Involving struggles over sacred symbols and spaces, with appeals to the icon of the cow as a universal mother, the movements relied upon and further generated a parochial definition of the Hindu community, with a marked anti-Muslim (and anti-Dalit) feeling. While deeply committed to gauraksha, Gandhi reflected: “Hindus must not imagine they can force Mussalmans to give up cow-sacrifice. They must trust, by befriending Mussalmans, that the latter will of their own accord, give up cow-sacrifice…Nor must Mussalmans imagine they can force Hindus to stop music or arati before mosque”. He also regarded the ‘cow protection societies’ as ‘cow killing societies’ due to their inherent violent nature. The debunking of a language of force and violence, and the articulation instead of a dialect of persuasion, understanding and mutual consent, advocated by Gandhi, is even more pertinent in today’s context, when there have been serious attempts to exploit the emotional fault lines of a section of Hindus, and vigilante groups have been violently attacking minorities in the name of cow-protection. My third example draws from Gandhi’s use of Hindu idioms, particularly that of Ramarajya. He stated that if the said word offended anyone, it could be replaced with Dharmarajya, imparting it a different meaning, and squarely equating it with his ideas of freedom, including khadi, refusal to pay the salt tax, and Swaraj. He declared Ramarajya to be a “moral government based upon truth and non-violence, in other words universal religion”, and a rule under which “the poor will be fully protected, everything will be done with justice, and the voice of the people will always be respected”. While using a symbol that could potentially spell alienation for some, he nonetheless appropriated it to signal a long utopian tradition in India and then cleverly intermeshed it with contemporary political desires of a just, equal and free society. Rejecting Hindutva’s exclusivist interpretation, Gandhi’s conception encompassed not only the mythical, ancient rule of Rama, but also the medieval, Mughal system of urban production and economy, and then went beyond it to provide a language of hope, dignity and rights for all. These three brief examples illustrate that in Gandhi’s Hindu spiritual ethics, religion was not an abstract doctrine, but a living body of thought, which was redeployed by him to express an ethical way of political practise.