or less true" and that no (religious) "propaganda can be allowed which reviles other religions" (as cited in Fischer, 1962, p. 213). One does not have to be hostile to Gandhi's view of religion to to suggest that it implies a secular conceptualization of statehood. But it would be more accurate to say that Gandhi's politics embraces and acknowledges a religious component as fundamental to human experience while also moving beyond it in the political context. Thus his articulation in The Story of My Experiments with Truth of a "devotion to Truth (always uppercase for Gandhi), which "has drawn me into the field of politics." Gandhi continues:
To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creatures as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. . . . I can say without the slightest hesitation and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has noting to do with politics do not know what religion means (as cited in Fischer, 1962, p. 213).
This statement is relevant to Gandhi's methods of political persuasion not only because of the consistency with which he publicly articulated his views to the Indian people but also because the structure of Gandhi's political activism had rather specific religious roots. Runes cites Gandhi's debt to the Russian novelist Tolstoy, who, upon publication of Anna Karenina in 1877 (War and Peace had appeared in 1869) rather famously underwent a late-life conversion after what appears to have been a mental breakdown. He was converted to noninstitutional Christianity, taking his cue not from the Russian Orthodox Church but from the Beatitudes, which he said focused on "social repentance, religious purification, radical opposition to the interests and institutions of he world, rejection of property, power, war, oath and political statutes" (Runes, 1950, p. 1174).
According to Fischer, Gandh...