Speech at Lausanne, 8 December 1931; printed in his weekly paper Young India, 31 December 1931
Truth Is God
In December 1931 Mahatma Gandhi left London after the second Round Table Conference broke down. He had stayed at Kingsley Hall in the East End, but the talks over seats and votes ended with nothing agreed. On his journey home he stopped in Switzerland to visit Romain Rolland in Villeneuve. On 8 December 1931 he spoke in Lausanne, where Swiss workers and students filled the hall. His secretary Mahadev Desai took notes, and Mirabehn sat nearby with their Swiss hosts, Edmond and Yvonne Privat. Someone asked him about religion. For decades he had said that God is Truth. That evening he turned the phrase around and said, "Truth is God."
People often start an argument by asking you to agree on their God first. If you do not share that God, the conversation stops before it starts. Gandhiji saw that religious words divided the very people he wanted to reach. An atheist will deny God, but nobody stands up and says they are against truth. Even the person who rejects religion wants to know what is so. When you put truth first, you give everyone a common ground. Then the work is not about defending a creed. The work is about looking at what happens and seeing what holds up under a test.
Therefore
Start your argument from the ground that nobody can deny. If you begin with names people fight over, you lose them before you begin.
Young India, 31 December 1931
Gandhiji traveled on through Italy, met Mussolini in Rome, and sailed from Brindisi. His weekly paper, Young India, printed the Lausanne speech on 31 December 1931. A few days later, on 4 January 1932, the government arrested Gandhiji in Bombay and outlawed the Indian National Congress. In jail he kept the formula he had used in Switzerland. He did not ask his followers to accept a dogma. He asked them to treat their daily actions as experiments. When they tested what was real and faced the outcome, the work moved forward without any church or doctrine.
A small reminder, on the notebook or the desk, that a conversation works best when you start from what nobody can deny.
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