Bartholomew's Notes

A new book debunking Mahatma Gandhi puts Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on its cover; WND is loving it:

Gandhi’s name has come up repeatedly in the Democratic presidential race – with both Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., outspoken admirers of the Indian independence leader – perceived as a virtual 20th century saint thanks to mythologizing books and movies.

Yet, the real Gandhi was not the little man revered by the U.S. cvil rights leadership for his commitment to non-violence, according to the authors of “Gandhi Under Cross-Examination,” which, using the India leader’s own words, portray him as an anti-black racist, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, a critic of George Washington and a man who believed Jews should not have resisted Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate them.

The book was written by G.B. Singh, who is a US colonel (apparently he’s a periodontist in the US Army Medical Department), in collaboration with Timothy Watson, author of The Ethics of Timelessness, a philosophical book which argues that “metaphysics is a science of immunology for the human spirit” which “reunites philosophy with its roots” (the PhD thesis version can be seen here). This is Singh’s second anti-Gandhi book, following Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity, which was published by the sceptical publishing house Prometheus Books. Singh explained his motivation in an interview when that book came out:

…in February 1983, I saw the film Gandhi which reinforced the story of Gandhi I had learned in India. In March 1983, I read the article, The Gandhi Nobody Knows by Richard Grenier. This article brought about fundamental changes in me especially dealing with asking probing questions and there I started to pay more critical attention to Gandhi while at the same time I was actively pursuing research into Hinduism.

These two areas of research eventually converged. The tragic events of 1984 in India against the Sikhs, painful that they were, were no surprise to me. Just following the attack on Golden Temple and other gurdwaras, Mrs. Indira Gandhi justified her bloody actions by invoking one of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings-that event in itself forced me to conduct a thorough research on our mahatma.

Singh’s earliest thoughts on the subject were published by the newsletter of African Americans for Humanism. However, Thomas W. Clark published a critical review of Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity in The Humanist in 2006:

For those who relish the debunking of religious impostors, Singh’s contentious litany of Gandhi’s real and imagined faults may provide some satisfaction, but for most readers his conclusion that Gandhi was a “thug” no better than Stalin or Hitler (pages 308-309) will seem overwrought and unnecessarily inflammatory. B. R. Ambedkar’s 1945 classic, What Gandhi and the Congress Have Done to the Untouchables, offers a far more substantial and balanced account of some of Gandhi’s shortcomings.

Gandhi under Cross-Examination is published by Sovereign Star Publishing, which is based in New York. According to its website:

Sovereign Star is dedicated to providing accessible books written to stimulate intellectual and historical enlightenment. We are quickly developing a reputation for publishing bolder and more though-provoking materials than many others in the field.

However, given that Gandhi under Cross-Examination is the only item listed on the catalogue page, it’s difficult to assess on what exactly this “developing reputation” is based.

The book is available on special offer from WND, with some issues of Whistleblower inevitably thrown in. This is a rare endorsement by WND of this kind of religious debunking, and it should be noted that Singh also recalls that when he read the New Testament he “recognized so many holes in the story of Jesus Christ”. Perhaps we’ll see Christopher Hitchens’ attack on Mother Teresa on offer as an encore?

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