| Summary/Abstract |
India recently witnessed a prominent movement against state corruption led by the ‘India Against Corruption’ (IAC) group, which came under criticism for utilising the Gandhian hunger strike as a protest tactic. This essay examines the Gandhi and the Gandhianism conjured up by the movement's critics, who dismissed the IAC as either sacrilegiously un-Gandhian or anachronistically Gandhian. I argue that these critics reinstated Gandhi and Gandhianism as unidimensional, ossified and largely inimitable texts. In so doing, they glossed over the contradictions, experimentation and ambivalences that marked Gandhi's life and attributed to him a closure that he disavowed. This desire to reproduce or preserve the ‘real’ Gandhi needs to give way to more creative mimicry, so that his praxis can be reinvented and enlivened by social movements today.
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