After asking his students why they think Gandhi felt he failed, or why Gandhi is a man “greater than empires”, Martin weighs in with his own thoughts.

To this day, India and Pakistan remain split. Terrorism derails trains on a regular basis and the feast days of Hindu gods are marked by parades of both the faithful and the police. And even as India prepares to raise itself out of poverty and compete with China, the 600,000 villages throughout the subcontinent remain backward and isolated thanks to Mr. Gandhi’s legacy of a village-led economy that effectively shut out foreign direct investment until 1991. Gandhi may be the most popular Indian since Siddhartha Gautama, but what did he truly leave us? The doctrine of ahimsa often feels remote and alien in our world where hyperpowers and transnational terrorists dictate our political, economic and social climate. “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind,” went the Mahatma. However, Mr. Gandhi, mankind sees different things — just like how you, Nehru and Mr. Jinnah saw India and Indias.

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This may seem like such a harsh assessment of a man who is so far removed from our time. Through history, it becomes so easy for us to pass judgment on people who acted without the benefit of our retrospection. It’s so easy to say that Gandhi failed to see this or Gandhi failed to see that. It is inevitable (and thus incredibly convenient) that we approach this question of failure by making a checklist of Gandhi’s goals and comparing them to what actually happened. He wanted independence and he wanted one India. He got one but not the other. Therefore, he failed. Or he did not succeed completely. Which means he failed. Or something like that. Sounds almost too simple.