29/08/2025
Why We All Killed Gandhi: Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Unsparing Truth
From Dr Shai Tubali.
On the evening of January 30, 1948, Jiddu Krishnamurti was in Bombay, sitting with a small group at Ratansi Morarji’s house. Pupul Jayakar was there, along with friends. The atmosphere was intimate, almost domestic, until the telephone rang.
Achyut Patwardhan returned from the call pale, his voice trembling:
“Gandhi has been assassinated.”
The room fell silent. Krishnamurti became very still, yet keenly aware of each face, as if listening to their unspoken reactions.
Then a question arose at once: was the assassin Hindu or Muslim? The answer mattered – because it would decide who bled next.
When it was revealed that Gandhi had been killed by a Brahmin from Poona, riots broke out. Nehru’s anguished voice came over the radio, the whole nation stunned, paralyzed. For a brief moment, India looked inward.
The Question After Death
On February 1, Krishnamurti faced a hushed audience. Someone asked what seemed the most natural question of all:
“What are the real causes of Gandhi’s untimely death?”
His reply shattered the air.
“The real cause lies in you. The real cause is you. Because you are communal, you encourage division – through property, through caste, through ideology, through religion. When you call yourself a Hindu, a Muslim, a Parsee, or anything else, conflict is inevitable.”
The Mirror of Division
Imagine it: a grief-stricken people, desperate to mourn their saint, suddenly told they were complicit. While others searched for one man to blame, Krishnamurti turned the mirror back on every listener. Division, he said, begins inside us. And as long as we cultivate it, violence will endlessly sprout.
For him, even nonviolence as an ideal was illusion. What mattered was perceiving the fact of violence, seeing its root in our daily divisions, and ending it in the immediacy of awareness – not someday, but now.
One War, Many Masks
Seventy-seven years later, his words pierce as sharply as ever. We call ourselves American and Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian, Muslim and Jew, Democrat and Republican – and still wonder why the world burns. Each side insists it represents justice. Each side brands the other evil. Yet both spring from the same seed: the mind that divides.
There are no wars, Krishnamurti insisted. There is only one war, changing its form.
As long as we meet reality with division, the reflection will be more blood. Ideas and symbols will continue to kill, while human beings keep paying the price.
The Unfinished Lesson
Krishnamurti’s voice was not meant to console. It was a wound laid bare. The truth he offered was merciless: Gandhi’s death was not only the act of one man. It was the flowering of the divisions we all nurture.
And until those divisions end in us, the same war will continue without pause – only its names will change.
