbelievable proof of Einstein’s awe. It is this unbelievable man, and the unbelievable possibility of his final healing act, that they took from us with three bullets. And that is a loss that no amount of ceremony can ever hope to fill.

✍️ Athul Krishna