Question the world you must. Question its words if you must. But don’t quarrel with the alphabet.” Sitting at the feet of the Mahatma in Sevagram, I recalled this warning of my Marxist teacher to a group of young rebellious students. He was drawing our attention to a profound truth of communication: It is only by using a shared language, metaphors and symbols that we can hope to create new meanings and a new world.

I asked myself: Have we made the mistake that our teacher had warned us against? Are the liberal, progressive and secular Indians engaged in a futile quarrel with the alphabet of Indian society? We speak or think in English. We flinch at the mention of nationalism. Our alacrity in denouncing everything that our civilisation must be ashamed of is never matched by remembering things that we have reasons to be proud of. We are happy to name our adversary “Hindu nationalists”. We participate in public spectacles to question the existence of God. We take pains to distance ourselves from anything religious, especially Hindu. And then we wonder why the people of this country do not listen to us.

Sitting in Sevagram Ashram, Gandhiji’s home till the end, the message was unmistakable: Be the change you wish to see. If we want the state of affairs to change, we must begin by changing ourselves. We must radically change the way we think, communicate and act. This was my takeaway from a conversation among friends from diverse ideological traditions — Gandhian, Ambedkarite, socialist, Marxist, feminist and non-ideological — who gathered to reflect on how we can reclaim the republic in the face of the current onslaught.

The first lesson was surprisingly........

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