I recently came across a book with the intriguing title, Lenin and Gandhi. Its author was the Austrian writer, René Fülöp-Miller. The book was published originally in French; what I read was the English translation, published in 1927.

Back in the 1920s, a book-length comparison between Gandhi and Lenin made eminent sense. The two men were near contemporaries, who entered this world within six months of one another. Both were born middle-class, both driven by a passionate desire to emancipate the poor and end injustice.

However, there were also key differences. Lenin was savagely polemical in his writings, whereas Gandhi exuded civility in public and in private. A related, yet much more important, distinction was that one worshipped at the altar of violence, whereas the other was devoted to the practice of non-violence.

So far as I know, the first writer to compare Gandhi and Lenin in print was the Bombay radical, Shripad Amrit Dange. In April 1921, Dange published a tract, 60 pages long, carrying the straightforward title, Gandhi vs Lenin. As a communist himself, Dange preferred Leninism to Gandhism but – perhaps because he had observed Gandhi in the flesh – retained a residual sympathy for his compatriot.

He thus observed that ”the complete realisation of the theories of both the systems in practical life is an impossibility. Gandhism suffers from too much an unwarranted faith in the natural goodness of human nature, while Bolshevism suffers from too much neglect of human interests and sentiments.”

Four years after Dange, an American Methodist minister named Harry Ward published an article called “Lenin and Gandhi” in the April 1925 issue of a journal named The World Tomorrow. Ward also noted that Lenin and Gandhi transcended their middle-class backgrounds and identified themselves with the masses through the “bare simplicity of their lives”.

He then turned to the contrasts. As Ward put it, “Lenin’s philosophy is a philosophy of power, his program a program of force. Gandhi’s philosophy is a philosophy of love, his program a program of non-violence… Lenin says we will overcome the force of the oppressor through more force of the same kind. Gandhi says we will overcome it by a........

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