Ajay Skaria talks with Omair Ahmad about his new book Excerpts from this conversation were published earlier in The Wire) It is rare to speak of “religion” in the political domain these days, and you mention your own difficulties in breaking out of the secular mould to read Gandhi in this light. Could you explain? I must confess that, like most others who had come of intellectual age as part of the Indian left, I was for long suspicious of Gandhi because of his overt religiosity. Certainly, if you had asked me as late as 2000 whether there was any chance that I would work on Gandhi, I would have emphatically said “no.” And I would have said so partially because both as a college student, and later in my work in adivasi regions, I often encountered too many Gandhians running ashrams that effectively practiced an upper caste Hinduism. Even now, to my mind, his Hinduism as a social phenomenon likely enabled the later rise of Hindutva. I was drawn into Gandhi’s wri