Are good institutions enough? - III

Democracies need not always die because of military coups. Democratic governments may die at the hands of elected leaders. They may be killed quickly as at the hands of Hitler, or they may erode slowly, in barely visible steps that nobody will notice. The latter is more probable since the end of the Cold War. Most democratic breakdowns now are caused by elected governments themselves by slowly  strangling democratic institutions. Examples include Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia.

If constitutional rules were enough, then figures such as Perón, Marcos, or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas would have been one-or two-term presidents. But this did not happen. All of them came to power under what were thought to be well-designed constitutions which contained an impressive array of checks and balances that should have reined them in. The constitutional and legal safeguards can be easily manipulated by a determined authoritarian leader. Why? 

Constitutions, no matter how well-designed, will always have countless gaps and ambiguities. No set of rules can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances. The rules can only be general and are subject to different interpretations by different people. What does “advice and consent” or “crimes and misdemeanours” mean? If constitutional powers are open to multiple readings, they can be used in ways that their creators didn’t anticipate. Also, the written words of a constitution may be followed to the letter in ways that undermine the spirit of the law. 

When electoral route is used to throttle democracy, you don’t get the usual signals about the death of a democracy like the president being killed or sent off into exile, the constitution being suspended, tanks in the streets etc. On the electoral road, constitutions and other well-known democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. All the outward show of democratic processes will be maintained. 

Each individual step that seems to undermine democracy seems minor — none appears to truly threaten democracy. Elected autocrats will tell you their efforts are aimed at making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. There will be nothing that will set off the  alarm bells of a majority of people. Those who protest against government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. 

Government actions to subvert democracy often seem legally correct and will be approved by parliament and the supreme court. Key players who might threaten the government like opposition politicians and  business leaders who finance the opposition are bought off or enfeebled. Would-be  autocrats often use security threats — wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures. For such leaders, a crisis represents an opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient constitutional constraints. Over time, what was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Institutions alone are not enough to check elected autocrats. Whether the autocratic leader subverts democratic institutions or is constrained by them will depend on democratic norms. Norms are shared codes of conduct that are widely accepted within a society. These norms are what make a constitution work smoothly for a long time. Because they are unwritten, they pass unnoticed and we can be fooled into thinking they are unnecessary. But their absence can prove dangerous. These norms prevent political parties from acting in such a fashion that the whole system is endangered. One such norm is that rival political parties don’t regard each other as enemies. 

Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not work. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. The courts and other neutral agencies are packed with their sympathizers, the media and the private sector will be bought or bullied into silence. In the electoral route to authoritarianism, the very institutions of democracy will be used to kill it. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity. In How Democracies Die, the authors give four warning signals, any one of which indicates danger: 

when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,

3) tolerates or encourages violence, or

4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

Are good institutions enough? - II

A common example of how fallen moral values of a society can lead to horrendous consequences is the holocaust. Many people have tried to analyze how, in a society that was once regarded as the pillar of Western civilisation; in a culture of law, order, and reason, industrial scale murder of millions of people could have taken place? How could large numbers of people willingly tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens? Within a couple years of Hitler coming to power, he was hailed as a great national statesman. So what if Jews were being discriminated against? The economy was doing well, right?

Hannah Arendt published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in which she pointed out the general pattern of how ordinary people become brutal killers. One of the aims of employing the word banality was to show that great evil did not require abnormal, monstrous people. They could be achieved by ordinary people carrying out routine activities. These activities were not murderous in themselves. They consisted of office work such as organising transport, deciding how many Jews should be deported and to where. 

Adolf Eichmann had the task of regulating “Jewish affairs and evacuations” in the Nazi regime. He knew perfectly well the train destinations and understood that the Jews were to be killed, and how they were to be killed. But he had a curious idea of duty: if he did not see Jews being killed, his activities were not responsible for the crimes. He was ready to do anything to advance in the Nazi bureaucratic grades. He had carried out orders to the best of his ability and experienced no regret. 

Efficient production of evil depends on each person specialising in a part of the process. This diffusion of responsibility makes it easy for people to use their remarkable powers of rationalisation to wash their hands off any responsibility for the resulting monstrosity. At no step was there a protest. Over time, criminal activities had become routine and criminal orders were implemented without revulsion. Arendt recognised that Eichmann was the perfect example of the modern man devoted to carrying out efficiently what he had been tasked to do without being burdened by feelings.

It is rare to find Nazi documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation" and "special treatment"; deportation was called "resettlement" and "labor in the East". The function of such clichés and stock phrases is to protect people against reality. In ordinary language, they would be called lies. Eichmann easily accepted and internalized these "objective" Nazi rules which deprived them of their emotional content. 

Eichmann believed his inhuman acts were marks of virtue. He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do. Arendt had little sympathy for the excuse repeatedly used by Nazis criminals: “I was a cog in the machine”; “I obeyed the orders”; “anybody would have acted the same way”… etc. She insisted that “obedience and support are the same."

None of the various "language rules," carefully constructed to mask the truth, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than the first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." If the creeping normalization of hate speech is not opposed at the very beginning because they still seem “below the threshold” of concern to many, it may escalate into unimaginable violence given the "right" kind of leader. 

The Nazis were elected but the democratic institutions were unable to keep them in check. The reason was that the values of the people manning these institutions slowly got aligned with Nazi views. There were physicians, engineers, military leaders, etc. who were in support of the Nazis. Many prominent scientists and engineers built the Nazi war machine and helped Hitler to come close to world domination. German physicists and engineers built solid and liquid-fuel rockets, worked on developing an atomic bomb, invented nerve gases such as sarin, produced a cruise missile (the V-1), and much more. 

Doctors tested new drugs on the prisoners, presenting the results to a scientific conference. By 1939, around two thirds of all German doctors had some connection or other with the Nazi Party. Nazi racial hygienists were among the top professionals in their fields. Academics in every field gave support to the Nazi regime.  Many university faculty used party membership as a method of advancing their careers. In short, the most educated, privileged and respected people were Nazi sympathisers. There has been no evil in history that has failed to find support among many of the great and the good.

Are good institutions enough? - I

Nowadays, private morals have been made less relevant in public life. The West relies upon external rather than internal restraints. The hope is that institutional checks and balances will control those who are in power rather than self-imposed ethical limits. But rules and regulations can only go so far and no further in catching unethical business/political practices. To work effectively, good institutions should be strengthened by matching moral values held by the majority of the population.

Gandhi considered as futile the modern quest of trying to make institutions so perfect that they would obviate the need for the individual to be good. A person in public life has to be a person of character exercising self-restraint all the time. Gandhi believed in self-imposed internal ethical control as against institutional restraints imposed from the outside by society on one’s behaviour, especially when in public life. Gandhi emphasises moral and individual change as necessary for social and economic change. He said:

Unfortunately a belief has today sprung up that one's private character has nothing to do with one's public activities. This superstition must go. Our public workers must set about the task of reforming society by reforming themselves first. This spiritual weapon of self purification, intangible as seems, is the most potent means for revolutionising one's environment and for loosening external shackles. 

This reliance on inner strength rather than external institutional control was because Gandhi believed that such external controls are easily subverted resulting in the abuse of power that we see around us. Practicing self-restraint is more sustainable and irreversible. If a person has taken a conscious decision to be in public life, he or she has to exercise self-restraint in private behaviour. Both perfecing individuals and perfecting institutions are impossible tasks but Gandhi believed that the former was a better gamble. 

What’s very important is that no amount of “good institutions” will stop people from cheating. No matter how well-designed rules are, and how good is the system of sanctions forcing people to follow the rules, if everybody is a rational agent maximising their own material benefits, the system will not work. Crooks will pay the cops to look the other way, while judges would decide in favour of who pays them more. Good institutions will only work when they are strengthened by appropriate values and preferences of the people who occupy them. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote about what it means to be "honest": 

. . . when they talk of an "honest" politician, an "honest" writer, an "honest" newspaper, an "honest" institution, an "honest" tendency, meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not dishonest, but that they are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in opposition to the authorities.

How well a society functions depends on its package of social norms. Adam Smith said that it’s our automatic norm following — not our self-interest or our cool rational calculation of future consequences — that often makes us do the “right thing” and allows our societies to work. In the period leading up to the financial crisis, some asset managers on Wall Street and mortgage lenders who sold toxic assets knew they were toxic and were proud of their ability to exploit unsuspecting investors. Institutions like SEC, The Fed or the banks proved ineffective. 

Two behaviours that have become devalued in modern times are guilt and shame. Feeling shame is about wanting to hide; feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends. Consistently ignoring the need to examine one’s own actions reduces the moral credibility needed to persuade others to make sacrifices to defend shared values. They reflect our judgments of our actions and the kind of person we think we are. These emotions tell us that there is something wrong in our lives and relationships that we must correct. 

Politics and the Gita - V

The sociologist, Timur Kuran, wrote Private Truths, Public Lies in which he coined the term “Preference Falsification”. Even in democratic societies, there are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social disapproval. People’s willingness to speak freely depends upon their unconscious perceptions of how popular their opinions are. People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do.

This increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion. Thus, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This falsification of private preferences when people have to express them publicly causes much tension to build up in a society that appears asleep. Deceptive stability and explosive change are thus two sides of a single coin.

But as soon as people realise that others share their views, they are emboldened to express themselves. This leads to a “Preference Cascade” which makes it possible for profound transformations to occur. Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

In India, such a preference cascade has been caused by social media. Whatever beliefs or impulses we might have, we can find and connect with like-minded people online. Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers. This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice. Because liberal elites ran the media, and a liberal consensus seemed to prevail, people did not express these feelings. Social media showed the people who did not share these views that they were not alone, and gave them the courage to express ourselves.

Even avowedly secular politicians are pandering to what they see as the Hindu voter bloc, to the point of displaying religiosity publicly in order to not give the impression that they are too pro-Muslim. They perceive the need to do that because the atmosphere has already been shaped, the public discourse has already been shaped, in a way that polarises. So, Rahul Gandhi began wearing a sacred thread, visiting temples and calling himself a Shiv bhakt. The Congress and other Opposition parties try to boost their Hindu credentials believing they had to compete with the BJP for the Hindutva vote. 

This means that the men and women who wrote the Constitution were an out-of-touch elite, and the values they embedded in it were not shared by most of the nation. The “Idea of India” that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These “liberal” values were imposed on a nation that, deep down, did not accept them. It is remarkable that the icon of that fringe - Gandhi - was able to pass off his minority version of Hinduism as the majority view and persuaded the majority of the country to accept it.

In From Beirut to Jerusalem:, Thomas L. Friedman compares the Left and Right in Israel and the situation has some similarities with India: the only difference between them was in rhetoric. The Right wanted to shout at the top of its lungs while the Left was ready to just quietly mouth the words. The debates were monologues in which everyone was speaking and no one was listening. He writes: 

If there is one thing I have learned in the Middle East, it is that the so-called extremists or religious zealots, whether in Jewish or Muslim society, are not as extreme as we might think. The reason they are both tolerated and successful is that they are almost always acting on the basis of widely shared feelings or yearnings. As Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak rightly put it, these so-called extremists are usually just the tip of an iceberg that is connected in a deep and fundamental way to the bases of their respective societies

PS: For an interpretation of the Gita for present times as Gandhi would have seen it, see The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: by Eknath Easwaran (3 volumes)

Politics and the Gita - IV

Gamdhi lived by the principles of truth that he got from Gita. So also would be the claim by Godse. During the trial after Gandhi's assassination, Godse said in his final statement, “My respect for the mahatma was deep and deathless. It therefore gave me no pleasure to kill him. Indeed, my feelings were those of Arjuna when he killed Dronacharya, his Guru at whose feet he learned the art of war”. But Godse could not forgive Gandhi for his pro-Muslim bias. Godse said “I felt convinced that such a man was the greatest enemy, not only of the Hindus, but of the whole nation.” 

One of the main reasons that Godse gave for killing Gandhi was the latter’s refusal to conform to the principles of realpolitik. He wanted to remove his brakes on the Government of India so they could conduct statecraft on the basis of ruthless realpolitik.  He thought that there was plenty of latent support in the country for his line of thinking and that posterity would vindicate him. GD Khosla, former Chief Justice of Punjab, who heard Godse’s appeal and sent him to the gallows said in his book, The Murder of the Mahatma, that if the verdict had been left to the audience, Godse would have gone scot-free for his assassination of Gandhi. 

Thus four people - Ambedkar, Gandhi, Tilak and Godse, three of whom revered the Gita - concluded that the central message of the Gita supported the convictions that they already held. Godse’s reading of the Gita appears to gather more supporters in contemporary India just as he had predicted. Several episodes of the podcast The Seen and The Unseen discuss a theory that I agree with - Indian society is largely conservative and inward-looking. 

Akshaya Mukul's book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India shows how a publishing house, established a century ago, went on to become influential in promoting an idea of Hindu India, and initiated Islamophobia and cow protection that continue to this day. The Gita Press is the largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. All regular Hindu religious texts - Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata - were published by it. Since it started, the press has published almost 410 million copies of the Gita, nearly 70 million copies of the Ramcharitamanas and 94.8 million copies of monographs on "the ideal Hindu" woman and child. It is a convenient tool of the Hindu Right groups like Hindu Mahasabha, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Jana Sangh and odd organisations like Ram Rajya Parishad.

It has two magazines. Kalyan has a monthly circulation of more than two lakh and mostly sells in north and east Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. It also has an English monthly called Kalyana-kalpataru, started in the early 1930s, that sells in south India and among the diaspora in the US and other countries. Gita Press has been at the forefront of the demand for a Hindu nation right from the beginning. After 1947, the Gita Press talked of not letting Muslims join the Indian Army and forming a Hindu militia. Cow protection has been a key theme of the Gita Press's existence. 

The purpose of another of its publications, Hindu Sanskriti Ank, that had contributors like the Shankaracharyas, Mahant Digvijaynath, MS Golwalkar, Swami Karpatri Maharaj and many others, was to establish the supremacy of the sanatan Hindu dharma. This was achieved through emphasis on the comprehensive nature of Hindu culture with its long tradition of education, philosophy, medicine, architecture, science, music, language and literature, besides its numerous religious texts and ritual practices. Many of these articles had political and communal overtones.

It used the message and tenets of sanatan Hindu dharma to homogenise Hindu religion and take the message of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and other such organisations to ordinary Hindu homes. The political message that it carries - a trend right from 1926 - helps in carrying out the propaganda in favour of its larger mission of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.

Whole Numbers and Half Truths by Rukmini S. reveals some sobering statistics. For decades, we are fed the myth that Indians are basically liberal and secular. But a number of polls have shown that Indians have a lower commitment to democratic principles than most major countries. Indian respondents have an even lower number with respect to regard for civil rights than Pakistani respondents. The percentage of Indian respondents who thought that a strong leader would be "very good" for India was higher than even Russia. (And my guess would be that the majority of the respondents would have been educated city dwellers.)

India ranks poorly regarding respondents who believe in media freedom, free operation of opposition parties, the holding of regular, honest elections with a choice of at least two political parties and the existence of a fair judiciary. In 2019, Indians were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. A survey of 4 Indian states - Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha - shows that 3/4 of respondents expressed a majoritarian form of nationalism. As levels of education rose in the survey, so did support for restrictions on free speech. 2/3 of Hindus said that it was important to be a Hindu to be "truly" Indian.

Politics and the Gita - III

Ambedkar had a very critical view of Gita, which he says provides a philosophic basis to the Varna system. Ambedkar believed that the Manusmriti, the Vedas and the Gita are all woven in the same pattern and same threads run through them. He denounces those who say that Manusmriti is problematic, but Gita is good. For him, all religious books of Hinduism – other than Upanishads – were written by the Brahmins who injected the same doctrine in all these books. Ambedkar writes that it is actually Gita in which the caste system is systematically ordained and explained. Ambedkar argues that: 

If Krishna were to appear as a lawyer acting for a client who is being tried for murder and pleaded the defence set out by him in the Bhagavad Gita, there is not the slightest doubt that he would be sent to the lunatic asylum.  

For Ambedkar, Gita is a discourse on the law. He deploys the metaphors of the courtroom, and Krishna as a defending lawyer. The Gita captures that moment when the necessity of war interrupts the ethical demands of brotherhood. In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that according to Ambedkar, the Gita defends war on two grounds. 

1. It says that because the world is perishable and “man is mortal”, he is “bound to die”. What difference does it make for the wise whether “man dies a natural death or whether he is done to death as a result of violence”? “Life is unreal”, he continues, “why shed tears because it has ceased to be?"
2. It says that it is a mistake to think that the body and the soul are one. The key difference is that the body is perishable while the soul is eternal and imperishable. When death occurs it is the body that dies. The soul never dies. As the soul is never killed, killing a person can never be a matter of any movement. War and killing need therefore give no ground to remorse or to shame. 

To Ambedkar, this would actually seem to be an “unheard of defence of murder”. The representation of life as deathless abstraction provides the philosophical justification for untouchability which is the reduction of life to “mere existence” and the mystification of the law as divine will. The Gita reduces the body to mere existence and is therefore  dispensable. It justifies suffering of the self as absolute obligation to God, and in more public moments, to the nation or swaraj.

It does not differentiate between suffering caused by an ethical stand and suffering caused under force. No distinction is made between an intimate bodily injury that is not practiced by the self but inflicted by fellow men and legitimised by the law. It is explained away as the sufferer’s fate.  

 For Ambedkar, the divine status accorded to Krishna and the Gita hides the historicity of its beginnings and prevents criticism. To him, Krishna is basically a fallible warrior. Throughout the Mahabharata, for instance, Krishna remains a subject of abuse because of his “low origins” and “loose morals”. He is the classic Machiavellian figure whose name attaches to “intrigue” and violation of “rules of war”.  Interested more in its spuriously modern authority than in its scriptural antiquity, he is relentless in his emphasis of the Gita’s uncertain authorship. It is not, according to him, “a single book written by a single author”.

What is, then, according to Ambedkar, the politics of the Gita? Not only is Krishna, by deliberate mutation, made a god amongst other gods, a godliness which is inconsistent with his status as a fallible man throughout the Mahabharata, he is also suddenly made a “representative” par excellence, within the event of the Gita, of all other forms of gods.  

He accuses the Gita of reinforcing Chaturvarnya, or the Law of Four Varnas. Krishna says that a person should not create doubts in others about Karma which of course includes the observance of the rules of Chaturvarnya. That is another way of saying that you must not agitate or excite people to rise in rebellion against the theory of Karma. It tells that every one should do the duty prescribed for his Varna and no other and warns those who worship him . . . that they will not obtain salvation by mere devotion but by devotion accompanied by observance of duty laid down for his Varna. In short, a Shudra however great he may be as a devotee, will not get salvation if he has not observed the duty of the Shudra — namely to live and die in the service of the higher classes.

This advice stabilises the caste system by invoking fate. For a shudra is born a shudra by his fate, and must aspire to salvation only as a shudra. This is how the potential of any revolutionary “counter-violence”, according to Ambedkar, is suppressed in the Gita. The system is further stabilised by creating an ethics of non-violence. Not only is the shudra barred from insurgency against fate in the name of devotion; those who provoke him are barred too with the threat of retribution. It is this suppression of counter-revolution which Ambedkar argues is the “soul” of the Gita that goes by the name of fate and the trope of “salvation”.

Ambedkar's anger is apparent in the words he uses in the interpretation of both Krishna and the Gita: “absurdity”, “stupidity”, “abhorrent”, “puerile”, “fool’s errand”, “childish”, and “lunatic asylum”. I can understand his anger. Some months after my stroke, I was at the receiving end of this "God's child" stuff a couple of times and I was not amused. I saw a cartoon which states, "Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways. If I worked so mysteriously, I will get fired."

It is often noticed that god is said to be close to people with various disabilities and ailments. I once asked the nurse to do some channel surfing when I saw a program entitled "God's children". I need not have guessed the general theme of the program - it was about a genetic disease that made teenagers look like they are seventy (Progeria, the disease that the character played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Paa suffered from.) God's children indeed!

Politics and the Gita - II

The first strategy in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita was to treat the text as an allegory. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi’s view, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is one which is raging all the time, even today". He regarded the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and vices.” Even winning the war did not bring happiness, it brought only regret and remorse to all, proving that "mere material gains never brought peace within.” 

He holds that "Every one of us is a mixture of good and evil. . . The difference that there is between human beings is the difference of degree." In interpreting the battle in the Mahabharata, he says that, "Duryodhana and his supporters stand for the satanic impulses in us, and Arjuna and others stand for Godward impulses. The battle-field is our body. The poet-seer, who knows from experience the problems of life, has given a faithful account of the conflict which is eternally going on within us." (Navajivan, 11-10-1925) 

According to him, the notion of avatar is a result of human imagination. What humans imagine Krishna to be is more important than the historical Krishna. He thought that an avatar did not mean any descent of God into human form but the ascent of humans into divine status. Those who stood against the wickedness and immorality of the time were looked on as avatars and thus it was open to every human being to be an avatar. For him, therefore, the Gita becomes above all a book of ethics, emphasising selfless devotion in the cause of human brotherhood.     

In reading the Gita in this manner, Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly the Extremists. During his time in the Yerwada Jail (1922-24), he read around 150 books including the entire Mahabharata along with all the available translations of Gita including Tilak’s.  Gandhi agreed with Tilak about the importance of doing the right action and following truth as per Gita. However, he disagreed with Tilak about how to do the right action. Gandhi drew the message of non-violence and ahimsa from Gita. 

Gita advocates three paths: Karma yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Gyana Yoga; without preferring one over the other. In Tilak’s interpretation of Gita, Karma Yoga (action) rules supreme, and takes precedence over the Bhakti Yoga (devotion) and Gyana Yoga (knowledge). He justified action, even when it became violent like killing, as long as it is without personal interest or motive. 

Gandhi however interpreted that action without expectation of fruit (anasaktiyoga) was the essence of the entire work. The crux of this difference was illustrated in Gandhi's paper Young India where he said that Tilak considered everything fair in politics, an idea of politics that he did not accept. Tilak objected to the remark and said in a letter to Young India:

I write this to you to say that my view is not correctly represented therein. Politics is a game of worldly people, and not of sadhus, and instead of the maxim "Overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good" as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krisna "In whatsoever way any come to Me, in the same way I grant them favour". That explains the whole difference and also the meaning of my phrase "responsive cooperation". Both methods are equally honest and righteous but the one is more suited to this world than the other. 

Gandhi answered:

I naturally feel the greatest diffidence about joining issue with the Lokamanya in matters involving questions of interpretation of religious work. But there are things in or about which instinct transcends even interpretation. For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be applied. 

If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape condign punishment, we may not return anger but gentleness even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly but essentially for the worldly. With deference to the Lokamanya, I venture to say that it betrays mental laziness to think that the world is not for sadhus. The epitome of all religions is to promote purushartha, and purushartha is nothing but a desperate attempt to become sadhu, i.e., to become a gentleman in every sense of the term. 

Finally, when I wrote the sentence about "everything being fair in politics" according to the Lokamanya’s creed, I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation "evil unto evil". To me it enunciates bad law. And I shall not despair of the Lokamanya with all his acumen agreeably surprising India one day with a philosophical dissertation proving the falsity of the doctrine. In any case I pit the experience of a third of a century against the doctrine underlying "evil unto evil". The true law is "truth even unto evil".