SONIA Gandhi was in New York in October to take part in events organised to mark the International Day of Non-Violence.

It was in June 2007 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to observe Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence. Some Pakistanis didn't like the idea and drew attention to the atrocities committed by the Indian state agencies in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Holding Gandhi responsible for actions of the Indian state shows how little such people know about Gandhi. For reasons having to do with the political history of the first half of the 20th century of the subcontinent, Gandhi is projected in our textbooks as a cunning bania who tried to prevent the creation of Pakistan only to go into oblivion thereafter. The popular perception of Gandhi in Pakistan is a mix of ignorance and negative stereotyping. In India, he is everywhere. Major thoroughfares bear his name and his image adorns Indian currency notes.

The popular rendition of Gandhi is stripped of all contradictions that constitute his person and legacy. That is true on both sides of the border especially when it comes to the cast of the lead characters of the Partition saga. Gandhi is the personification of good and Jinnah of evil in Indian nationalist historiography. In Pakistan, it is the other way around.

Tampering with official orthodoxies comes with political risks. Deviation from the nationalist script can cast its shadow on even a patently anti-Pakistan person like L.K. Advani when he dared to utter something positive about Jinnah during his visit to Karachi a few years ago.

Individuals like Gandhi are difficult to pigeon-hole. They defy easy categorisations. Someone who did not play the role of a responsible father towards his biological children as envisaged by tradition was considered as 'Bapu' by many of his compatriots, including Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister. Nehru in a tearful voice conveyed the news of Gandhi's assassination to his countrymen by saying, "the light has gone out of our lives". Let us look at some aspects of his complicated personality and politics that are not part of the image of Gandhi that we have in Pakistan.

Consider the logic of holding Gandhi responsible for the violence that is endorsed by the Indian state. The man who lived only for five months after India's independence himself had a very troubled and complicated relationship with the new state. The icon of the Indian anti-colonial movement was not even in Delhi when the Indian tricolour replaced the Union Jack in August 1947. When Nehru's India was having its 'tryst with destiny', Gandhi was in faraway Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata, trying to put out communal fires that had gripped Bengal's capital. The person who is portrayed as the father of the Indian nation was in mourning at its birth.

His relationship with the party, the Indian National Congress, that had led India's movement for independence and whose leader was in New York on October 2 as heir to Gandhi's political lineage was not straightforward either. Once India gained independence, Mohandas proposed to disband the Congress party because, according to this political maverick, the organisation had served its purpose.

The cunning bania of Pakistani textbooks was killed by a Hindu zealot because in the latter's estimation the man was too soft on Muslims. We are not told in Pakistan that one of the reasons behind Nathuram Godse's, the man who pulled the trigger on Gandhi, and his associates' anger was Gandhi's insistence that Muslims shouldn't be reduced to second class citizens in India and that the Indian government should be fair in dividing the assets of British India with Pakistan.

If the above examples tell us about Gandhi's nuanced relationship with the central Indian state after independence and the party that ran it, the nature of his personal relationship with his contemporaries was not free of tensions either. Jinnah's bumpy relationship with Gandhi is sufficiently chronicled in Pakistan. We tend to think that barring Jinnah and his All India Muslim League the rest of India dutifully followed whatever Gandhi said. The reality was far from it. I will offer glimpses of Gandhi's ties with Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar to illustrate this point.Nehru comes across as a spiritual son of Gandhi. In the Pakistani version of history, Nehru was the Brahmanical stick that the lean, half-naked bania used to undermine the Pakistan movement. Non-violence was a creed for Gandhi, for Nehru it was more of a method. In January 1928, the differences between the two men reached the level where Gandhi in a letter to Nehru wrote, "the differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us."

Whereas the Nehru-Gandhi differences were conducted under the umbrella of the Congress, one of the major challenges to Gandhi's claim as being the true representative of all Indians came from Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who came from the community of untouchables but managed to study at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

He challenged the Gandhian solution to the problem of untouchability and lobbied for separate electorates for them. When the British consented to Ambedkar's demand in 1932, Gandhi went on a fast unto death. Ambedkar finally agreed to forego separate electorates in turn, saving Gandhi's life. Thus, an untouchable saved Gandhi's life while a born-again Hindu took it in 1948.

But what is it about Gandhi that a Bollywood motion picture, Lage Raho Munna Bhai, based on his methodology, can become a blockbuster in the 21st century?

Partly it was Gandhi's subversion of rules of the charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders are seen as a cut above ordinary people. The way they come across is as if common human traits don't apply to them. Larger than life in public their personal persona is usually a well-kept secret.

Gandhi became all too ordinary to the chagrin of his foes and friends alike. He literally denuded himself for everyone to see how physically vulnerable he was. He turned that vulnerability into his strength. He had no compunction in cleaning the latrines at a Congress conference in solidarity with bhangis (waste removers).

In the age of sound-bytes where emphasis is more on packaging than the message, Gandhi serves wide-ranging purposes, from Apple computers using his image in its 'Think Different' campaign to Sanjay Dutt popularising Gandhigiri.

But Gandhi did not succeed in achieving his declared political and social objectives. The man who was equally at ease with Indian industrialists and untouchables couldn't surmount the political fault-line of Muslim nationalism that stared in the face of pan-Indian nationalism. Maulana Azad's recounting of two meetings with Gandhi in March-April 1947 best capture the mysteriously contradictory nature of the man. In the first he told Azad, "If the Congress wishes to accept Partition, it will be over my dead body." Azad had the 'greatest shock of (his) life' when in the subsequent meeting Gandhi was no longer opposed to Partition.

Gandhi as we know in Pakistan is a caricature of his complex self, in pretty much the same way as Jinnah is in the Indian popular imagination.

The writer teaches at the University of British Columbia, Canada.