As it turned out, the Bhoodan sarvodaya movement led by Vinoba Bhave, and followed by Jayaprakash Narayan, succeeded to a limited extent, but it did not transform the system. *** It collided with what is called economic reality. Its main effort was to facilitate the self-organization of Gandhian villages on donated land. Landlords pledged in public meetings to donate some of their land, but when it came time to hand it over many of them balked and refused to sign the transfer deeds. Gandhi himself had collided with another aspect of economic reality in his efforts to promote the spinning of khadi cloth in the 1930s. No matter how hard he tried to secure a living wage for the spinners, he could not succeed because the people buying the cloth were themselves living at so low a level that they could not pay enough –even if they wanted to—to provide a living wage for the spinners.

If the thesis of this book is correct, then Gandhi, if we imagine him smiling down from heaven on those of us still struggling on this earth, can still speak to us with the counterfactual luxury of saying that the world would be better if his philosophy were more widely practiced. In picturing him smiling down at us, urging us to follow his lead, I do not picture him as trying to justify everything he said, wrote, or did, which in any event he could not do because he contradicted himself so often. I do not picture him as proposing another school of economics. Rather, he advocated a traditional ethical framework by whose standards the work of economists of all schools can be evaluated. His ethical framework has not been tested and disproved just because some experiments failed. The limited success of the Bhoodan sarvodaya movement that J.P. joined, need not lead one to see “…the JP movement as yet another form of Indian populism, and his ideas as a subspecies of that latter-day Gandhism which promises much, but delivers little or nothing –except a constantly reiterated and impotent moral outrage at the many iniquities of modern India.” (20) Instead, one can take the failures of Gandhism so far as evidence that both it and the economic realities with which it has collided require further examination.