If Gandhi were alive, he would have surely opposed the ban his biography by Joseph Lelyveld’s, “The Great Soul”.

The campaign was launched by union law minister M Veerappa Moily, who said the centre would consider banning it. The Gujarat government then went ahead and did it – though its move in 2009 to ban Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah had backfired and the Gujarat high court had to ask it to withdraw the order. This time, chief minister Narendra Modi’s step has full support from leader of opposition Shaktisinh Gohil. The Maharashtra government has said it would take steps to ban the book.

And none of the people behind these moves has even seen the book, much less read it. What they have read are a bunch of reviews that have taken a couple of lines from the book to portray Gandhi as homosexual and racist. As for those couple of lines, for example, the one from Gandhi’s letters to Hermann Kallenbach, they happen to be in the public domain. So, if anything, Moily et al should consider banning all archival material on Gandhi.

Gandhi considered two values – truth and non-violence – above all, and in fact held truth to be god itself in all senses of the term. He went out of his way to put before the world full truth about himself. He had consciously chosen not to hide every little detail about himself, be it his controversial experiments to test his brahmacharya late in his life or the apparently bisexual relations early in life. The material bought out by the latest of 200-odd biographies is something Gandhi himself had very much chosen not to hide from a future scholar. Then, hiding that truth so that Gandhi remains a holy figure in the eyes of uncritical masses is simply a populist move, a move designed to bask in the reflected glory of his holiness.

Moreover, the biographer himself, whose Pulitzer-winning work on Apartheid (“Move Your Shadow”) was praised as unique and magnificent, insists that he himself has never once used the word bisexual or racist. He was only showing how a lowly legal clerk with zero confidence in life entering South Africa in 1893 left the country a couple of decades later as a mahatma. This transformation was not easy and Gandhi fought several inner battles to reach where he reached.

Now, all this talk is fine, but was he a bisexual or not – after all, homosexuality was a crime in this country till two years ago, and many still consider it an aberration. Eminent Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud says that non-romantic love between friends was commonly expressed in such terms in those days, and the correspondence between Rabindranath Tagore and CF “Dinbandhu” Andrews too was of a similar kind.

If Gandhi did not think twice before telling the world about sleeping naked with his grand-niece would surely have let the people know about his physical relations with Kallenbach if that really was the case – after all, that would have been less controversial.

The controversy is not in the archival material, not in the book itself, but in the reviews – and there again, not in the two reviews in the New York Times (see here and here) but in the British press and particularly one review by Churchill fan and islamofobist Andrew Roberts (here). It’s in these few reviews that the insinuations and innuendos have been read where there are none.

It’s these ideologists and their ideologies that should be considered for banning. But, then, Gandhi would not have approved of that either.