For Jahanbegloo we are more than ever living in a “Gandhian moment”. Indeed, since Gandhi’s death, and nowadays more than ever, the shallowness of much of “realist” ideology – particularly in what concerns the primacy of force – is confirmed on a daily basis by events unfolding across the four corners of the globe. As the author rightly points out, race segregation in the US may have been reversed by federal laws, but these laws would have not come about without the non-violent, “Gandhian”, action of militants and the leadership of that great admirer and follower of Gandhi, Martin Luther King. The apartheid regime in South Africa was not toppled by guerrillas, but rather when the armed struggle was replaced by nonviolent negotiation turning the enemy into an interlocutor. Pinochet’s power was not ended by armed insurrection but by the peaceful mobilization of a majority of Chileans.

Jahanbegloo runs through all the components of Gandhi’s legacy starting from the most basic and indispensable premise: the impossibility of separating politics from ethics. This is indeed Question Number One for any political discourse, and one that has occupied, and preoccupied, both theoreticians and practitioners since antiquity. Gandhi’s radicalism – implicitly challenging major political thinkers from Machiavelli to Schmitt – is based upon a very clear and well-defined moral option. Its roots have been correctly identified in spiritual currents within the Indian tradition, and more specifically in versions, or rather spinoffs, of Hinduism: Buddhism but especially Jainism, incidentally very much present in Gandhi’s native Gujarat.

Here, however, one should be well advised not to give an excessively linear interpretation of the roots of Gandhi’s moral views placing him exclusively within Indian tradition. The Gandhian Moment stresses how open Gandhi was to, and largely shaped by, intellectual and moral inputs originating outside India, from Tolstoy to Thoreau, with their combination of strong spirituality and aspiration to a simple life. Indeed Jahanbegloo is especially convincing in depicting a person and thought that cannot be rigidly classified within a single cultural tradition. Gandhi comes out of these pages as deeply Indian (and Hindu) but also deeply cosmopolitan.

Ethics is indeed the thread running throughout Gandhi’s legacy, and Jahanbegloo is particularly effective in leading us through the logical sequence of the Mahatma’s spiritual and political journey. An ethical approach, in this journey, is not one out of many possible options, insofar as ethics – conceived in terms of a recognition of the Other that, in its unconditionality, reminds this reviewer of both Kant and Levinas – is the root and reason for nonviolence.

Here we come straight to the link with politics. Gandhi was indeed categorical, and one would add impossible to challenge, when stating that nonviolence is the only possible mode of political action compatible with democracy. In times such as ours, when one has seen the appearance of the oxymoronic category of “democratic coups”, it is a lesson worth recalling.

But for Jahanbegloo the “Gandhian moment” is wholly relevant and contemporary even beyond politics at a time when history has certainly not ended, but geography is not what it used to be. Gandhi can indeed help us find an answer to the difficult challenge of combining physical togetherness with cultural difference. It is an answer that Gandhi derived both from his deepest personal convictions and from the reality of his huge and diverse country, and which discards both alternative answers that the West has given to the problem. On one side assimilation, based upon an often mendacious slogan of equality of all citizens whatever their race and religion; on the other, multiculturalism, intended as territorial coexistence of separate “tribes” apparently respected in their own peculiarities, but inevitably ranked in a socio-economic and cultural scale. Gandhi over and over again proposed another path: the intercultural one. One in which multiculturalism is a fact, not a policy, a starting point that must lead – to quote Jahanbegloo – to “the awareness of commonality, the acceptance of difference, and the recognition of shared values”. Gandhi also gave us a precise formulation on how intercultural relations must be handled: through dialogue. Again, this is not – as self-styled realists would argue – an idealistic dream, but rather a very concrete and practical suggestion. Dialogue implies giving up the pretense of being the only depositary of Truth – and indeed, though moved by very strong convictions, Gandhi was characterized by what Jahanbegloo calls “epistemic humility”.

A very contemporary message, if we think of the obtuse and often violent hostility that today seems to proliferate between religions, races, genders and even between fans of opposing sports teams.

What is especially interesting, in our time of raging fundamentalisms, is the fact that Gandhi, a deeply religious Hindu, did not draw any difference between political and religious pluralism and dialogue. No doubt he was naturally helped in this by the very nature of Hinduism, focusing on rituals and “orthopraxy” rather than doctrinal orthodoxy, i.e. on precepts related to moral behavior rather than on theology. Ethics can certainly be a more fertile domain for dialogue and convergence than theology. As quoted in Jahanbegloo’s book, Gandhi wrote a sentence that no Christian, even the most progressive, would be able to formulate: “There is in Hinduism room enough for Jesus as there is for Mohammad, Zoroaster and Moses.”

Another precious lesson for our times that comes out of the book concerns the way of escaping the lethal opposition between secularism and religion –which is today tearing apart the whole Muslim world, with anti-liberal believers on one side and anti-democratic secularists on the other. Gandhi makes it very clear that religion cannot be expelled from the public sphere, but has no claim to dominating the state, to imposing through state legislation its precepts upon those of different or no belief. Rejecting the arbitrary blurring of the difference between secularism and atheism Gandhi’s India proves that society can be religious, but the state must be secular.

Gandhi also shows us the way to overcoming another dichotomy, that between dissidents and revolutionaries: the former heroically engaged in challenging injustice and power – all injustice, not just those perpetrated by one’s political adversaries – the latter focused on the creation of a new power and a new system, whose blueprint they have very clear in their minds and are trying, always forcefully and often forcibly, to turn into reality.

Gandhi was a dissident in his means – nonviolence, civil disobedience and moral indictment of injustice – but was deeply revolutionary in his ends as well as in the results of his actions.

Though Jahanbegloo’s book should be commended for reminding us of the importance of Gandhi as an ethical and intellectual resource for the present, I would like to conclude with a critical note prompted by the lack, in The Gandhian Moment, of an explicit account of the contradictory and problematic nature of some aspects of Gandhi’s views.

I have in mind, in the first place, his rejection of the concept of representative democracy and his strong preference for direct democracy at the village level. (“Representatives will become unnecessary if the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled. It will then be a state of enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler”). An anarchist utopia which, it must be added, does not coincide with Gandhi’s pragmatism and his actual political behavior, especially within the Congress Party.

Also very problematic is the fact that Gandhi often crossed the line between a sacrosanct criticism and the reactionary rejection of modern civilization, in particular with his views of an economic system avoiding industrialization and based upon traditional crafts (hence his campaign in favor of home cotton spinning).

Finally, his noble campaign against untouchability cannot be interpreted, as Jahanbegloo does, as an opposition to the caste system. Gandhi – who for this reason was criticized by Ambedkar – was in favor of maintaining the original core of the caste system, the four varnas (brahmans, warriors, producers and traders, manual workers) while criticizing the proliferation of sub-castes.

It is true, on the other hand, that Gandhi’s thought is neither systematic nor dogmatic, so that also his contradictions do not affect the overall consistency of a message whose permanent validity fully justifies the author’s idea of an still contemporary “Gandhian moment”.

It is understandable that Ramin Jahanbegloo, an intellectual and a dissident who does not abandon the hope for a better future for his country and for the world, has been fascinated by Gandhi. But we should all be, whoever we are and wherever we live.