Over the years I have witnessed the enthusiasm for his teachings waning and popular participation in his name lessening. For the youth -- I held a small survey -- Gandhi is a wispy figure, way out in the past as someone who led the independence movement for the country. The whole spirit of reverence and dedication is missing. It looks as if the celebrations of Gandhi Jayanti have lost their élan and become a simple ritual to be gone over year after year. Even otherwise, Gandhi has receded into the background. Seeing India of today, talking in terms of military power and glittering plazas, his words seem to be out of place. A person who gave us freedom and dignity is followed by a few whose number is decreasing day by day. Wardha, from where he fought the independence movement, is an abandoned place today. Not even curious visitors drop in to see the cottage from where he waged his war against the British.

Probably, this is the kind of phenomenon that takes over the liberation movement the world over when it becomes old. The negligence is on the part of the government which turns its back on heroes because they do not belong to the ruling party. It is a slur on the country if the founder, the father of the nation, is allowed to disappear in the shadows. He represents the country's ethos. Yet, I have seen the best of traditions -- and sacred memories -- getting politicised.

Ideologically opposed to the Gandhian thoughts, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) after coming to power at Delhi saw to it that the photo of Gandhi would gradually disappear from public buildings, government offices and airports. It is not visible even at a sequestrated place. Hindu Mahasabha leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, not Gandhi, beams at the visitors to the rooms of the BJP ministers.

If at all, the BJP pays lip sympathy to Gandhi who was never enshrined in the same way that Rana Pratap Singh and Shivaji, the two Hindu heroes, figure in the Sangh Parivar's pantheon. The RSS headquarters at Nagpur does not display the photo of Gandhi. Nor does it observe a holiday on his birthday. Even the fact of his assassination by a fanatic Hindu was first deleted from the textbooks which the parivar's Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi got rewritten on the pretext of "dropping bias" from the Indian history.

If it is not politics, then what is it? The HinduRashtra (state) is the BJP's plank which, it believes, earns it votes. Gandhi was, however, opposed to astate religion. He wrote in The Harijan, a weekly he edited, on September 22, 1946: "The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your religion or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern."

Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, too redefined his two-nation theory after partition. It was no more on the basis of religion -- Islam and Hinduism. Instead, he said: "You may belong to any religion, caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens of one state. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is a personal faith of each individual, but in political sense as citizens of the state."

Gandhi always held that religion did not make the basis for nationhood. He once told Jinnah that if a person were to embrace another religion, he would not become a member of a different nation. A little bit of that thinking still resides in the hearts of most Indians. In spite of the demotion of the Babri masjid or the happenings in Gujarat, there is a strong subterranean feeling among the people for diversity. The Sangh parivar has been trying hard to change this thinking: to turn a secular India into a Hindu India. But it has failed in its efforts. Whatever its onslaughts, we are still fighting to keep our society pluralistic. Fanatics in both the communities are making the task difficult. Yet whatever is left of the Gandhian values, they are standing us in good stead.

In fact, Gandhi's assassination gave us 40 years of communal harmony. People would snub those who talked about the Hindu Rashtra. The Sangh parivar was then careful not to open its mouth. The climate was such that BJP or its earlier brand, the Jana Sangh, never crossed a double-digit figure in the Lok Sabha elections those days. It is another matter that the forces, which should have consolidated the pluralistic society, failed us.

Where India has failed Gandhi the most is the style in which the 200 million people -- one fifth of the country's population -- are living. His asceticism does not fit into the yappy culture of consumerism which is taking over the urban areas. Simplicity is no more a virtue. The weak are looked down upon. It is the survival of the fittest. Gandhi's concept of the rich being the trustees of the wealth they earned has not worked. The rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. Villages, where Gandhi said the God lived, are more or less the same even after 55 years of independence. Development has not benefited them much. Cities have all the comforts.

Gandhi would have also been disappointed if he were living today to see how his basic belief that "wrong means will not lead to right result" had been flouted in every way possible. He would say that if the methods were vitiated, the ends would be vitiated. Not many Indians believe in this dictum any more. What matters to them is success, not how they achieve it. There is increasing contempt for what might be called the moral and spiritual side of life.

Against this background, Gandhi's method to evolve a non-violent way to resolve conflicts has been rejected not only by the world but also in India. We cannot expect others to follow Gandhi when we have shunned him. That may be the reason why the Kashmiri students at Srinagar resented my observation the other day that if their movement had been non-violent, it would have made an impact on the civil society in India and elsewhere.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.