Some of you may think this column should have been written last week in the immediate wake of Gandhi Jayanti. The truth is that’s precisely why it wasn’t. To ask questions of the Mahatma on his birthday would have been inappropriate timing. A week later it feels fine.

There are several unresolved questions about Gandhi’s views that need to be addressed. I don’t have the answers, but his biographers have wrestled with them for decades. There’s one in particular I want to address today. It’s about the Gandhi of the 1890s and 1900s in South Africa.

Was the young Gandhi a racist? Two South African scholars, writing almost 20 years ago, said he was. Ashwin Desai and Ghulam Vahed in The South African Gandhi mention how at the turn of the century he would call Blacks “kaffirs”. Even at that time, it wasn’t a polite way of referring to them although it was common to do so. In 1904, he said “about the mixing of the kaffirs with the Indians I must confess I feel most strongly”.........

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