Your book ‘Let’s Kill Gandhi !’ has been widely criticized. Do you think Mahatma Gandhi is being assassinated once again in our country? Do you think that the Brahmanic hegemony is back in our country?

Yes, it is true. I think such fears are gaining more acceptance in our country. There is a fear that democracy itself is being locked up. The institutions that we prided in and were supposed to be the pillars of our democracy, including the media, are being completely subjugated. The judiciary is undermined. Even the judges themselves are feeling threatened by attempts to subjugate them. The polity, of course, has no hope from them, because all of them have betrayed us some way or the other; whether it is financial corruption or moral corruption. Lack of ethics can be seen throughout the country. So the fear is very real. Getting rid of that kind of tradition has happened in our culture in the not-too-distant past. We still have people who believed in that era. Then social order was very much fondly in place and attempt was also made to convert that into the political order. If you look at the freedom movement, it was completely controlled by Brahmins initially. It was only after the advent of Bapu and later with the advent of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, that order started receding from public. So it’s not very far back that we have that tradition of the Brahmanical supremacist system in our democratic setup. The fears are very legitimate under the guise of manusmriti.Manusmriti is one of the biggest anxiety of the dalits today. Because it codifies caste hierarchy. Today even our constitution is being challenged, and there is now a talk about replacing the constitution with a manusmriti inspired new constitution. In this situation, my book also acts as a thorn in their flesh. There was a systematic campaign to justify Bapu’s murder during this past 70 years. A couple of generations of Indians who have never heard the counter point, started believing in this campaign. So my book has become the messenger of truth. I was criticized when my book was published, even by historians. They said there is nothing new in it. But the first response of readers is: ‘My God! We never knew this!’ For the past two years, there have been very organized series of lectures throughout the cities of Maharashtra where I speak about the conspiracy and the truth of Gandhi’s murder. At the end of my lectures, the audience has unanimously come up to me and said: ‘My God! For 70 years why weren’t you telling this truth. Why were they allowed to get away with a campaign of lies?’ That is what hurts my detractors most. Because, for some of them, their existence depends on the denial of truth. They spread lies. They can sustain only by shouting the lie louder and louder. So my book troubles them a lot.

Gandhi’s great weapon against the British was resistance. What is the importance of resistance in our present political and cultural life?

Bapu himself said that for democracy to survive, the citizen must consider resistance to the wrong policies of the government a duty. The health of democracy is decided by measuring the freedom of its citizens to resist and oppose the government. Gandhi said that if the people thought that government was implementing empty laws and policies, then the people should be brave enough to enforce a solution. That is what democracy is all about. Bapu also said that people should be then prepared for the consequences of doing resistance. But the leadership don’t want to face the consequences. The government acts strictly against them. Civil disobedience and civil resistance, as long as they are not violent, are still a very legitimate part of the democracy. It’s very easy to convert democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship, we see it happening today unofficially. Under the pretence of democracy, the regime is almost totalitarian. It’s an undeclared dictatorship, and it becomes the duty of a citizen to resist this. It becomes the duty of the people to identify the symptoms before they become a mortal threat to democracy.

There are lots of resistant movements coming out, but sometimes, many criticise that it engineers anarchy in the society. What is your response?

For a certain time, resistance will result in anarchy. No resistance can be absolutely hundred percent disciplined. For sometime, the government will also behave in a dictatorial manner to oppress that resistance. So they are left with no choice, but to appear to be anarchic. But you must understand that a completely anarchic movement will never succeed. People cannot tolerate that kind of uncertainty of life. For a brief period, may be, they will tolerate, but the fatigue that anarchy causes on civil society will take its toll. So passive resistance is the only thing that will finally be sustainable.

You look at the Narmada Bachavo Antholan; it has gone on for so long, may be they haven’t had spectacular victories, but they have managed to sustain their movement for an appreciable length of time. They could have abandoned it, but then people would have lost faith in it. If they had gone and preached anarchy, it wouldn’t have been easy for them to sustain it. It would have then been very easy for the government to describe it as anti-social. Now it becomes very difficult for the government to demonize and discredit them. You look at the several ingredients resistance movements had in the past decades. All the disciplined movements have resulted in positive solutions, even if it was for short while. But there was an example of fatigue in the leader of UP formers, who appeared to emerge as the most powerful farmer leader in the country. His farmer movement was pretty militant. The farmers blocked road, blocked highways. It was very difficult for him to sustain that kind of movement. At one time, when the government resisted them, the fatigues set in very fast. But look at the several agrarian agitation in Maharashtra, Vidharbah, Konkan, etc. They have been able to sustain themselves for a much longer time, because they took the path of discipline. They have better results than other groups like Naxals. The Naxalite movement is a failure because, while they claim to be fighters for achieving the rights of the poor and the Adivasis, they have done more harm than good to the Adivasis. The only thing is that, as long as the Adivasis accept their patronizing protection, they are insulated against police terror. But with the armed forces fighting them, the tribal situation has became even worse. The naxals are not really succeeding. They have succeeded in carving out a territory where the government machinery has been stopped from entering. But they are not doing better than the government in the territory that they control. They offer no better facilities to the tribals in any case. There are a lot of Gandhians working in the tribal areas, who, through their endeavours, have managed to get much more justice for the tribals, like actress Sonia Suri. She, through her own suffering and her own spirit of fighting against the oppressor, has achieved much more than the Naxalites. True, passive resistance may not gain any spectacular victory, but it is much more victorious than the arms struggle that is happening over there.

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet,” said Gandhi. Are leaders polluting the minds of the Indian people?

We must accept the fact that, in current Indian politics, we don’t have ethical leadership models. What we have is an opportunist leadership. The entire spectrum of politics you see is opportunistic politics of power. Everything is centred around the quest for power, and there is no ethics. Bapu lived by the philosophy that the means are as important as the end. ‘Something achieved dishonestly could never be good,’ Bapu said. Today the reverse is happening; it’s the end that matters. If you are successful in the end, that’s all what matters, no matter how much damage you have done to the nation in the process. Unfortunately, we are living through such an age. We have to suffer because of it every time there is an election. Our tragedy is that we can only choose between bad and worse. We have no ideal option. We don’t have an ideal choice, nobody is that pure. Recently in Pune, I was asked to talk about politics in black or white, and I said that like life, politics cannot be black or white. it’s a whole spectrum of ways. Unfortunately, we are today stuck in between the darkest and the slightly dark. There is no shining light in our politics. That is the tragedy of our democracy.

Do you think there is lot of anger and rivalry in the Indian people today? If so why?

I have come to believe that we Indians are divided in our souls. We like to claim that the Britishers and the Mughal invaders succeeded to divide us. The key to their success was they realized that we were a divided society. They just exploited those divisions amongst us to grab and sustain the power. The same thing has happened after Independence. Our political leadership has also realized that as the people are divided, they don’t have to make any effort to divide them further; they had only exploited the divisions that exist amongst us. We like to claim that we are a united nation and are a united people. We only act as if united. If we have a boarder situation with Pakistan or we have a Cricket Match between Pakistan, that’s the only time that we are united. We make a show of national unity and fervour by having the tri-colour painted on our faces or on our bodies. In reality we are not united, we are divided on caste, on religion, on region, on gender, on economic status. Each and every divisive thing is rampantly evident within our own selves, and that is what is being exploited by our rulers. They discovered that the most successful politician will be the one who exploits divisions. We continuously fall victim to it, because we are inherently that way. They just have to play us against each other, and they are successful in that. We have to admit the facts; alcoholics cannot be cured unless they accept the fact that they are addicted. The first step is to take them for rehabilitation, or else you can forcefully put the munder medication for six months or one year. Then they go back and may become worse than they were ever before. But only those who are willing will be cured of addiction. It is the same with that communal mindset, the culture of division that we have within ourselves. We must first accept that nobody else has divided us; we have a divided mind. Everybody has only exploited the division that existed within us. Only then can the cure happen.

Is democracy in India passing through a critical period, is the very idea of India and our constitution being questioned? If there is a crisis, what do you suggest as an antidote?

At the moment, our democracy is showing symptoms of a life threatening situation. I am no way exaggerating it. This is the ground reality of our democracy today. The cure is to impart a transformation, a voluntary transformation within ourselves. If we want to turn back our democracy and revert to being the idea of India, we will have to undergo a drastic surgery. The idea of India is terminally and fatally ill today. It has been corrupted, it has been tarnished and it has been tormented. The right wing Hindu militant organizations had never expressed their faith in the idea of India, nor had they shown any voluntary acceptance of the constitution. Only when there is political necessity, they pretend to revere the constitution and its creator. In their ideology they have never accepted the whole constitution. So, to expect them to uphold the constitution is quite foolish. The fact is that we who believe in our constitution and the idea of India, which our founding fathers saw and created, did not exist prior to Independence. The Hindu Rashtra of 5,000 years old and all such things may have existed in their imagination. But the Indian nation came to existence not even after Independence, but only after the Indian constitution, which enshrined the idea of India as visualised by our founding fathers, was adopted. That idea of India is under siege now by people who never accepted it. These people never accepted the flag for the symbolism that it showed in its tri-colour. They never accepted the constitution, because to them the manusmriti was a bigger constitution than anything ever written by man. They are hypocrites who pretend to accept it because of political necessity. The failure is ours, the people who believe in the constitution, not in the words of the constitution, but at the spirit of the constitution and in the idea of India. We have betrayed both. We should have been out on the streets fighting these forces much before they gained acceptability and respectability in our society. And now we are waking up, bolting the stable door after the horse was bolted out of it, as an English proverb says. We have to capture that horse and bring it back and then secure the stable. This is our failure. People like me, who call ourselves liberals and secular, have proven to be lazy folks. Why was Bapu successful? He did not wait for the ailment to become terminal. He did not even wait for the ailment to manifest itself. He started addressing the disease as its first symptoms started appearing. A good doctor is not someone who cures your ailment after you suffer from it; he or she is someone who will identify your susceptibility to an ailment and will tell you to take precautions. When the crisis happens, then there is nothing but surgery or radical medicine to have recourse to. In society and in democracy we have to be expert enough to understand and identify the symptoms. Any ailment, any disease affecting democracy can’t happen overnight. If anybody is to be blamed for what happened in Gujarat, it is liberals like me who behaved like the ostrich; we buried our beaks in the sand and said that nothing wrong can happen. The genocide in 1984 and 2002, both points a finger at the liberals and the seculars who betrayed those people more than the oppressors and the aggressors.

The Christian community in India is a minuscule minority. As a member of the Gandhian family, what have you to say to the Christians of India?

The Christians are no different from other Indians. India belongs to them, even if there was only one Christian in the entire population of India, that one Christian would have as much right to our India as the rest of the population would have. Even a minority of one cannot be denied the fact that they have equal rights. My message to the Christians is, do not feel intimidated, do not feel oppressed, and if you feel so, come out in the open. You have the right over this land and you have a right to fight for that right. Bapu always said that even one cry for justice was bad enough. Recently I filed petition in the Supreme Court against cow vigilantism and mob killings. The Supreme Court asked to take measures to prevent such incidents. I pointed out inaction of the states after assuring the Supreme Court. So we gave an application asking that strict proceedings must be started against the officials, the politicians, whoever is responsible for the killings. So the Supreme Court issued notices accordingly to 3 north Indian states. Some media people interviewed me and asked why you took such a step when only stray cases of killings happened, I answered that for me it is too much even if one single person in one billion population is murdered, killed, intimidated or terrorized. Why do you want me to wait for 5,000 or 50,000 or 5, 00,000 to be murdered? It will be too late by then. I must act when the atrocities start happening. My action is a response to the silence of the majority who said, ok, only five people are killed, why make a big scene out of it. Should we wait until 50,000 are killed? I cannot lead an agitation on the streets. I don’t even have the ability to do that. But I have faith in the constitution and the justice system. And so it is my duty and right to appeal to the justice system to set things right. At least the afflicted will have that assurance that somebody is concerned about us. Otherwise what assurance can we give them? How can we go and tell them that this is your nation, when they see the killers roaming around, more powerful, more arrogant and more threatening? What hope do they have in democracy? This is what we need to convey to the Christians also: Don’t think you are alone. You may be a minority, that does not mean that you have to live in anxiety. There will be people who will stand up for you and the day you feel threatened, have the courage to stand up and say we feel insecure, we feel threatened and we are determined to make issue out of it to bring about a change. If you are a minority, it doesn’t mean that you are forgotten or discarded or neglected. That attitude is very bad for democracy. For the survival of democracy, I would just say to everybody, you are not alone, even if you are only one, you would never be alone.

Do you think religions fall to the temptation of power politics in today’s world? What do you think is the role of religion in our society?

Religion to me should be a private matter. As soon as it becomes public, it is prone to exploitation and corruption. I am not a religious person, I don’t know what I am, I am not an atheist, I am not practicing a religion, but I do believe there is a spiritual entity, which I subscribe to. I don’t want to say anything to believers or nonbelievers. I don’t believe in that. But I firmly believe that religion, especially the ritualistic religion, should be a private matter, a matter of individual choice. If religion starts influencing the democratic process, then it also becomes susceptible to the corruption of power. We are all witnesses to vote bank politics. It is a reality in our country, only because religion has allowed itself to be manipulated and allowed itself to become corrupted. Religion should be a very pure belief, practice and it should be a private affair.