Against the backdrop of the raging SIR controversy, Gandhi Jayanti is an opportune moment to recall the young lawyer Mohandas Gandhi and his travails in South Africa, where a colonial regime was seeking to deny Indians their vote. His first political battle was not satyagraha but the right to vote. In July 1894, the Natal government proposed to disenfranchise Indians as part of colonial policy. In his petition to Lord Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Gandhi wrote that an Indian without the vote would lose “self-respect, to remain in the Colony”. A year later, he warned that the consequences of disenfranchisement were “too dreadful to contemplate”.

That fight, in a colony, became his template for India and what he envisioned for the free Indian citizen. In the decades preceding 1947, many in Congress and in Whitehall argued that India was too illiterate,........

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