A problem with this solution to the puzzle is that it is consistent with seeing no reason at all for Gandhi to be religious. He could have just adopted Nehru’s scientific worldview, period. Sometimes Nehru himself when he describes Gandhi’s religion makes excuses for Gandhi by disassociating him from the features of religion which modern liberals condemn: Gandhi is not prejudiced against people of other faiths than his own; he is not prejudiced against atheists or agnostics; he does not imagine supernatural causes for natural events (with occasional lapses); he does not want to make India a theocracy. Gandhi worships truth. The same might perhaps be said of Auguste Comte, of John Stuart Mill, or of Nehru’s favorite Bertrand Russell. One is then left to wonder what there might be in Gandhi’s religious truth that would distinguish it from Nehru’s scientific truth.

Professor R.G. Gupta in his dictionary of Gandhian moral terms offers definitions of ahimsa, satyagraha, and many other words, but when he gets to truth he gives up. He finds Gandhi’s use of the term too protean. He offers no definition of it. (12) I want to suggest that Professor Gupta gave up too soon. There are some core elements in Gandhi’s conception of truth that Nehru and others have not sufficiently appreciated or understood. Today they make Gandhi’s ideas even more defensible than “science,” “scientific method” and “truth” generally – three ideas that have been thoroughly deconstructed in the half century that has elapsed between Nehru’s time and our own. They give a meaning to Gandhi’s faith different from the merely negative meaning of deleting from religion everything that liberals do not like about it. Erik Erikson came close to articulating them when he wrote:

 

“Gandhi commits himself only to ‘the relative truth as I have conceived it,’ but he also clings firmly to the dictum that only insofar as we can commit ourselves on selected occasions ‘to the death’ to the test of such truth in action –only to that extent we can be true to ourselves and to others, that is, to a joint humanity. … there is no reason to question the fact that the sudden conviction that the moment of truth had arrived always came upon him as if from a voice which had spoken before he had quite listened. Gandhi often spoke of his inner voice, which would speak unexpectedly in the preparedness of silence –but then with an irreversible firmness and an irresistible demand for commitment…. That is, the moment of truth is suddenly there –unannounced and pervasive in its stillness. But it comes only to him who has lived with facts and figures in such a way that he is always ready for a sudden synthesis and will not, from sheer surprise, frighten truth away. But acting on that inner voice means to involve others on the assumption that they, too, are ready –and when Gandhi listened to his inner voice, he often thought he heard what the masses were ready to listen to. That, of course, is the secret of all charismatic leadership, but how could he know it was ‘the truth’? Gandhi’s answer would be: Only the readiness to suffer would tell.