Understanding the Founding Fathers Quotes

“War demoralizes those who are trained for it. It brutalizes men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. Its path of glory is foul with the passions of lust, and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Speaking out matters. Perseverance matters. Teamwork matters. A common struggle helps, as does restraint or, when required, stepping aside—or stepping forward. Forgetting enmities also helps. Turning for aid to recent adversaries or ‘outsiders’ can be of benefit. And nursing great goals in the heart can become a contagious force.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“They belong to one another because, to use Gandhi’s language, they drink the same water, breathe the same air and eat the same soil’s produce. And because they share the same history, even while often looking at it from clashing angles.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“As the Punjabis were thrown into a collision course, the departing British more or less abdicated responsibility. Returning home at the earliest became the dominant desire of most British soldiers, policemen and civilians.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“In 1947, additional factors contributed to the carnage. London’s abrupt 20 February announcement that the British would very soon leave Punjab, Bengal and all of India was not accompanied by any plan of who would replace them in Lahore, Calcutta or Delhi.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“To ‘die to prove that I alone was right’ was meaningless, Gandhi said on 5 June”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“the British adroitly played Indians against fellow-Indians. Obligingly, Indians betrayed one another.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Muhammad Ali Jauhar, who for three remarkable years (1919-1922) championed Hindi-Muslim partnership, dismissed the ‘divide-and-rule’ explanation for India’s problems. ‘They don’t divide,’ Jauhar pointed out. ‘We divide and they rule.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“In his view, an Indian peasant and an English monarch were equal as human beings. For Marx and Anderson, on the other hand, some races are superior, others inferior”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“His cap may be emblazoned with equality, but Anderson’s pen smacks of racism, which was true also of the undoubtedly great Karl Marx.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Daily Tribune, 5 August 1853: England has to fulfil a double mission in India, one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“The fact that Hindus and Muslims had worked jointly, ‘renouncing their mutual antipathies’, also interested Marx.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Marx observed that by organizing native regiments in their Indian Army the British had unwittingly created ‘the first general centre of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of’.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Extremism is not confined, however, to Muslims, and non-Muslims too have perpetrated terrorist acts.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“These acts represent an inhuman extremism which threatens Muslims and non-Muslims alike and is rejected by a vast majority of Muslims in India and elsewhere.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Many in the world picture a threat from what they see as a monolithic Muslim world, when in fact that world is sharply divided.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Jinnah was not tempted. ‘India is not a nation’, he commented. ‘It is a subcontinent composed of nationalities.’ More than willing to fight the Congress, henceforth, he would fight even more the notion of one India and seek allies in that fight.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“In the new situation created by Hitler’s war, Linlithgow was more successful at dividing Indians than Gandhi was in uniting them.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“After Congress ministries resigned across the land, the parties led by Jinnah, Ambedkar and Ramasami jointly observed 22 December 1939 as Deliverance Day.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“the British would not permit a government ‘whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“The Empire seemed to be giving a veto on India’s political advance to Jinnah, the princes and Ambedkar.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“the Empire assured Muslims and other minority ‘elements in India’s national life’ that Britain would never allow ‘their coercion into submission’ to a majority government”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“the stoutest Nehru defender must admit that the Indian prime minister responded poorly and also unwisely to the challenge that China presented”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“No Indian can look back at that 1962 defeat with anything except embarrassment”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Ordered to open fire at unarmed protesters, Indian soldiers of the Empire’s Garhwal Rifles, staged a satyagraha of their own and refused.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Britain’s post-War assessment, shared by the Labour Party, that a separated Pakistan would benefit the Western world in the context of the Middle East’s oil,”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Churchill’s keenness on dividing India, his instruction to Viceroy Wavell in 1945 that he should not leave India before splitting it into ‘into Pakistan, Hindustan, Princestan etc.’,”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Khaliquzzaman suggests that if Jinnah had responded positively to Gandhi in 1944, a peaceful separation might indeed have replaced the 1947 tragedy.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“the speed with which the British left after announcing Independence and Partition may have been, in his words, ‘the most contemptible single act in the annals of the Empire’ (p 77).”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings

“Every Indian election in the eighty-two years since the pact— whether nationwide or in a state, town or village—has been conducted on the basis of that pact, with reserved seats for Dalits but without a separate electorate.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings