02/10/2026
Mahatma Gandhi, Freedom and the Age of More
Ideas for a More Trusted World
By Abhimanyu Ghosh | 2 October 2026
There is a detail about the Salt March that I keep coming back to.
The demand was independence. The object was salt.
In March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi began walking from Sabarmati towards Dandi. On 6 April, he broke the colonial salt law. A campaign against British rule had been organised around something found in every household—a necessity whose production and sale were subject to a government monopoly. NCERT
Nobody needed to understand constitutional negotiations to understand why salt mattered.
That is where I want to begin on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary: with the work of turning a political objective into something people could understand, participate in and carry into their everyday lives.
Because the question I want to explore is not what Mahatma Gandhi might have thought about a chatbot. We cannot know that.
It is what his involvement in India’s freedom movement allows us to examine about leadership now: how people acquire a part in change, how an organisation sustains a purpose, and how we decide whether greater capability is actually giving us greater freedom.
A movement needs more than an audience
During the Non-Cooperation Movement, students left government institutions, lawyers withdrew from courts, and workers and peasants participated through strikes and other actions. Congress expanded its organisation and communicated through regional languages. Participants also interpreted the campaign through their own concerns; they did not always follow the instructions of national leaders. NCERT
That last detail matters. People were not simply an audience receiving a message. They had interests, grievances and decisions of their own.
There is a distinction here that I would bring into any organisation attempting change.
An employee can understand an announcement without having any meaningful influence over what follows. A customer can see a campaign without believing its promise. A community can be consulted without its concerns changing the decision.
Being reached is not the same as being involved.
Imagine a company announcing a major AI transformation. The chief executive explains the ambition. The presentation is clear. Everyone receives access to the new tools.
But can the people doing the work help decide where those tools belong? Can they identify a process that should not be automated? Can they challenge a result without being treated as resistant to change?
Those are the questions I would ask before describing the transformation as a shared effort.
The historical comparison has limits: employees are not participants in an independence struggle, and a business initiative is not a campaign against colonial rule. But the distinction between an audience and a participant is worth examining in both settings.
Salt was a point of entry, not the entire programme
Mahatma Gandhi’s speech on the eve of the Dandi March went beyond explaining why he would walk. He addressed what should happen if he and his companions were arrested, described ways of challenging the salt monopoly, and set out responsibilities for Congress and local leaders. He reiterated nonviolence as a condition of participation. Gandhi Ashram Sabarmati
So alongside the public image of a man walking towards the sea, there was a practical question: what happens next, and who acts?
That is the part of the story I would put in front of founders and chief executives.
A purpose needs a form that people can work with. “Build trust” is an intention. Giving customers a clear explanation, an accessible complaint process and someone authorised to correct a mistake makes that intention operational.
Likewise, “use AI responsibly” leaves several questions unanswered. Who reviews consequential outputs? Who receives reports of errors? Who can suspend a process? What happens when a commercial target conflicts with an agreed safeguard?
If the answers depend entirely on one person being available, the organisation has not finished designing its responsibilities.
In my own work, that is a distinction I want to keep testing: are we communicating an ambition, or have we made it possible for other people to act on it?
The spinning wheel was also an argument about the economy
Mahatma Gandhi’s promotion of khadi was not only about what people wore. In his writings, he connected hand-spinning and hand-weaving with village livelihoods, decentralised production and reduced dependence on imported cloth. His Constructive Programme placed khadi alongside education, sanitation, village industries and other social and economic activities. These were elements of his proposed route towards self-rule. Mahatma Gandhi Website
Those proposals deserve to be understood in their historical setting, rather than reduced to a modern branding exercise.
They also introduce a question that belongs beside an AI investment proposal:
Where will the benefits of greater productive capacity go?
Suppose a system enables a team to complete a task in half the time. That creates several possibilities. The organisation might improve its service, develop new products, train employees for different responsibilities or reduce repetitive work. It might also increase workloads or reduce employment.
The technology does not make all those choices by itself.
I would want the business case to explain not just the capacity gained, but the decisions that follow. Where roles will change, people deserve a specific conversation about the transition. Where productivity improves, we should be able to explain what that improvement makes possible beyond a better number on a slide.
This is not a proposal to replace modern industry with spinning wheels. It is a way of separating a technological achievement from the economic arrangements surrounding it.
Self-rule was more than a change of government
In Hind Swaraj, Mahatma Gandhi gave self-rule a personal as well as political meaning:
“It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.” Mahatma Gandhi Website
Within that text, independence was not simply the substitution of Indian rulers for British ones. Mahatma Gandhi linked it to self-discipline and a wider criticism of the civilisation he associated with industrial modernity. That was his argument, not a definition accepted by everyone in the freedom movement. Mahatma Gandhi Website
The contemporary connection I want to explore is human agency: our capacity to understand, choose and question.
An AI recommendation can be useful. The problem I would look for is a process in which questioning it becomes impractical. A personalised service can be convenient. The problem is different when the person using it cannot understand the terms or easily decline.
There are documented examples of that distinction in digital commerce. The US Federal Trade Commission’s 2022 report on “dark patterns” described practices including disguised advertising, misleading countdown timers, hidden charges and obstacles to cancelling subscriptions. The report examined how design can impair consumer choice. Federal Trade Commission
That is more concrete than saying technology is making everyone less free. Some products help us act on our intentions; some practices interfere with them.
For a business leader, the question is whether we are helping a person make a decision—or making it difficult for them to make a different one.
I would want that question inside the product review, not left to the complaints team after launch.
What does “more” actually mean?
Mahatma Gandhi also argued in Hind Swaraj that satisfying desires does not necessarily bring them to an end. His discussion of consumption questioned whether multiplying wants should be treated as progress. Mahatma Gandhi Website
That opens a conversation I want to have without pretending to stand outside it.
I build businesses. I care about growth. I want ideas to reach people. This newsletter itself is an attempt to build an audience.
But I also want to be able to explain what the growth is for.
More customers because we solve a problem they genuinely have is one proposition. More spending achieved by making people misunderstand a price is another. More engagement because something is worthwhile is different from making it difficult to stop.
For me, the useful distinction is not between business and a life without business. It is between creating value and making “more” the only test of whether something worked.
There is an equally important distinction between choosing to consume less and being unable to afford necessities. I would not turn a discussion of simplicity into advice that people should accept deprivation. Better housing, healthcare, education, mobility and financial security can expand a person’s choices.
The question is what happens after “more” becomes detached from any particular improvement in life.
At an individual level, I would ask: what do I genuinely enjoy, and what am I pursuing because I have stopped examining the pursuit?
At a business level: what are we making easier for people—and what are we asking them to give up in exchange?
The freedom struggle also contains disagreement and limits
India’s independence cannot be explained as one person’s achievement or one uninterrupted campaign. Mahatma Gandhi worked within a wider movement involving other leaders, organisations and conflicting political visions. The eventual transfer of power also involved postwar British decisions and negotiations, and independence arrived alongside Partition and communal violence. NCERT
Nor did Mahatma Gandhi’s public standing settle the question of whom the movement represented. B. R. Ambedkar challenged his positions on caste; their disagreement is documented in the exchange accompanying Annihilation of Caste. CCNMTL
These are not details to remove from a leadership case study. They are part of it.
They require us to distinguish an intention from an outcome, a leader’s claim from other people’s experience, and participation from agreement.
That matters in the contemporary organisation too. A founder may sincerely believe a decision benefits everyone. The people affected must still be able to describe where it does not.
The responsibility remains human
The connection between this history and today’s AI discussion is not that a historical figure supplies a ready-made answer to every new problem.
It is that the freedom movement gives us concrete events through which to examine participation, organisation, economic dependence and the meaning of self-rule. These are substantive questions, not just anniversary quotations.
Modern AI governance has its own requirements. NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework places responsibility for decisions about AI risks with executive leadership and calls for defined oversight, feedback and appeal mechanisms. NIST AI Resource Center
For the organisations we build, I would translate that into a straightforward expectation: someone must remain available to explain a decision, listen to a challenge and take responsibility for correcting it.
That is also how I want to approach reputation. A claim about trust should lead us towards the actual experience of dealing with an organisation.
Can a customer understand what they are buying? Can an employee question what they are being asked to do? Can someone affected by an automated decision reach a person with the authority to help?
Those questions belong beside our ambitions for speed, scale and growth.
As we build more capable businesses, are we also giving people more understanding, more choice and more room to exercise their own judgement?
That is the conversation I want this edition, marking Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, to begin.
— Abhimanyu Ghosh Founder & Chairman, WCRC Ideas for a More Trusted World
