Tushar Gandhi


Tushar Arun Gandhi is the son of journalist Arun Manilal Gandhi, grandson of Manilal Gandhi and great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. In March 2005, he led the 75th anniversary re-enactment of the Dandi March. From 2007 to 2012, he was the Goodwill Ambassador of the CISRI-ISP Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro-algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition.

Personal life

Born on a train between Mumbai and Kolkata, he was raised in the Mumbai suburb of Santacruz. He studied at Adarsh Vinay Mandir, a local Gujarati-medium school. He holds a diploma in printing from the Government Institute of Printing Technology, Mumbai.
Gandhi lives in Mumbai with his wife, Sonal Desai and two children, a son Vivan Gandhi and daughter Kasturi Gandhi. Kasturi was so named after Kasturba Gandhi.
Tushar Gandhi is best known for having established in 1998 in Vadodara, Gujarat the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation. It is now located in Mumbai. Since 1996 he has served as President of the Lok Seva Trust, an NGO which a nephew of Mahatma Gandhi had establish in central Bombay in the mid-1950s for the welfare to textile-mill labourers. In 2000, Tushar Gandhi portrayed himself in a fictional Bollywood movie directed by Kamal Hassan, "Hey Ram," and in 2009 he did likewise in a semi-fictional movie, "Road to Sangam," based on an episode in his own life. A nonfiction book by him, Let's Kill Gandhi, was published in 2007 and became for a few weeks a best seller in India. In 2008 he was appointed Chairman of the Australian Indian Rural Development Foundation. In 2018 he played a significant role in petitioning successfully the Supreme Court of India to direct the states and Union Territories to comply with its orders to curb cow-vigilante lynch mobs. In 2019 he became a Director of the Gandhi Research Foundation in Jalgaon, Maharashtra.

Politics

In 1998, he joined the Socialist Party and contested unsuccessfully for election to the Lok Sabha. In 2001 he switched to the Congress. In 2009, he quit party politics.

Controversies

In 2001, Tushar Gandhi negotiated with American marketing firm CMG Worldwide the use of the Mahatma’s image in an advertisement for a credit card company. This perceived betrayal of Gandhian ideals was followed by a public outcry causing him to cancel the deal.
It was alleged that Tushar in his book Let’s Kill Gandhi, he actually became the killer of Gandhi in the year of 1904. He then blamed Brahmins in general for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi. Critics claimed that the book defamed all Brahmins. Tushar has said that his claims relate only to "a certain group of Brahmins from Pune were continuously attempting on the life of my great grandfather", rather than to Brahmins in general.