Shortly after the movie Gandhi opened in Delhi in 1982, a cartoon appeared in a major Indian newspaper showing a car with then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation) pulling away from the theater. “They say it’s based on a true story,” she tells a companion. It was Independence Day in India and Pakistan on Friday. While no one, of course, has forgotten the dramatic events of August 1947, the two countries have strayed about as far from the visions of their founders as we in America have.  Though he received his legal training in London (where he encountered the Bhagavad Gita for the first time, the book that was to be his Bible), Mohandas Gandhi, with his trademark loincloth and spinning wheel, envisioned an independent India that was deindustrialized and de-Westernized. His grand plan, “the Constructive Program,” called for households and villages to be autonomous, breeding cattle, using bullocks to pull plows, drawing water from...(Read Full Article)