Jain writers have long presented anekantavada as the intellectual application of ahimsa. To assert one's own view as the whole truth is to do violence to the partial truth in another's, and the dogmatic insistence that produces sectarian conflict is on this account a species of harm. The connection is explicit in the tradition and is not a modern gloss, though modern Jain apologists have emphasised it heavily.
In practice Jain philosophers used the doctrine as a method of engagement. Where Buddhist opponents held everything to be momentary and Vedantins held reality to be permanent, Jain writers argued that substance is permanent while its modes change, so both schools had seized one aspect and denied the other. This let them position Jainism as the comprehensive account and their rivals as partial, which is a strong claim rather than a modest one, and their opponents said so.
The standard objections came quickly. Buddhist and Nyaya logicians argued that the sevenfold scheme either collapses into contradiction or is trivial, since once every assertion is qualified by respect, nothing is being denied at all. Shankara dismissed it as incoherent. Jain replies distinguish contradictory predicates asserted of the same aspect, which remain forbidden, from predicates asserted of different aspects, which do not conflict.
The comparative reach is worth noting and worth handling carefully. The Buddhist doctrine of two truths and the Buddha's refusal to answer certain metaphysical questions address a related difficulty about the fit between language and reality, but they do so by ranking or setting aside claims rather than by combining them. Modern writers have compared anekantavada to pluralism and to the philosophy of science, and Gandhi cited it in support of tolerance. Those readings are legitimate extensions rather than statements of the classical doctrine, which was developed to win philosophical arguments as much as to end them.