The Objections, Which Are Also Religious

The strongest criticism came from inside India and was theological as much as political. B. R. Ambedkar argued that calling the excluded castes Harijans, children of God, softened a structure that needed dismantling, and that the reform Gandhi wanted left the caste order itself standing. Their disagreement came to a head over separate electorates for the depressed classes, which Gandhi opposed by fasting and which produced the Poona Pact of 1932 with reserved seats instead. Ambedkar accepted the terms and did not accept the argument, and he later left Hinduism for Buddhism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah made a different objection: that a movement speaking in a Hindu religious idiom could not represent Muslims, however sincerely it wished to.

He fasted repeatedly against communal violence, most notably during the killings that accompanied partition, and he was shot in Delhi in January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, who held that he had conceded too much to Muslims and to Pakistan. The method outlived him unevenly. It was studied closely by the American civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King Jr. reworked it in an explicitly Christian frame, while in India itself the reputation has never stopped being contested, which is what usually happens to a figure whose claims were religious and whose arena was a state.